A4


Politics & The Nation


Nancy Pelosi as the liberal bogeywoman


pelosi from A1


Flores, a Republican who is chal- lenging Rep. Chet Edwards (D- Tex.), “you will get a huge re- sponse from the audience.” Which is why, by Flores’s estimate, he manages to drop Pelosi’s name into his speeches about as often as he does President Obama’s. Pelosi (D-Calif.) has become


“the face of liberalism in the Oba- ma era,” more so than Obama himself, said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public af- fairs at Princeton. Her infamy among conserva- tives is partly the product of her often-imperious manner, a rough- er media culture and a superheat- ed political climate. But it is also a backhanded acknowledgment of how effective she has been. Pelosi has unabashedly wielded


the leverage of her office to mus- cle her agenda through the House. Once dismissed by her op- ponents — and even some of her fellow Democrats — as a light- weight, she has proved to be “the most powerful speaker we’ve seen in modern history,” said political analyst Charlie Cook, whose as- sessment is shared by a number of congressional scholars. More questionable is whether making Pelosi the bogeywoman of this year’s congressional elections will help Republicans win back the House. A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in late March, around the time that the speaker engineered the final passage of health-care overhaul in the House, suggested that she stirs both sides. Pelosi’s overall approval ratings had not changed much over the previous three months, but the partisan passion that surrounded her had grown more intense. Among Republicans, the number who “strongly disapprove” of her performance jumped from 60 percent to 74 percent, which was greater than their negative view of Obama. But there was a corre- sponding rise in her approval among Democrats: Thirty-eight percent “strongly approved” of her performance as speaker in late March, up from 22 percent in mid-January.


So when the Republican Na- tional Committee unfurled a big red “FIRE PELOSI” banner last month from a window of its Capi- tol Hill headquarters, right above the front door, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Com- mittee sent out a photo of it in its own fundraising e-mail. “Fire Pelosi” became a GOP ral- lying cry 15 minutes after the health-care vote, when the RNC launched a Web site depicting the speaker engulfed in flames and brandishing her fist. The Repub- licans say that one appeal raised $1.5 million in less than a week; Democrats called upon her sup- porters to come up with at least $1 million in response. When Pelosi is asked about the starring role she is playing in this year’s campaign, she dismisses it. “I think mostly people are inter- ested in what the comparison is between the candidates,” she said. “Let them do what they do.” Indeed, making an issue of the


speaker is not exactly a new idea. As far back as the 1980 presi- dential campaign, Republicans aired a television ad that depicted a car running out of gas. Behind the wheel was a beefy, white- haired actor who looked a lot like Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.). “He really has an Irish kisser,” the then- speaker said of his doppelganger. Newt Gingrich’s staff estimated


that his name or image popped up more than 100,000 times in cam- paign advertising during his stormy four-year tenure. “It can become really demoral- izing for your side,” the Georgia Republican said. The current ef- fort against Pelosi, he added, “weakens her in her own caucus, as it certainly weakened me in my own conference.”


But did their assault on Gin- grich win the Democrats any seats? “No,” said Steve Elmendorf, who was the top aide to then- House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). “It’s very hard in any of these races to make it about the congressional leader- ship.”


And Gingrich warned that cam- paigning against the Democrats —even one as unpopular with Re- publicans as Pelosi — is no substi- tute for offering voters some idea of how the GOP would govern if Republicans won back the House. “People who think that all the Re- publicans should do is just yell ‘no’ are just plain wrong,” he said. Especially when your opponent is 50 feet tall. tumultyk@washpost.com


Staff writer Paul Kane and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.


