Daily Inspiration Quote by Elena Kagan

Kagan’s line is a masterclass in judicial self-defense: calm, clipped, and engineered to deny her questioners the spectacle they came to produce. The doubled “are are” (almost certainly an unpolished spoken stumble) ironically sharpens the point. It sounds like real-time speech, not a memo, which makes the boundary she draws feel less like a talking point and more like a reflexive professional ethic.

The specific intent is procedural: to preempt the familiar confirmation-hearing trap where nominees are pressed to audition their “values” as if the Court were a legislature with robes. By declaring those values “wholly irrelevant to the job,” she reframes judging as craft and constraint rather than personality and preference. That’s not naive; it’s tactical. She’s not claiming she has no priors, only that the institution cannot survive their public performance as campaign promises.

The subtext is aimed in two directions. To senators: you don’t get to turn this into a partisan reveal party. To the broader audience: legitimacy depends on the Court looking less like nine branded influencers and more like an interpretive machine that can be criticized for reasoning, not vibe. The blunt “neither you nor anyone else will know” also functions as a warning: the Court’s authority rests on opacity about motive, and she intends to preserve that opacity.

Context matters: post-Bork, post-Culture Wars, when hearings became proxy battles. Kagan’s refusal is less coyness than damage control for a judiciary that knows the moment you advertise “values,” you invite the public to judge outcomes as loyalty tests.