"I don't know that it would be useful to pursue these questions any further," he said. "We are searching for a way senators can get substantive answers . . . short of voting no."
Kagan, the Obama administration's solicitor general and former dean of Harvard Law School, had brushed aside Specter's efforts to get her to comment on whether she favored a standard for the court that gives stricter scrutiny to legislation, or favors the looser "rational basis" approach that gives more deference to Congress.
She also would not answer whether the Supreme Court should have agreed to hear an appeal in a lawsuit brought against Saudi Arabia by thousands of 9/11 victims and family members. As solicitor general, she urged the court last year not to take the case, which was pressed by law firms including Cozen O'Connor PC in Philadelphia.
"You shouldn't want a judge who will sit at this table and who will tell you she will reverse a decision without listening to arguments and without reading briefs and without talking to colleagues," Kagan said.
Still, Specter said he was "not frustrated" by Kagan's rhetorical tiptoeing. "I have a role and she has a role," he said during a break in the hearing.
Actually, Specter said, Kagan had been more forthcoming than many nominees - she agreed during Tuesday's questioning with his long-standing call for televised Supreme Court proceedings, while every other would-be justice has declined to answer.
And Specter said he did not agree with Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who suggested Tuesday that the Senate would be better off getting to know Supreme Court nominees informally rather than holding hearings, as was done before the 1930s.
"I believe the justices across the street pay some attention to what we do here," Specter said. "... They may not care about what Arlen Specter says on the Senate floor, but they may care about . . . the historians."
