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 President Obama introduces his Supreme Court nominee, Solicitor General Elena Kagan
(Credit: CBS) The leading Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee said this morning that it was important to examine whether, if confirmed, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan would say no to the Obama administration.

"I think the Congress and the Senate needs to examine her record carefully," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said on CBS' "The Early Show." "This is not a coronation. She'll be subjected to scrutiny. We need to know whether or not [if] she obtains that robe and sits on that bench, will she be an objective person? Will she say 'no' even to the Obama administration and some of their agenda items if they're unconstitutional? She's got to demonstrate that or she shouldn't be given a lifetime appointment."

Sessions voted against Kagan's nomination last year for Solicitor General, citing her lack of appellate court experience. (Seven Republicans supported her in the 61-31 vote).

When asked by "Early Show" anchor Maggie Rodriguez what he would need to learn from Kagan to earn his and other Republicans' support, Sessions said, "I'm not sure what we'll be looking to hear. I'll be meeting with her personally, I look forward to that. She has a good academic background. But not much actual, practical experience. Most of her actual legal experience has been in sort of political law, been within the Clinton administration or the Obama administration." [Kagan served as Associate White House Counsel under Clinton.] "We need to know that she's got the personal discipline that good judges and good lawyers have so that day after day, week after week, it won't be her politics or her ideology but the law and her fidelity to it, that will decide how she handles her cases."

CBSNews.com Special Report: Elena Kagan

"Has she in your view shown otherwise as Solicitor General?" Rodriguez asked.

"I think we're going to look at that record," Sessions said. "It's not been long, just a little over a year. It's a good legal position. It's the first real significant legal position she's ever had. So I think it is something to examine."

Some analysts pointed to Kagan's time in the Clinton White House, during which she asked the president to support a ban on all late-term abortions of viable fetuses except when the mother's health is at risk, saying her position might shift the court to the right compared to Justice John Paul Stephens, whom she would replace.

When asked by Rodriguez for a response, Sessions said, "I don't sense that she would on that issue move the court to the right. A 'partial-birth' abortion situation was something that is to me unthinkable that somebody would oppose that, so she was correct on that for sure. But I don't know that that reflects any serious disagreement with the court's view on abortion."

When asked for a prediction on whether or not she would be confirmed in time to take a seat by the traditional first Monday in October, Sessions said, "I'm not going to predict that.

"The American people need to know that this appointment is very, very important for our country. The next Supreme Court as configured will decide many issues about the limited nature of the federal government, and is it still limited today? Her background is on the other side — she's been a liberal political activist throughout her life. And she'll need to put that aside and be an objective judge. That will be I think the examination's center."

I don’t know whether Henry Mencken's reminiscences will be the definitive book on American journalism, though I should think they might be, or whether he will get around to bringing them up through the Smart Set and Mercury years. But they will make the all-around best reading of any book on the trade at large. His second volume, uniform with the first, is called "Newspaper Days" and covers the period 1899-1906, which is to say, from his first application for a newspaper job as a raw kid of eighteen to his early glorification as Sunday editor, city editor (at twenty-three) and finally managing editor (at twenty-five) in the last days as The Baltimore Herald changed to an evening paper and headed toward the boneyard. His rapid advance was the result of many operative factors but mainly of incessant and resourceful industry, twelve to twenty hours a day. Yet he found time on the side for a shocking amount of literary activity, sold short stories all over the place, wrote at least two volumes of poetry, set up a sort of gadget news service, and managed a sound unofficial coverage of beer-swilling contests and firemen's balls. Speaking of the experience of the great Baltimore fire in 1904, he says, "When I came out of it at last I was a settled and indeed almost a middle-aged man, spavined by responsibility and aching in every sinew, but I went into it a boy, and it was the hot gas of youth that kept me going."

There is a power of stuff you cannot learn from books, to be a whole man, and surely the police and city-hall beats in the Baltimore of the 1900's was learning the hard but thorough way. H. L. Mencken went into it, he says, "full of an innocent delight in the world," but if he had any loose baggage of illusions he got quit of it early and painlessly enough so it could not devil him; he "had a grand and gaudy time of it." And he makes just about the best kind of memoirist, neither talking as though he had his dinner clothes on and they were too tight, nor messing die place up with self-analysis, sexual repressions and sighs.

After all this dream-we-lost stuff, all the endless I-saw-pants- fall reverberance, it is pleasant to sit down with a man who grew up while he was growing, whose world was wide but whose knowledge of it was sharp and intimate, who left social apology and uplift and prophecy to others and took in the show, sdll being part of it. He is not solemn with himself and he isn't with anything else. Possibly his brisk and offhand way with the various currents of life in America will annoy many who talk more and actually know less about them; and certainly he is the first to tell you he has no more social responsibility than a cat. But he is a damn good reporter and he knows where the side door is on anything from fancy houses to a Republican convention; moreover, he knows, appreciates and does proud the profession he has spent most of his life in and is now talking about, from the hand-set whiskey of the Baltimore printers to the stereotype, the city room, the front office, the legal department. No reporter, or artist, or press foreman, or hot professor, or minister of the faith, no flack or floozie or tub-thumper could put anything over on him from the age of twenty-three, and that is saying quite a lot when you look around the field. What mistakes he has made or seems to have made are usually the result of (1) his firm and often justified conviction that the world is still the Baltimore city hall, (2) his not having heard somebody else through the bull-moose racket he keeps up himself.