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If Elena Kagan wants to be the next justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, she’s gonna have to do it without the support of “The Maverick.”
Arizona Senator John McCain will not support Kagan’s rise to the country’s highest bench and he explains why in an op-ed piece he wrote for USA Today, which is scheduled to appear in the paper tomorrow.
McCain’s biggest beef with Kagan — as spelled out in his op-ed — is the way she dealt with military recruiters on the Harvard campus while she was the dean of the Harvard Law School.
Check out the meat of
McCain’s op-ed below.
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When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School,
While Kagan is entitled to her opinion, she was not entitled to ignore the law that requires universities to allow military recruiters on campus under terms of equal access with all other recruiters. The chief of recruiting for the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General Corps described the impact of Kagan’s changes by saying that “Harvard is playing games.” The Army’s report from that same period was even more blunt, stating, “The Army was stonewalled at Harvard.
she unmistakably discouraged Harvard students from considering a career
in the military — even while claiming to do otherwise — by denying
military recruiters the same access to Harvard students that was granted
to white-shoe law firms. Kagan did so because she believed the
military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to be “a profound wrong — a
moral injustice of the first order.”
McCain’s announcement comes a week after Utah Senator Orrin Hatch announced he would be opposing Kagan, too.
In fact, not a single Republican in Congress has said they’d support Kagan and since McCain is currently waging a tough primary campaign here in Sand Land, it seemed highly unlikely he would be the lone elephant to give her the nod of approval.
Unfortunately for Republicans, it seems they can write op-ed pieces opposing Kagan until they’re blue (no pun intended) in the face — Congressional Democrats have more than enough votes to push Kagan through the confirmation process.
Click here to check out McCain’s op-ed in its entirety.
