Kagan Booted Recruiters, Linked GOP Terror Proposal to 'Dictatorships,' Wrote Thesis on Socialism

Elena Kagan’s most notable foray into public life was kicking military recruiters off of Harvard’s campus.

President Obama’s latest choice for the Supreme Court has held a number of high-profile jobs over the years, but she has left a relatively thin paper trail, with one major exception. As the dean of Harvard’s law school, Kagan fought to bar military recruiters from the university’s campus. Her reasoning? Even with two wars in progress, she contended, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should disqualify the US military from having any association with the school. “I abhor the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy,” she said, describing it as a “moral injustice of the first order.”

Critics say Kagan’s legal arguments on the matter are so preposterous that they raise doubts about her ability to serve on the bench. And indeed when the Supreme Court later rejected her position on military recruiting at Harvard, it did so unanimously.

Beginning in 2004, Kagan changed established Harvard policy and barred recruiters from the school’s career center. The Pentagon responded by invoking the Solomon Amendment, a 1994 law that explicitly requires universities that receive federal funding to allow military representatives at least as much access to campus as any other group. With Harvard’s $400 million in annual grants on the line, Kagan was forced to surrender.

But she kept fighting. Kagan and the university filed an amicus brief arguing that Harvard’s policy did not amount to discrimination against the military. The university, claimed the brief, does “not single out military recruiters for disfavored treatment: Military recruiters are subject to exactly the same terms and conditions of access as every other employer. Read more...

From The Daily Princetonian:

Kagan spent her senior year conducting research for her thesis on the history of the socialist movement, which was titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900–1933.” Her thesis has been criticized by her opponents for revealing sympathies with the Socialist Party and became a source of controversy when she was a potential nominee for Associate Justice David Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court last spring — a position which instead went to Sonia Sotomayor ’76 — and when she was nominated for her current position of solicitor general in January 2009.

“Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness,” she wrote in her thesis. “Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter. Such a state of affairs cries out for explanation.”

She called the story of the socialist movement’s demise “a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America ... In unity lies their only hope.”

Kagan also engaged in political activity outside the academic year and the ‘Prince.’ She first became interested in politics in high school and worked as a legislative intern for Rep. Ted Weiss, a Democrat from New York, during the summer of 1978, and as deputy press secretary for Holtzman in the summer after her junior year.
Though shielded from her friends, Kagan’s political beliefs emerged most clearly in an opinion piece she wrote for the ‘Prince’ a few weeks after that 1980 election night, in which she described her disappointment at Holtzman’s loss and her own liberal views. “I absorbed ... liberal principles early,” she said. “More to the point, I have retained them fairly intact to this day.”

In the piece, Kagan also expressed her dissatisfaction with the state of the political left at the time, lamenting the demise of “real Democrats — not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days” and the success of “anonymous but Moral Majority-backed ... avengers of ‘innocent life’ and the B-1 Bomber, these beneficiaries of a general turn to the right and a profound disorganization on the left.”

She hoped that the future would “be marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore.” Read more...

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