Nominee’s anti-abortion stance in ’97 surfaces

May 11, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Combined dispatches

WASHINGTON

As a White House adviser in 1997, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan urged then-President Bill Clinton to support a ban on late-term abortions, a political compromise that put the administration at odds with abortion-rights groups.

Documents reviewed Monday by The Associated Press show Kagan encouraging Clinton to support a bill that would have banned all abortions of viable fetuses except when the physical health of the mother was at risk. The documents from Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., are among the first to surface in which Kagan weighs in on the thorny issue of abortion.

The abortion proposal was a compromise by then-Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle. Clinton supported it, but the proposal failed, and Clinton vetoed a stricter Republican ban.

In a May 13, 1997, memo from the White House domestic-policy office, Kagan and her boss, Bruce Reed, told Clinton that abortion-rights groups opposed Daschle’s compromise. But they urged the president to support it, saying he otherwise risked seeing a Republican-led Congress override his veto on the stricter bill.

Clinton generally supported banning late-term abortions but insisted there be an exception when the mother’s health was at risk.

Because Kagan spent little time in court and never sat as a judge, she does not have the typical long history of court opinions and legal briefs. That has made it difficult to assess her legal acumen or ideology.

President Barack Obama announced Kagan’s nomination to the high court Monday.

Obama portrayed Kagan as a guiding force for a fractured court and a champion of typical Americans. She would be the youngest justice on the court and give it three women for the first time in history.

Less excited, Republican senators said they would give the nomination a long, hard look in potentially contentious summertime confirmation hearings. One declared he would oppose her, but Democrats hold a strong majority of Senate seats, making eventual approval likely.

In choosing Kagan, the U.S. solicitor general and a former dean of Harvard Law School, Obama sought someone he hopes will seal majority votes on a divided court, as the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens sometimes had the ability to do. The president, who said Kagan has “one of the nation’s foremost legal minds,” wanted someone who could counter the court’s conservative leaders as well as sway votes with her thinking and temperament.

Obama chose a nominee who has never been a judge, a factor the White House said had worked in Kagan’s favor, giving her a different perspective from the other justices. Poised to put his imprint on the court for a second time, the president embraced Kagan’s profile: a left-leaning lawyer who has won praise from the right, earned political experience at the White House and on the college campus, cleared one Senate confirmation already and served as the nation’s top lawyer.

He wanted not just a justice who would thrive but one who would lead.

At 50 years old and with lifetime tenure, Kagan could extend Obama’s court legacy by decades. Her vote could be the difference on cases that shape American liberties and the scope of the government’s power.

The choice also makes history for Obama, and he reveled in it. After being the first president to appoint a Hispanic justice last year in Sonia Sotomayor, he would also be the one who ensured that three women would serve on the court at the same time. Kagan would join Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Mentioning Kagan’s late mother, Obama said: “I think she would relish, as do I, the prospect of three women taking their seat on the nation’s highest court for the first time in history — a court that would be more inclusive, more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever before.”

A beaming Kagan shared a handshake and a kiss with Obama, who towers over her, and then she stepped up on a riser to accept the honor of her life. Her comments emphasized a career built on teaching and arguing the law, not the judicial beliefs that she will be closely questioned about by senators.

She said the court allows “all Americans, regardless of their background or their beliefs, to get a fair hearing and an equal chance at justice.”