WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is telling senators she’ll do her best to consider cases impartially and with judicial humility, as she begins Judiciary Committee hearings.
As the opening gavel fell on her nationally televised hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the 50-year-old solicitor general and former Harvard Law School dean appeared on track for confirmation as a result of a Democratic majority on the Judiciary Committee and in the Senate as a whole.
Kagan stopped by the Oval Office of the White House to receive best wishes from President Barack Obama on her way to the hearing. A few moments and little more than a mile distant, she strode with a smile into the committee room and took her place at the witness table — where senatorial ritual then required her to sit for hours while lawmakers delivered prepared speeches from an elevated dais across the room.
“The Supreme Court is a wondrous institution. But the time I spent in the other branches of government remind me that it must also be a modest one,” Kagan is set to say, according to an advance text released by the White House.
In another, a 5-4 majority said the right to bear arms can’t be limited by state or local laws any more than by federal legislation.
Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.
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