Third woman on US Supreme Court

WASHINGTON – The United States Senate has confirmed Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination, making her the third woman on the nine-member court and the fourth in history.Five Republicans supported President Barack Obama’s pick, with Nebraskan Ben Nelson the only Democrat to oppose it.Opponents said she would advocate for liberal policies from the bench and criticised her lack of judicial experience. Kagan was a White House aide to President Bill Clinton and later dean of Harvard Law School.When he took office, Obama named her US solicitor general, the lawyer who argues the government position before the Supreme Court.He nominated her to the nation’s highest court in May, when Justice John Paul Stevens announced he was retiring.Kagan, 50, can now serve on the Supreme Court for the rest of her life. A native of New York – she is unlikely to alter the court’s narrowly divided ideological make-up. She is Obama’s second nomination, after Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Hispanic justice, and also a New Yorker.Thirty-six of 41 Senate Republicans opposed her nomination, arguing that her lack of judicial experience and what they described as her liberal political views made her unsuited for the ostensibly non-partisan and apolitical high court.Kagan worked as a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice and a hero to liberals.“The massive expansion of government power we’ve seen over the last 18 months puts our country at a unique time in history,” Senator Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican, said in a statement. (BBC)