This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 24th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama wants a Supreme Court justice who shares many of Justice Stephen's views of the First Amendment,

especially in the realm of campaign finance reform.

In Elena Kagan, it's not clear if the President has found that nominee.

John Samples, Director of the Cato Institute Center for

Representative Government, comments. Well in general we don't know a lot about her

views about anything and that seems to have been a remarkable achievement by her of

you know obscuring her views about important issues for some time. She served as

Solicitor General, She argued the Citizens United case on behalf of the government.

The rehearing. The rehearing, she argued on, she argued the rehearing on behalf of the government.

That doesn't tell us a great deal about her views.

She did change the argument by essentially

dropping an argument in favor of an earlier precedent, the Austin case.

But that was going to lose at the Supreme Court level, so it doesn't really tell us anything.

It was just a strategic move in trying to win the case.

She did make an argument in a recent First Amendment case that in some case we should rethink the First Amendment in a way

that in some cases where social cost of speech should be balanced against the

benefits of the speech.

Justice Roberts took strong exception to that in the opinion,

said it was a startling and dangerous idea,

that in fact the whole point of the First Amendment was to set political

speech or speech in general outside of that kind of cost-benefit analysis and in a sense for her to choose that kind of argument I think which was

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