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Those that can’t do, teach. Either that, or they become the President or a Supreme Court justice.
Our Professor in Chief has nominated fellow ex-professor Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, thus giving another academic a shot to swing our country to the left.
Ever since Obama arrived at the White House, he’s been appointing his old academic friends to high places. It’s not strange for presidential administrations to have a revolving door with Ivy League universities, but this administration’s door is spinning off its hinges.
Like Obama, Kagan never made it big in the economic world. They earned their names by being blessed and selected by the self-perpetuating academics who fill our “best” schools. Even within the Obama administration, you can connect the dots in Kagan’s rise to power.
Kagan graduated from Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard, served as a law clerk, and then almost immediately went back into academia as a professor at the University of Chicago. Coincidentally, from 1992 to 1995, she taught in the same department at Chicago as another young and promising liberal: Barack Obama.
1995 marked the first time Kagan went through the revolving door between academia and government. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to be his associate White House counsel. After four years with Clinton, her nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court failed and she returned to academia.
In 1999, she was courted by Harvard’s then-president Larry Summers to become the dean of the Law School. Yes, this is the same Larry Summers who is currently the chief economic adviser to President Obama.
In her rise, Kagan certainly knew how to network with the right people, or in her case, the left people. Her connections with Obama and Summers ensured she would be taken care of. She wanted to make sure her second trip into politics would not fail like the last one.
Kagan’s plan seems to be working. The communications officials at the Obama White House have done a good job marketing her candidacy, portraying her as an open-minded intellectual with a wide base of legal experience.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and company are doing all they can to protect the true identity of Elena Kagan. In their estimation, the fact that she doesn’t have a long written record is a plus. It makes it much more challenging to find out where she stands on the issues.
The relatively few things we have found out about Kagan point to some radical tendencies.
We know she is not a huge fan of the military. While Kagan was dean at Harvard Law, she banned the ROTC from meeting on campus and didn’t let military recruiters come to Harvard.
In an email to students in 2003, she justified this action by stating that the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was “a profound wrong – a moral injustice of the first order … I abhor the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy.” She took out her anger at the military on Harvard’s students, and not just any students: she took it out on the ones who were planning to serve our country.
Kagan’s radicalism does not stop there. One thing the media has missed (surprise, surprise) is the fact that she hired Cass Sunstein while she was the dean at Harvard. Sunstein – Obama’s regulatory czar – has become well-known, mainly because Glenn Beck has gone after him on his TV and radio shows.
Beck has called him “the most dangerous man in America.” Sunstein has publicly stated that he wants animals to be represented in court, and he would use the courts to create a “chilling effect” in order to regulate speech that might hurt someone’s feelings. He also wants to repeal the Second Amendment and ban hunting.
We can’t necessarily infer that Kagan supports the same wacky ideas that Sunstein professes, but we can infer that she is sympathetic enough with his ideas to hire him. If she doesn’t consider Sunstein radical, she cannot be too far away from him ideologically.
Kagan’s intertwined relationship with our country’s influential and left-leaning intelligentsia leaves some questions about her nomination. We must be skeptical about people who arise out of this self-perpetuating academia. Kagan’s only qualifications are her connections to powerful people.
Obama’s administration is filled with people with sketchy views who haven’t done anything substantial in the private sector. Kagan has been a teacher or government official nearly her entire life. According to President Obama, this is the type of wisdom and experience we need on the Supreme Court.
A version of this article was originally published at HumanEvents.com.