"I know that a solicitor general is required to argue the legal positions of the administration that hired her — but to this extent?"

Civil libertarian Nat Hentoff raises a few concerns about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, particularly her comments during the Citizens United oral arguments about government bans on political speech:

This is how the former dean of the Harvard Law School and a former clerk of Justice Thurgood Marshall answered: "I think a pamphlet would be different. A pamphlet is pretty classic electioneering."

Pamphlets played a key role in how we became the United States of America — including Tom Paine's Common Sense and The Crisis; John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, and Samuel Adams' The Rights of the Colonists, among others.

Later rejecting Kagan's argument, Roberts noted that the government had taken a position, as argued by Kagan, that embraced "a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets."

I know that a solicitor general is required to argue the legal positions of the administration that hired her — but to this extent?

Read the rest here. Reason weighed in on Kagan's free speech record here and here.