Elena Kagan Memos: Clinton Library Papers

[Casino67]

Politics Daily:



Elena Kagan is making courtesy calls on senators to smooth the way for her confirmation hearings, with a White House team in tow to manage the process. With a background in politics, policymaking and dealing with the press, however, Kagan is a seasoned strategist herself, with stints in campaigns and at the Clinton White House.

One rap on the nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens is that she has never been a judge. But she does know how government works at the highest levels: the sausage-making behind high-minded presidential initiatives and the inner workings of Congress. She also has been an active Democratic donor, contributing to federal and local contests in states where she has lived: New York, Massachusetts and Illinois.
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As the nation has begun an intense look into the woman who will likely be confirmed sometime this summer, one place to focus is the paper trail available at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, which is starting to release documents from her tenure.

President Obama met Kagan, whom he nominated on Monday to the high court, while they both were at the University of Chicago Law School. They overlapped there a few years before she left to join the Clinton administration, first as an associate counsel to the president from 1995 to 1996 and then as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy from 1997 to 1999.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel also knows her from their days in the Clinton White House. Kagan's boss at the Domestic Policy Council was Bruce Reed, with whom Kagan became buddies at Princeton; she was his editor at The Princetonian. And Reed was and is a close Emanuel friend; they are co-authors of a domestic policy book.

The Clinton Library documents indicate that Kagan was given to scribbling notes on the sides of memos and complained of too much legal "gobbledy gook" in one advisory that landed on her desk. Kagan seemed to like to reduce tasks -- even mega-projects such as Clinton's race initiative -- into bite-size chunks. And she liked to plan.

On June 22, 1998, when Kagan was a deputy domestic policy adviser, she and Reed crafted a memo proposing a variety of suggested "summer announcements and events" for the president. Clinton could announce "the national roll out" of a $195 million anti-drug media campaign, complete with a "road block" purchase of ads on network television that night; he could launch a summer reading initiative; he could crack down on health insurers in federal plans that discriminate against sicker patients. Knowing how to sell a story, Kagan scribbled a note on the side of that memo saying if Clinton did that, they should "find three victims" from the "diabetic community."

And Clinton could even ask Congress to crack down on food safety because "summer is the time when people think most about these issues."

Kagan also seemed unafraid to be confrontational or shy away from intramural wrangling. When a memo from the Office of Public Liaison used materials developed from personnel in her office -- but did not give credit -- she scribbled in a margin to Reed: next time they want "help from our staff in preparing briefing materials, [they] should check in with one of us first."

On June 13, 1997, Clinton issued an executive order creating a commission to study race in America, and on Nov. 11 of that year, Reed and Kagan in a memo offered a series of policy ideas for a "race neutral opportunity agenda." There was still a need for "strong civil rights enforcement" and for "narrowly tailored affirmative action program," they wrote. The best hope for improving race relations was to "expand opportunity across racial lines," a concept that years later would be echoed by Obama himself on the presidential campaign trail.

Reed joined the Obama administration last month as the executive director of the new National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. I asked him Thursday about how Kagan swam in the White House political stream.

"She wasn't a political hack; we had plenty of those. She was a serious thinker who could master any policy issue," Reed said.

Cont'd

[righteousmomma]

She is a liberal Democrat through and through --in life and world view and perspective.

(I cannot believe how much money she has donated to the Democrats and thus their ideology!

All liberal Democrats too.) Can anyone this committed to a political ideology be an impartial "judge" on the United States Supreme Court ? I think not. Can anyone who comes out of the outdated old Constitution into the light of a "living Constitution" relate to the core values and beliefs that have created us? I think not.

 

While this is a free country and, at the moment, has free speech I am concerned that free thinking is at risk.

One Way to think, believe and do --- and its their way.