And so it begins -- the online war to define Elena Kagan, whom President Obama nominated early Monday to be the 112th justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
She is not the first SCOTUS nominee to be vetted by the online public in our blogging, Facebooking, tweeting, YouTubing times. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic on the court, carried that distinction. But the Obama of July 2009, when Sotomayor was nominated, is not the Obama of 2010, when the president's polling numbers have significantly lowered and Democrats have lost their "super-majority" in the Senate. In other words, Kagan's confirmation is not as definite as Sotomayor's. The GOP, especially Senate Republicans, will take advantage of that.
Enter the YouTube channel called RepublicanSCOTUS, which was created last month and features video clips of Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The channel currently has 10 videos. Expect more to be added as pundits and pols line the cable shows. Already Kagan is a trending topic on Twitter, and will be for days to come. Facebook groups will inevitably be created. And we'll see what kinds of videos YouTubers in particular -- and the online masses in general -- will post relating to Kagan.
On a related note, we wonder, is Kagan YouTube-friendly? In a video clip making the rounds, Kagan is an advocate of allowing cameras inside the Supreme Court. Is Kagan also in favor of allowing hearings to be streamed live online, as we've argued in this space?