Former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan hasn’t even been nominated for the Supreme Court but conservatives already have a line of attack planned. It centers on an e-mail Kagan sent four months after she landed the gig at Harvard. The topic: the presence of military recruiters on campus, which violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy. But if Harvard banned the recruiters it would risk losing federal funding for the entire campus. Here’s what Kagan wrote:
“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.”
It’s hardly inflammatory and it’s not a unique opinion, but it’s enough to rile up the right. The president of one conservative think tank said Kagan’s reaction seems “fit for something like the Holocaust” and that, “if she is the nominee, that is an angle that I would press.” We’re betting there are a lot of conservatives who agree with him. As long as everyone on talk radio and Fox News can find one line of attack, especially if it paints Kagan as an un-American opponent of the military, they’ve got a chance of derailing her nomination. Of course, she hasn’t even been nominated yet so they should probably get back to digging though all of the other potential nominees’ trash.
Foes may target Kagan’s stance on military recruitment at Harvard [WP]
