U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan "should be disqualified" from a position on the country’s highest court, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Glenn Beck Saturday at a meeting of the National Rifle Association. Gingrich said Kagan tried to bar military recruiters from the Harvard Law School campus when she was the dean there during the gathering in Charlotte, N.C., The Charlotte Observer reported. "That is an act so unbecoming an American that she should be disqualified," Gingrich said.
Gingrich and Beck both urged the estimated crowd of 10,000 people at the event to vote in November for candidates who supported a conservative agenda. "We have to think of something because the Titanic is going down. We need to save the passengers, that’s what we need to worry about," Beck told the crowd. "Your mission is to organize at every level … and to simply, decisively beat all of the [liberal-leaning candidates] and get this country back on track," Gingrich said.
Gingrich also drew loud applause when he talked about the right to bear arms: "It’s not in defense of hunting, it’s not in defense of target shooting or collecting. The Second Amendment is defense of freedom from the state."
I expect some of you couldn’t make it to the duet between Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich at the NRA gathering in Charlotte this weekend. No surprises. Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, isn’t qualified because she opposed military recruiters on the Harvard Campus and she wants to get rid of Don’t-Ask, Don’t-Tell. In other news, they agreed that the Nazi/Socialist/Liberal regime of Obama has to go.
Today the AJC reprinted E. J. Dionne’s column from the Washington Post about Kagan and the military recruiting controversy. He says he had a conversation with her back then, and it was in fact her balanced way of describing her position that would be the best argument FOR her being confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Dionne’s position was that the military needs the liberalizing influence of educated recruits, so their discriminating against gays should be fought in other arenas and allow them to recruit on college campuses.
Her position was that, in a free and democratic society, the military should be able to recruit on campuses, but university officials have an obligation to maintain policies that protect groups that are part of their student population from discrimination. So you have a conflict between two principles. At Harvard Law, she struck the balance by allowing recruiters access through a student veterans group, but not through the main career office.
Dionne said that her comfort in having a calm and thoughtful discussion with him about it — they agreed on the conflicting principles but came to different conclusions about the remedy — was exactly what we need on the court.
Hopefully, she will be able to convince the senators of the same, although Dionne said these hearings hardly allow one to be candid and therefore wind up being rituals of non-substance, which is probably inevitable and is the prudent way to go. He coins a phrase: “vacuity in pursuit of confirmation is no vice.”