S


KLMNO


THURSDAY, JULY 1, 2010 Kagan wraps up confirmation hearings


Republicans grill nominee but say they expect approval


by Robert Barnes and Amy Goldstein


Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan navigated the last day of her confirmation testimony Wednesday, charting a course be- tween Republican attempts to characterize her as a results-ori- ented social liberal and Demo- cratic attempts to prod her to crit- icize as politically motivated the court she seeks to join. Outside the committee room,


Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat- rick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) predicted confidently that “Solicitor Gener- al Kagan will be confirmed,” and he got little argument from his Republican colleagues. Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), one of Kagan’s toughest questioners, referred to her as “soon-to-be Justice Kagan.” But that did not mean the nom- inee — or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his conservative colleagues on the court, for that matter — had an easy day. Republican senators pressed


Kagan on the issues that have dominated her hearings from their side: her opposition to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on service by gays, her ac- tions on “partial birth” abortion during the Clinton administra- tion, and her views on gun rights and whether there is a constitu- tional right to same-sex marriage. Democrats repeatedly de- nounced the Roberts-led court as an activist bunch bent on finding new rights embedded in the Sec- ond Amendment, favoring corpo- rations over workers and reach- ing out to demolish campaign fi- nance regulations passed by Congress.


Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-


R.I.) criticized precedent-chang- ing decisions “done 5 to 4 with Re- publican appointees only, driving the law in a different direction by the narrowest possible margin.”


Kagan defended herself but tried to stay largely out of the fray. Leahy said she answered more than 500 questions during 17 hours of testimony, although Re- publicans and even some Demo- crats might quibble with the word “answered.” It is a familiar com- plaint at confirmation hearings, yet Kagan was a contrast to last year’s nominee, Justice Sonia So- tomayor. Sotomayor carefully wrote down each question on a legal pad and was circumspect and cautious. Kagan was a bit looser. She took no notes and expanded on the court cases senators cited, even as she declined to “grade” them or say whether she thought they were correctly decided. She showed fatigue only once, when she called Sen. Benjamin L. Car- din (D-Md.) “Sen. Carhart,” the name of a party in two of the court’s famous abortion cases. “I felt like I was back in my fa- vorite classes in law school, listen- ing to her encyclopedic knowl- edge of the law,” Leahy told re- porters after Kagan finished. Even Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.),


the committee’s ranking Repub- lican, said the panel had seen the nominee’s “gifts and graces in many different ways.” But he said he still did not know whether she would be “more like John Roberts or Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Republican senators tried to


make the case that Kagan’s politi- cal views foretell how she would rule on important social issues. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah) pressed her on a memo she wrote as a domestic policy aide to Presi- dent Bill Clinton that said it would be a “disaster” if the Amer- ican College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a finding that the procedure critics call par- tial-birth abortion was not the only option for preserving a wom- an’s life or health.


Kagan told other White House


staff members that they must in- sist that the group add language saying it might be the best option for the woman. “That bothers me that you —


that you intervened in that partic- ular area in that way,” Hatch said, adding that it had ramifications for Congress and in court deliber-


Questions for Kagan


From the hearing room ON THE LATE JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL


Elena Kagan “Justice Marshall lived in a time and he lived in a world and he lawyered in a world in which many doors were closed to him. As he was trying to eradicate Jim Crow segregation . . . there were not a whole lot of people who were willing to listen to the kinds of claims he was making, just claims, for racial equality. “And I think what he — the reason


he revered the courts was that step by step by step over the years he did find success in the courts because the courts were willing to listen to those claims in a way that nobody


else in the governmental system was.”


ON GUNS


Sen. Charles E. Grassley “Do you believe that the executive


branch has the power to prohibit the sale of firearms without legislative authorization?”


Kagan “As I said . . . I never believed that the president had the power to prohibit that without legislative authorization, so — in fact, that’s one that [Supreme Court rulings] Heller and McDonald don’t affect, that the president didn’t have that power before and doesn’t have that power after.”


ations on the issue.


But Kagan said she was only in- sisting that both statements be in- cluded, which she knew to be the position of the doctors group. In fact, she said, the group opposed the legislation that would ban the procedure. “Senator Hatch, there was no


way in which I would have or could have intervened with ACOG, which is a respected body of physicians, to get it to change its medical views on the ques- tion,” Kagan said. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) pressed Kagan on whether her statement at her solicitor general confirma- tion hearings that there is not a constitutional right to same-sex marriage is her personal opinion or merely a reflection of current law.


