There are signs that the GOP is tossing aside far-right fundamentalists and the Tea Party Movement. Elena Kagan’s potential nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States revealed a fissure in the relationship between two prominent Republican Senators and the far-right wing of their party.
On April 11, 2010, Ben Domenech wrote in The New Ledger that Kagan’s nomination “would please much of Obama’s base” because she “would be the first openly gay justice.” Domenech’s comments created a firestorm over Kagan’s sexual orientation that even drew in the White House.
On April 13, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in a comment that would come back to haunt him, said about Kagan: “I like her. I liked her (referring to her confirmation hearings for Solicitor General). I liked her answers.”
Bryan Fischer, of the influential extreme right-wing fundamentalist organization, the American Family Association (AFA), assuming that Kagan is a lesbian, said on April 15: “We simply should not elevate to the highest court in the land people who are known for engaging in sexually abnormal behavior….” Apparently not believing his statements were sufficiently homophobic, Fischer, on his AFA blog post the following day, said no homosexual should ever serve as a judge because, according to him, homosexuality equals pedophilia.
Senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.), during an interview on Face the Nation on April 18, side-stepped the question whether he has been distancing himself from the Tea Party because he refused to attend a Sarah Palin rally in Boston (and presumably because he voted against a GOP plan to filibuster a $15 billion jobs bill). The same weekend, at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, S.C. William Gheen, head of the far-right group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), punished Sen. Graham for saying he liked Ms. Kagan by calling for him to “come out of that log cabin closet.”
During hearings for the next Supreme Court justice, the Democrats should be sure to capitalize on this twist to the story by pointing out that extreme far-right Republican groups who oppose their nominee are out of touch with principles of decency and tolerance and that even the GOP is beginning to move away from them. It is possible that Graham and Brown, in an attempt to not be lumped with those extremist groups, will further distance themselves from them and not oppose the Democratic nominee.
