Why The Rush To Seat Elena Kagan?

Despite the fact that America is suffering from its biggest deficit ever; the highest unemployment rate in years; terrorist threats, and an environmental disaster of monumental proportions, last week, Congress spent valuable time rushing to confirm President Obama's handpicked Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, to the Supreme Court.

She's supposed to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, a liberal who'll retire this summer, but the question should be whether Congress has more important things to consider. There are no pressing issues that must be determined by the highest court in the land? In fact, the Court could take off for 6 months and it wouldn't make that much difference to the country, so why the rush to confirm Ms. Kagan before the midterm elections?

I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist but I'm tempted to say: "The plot thickens!" Ms. Kagan is relatively young - 50 - and she would be in the job for life, if confirmed. No matter what kind of testimony President Clinton's former White House Counsel gave in her confirmation hearings, records show that she's a committed ideological liberal from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who disdains the military, like all good progressives. While conservatives are presently the majority in the High Court, they're not immortal and Mr. Obama may have the opportunity to appoint a justice who'll eventually tip the court leftward. In his view, it's vitally important that the third branch of government become liberally dominant so as to affirm constitutionally flawed legislation

I keep hearing media pundits complain that they can't understand why Mr. Obama's policies seem to be hurting the economy, but if they'd really vetted him before fawning over his flimsy curriculum vitae, they'd have recognized that he's doing exactly what he was taught in college.

A former classmate of Mr. Obama at Columbia University, Wayne Allyn Root, was a Libertarian vice-presidential candidate in 2008 who penned an op-ed piece for the Las Vegas Review to which, apparently, no one's paying attention. He wrote: "Barack Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos - thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within."

Mr. Root charges that the president is following the strategy of two Columbia professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who focused their efforts on creating a welfare society and foisting it on the Democrat Party, which was in power at the time. In their 1966 book, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty," the professors did so because, "Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition,"

Since the Democrats became the majority in 2006, the economy has floundered, and since Mr. Obama took office in 2008, his policies are continuing its decline. Mr. Root points these out: universal health care; cap-and-trade; legalizing 12 million immigrants; a massive stimulus and bailouts, etc.

He says: "Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it."

Sunday, we celebrated the 234th Anniversary of the United States of America and I received an e-mail asking me to join others in saying the most powerful Catholic prayer - the Rosary - to save our nation. Are we really in such danger that only God can rescue us? That sounds paranoid and alarmist and yet it's difficult not to be concerned with the events currently confirming that anxiety. Even the administration's negligence in cleaning up the oil spill is generating hardship in the Gulf, requiring government assistance, with more citizens dependent on it.

I was watching the Fox Business Network last week and anchorman Stuart Varney said that the first thing he noticed when he came to America from Great Britain was that this country is a true meritocracy. This is a system where progress is made based on talent and ability rather than class privilege or wealth. Unlike other countries, where your background can limit your success, there's nothing to stop you here from earning success. He said: "In Europe there is freedom 'from' but in America, there is freedom 'to do.'" That's what makes America a great nation and this entrepreneurial spirit is dangerous to the socialist ambitions of a dictatorial government.

But this is America, right? We have the Constitution to protect us, right? The Founding Fathers were well aware of the danger of a runaway government and wrote safeguards limiting it, right? Well that's also why we should be nominating justices who strictly uphold that sacred document, not those who regard it as a living entity that can be molded to a certain ideology. Thurgood Marshall was one of the latter types of justices and Ms. Kagan clerked for him and had great respect for the liberal jurist.

Most of the drastic social changes in our society have been the result of judicial fiat rather than the result of the people's choice: Abortion on demand; the abuse of eminent domain, and pornography, including virtual child pornography, have all been deemed by the Supreme Court to be protected by the Constitution. To progressive politicians, social engineering cannot be trusted to the populace but can be promoted through the courts. We cannot trust the present Congress to recognize the threat to our civil liberties, and were it not for the Tea Parties, Fox News, Glenn Beck, and the Internet, much of this information would not be available to the public, given the mainstream media's complicity in spinning or covering up hard data.

It's no surprise that Mr. Obama tried to wage war on Fox News. Under the guise of shutting down terrorist communication, a Senate committee approved The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which essentially gave the president power to shut down the Internet for as long as 4 months. The original language of the bill gave him the right to do this without congressional approval. That has since been changed though we learned that the president already had this ability under the Communications Act.

Perhaps there's no cause for alarm and we will somehow get through this with our nation's principles intact.

But just in case, I said the Rosary.

Alicia Colon resides in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com.