Sun Jun 27, 4:10 PM ET

US Supreme Court nominee Solicitor General Elena Kagan attends a meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, in May 2010. Republicans may obstruct President Barack Obama's pick to fill a second US Supreme Court vacancy if she represents "activist" tendencies, a key US senator said Sunday.

By all accounts, U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan is a shoo-in to win Senate approval for her nomination to the Supreme Court, potentially making her confirmation hearings a snore. She is a centrist who has received the endorsement of prominent conservatives such as Kenneth Starr (the independent prosecutor who chased Bill Clinton) and Ted Olson (George W. Bush's lawyerBush v. Gore, the case that sealed Bush's presidency after the disputed Florida vote). Her closet contains no skeletons. No one expects this one to go down.

So is there anything worth watching for in Kagan's hearings, which start Monday at 12:30 p.m. Eastern in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee?

You bet! But it will not be on the witness's side of the table — all the fun will be coming from the Democratic senators.

The real show to watch will be the attempt by leading Democrats such as Patrick Leahy (D-N.H.) and Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), along with their interest group allies, to turn the tables on longstanding conservative claims that liberal judges and justices have engaged in "judicial activism." The core of the conservatives' argument: Some judges have gone well beyond the original meaning of the Constitution to find rights and principles that are not really in there.

The Democrats hope to convince the American public that the real activists these days are the right-leaning judges who have become increasingly influential. While ostensibly questioning Kagan, the Democrats' real aim will be to advance the argument that it is actually conservatives who are using the courts to impose their ideological views.

Ever since Earl Warren's tenure as United States chief justice in the 1950s and 1960s, the right has accused liberal judges of overstepping their role by engaging in such activism. Warren's court desegregated schools, banned school prayer and accorded criminal suspects new rights. Richard Nixon won office in part by attacking this sort of judging. in

Still, the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — under a court with four Nixon appointees, including the chief justice — gave women a constitutional right to choose abortion, angering conservatives more.

The 1990s were awash in conservatives' complaints about judicial activism, sparked by Supreme Court decisions on school prayer, religious displays on public grounds, criminal defendants' rights, the death penalty and other hot-button issues.

It all came to a head in 2003. That year the court decided in Lawrence v. Texas that states could not criminalize gay sex. And in litigation involving the University of Michigan School of Law, the court gave the green light to some affirmative action in college and graduate admissions. The result? Bestsellers like Mark Levin's "Men in Black:  How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America," arguing that the justices were writing their personal ideologies into the Constitution and lambasting decisions on affirmative action, gay rights and abortion.

The arguments against judicial activism have been remarkably successful in mobilizing the socially conservative wing of the GOP.  This, in turn, has helped conservatives accomplish two major goals.

First, it has led Republican presidents to look further to the right for nominees to the federal bench, and has put Democrats on the defensive. President George W. Bush said he admired justices in the mold of the court's two most conservative — Antonin ScaliaClarence Thomas — and then appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Sam Alito. Democrats' nominees, meanwhile, have been more moderate than many in the liberal wing of the party would prefer. As a result, the federal courts have shifted significantly to the right in both their makeup and in their judgments in recent years.

Second, it has helped conservatives win elections. Bush's win in 2000 has been attributed in part to the use of "wedge" issues and mobilization of the conservative base — exactly the target of campaigns about judicial activism.

Given those Republican successes — and the recent rightward tilt of the court — Democrats have tried to turn the activist tables. When the Supreme Court decided for George Bush in Bush v. Gore, and when it struck down congressional laws protecting the disabled and the elderly from state actions, liberals went bananas. They argued that this time it was the conservative justices who were ignoring the will of Congress and engaging in selective interpretations to fit ideological preconceptions. and

But though polls showed that many disagreed with Bush v. Gore, they also showed that the American people supported the court as the body most capable of resolving the election dispute.

Still, the Roberts court has given the left a new lease on its argument that it is conservative judges who are making up the rules and mangling the Constitution. In 2006, the five-person conservative majority on the court rolled back years of precedents without even acknowledging doing so. It upheld Congress' ban on certain late-term abortions (the procedure that critics call "partial-birth abortion") even though the court just a few years earlier had struck down a similar, nearly indistinguishable law. It interpreted campaign finance restrictions on corporations so narrowly that the remaining law was meaningless. It said taxpayers could not sue over Bush's "faith-based initiatives" even though such suits against Congress had long been OK'd.

To liberal critics, such willful dismissal of precedent is the definition of judicial activism. Even Justices Scalia and Thomas — though they agreed with the results in these cases — called out their colleagues for not being honest in overturning precedents.

Then came this January's big decision in a case known as Citizens United. In that case, the court struck down a congressional law limiting corporate influence in elections — this time explicitly established precedents. The president pointed a finger at the justices in his State of the Union address (prompting an angry shrug from Justice Alito and, later, a public rebuke from the chief justice). Polls showed that the decision in Citizens United was wildly unpopular, even among Republicans.

Finally, the Democrats had their opening. On "Meet the Press" in April, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Leahy began to articulate the case the Democrats will make.

"This is a very, very activist court, the most activist court in my lifetime. They rewrote the law to say that — so they said that women could be paid less than men. They rewrote the law to say that age discrimination laws won't apply if corporate interests don't want them to. ... And they rewrote the law to say that corporations could come in and meddle in elections in this country."

Expect to hear a lot more of this argument at Kagan's hearing in the senators' opening statements and the questions they pose. Expect to hear about Judge Martin Feldman, the Reagan appointee who last week struck down President Obama's moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Expect to hear about judges not respecting the elected Congress and the president.

That's going to be the show to watch. In questioning Kagan, the Democrats' underlying goal will be to showcase the arguments that would put the activism shoe on conservative feet.

And, like conservatives before them, they have an agenda that goes much further than this week's hearings. Despite claims to the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that Supreme Court justices actually are sensitive to public opinion. So, putting heat on them may slow the conservative push to the right. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing justice on the Supreme Court, seems particularly amenable to what the public is thinking.

Beyond this, the Democrats and their liberal allies hope the hearings will provide a critical opportunity to re-educate the American public about this whole idea of judicial activism. Polls show that millions of Americans tune in to these hearings. If that audience can be convinced that the conservative court is dissing the Constitution, this belief could ripple in just the manner it did for Republicans — in shaping the direction of the court and even the country’s politics.

But no matter what, don't look for Elena Kagan to help. Paint her noncommittal. Like Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Kagan knows she has to toe a fairly neutral line as she parries questions from both the left and the right on the proper role of judges in interpreting the law. After all, she wants the job. The Democrats are already voting for her; all she has to do is not get too many Republicans too angry.

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Barry Friedman is the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and author of the recent book "The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution." You can visit his home page and blog at www.thewillofthepeople.org.