By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Recently released records from Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s tenure as domestic policy advisor in the Clinton administration offer few clues to the positions she might take on social issues such as abortion, assisted suicide and illegal aliens.
The Associated Press is reporting that the 46,500 pages of documentation released on Friday by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library reveal that Kagan could be very unpredictable in regards to social issues.
For instance, she was in favor of denying routine prenatal care to illegal immigrants during the 1996 welfare reform debate. However, a year later, during a debate about Oregon’s assisted suicide law, she said a proposed federal ban on assisted suicide would be a “fairly terrible idea.”
Other reports show that she was skeptical about medical uses for marijuana. She was also deeply involved in President Clinton’s decision to keep in place a ban on the use of federal money for needle-exchange programs that were intended to reduce the spread of HIV AIDS. (This ban was repealed by Congress last year and signed into law by President Obama.)
Records have also shown that Kagan was instrumental in developing President Clinton’s strategy for sustaining his veto of the partial birth abortion ban in 1997 ( See /blog/?p=4766 ) that led to preventing the ban from taking effect until 2003.
The newly released records are only part of what will be almost 160,000 pages of documentation that will be released prior to the June 28 start of Kagan’s confirmation hearings on the Hill.
As the AP reports, the White House has cautioned against reading the files as an indication of Kagan’s views.
“The documents reflect Elena Kagan’s efforts to advance President Clinton’s well-established policy agenda, and they should not be interpreted as an outline of her personal positions on specific policy issues,” said Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman.
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