Senate Judiciary Committee members should be sure to ask Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, during her upcoming confirmation hearings, whether she or her office played any part in crafting ObamaCare or the administration’s defense to the lawsuits challenging that law. If Kagan helped to craft either, that would present a conflict of interest: when those lawsuits reach the Supreme Court, she would be sitting in judgment over a case in which she had already taken sides.
Though the Solicitor General deals with appellate matters, it is certainly possible that Kagan was consulted during the drafting of the law or the administration’s legal strategy for defending it.
The Senate Democrats who drafted ObamaCare took pains to protect it from a constitutional challenge. The law contains several pages of findings designed to show that the Constitution’s commerce clause authorizes Congress to force Americans to purchase health insurance. It would have been prudent for Senate Democrats to ask the government’s top appellate lawyer, who belongs to the same political party, whether they had done all they could to protect the “individual mandate” from a constitutional challenge.
Opponents began filing legal challenges to ObamaCare just minutes after President Obama signed it into law, and seven weeks before he announced Kagan’s nomination. On Tuesday, the Obama administration filed its first response, to a private lawsuit. According to the Associated Press, that filing “is to be followed in coming weeks and months by federal government court responses to lawsuits filed by many states.” Regarding the case filed by 13 (soon to be 20) state attorneys general, The New York Times reports, “Some legal scholars, including some who normally lean to the left, believe the states have identified the law’s weak spot and devised a credible theory for eviscerating it.” It is not certain, but it is certainly possible that the Office of the Solicitor General was consulted on the government’s response to lawsuits that would likely reach the Supreme Court.
If Kagan played a role in drafting ObamaCare or formulating the administration’s legal defense, and is confirmed by the Senate, propriety would dictate that she recuse herself from any challenges to that law that reach the high court. Supporters and opponents alike should be interested to know whether the Court will judge ObamaCare with nine justices on the bench, or eight.
