Kagan hid Obama's records, now she expects the favor returned.
Release The Records
CBS News reported yesterday that the White House is now promising to release Elena Kagan’s college theses. When conservatives are nominated to the Supreme Court, within hours every aggressive, ambitious reporter in town is out to find the “smoking gun” that will bring that nominee down. It doesn’t take long before there are exclusive interviews with their fourth grade teacher or cameras are shoved in their 90-year-old mother’s face, as was the case with Justice Alito.
But when a leftwing president nominates a leftwing activist for the Supreme Court, amazingly these reporters are more interested in the First Pet than serious investigative journalism. That explains why the vaunted New York Times, the Washington Post, the always exciting USA Today and none of the “mainstream” network news outlets could get their hands on Elena Kagan’s senior thesis on socialism in America. It was left to RedState.com – a conservative website. And what’s the reaction? Princeton University objected due to copyright issues.
Is someone’s senior thesis necessarily relevant to their views today? Consider what Judge Robert Bork had to say: “Generally, a person should not be held to account for something they wrote as a 22-year-old, unless there is no indication they have changed their mind. It would be fair to question a person about the writing to determine whether they had, in truth, changed their mind.” But of course you’d have to read the writing in question first to be able to form questions about it.
The White House initially stonewalled questions about Kagan’s paper trail, and it’s obvious why. They want to keep this kind of edifying information about Kagan away from the public, just as the Obama campaign refused to release information about Obama’s past, including his college transcripts. For a man who is supposedly one of the smartest ever to occupy the Oval Office, we still don’t know which courses Obama took in college or what his grades were. But why do I suspect that if we saw Obama’s transcript we might learn that he majored in socialist studies?
Gary Bauer
Campaign for Working Families
Posts
