Republican Senators shrug duty in Kagan vote except one

“Lindsey Graham stands apart from other Republican senators on Kagan vote

Graham said Kagan "has passed all those tests" envisioned by the Framers, then he challenged his colleagues: "Are we taking the language of the Constitution that stood the test of time and basically putting a political standard in the place of a constitutional standard? That's for each senator to ask and answer themselves."

Cornyn (he was still in the room) studied his cuticles. Coburn stroked his chin. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) raised a hand to cover a yawn.

Across the table, Dick Durbin (Ill.), the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, took Graham's words to heart. "During the course of his statement," he said, "I reflected on some of the things that I have said and how I've voted in the past and thought that perhaps his statement suggested there was a better course for many of us to consider in the future."

The banality of the Senate confirmation process has become an old joke. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) stopped by the press table as he entered the room. "You think you're going to hear one word that you haven't heard already?" he asked the reporters.

But Specter was wrong. Those who were there did hear something fresh: Graham's penetrating indictment of the tribal logic that has overtaken his colleagues.

First he read from a letter written by conservative legal scholar Miguel Estrada, a George W. Bush nominee blocked by Democrats in 2003, stating that Kagan should be "easily confirmable." He then read from a letter Kagan wrote recently containing similar praise for Estrada. "That gives me hope," Graham said, that people of different "legal philosophy and political interaction can at the end of the day say nice things about each other. . . . I think it would make a lot of Americans feel better if we could react that way ourselves a bit."”