“I don’t think that that would be appropriate” to answer, she said. She said pending cases might call on the court to make just such a decision.


Kagan was also called upon again to explain her decision as dean of Harvard Law School to deny the military use of the


school’s career services office for recruiting. She said the decision was based on the fact that the military could not agree to the university’s nondiscrimination policy. The “sole result and impact,”


Cornyn said, “was to stigmatize the United States military on the campus — the services that you say that you honor.”


Kagan said she strongly objects


to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But she said her decision was not a protest but a sign of support for the law school’s gay students who wanted to serve.


Sessions found a polite way to challenge her veracity, saying: “I believe your testimony was too consistent with an inaccurate spin” advanced by the White House.


Still, by the end, Republican


senators seemed to acknowledge that she will be confirmed. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), the committee Republican consid- ered most likely to support the nominee, asked her to consider technological advances in pre- serving the viability of a fetus when considering abortion cases. She promised Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that she had reread the Federalist Papers. Under questioning from Demo-


crats, Kagan repeatedly bypassed opportunities to criticize the re- cent work of the court and at times defended Roberts and Jus- tices Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. “Every justice has to do what he or she thinks is right on the law,” she replied when Whitehouse asked whether she was concerned by recent 5 to 4 rulings. “I’m sure everybody up there is


acting in good faith,” she said. “You wouldn’t want the judicial process to become in any way a bargaining process or a logrolling process,” she added. “You wouldn’t want people to trade with each other — you know, ‘You’ll vote this way, and I’ll vote that way, and then we can . . . get some unanimous decisions.’ ” barnesbob@washpost.com goldsteinamy@washpost.com


A winning performance that charmed her critics ly what she told them then. by Ann Gerhart


By the end of 17 hours of senato- rial grilling, lecturing and bad- gering, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan had revealed at least one passion: She loves this stuff. Put the woman in front of some stern interrogators who make her explain a dozen times why Har- vard Law School doesn’t require constitutional law in the very first year, and she comes alive. Over two days at the micro- phone, Kagan gave the impres- sion that there was no place she would rather be than seeking to address all questions of the mem- bers of the Senate Judiciary Com- mittee. She assured even the openly hostile Republican mem- bers that she knows they are men of “good faith.” And when the Democrats grumbled about the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., she enthusiastically responded that he, too, certainly is a man of “good faith.” She was expansive on the ques- tion of whether a judge is an um- pire (in some ways), a robot (nev- er), an ideologue (so wrong) or an empath (certainly not).


Original intent. Commerce clause. Forced arbitration. She took them all on, thoughtfully and pleasantly turning the most ab- struse legal concepts into real English. She talked of needing to have “a little play in the joints” when comparing legal principles, offering up an “oh, thanks but no thanks” in explaining another and refusing to “count her chick- ens” before hatching when Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) tried, with- out success, to have her speculate on how she might examine some- thing as a Supreme Court justice. When she needed to play for time in constructing an answer, in- stead of fidgeting or fumbling, Kagan frequently said “gosh.” When she needed to deflect, she made quick jokes. Kagan displayed such relish and expertise at the hearing table


Nothing personal She acknowledged having pro- gressive politics and said her be- liefs would have no bearing on her judgment.


At each point in her life, Kagan BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES


that she could hire herself out as a stunt witness and work five days a week on Capitol Hill. But she seems a cinch to take her place on the bench as the fourth female justice in the court’s history. Her harshest critics Tuesday were beaming at her Wednesday. “I know this hasn’t been the most pleasant experience for you,” said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). She nearly interrupted him to


Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan seemed to enjoy herself during her confirmation hearings. Now, he congratulated her for


her performance and said, “You . . . light up the room.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who came close in interviews Tuesday to accusing the former Harvard Law School dean of lying in de- scribing her handling of military recruiting on campus, seemed all but ready to swear her in by Wednesday evening.


report with evident pleasure: “I think it’s been terrific, that every- body has been very fair and very considerate, and I hope you found it informative. I found it some- what wearying, but actually a great moment in my life.” A day earlier Coburn seemed to wound Kagan slightly when he scolded: “I would not want to be a Supreme Court justice with you. I think I’d get run over!” The cor- ners of her mouth slumped just a bit.


