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Get Shorty?

Roe v Wade. Brown v Board of Education. In the United States the names of Supreme Court cases are shorthand for history. Those cases pointed the country in a different direction on abortion and civil rights, respectively, one protecting women's right to choose abortion and the other throwing out "separate but equal" institutional racism.

Whether Supreme Court justices are conservative or liberal matters as much as the law. The president today picked 50 year-old Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens, who announced his retirement last month shortly before his 90th birthday. So she might, if confirmed by the Senate, influence the direction of the country for decades to come.

President Obama made it quite clear in one sense that Kagan was a political pick.
He said her "understanding of law, not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page, but as it affects the lives of ordinary people, has animated every step of Elena's career". He added that cases she had fought as solicitor general, like that attempting to stop corporations spending more on elections, made a point about her priorities.

"I think it says a great deal about her commitment to protect our fundamental rights, because in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens," the president said.

Kagan started out clerking for , the civil rights campaigner and first black Supreme Court justice, who nicknamed her "Shorty". There is little doubt she is on the liberal side of the great divide.

In the current fractious political climate in Washington she might get a hard time when the Senate comes to conformation hearings. Some will object that she has never been a judge. The Washington Post headline "High court nominee never let lack of experience hold her back" does not inspire confidence.

But will Republicans start a "Get Shorty!" campaign? Some will object at her fighting as dean of Harvard law school to keep military recruiters off campus because of the ban on gay people serving openly in the military. But they also note she went out of her way to hire more conservatives and to listen to their views.

She hasn't pronounced on the hottest of hot button issues: abortion and guns. She has backed the Bush administration's detention without trial of foreigners accused of terrorism. Some conservatives feel that while she is a liberal she's not as liberal as many other possible picks. Indeed, those on the other side of the .

One interesting aside: Kagan is Jewish and if she is confirmed, in Obama's America, there will be no White Anglo-Saxon Protestant on the Supreme Court, indeed no Protestant of any hue or background.

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