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Anti-War.com The World Is Kagan’s Battlefield Why she shouldn’t join the Supremes May 12, 2010 by Justin Raimondo
If Ms. Kagan is confirmed, however, that last recourse will be far less reliable. Her views on the First Amendment, alone, ought to have civil libertarians, both liberals and conservatives, manning the barricades and declaring, “No pasaran!” According to Kagan, the government may limit speech not only if the consequences of free expression are deleterious to public safety and order, but also if the “motive” of the government is pure – that is, free of any consideration of the self-interest of public officials, or any a priori evaluation of some ideas as inherently and permanently invalid. I am simplifying her argument considerably, of course: in her article for the University of Chicago Law Review she makes a complex, and even an elegant argument – an argument, I would add, that is deadly dangerous to the concept of individual liberty. Go check it out for yourself. Suffice to say here that, in Kagan’s world, it’s okay to proscribe certain expressions if (1) the government can show an overriding public interest in doing so, and (2) if the motives of government officials can pass the test of self-interest – or, at least, give the formal appearance of neutrality. She has further written in favor of academic speech codes, and, in this context, her thesis on the history of the socialist movement in New York, while no doubt an admirable, value-neutral, scholarly effort, implicates her as being at least sympathetic to the goals if not the methods of a movement that has included a totalist as well as a democratic element. Given the predicament in which we find ourselves today, with the Constitution under assault from every side – from the neocons on the right, who want to outlaw “subversion,” and dispense with habeas corpus, and from some “progressives” who see government power as a panacea, especially now that they’re in control of the national government – Kagan is the last person we need on the Court. |