Kagan’s upward path Kagan, 50, has had a remark-


able trajectory to reach this mo- ment, with just a few disappoint- ments that each opened a door to something better. She was educated at Princeton, Oxford and Harvard Law School, then clerked for federal appeals judge Abner Mikva — who once offered Barack Obama a clerkship — and then Justice Thurgood Marshall, whose son observed the hearings Wednesday, along with


presidential adviser Valerie Jar- rett. After four years in the Clinton White House, as a domestic policy adviser and a lawyer in the coun- sel’s office, Kagan was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the federal bench, but Republicans blocked her nomination. She did not get tenure at the University of Chicago, where she had been a law lecturer before her stint in Washington, but she got a job as a visiting professor at Harvard, which quickly led to becoming the school’s first female dean. She did not become president of the uni- versity, but she gained another choice legal job — as the first female solicitor general. During her confirmation hear- ings for that job last year, she faced many of the same senators. And in signature Kagan style, she seemed able to summon up, with- out any notes, memories of exact-


asserted, her decisions were not a projection of some personal vi- sion for righting society’s wrongs. Rather, she was merely a repre- sentative or guardian of an insti- tution. At Harvard, she was not professing a political position when she banned military recruit- ers from the career center, she said; she was trying to observe the law and remain faithful to the university’s anti-discrimination policy (which frowned on “don’t ask, don’t tell”). As a White House aide, she was not professing a po- litical position but strategizing how to accomplish Clinton’s pol- icy objectives. As solicitor general, she was not professing a political position in refusing to challenge “don’t ask, don’t tell,” nor was she trying to curb political speech when she argued to uphold as- pects of campaign finance law. So deft was she at discoursing on all these subjects that no one asked Kagan whom she would represent as a justice on the Su- preme Court and what would ani- mate her if she arrived there. The closest anyone came was when Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) pushed her Tuesday to say why she wants to be a justice. It took him about five questions, of in- creasing persistence, until finally Kagan said this: “That’s, I think, the right way for a judge to do a job, is one case at a time, thinking about the case fairly and objectively and impar- tially. And in — in the course of doing that, of course, people’s lives change, because law has an effect on people. And you hope very much that law improves peo- ple’s lives and has a beneficial ef- fect on our society. That’s the en- tire purpose of law.” gerharta@washpost.com


Police in Ore. reopen investigation of groping allegations against Gore by Nigel Duara


portland, ore. — Police said Wednesday that they are re- opening an investigation into a Portland massage therapist’s al- legations that former vice presi- dent Al Gore groped her at an upscale hotel in 2006. In a brief statement, the Port-


land Police Bureau did not say why it was reopening the in-


vestigation. Police had said they considered the case closed be- cause there was no evidence. A spokeswoman for Gore said


that he “unequivocally and em- phatically” denies making un- wanted sexual advances toward the woman and that he wel- comes the investigation. “Further investigation into this matter will only benefit Mr. Gore,” spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said.


She also said that “the Gores cannot comment on every de- famatory, misleading and in- accurate story generated by tab- loids.” The masseuse, Molly Hagerty,


alleges that Gore made unwant- ed sexual advances during a massage appointment on Oct. 24, 2006, at the downtown Ho- tel Lucia, where Gore was re- portedly registered as “Mr. Stone.” Gore was in Portland to


deliver a speech on climate change. The story broke when the Na- tional Enquirer reported the al- legations a week ago. Portland police last week said


that Hagerty’s lawyer came to them with the allegations in 2006 but that Hagerty canceled appointments with detectives. The case reopened in January 2009, when detectives inter- viewed her but determined that


there was insufficient evidence to support the allegations. According to transcripts of the 2009 interview, Hagerty de- scribed the allegations at length. She said Gore groped, kissed and pinned her down on a bed. She told Gore he was act- ing like a “crazed sex poodle,” according to the transcript. Gore and his wife announced


June 1 that they are separating. — Associated Press


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70