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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.
When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School,
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.”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.
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.
