As we learn more and more about SCOTUS picks, there has been a bemoaning of a fact that we don't know what Elena Kagan, Obama's solicitor general, stands for.
The Daily Princetonian went an indepth look through Kagan's law school career and found a lot to like about her. But that, much like today, she had "reserved passion".
Elena Kagan's Reserved Passion
The goal, as Lawrence O'Donnell put it, was for Obama to find the "liberal within the liberal". As it is currently, a lot of progressives are hesitant to support Kagan. They cite her limited articles that she's written and the fact that she supports the administration's positions on the war on terror (even though that's precisely what her job entails). In fact, there's a meme going around that she's "harriet miers".
She's probably as far away from Harriet Miers as possible in terms of intelligence, but there's been a mystery surrounding her as to what she stands for.
The Daily Princetonian, the school that Kagan attended for undergrad documented her rise as a liberal activist who was as expected, "reserved".
Though shielded from her friends, Kagan’s political beliefs emerged most clearly in an opinion piece she wrote for the ‘Prince’ a few weeks after that 1980 election night, in which she described her disappointment at Holtzman’s loss and her own liberal views. "I absorbed ... liberal principles early," she said. "More to the point, I have retained them fairly intact to this day."
In the piece, Kagan also expressed her dissatisfaction with the state of the political left at the time, lamenting the demise of "real Democrats — not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days" and the success of "anonymous but Moral Majority-backed ... avengers of ‘innocent life’ and the B-1 Bomber, these beneficiaries of a general turn to the right and a profound disorganization on the left."
She hoped that the future would "be marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore."
This is consistent with the fact that she clerked for Justice Abner Mikva (a progressive) and that she clerked for Justice Marshall (also a progressive).
It's entirely possible that Kagan isn't a progressive when it comes to executive power. In fact, there hasn't been much written on that front, only her Solicitor General experience has been shown, but it's becoming more and more apparent that she's a pretty progressive choice.