But on the second day of her confirmation hearing, Kagan said on several occasions that she had come around to seeing the merits of preserving the limits on corporate spending on elections.

"When I walked up to that podium for Citizens United, I thought we had extremely strong arguments. I was acting as an advocate but I thought we had very strong arguments," she said in response to a question from Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.).

It is unusual these days for Supreme Court nominees to comment on recent rulings, and by that standard Kagan has been expansive in her testimony. However, as Specter sought to coax her into even stronger disapproval of the ruling, asking whether she found it "disrespectful" for the court to overrule an act of Congress, Kagan demurred. "I don't want to characterize what the Supreme Court did," she said.

and the short time at Harvard when Military had no sponsor at (because the veterans group turned down Kagan's offer) recruitment increased pretty ironic, imo:

During the winter-spring semester in 2005, military recruiters did continue to meet in Cambridge with Harvard Law students, and the number of students recruited that year happened to increase. But the recruiters had those meetings without any official sponsor within the law school.

Why even go through this exercise.  

Once a president picks his nominee with very few exceptions we already know who is going to vote or not vote in the senate for the nominee even before the confirmation hearings.  

In Kagan's case most republicans senators  if not all will vote no and most democrats if not all will vote yes.  

Let's say she swore on a stack of bibles that  "I will vote to uphold Roe v Wade".

And then in 2 years, she doesn't.  What can anyone do about it?  Nothing.

Oops:

Who is Barak? In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein says that Aharon Barak was "a leading proponent" of guidelines allowing torture-- making Israel the "only country in the world where torture was legally sanctioned," according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. He also gave a green light to administrative detentions, even as the judge conceded, "there is probably no State in the Western world that permits an administrative detention of someone who does not himself pose any danger to State security."

And he approved the barrier wall that crosses through occupied territory, of which Finkelstein says:

    If all branches of Israeli government and society bear responsibility for this impending catastrophe [the end of the two-state solution], the share of the HCJ and especially its liberal chief justice, Aharon Barak, is relatively larger. Due to its moral authority the HCJ was in a unique position to sensitize the Israeli public. Beyond helping fend off external criticism of Israel's annexationist policies, the HCJ chose to mute the collective Israeli conscience.

Of course Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul not long after he published that book.

Mondoweiss has the whole ugly story: