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5/11/2010
Burri: Kagan opposed military recruiting. THAT bothers me.
President Obama has chosen his SCOTUS nominee: Elena Kagan, Solicitor General, former Harvard Law School Dean.
Nomination made…let the storylines begin! Several exist already, and did, even before her nomination was announced. Most of them, you won't be surprised, don't matter a bit. For example:
She might be a lesbian. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, or…well, unless you’re part of the Obama administration. Then, apparently, there is something wrong with it. When a CBS News blogger suggested that Kagan plays for the other team, the White House freaked out:
"The fact that they've chosen to become enablers of people posting lies on their site tells us where the journalistic standards of CBS are in 2010."
Does it matter whether she’s a lesbian? Not really, except to the White House. They want everyone to know absolutely that they are not – repeat not – nominating a gay woman to SCOTUS, dammit!
Another example: as the Dean of Harvard Law, Kagan hired “32 tenured and tenure-track academic faculty members,” and guess what almost none of them were?
Of these 32 tenured and tenure-track academic hires, only one was a minority. Of these 32, only seven were women. All this in the 21st Century.
Thirty-two hires, and the only non-white: an Asian-American. Luckily for Kagan, she’s a liberal candidate – not a conservative – being nominated by a Democrat – not Republican – president. Otherwise, this might be a problem.
One more: for three years, Kagan served on the Goldman Sachs Research Advisory Council. Goldman Sachs, you may have heard, is the latest scapegoat for the financial crash, and the target of an SEC lawsuit.
Does it mean anything? Probably not. But it is funny. All these “issues” will be hashed and re-hashed and re-re-hashed over the next several weeks. And yet, I don’t care about them. They're background noise. Chum for the pundits. They don’t matter.
This one does:
Shortly after Kagan became Dean of Harvard Law she joined a lawsuit against the Solomon Amendment. This basically told universities around the country: if you prohibit military recruiting on campus, we'll take away your federal funds.
A federal appeals court agreed with her, and overturned it. Amendment gone, Kagan leapt and, in protest against Don't Ask, Don't Tell, banned military recruiting. The military had to rely on student group invitations for access.
Shortly after that, SCOTUS said: nope. Amendment back, over $300 million a year on the line, and…well, okay. The military can come back now.
But Kagan wasn't happy:
"This action causes me deep distress," Kagan wrote that morning in October 2003. "I abhor the military's discriminatory recruitment policy." It is, she said, "a profound wrong -- a moral injustice of the first order."
Okay, so she opposes the policy. More power to her.
But…whose policy is it? The military’s? No. Lest we forget: DADT was a creation of the Clinton administration. Post-Clinton, President Bush left it be. The military did what they were supposed to do: they followed the President's orders.
Harassing the military was pointless. More than that, though: it illustrates the divide between average Americans, who admire and respect the military, and the elite, who don't.
That Elena Kagan opposed military recruiting on a campus that dings the American taxpayers for hundreds of millions a year, all the while sitting on an endowment fund of over $25 billion (and that's after the recession took its bite)…this says something about her.
It won't affect her confirmation. That's going to happen. It should, though, give the administration some heartburn. President Obama should have to answer questions about it. It should serve as a reminder that his values aren't ours.
Lance Burri blogs regularly via his site, The TrogloPundit
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