GOP Sen. Sessions: “Unacceptable” that Obama Supreme Court Pick Banned Military Recruiters from Harvard
GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions saying yesterday that it is “unacceptable” that Obama Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan banned military recruiters from Harvard when she was Dean of the Harvard Law School. Kagan did so because she disagreed with the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military.
Sessions said:
“She would not allow the military recruiters to come onto the Law School in order to recruit JAG officers for the military because she didn’t agree with the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy President Clinton had adopted – and they just wouldn’t let them come on campus. We had 1,000 soldiers killed defending free speech and the right of Harvard to exist in freedom during that period of time. So, I think that would be something that would be asked.
She felt that this was discriminatory, but it was the established policy of the United States, President Clinton’s policy. She could work to change that, but I don’t believe it was acceptable for her to say ‘You can’t even come on our campus because I disagree with your policy.”
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Wild Thing’s comment……..
Sessions is one of a very small handful of principled men in DC.. I can think of about 10 that I respect a lot and we know they are conservative and consistently conservative as well.
She’s anti- life and anti-military. Obama picks people like himself.
The most liberal judges on the Supreme Court ruled against her. That should tell everybody where she stands.
By letting openly Homosexuals in the Military how does this help anything. How does it make us safer ? Except for all the problems it can cause what else can it do to benefit the country. Absolutely nothing.
Thats asking for trouble and what about putting them on submarines, on the cruises where the sub is submerged for 6 months at a time.
This whole idea is a catastrophe waiting to happen…
Why can’t they stay the hell out of business that they know nothing about. Bad enough the Pentagon has run amok with this PC BS, this will complicate the problem ten fold.
Pretend facts bring on real but undeserved outrage. Here’s what really happened…
1) Kagan briefly prevented the military from using the school’s Office of Career Services (OCS), but never barred recruiters from campus, allowing them to operate through the school’s Veterans Association during her entire tenure. 2) Harvard Law School has a long-standing policy designed to prohibit employers that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation from recruiting through the OCS, but made an exception for the military, which Kagan observed. 3) Seeking to fully enforce Harvard’s policy, Kagan supported an effort to overturn the Solomon Amendment, which would have stripped Harvard of $400 million in federal grant money had she barred recruiters from using the OCS. 4) In 2004, a federal appeals court ruled against the Pentagon on the Solomon Amendment, and Kagan briefly prohibited the military from using the OCS. 5) In 2006, the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court, and Kagan reinstated the military’s right to use the OCS. Even ultra-conservative Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano understood this, explaining that Kagan was “following the law as it then existed.”
BobF., I agree, and that is what I am telling people that say she was doing the right thing.
Mark, I sure wish they would, I would love every one of these communists kicked the heck out of our government on all levels.
algionfriddo, I let your comment through. Please the next time you wish to state quotes etc. please add a link to back up the information.
One thing I always do is back up what I post with links to the quotes.
Now to address what you said, because you are wrong.
This is from The American Spectator……….
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/05/11/fudging-facts-to-defend-of-kag
Fudging Facts to Defend Kagan
by John Tabin
Robert C. Clark, who was a colleague of Elena Kagan’s at Harvard Law School, takes to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page today to defend her treatment of military recruiters. His defense, though, relies on the omission of key facts:
In November 2004, however, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Solomon Amendment infringed improperly on law schools’ First Amendment freedoms. So Ms. Kagan returned the school to its pre-2002 practice of not allowing the military to use OCS, but allowing them to recruit via the student group.
Yet this reversion only lasted a semester because the Department of Defense again threatened to cut off federal funding to all of Harvard, and because the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Third Circuit’s decision. Once again, military recruiters were allowed to use OCS, even as the dean and most of the faculty and student body voiced opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
A reader could be forgiven for inferring from this passage that after the Third Circuit struck down the Solomon Amendment, it no longer carried the force of law, and that it became good law again a semester later when the Supreme Court reversed the Third Circuit. But as I laid out in today’s column, that isn’t how it happened. The Third Circuit stayed its decision pending appeal, leaving the Solomon Amendment in force; Kagan reverted the law school to its pre-2002 policy anyway. She relented in 2005 only because of the DoD’s threat; the Supreme Court ruling that upheld Solomon (unanimously, by the way) did not come until 2006.
The fact that Professor Clark’s defense of Kagan’s 2004 decision requires him to elide such important details is a rather stark illustration of just how indefensible that decision actually was.