The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
News of the Tautological
“Website Comment Poster Unknown”–headline, Telegraph (Nashua, N.H.), May 9
Antimilitary Justice?
It looks as though it’ll be Justice Elena Kagan. President Obama this morning nominated the solicitor general to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, and with the Democrats still holding a 59-41 majority in the Senate, she ought to sail through. Still, at least one aspect of her record deserves close scrutiny: her opposition, as dean of Harvard Law School, to military recruiters on campus.
A 2005 Harvard Crimson story detailed Kagan’s position:
Kagan announced in November that the military could not use the law school’s recruiting resources until the Pentagon signed a pledge promising not to discriminate against gay and lesbian employees. The military, which discharges openly gay servicemen under its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, refused to sign the pledge.
In fact, Kagan was demanding that the Pentagon sign a “pledge” to violate the law–an odd position for someone who aspires to sit on the highest court in the land. As National Review’s Ed Whelan notes:
What Kagan mischaracterized as the “military’s policy” is in fact the Clinton administration’s implementation of a provision of the defense-appropriations law that a Democratic-controlled Congress enacted in 1993 (with Clinton’s signature). Instead of taking potshots at military recruiters who were merely complying with the law, did Kagan ever exclude from campus any of the politicians responsible for the law? Of course not.
Even the liberal Peter Beinart can’t stomach Kagan’s antimilitary position:
The United States military is not Procter and Gamble. It is not just another employer. It is the institution whose members risk their lives to protect the country. You can disagree with the policies of the American military; you can even hate them, but you can’t alienate yourself from the institution without in a certain sense alienating yourself from the country. Barring the military from campus is a bit like barring the president or even the flag. It’s more than a statement of criticism; it’s a statement of national estrangement.
Beinart wrote this last month in the hopes that Obama would reject Kagan for this reason: If that happened, he argued, “it would make ambitious Ivy League administrators think twice because succumbing to the left-wing mindlessness that sometimes prevails on campus.” That’ll be the day.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
