WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee wrapped up its public questioning of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on Wednesday after she vowed to be politically independent and rebutted Republican attempts to portray her as pursuing a liberal agenda.
Following a day of opening statements and two days of questioning, Kagan appeared headed for approval by the committee and eventual confirmation by the full Senate, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed.
“You demonstrated an impressive, an encyclopedic knowledge of the law,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the committee chairman, told Kagan before gaveling the session to an end. The committee is to hear from outside witnesses for and against Kagan’s nomination when it resumes its confirmation hearings. But it faces an obstacle because committees have been asked not to hold hearings today between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. while the body of the late Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., lies in repose in the Senate chamber, Leahy said.
In response to questions when the committee reconvened Wednesday morning, Kagan said that times were different in the middle of the past century when Thurgood Marshall, the liberal legal titan who would become one of her mentors, found in the courts society’s only refuge to chip away at Jim Crow segregation laws.
Today, a judge must be “on nobody’s team,” said Kagan, the first nominee to the nation’s highest court in four decades who has never been a jurist. Trying to counter Republican efforts to portray her as an instrument of liberal politics, Democratic senators encouraged her to give avowals of neutrality.
Outside the hearing, committee Republicans and Democrats alike said they expect Kagan to be confirmed by the full Senate when it takes up the nomination, possibly by the end of July.
