Senate panel OKs Kagan

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Tuesday to approve Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, clearing a key hurdle on her path to winning confirmation as just the fourth woman to ever serve on the high court.

Voting 13-6, largely along party lines, the committee sent her nomination to the full Senate for consideration this month or in early August. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. was the only Republican on the panel to support Kagan.

"What's in Elena Kagan's heart is that of a good person who adopts a philosophy I disagree with," Graham said. "She will serve this nation honorably, and it would not have been someone I would have chosen, but the person who did choose, President Obama, I think chose wisely."

In a more than two-hour meeting, committee Democrats and Republicans revisited many of the same themes from the hearings held in late June with Kagan, the current solicitor general.

Republicans questioned her credentials and her lack of experience as a federal judge, and cited her decision, while dean of the Harvard Law School, to forbid military recruiters on the campus of the law school.

Democrats countered that Kagan's legal background matched many past and current justices and defended her Harvard position by saying that she was trying to walk the line of supporting the military and the university's prohibition on discrimination in light of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward homosexuals serving in the military.

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Much of the debate focused on the confirmation process that the committee employs for Supreme Court nominees.

Kagan came under bipartisan condemnation for what the senators described as her "opaque and limited answers" and her game of "hide the ball," the latest venting by a Judiciary Committee that is increasingly frustrated by its own system for vetting the nation's most important judges.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.