Jon Kyl: GOP won't filibuster Kagan

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is unlikely to face a Republican filibuster, the Senate's second-ranking Republican said Sunday.

"The filibuster should be relegated to extreme circumstances, and I don't think Elena Kagan represents that," Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CBS’s "Face the Nation."

Kyl voted to confirm Kagan to be solicitor general, the top lawyer who argues the administration's cases before the Supreme Court. But Kagan shouldn't be count on his vote again, he said.

"No," he said. "I explained at the time that my vote for the temporary position as the government's top lawyer in the Justice Department did not suggest how I would vote were she to be nominated for a lifetime appointment to a court such as the Supreme Court."

Administration efforts to keep Kagan's confirmation process humming along with little drama continue. Over the weekend, the White House sent a letter to the National Archives, urging the release of 160,000 pages of documents from Kagan's tenure in the Clinton White House. And this week she will head back to Capitol Hill for meetings to shore up additional support.

Judiciary committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) predicted Kagan's confirmation to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens will be "done this summer” ahead of the court's new term. Leahy said he'll be sitting down with ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) this week.

Republicans have meanwhile stepped up their criticism in the run-up to the expected summer hearing, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried a new line of attack Sunday, addressing Kagan's role in the Citizens United Case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment could not limit corporate funding in campaigns.

"Solicitor Kagan's office, in the initial hearing, argued that it'd be okay to ban books," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And then when there was a re-hearing, Solicitor Kagan herself, in her first Supreme Court argument, suggested that it might be okay to ban pamphlets. I think that's very troubling."

On the Sunday shows, GOP senators again focused on Kagan's role in barring military recruiters from Harvard Law School. In 2003, Kagan, the law school’s dean, decided that military officials could not use the campus' main recruitment office because the military's "don't ask, don't tell" stance violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy.

Sessions proclaimed that it was "no little bitty matter," and said that Kagan broke the law.

“She disallowed them from the normal recruitment process on campus,” he told Jake Tapper on “This Week.” “She went out of her way to do so. She was a national leader in that, and she violated the law of the United States at various points in the process.”

McConnell, who did not repeat the claim that Kagan had broken the law, did say "the committee ought to look into it," since the "record has yet to be developed."

And while Kyl declined to weigh in on former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's claim that Kagan is "anti-military," he said the controversy will "play a part in the hearings."

"In my view, it was inappropriate for her to describe it as a discriminatory policy of the military," he said. "She did not deny entry on to the campus of the president, President Clinton, or the members of the Congress who had adopted the law."

The White House has stressed that Kagan has had great relationships with veterans and with the military. And Leahy pushed back on “This Week,” saying it was "sound and fury signifying nothing."

"If somebody wants to go in the military, they usually find a recruiter," he said. "I mean, I don't think there was a recruiting station on the campus when my youngest son went and joined the Marine Corps. He wanted to join the Marine Corps. He had no trouble finding a recruiter. And I think in this case, the recruitment went on at Harvard all the way through. This really is trying to make up something out of whole cloth."

Fools:

Here are a few selected FReeper comments to date:

Chief Justice Roberts:

Kagan Asked Court to ‘Embrace Theory of First Amendment That Would Allow Censorship Not Only of Radio and Television Broadcasts, But Pamphlets and Posters’

In another article, titled “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V,” she writes, “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the un-coerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.”
Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, helped craft President Bill Clinton’s political strategy for sustaining his veto of the partial-birth abortion ban in 1997. As a result of Clinton’s successful veto that year, the ban was not enacted until 2003, when it was signed by President George Bush.
I can settle the question for everyone on the site.(Harvard Connections, you know.) Kagan is gayer than Christmas in Port-au-Prince.

She’s in the back of the closet, just like Barney Frank was until he was outed and heroically made a virtue out of being a god-curséd sodomite SOB, as well as a crook.

Now, about her hard-core, real-orders-from-the-Kremlin-belong-to-a-cell, commie family. Dad was a big time commie union infiltrator.

Mommie was a commie.

Bro still is a big-time commie.

These Kagans are NYC commies from the 1930’s, 1940’s, type of people. Elena? Red Diaper baby type. Can sing the “Internationale,” but not the SSB.

Pull the old Kagan FBI Files.

Look’em up in the VENONA files. I hope every Republican Senator does.

You don’t have to have very many brain cells to know that Elena Kagan is a Pluto-bound abortion-loving socialist. The thought of that grinning overfed New York dyke on our Supreme Court for the next 30-40 years makes me weep for my country.

Her heroes: Abner Mikva, Thurgood Marshall, Cass Sunstein (who believes the Constitution requires taxpayers to fund abortion and has proposed abolishing marriage - the pure Communist line since 1917) and Aharon Barak Israeli Supreme Court justice Aharon Barak (who has been called Israel’s “Big Brother”)

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