Today’s Kagan files are broken up with headings sure to appeal to GOP lawmakers and aides eagerly awaiting a “smoking gun”-type revelation that could complicate her upcoming confirmation hearings. More than a dozen bundles of files deal with abortion, and another half-dozen touch on gun ownership issues.

But at least one Senate Republican didn’t need to wait for this afternoon’s Kagan documents to draw his own conclusions.

In a morning statement, Judiciary Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said the nominee’s memos from her clerkship under the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall reflect “a leftist philosophy and an approach to the law that seems more concerned with achieving a desired social result than fairly following the Constitution.”

Sessions continued:

Ms. Kagan has never been a judge, and only briefly practiced law—spending far more time as a liberal advocate than a legal practitioner. Given this thin legal resume, her candid memos as a Supreme Court clerk arguably provide some of the best insight into how she would rule as a Supreme Court Justice. These troubling memos have to be carefully examined, and it is now doubly important that the White House fully produce the overdue documents from the Clinton Library in order to shed further light on the philosophy Ms. Kagan would bring to the bench.

It’s enough to make one wonder if Sessions, who requested Kagan’s Clinton-era files two weeks ago, knew what would come just hours after his statement was made. The Alabama Republican has vowed to hold up Kagan’s scheduled June 28 confirmation hearing in the Judiciary panel “unless the files were produced in time for senators to peruse them well in advance,” according to the AP.

But as Center for American Progress Action Fund blogger Joe Romm quickly pointed out, there was one big word missing from Reid’s letter to the chairmen: “climate.” The Senate letter includes no indication that the energy measure under consideration would include a nationwide cap on greenhouse gas emissions or a price on carbon, which President Obama directly called for in his Pittsburgh speech on Wednesday.

Of course, Reid’s omission of any reference to a full-scale emissions cap could have been inadvertent. What makes the absence of the C-word from the Senate letter a potentially ominous sign for environmental groups?

The fact that several senior Senate Democrats, including Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), have pushed all year for a smaller, “energy-only” bill that would include a renewable electricity standard and other clean-fuel incentives — but not the greenhouse gas limits that were present in the House-passed climate plan.

Reid acknowledged the choice before him in an interview with Univision last month, suggesting that he might be forced to call up a trimmed, energy-specific bill if Republicans did not come to the table. “The big bill that we need to do, they are not helping us on that,” he said.

The Gulf oil disaster has undoubtedly shifted the politics of oil, increasing the prospects for stronger safety standards, regulation of the industry, and new taxes — a prospect of which the industry is well aware. But so far, the devastation along the nation’s southeastern coast has opened few new eyes in the Senate to the benefits of a hard cap on greenhouse gases.

If the spill ends up giving Democrats cover to aim for an energy bill that can overcome a GOP filibuster this summer, leaving strict emissions limits on the cutting-room floor, fierce pushback from environmental groups would likely ensue. But those green advocates might want to start by asking why the word “climate” never made it into yesterday’s letter.

As Roll Call reports, the GOP’s next step is raising questions about whether Bill Halter, the Democratic rival of incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), was similarly enticed to drop out of his race. Meanwhile, an aggrieved sentiment is running through much of the Romanoff coverage on conservative blogs as the GOP base imagines how the media would have salivated over a similar political misstep by the Bush administration. (See the first comment on this American Spectator post, for example.)

In fact, the Bush White House faced its own Romanoff/Sestak-style dilemma in New Hampshire in 2002.

That year found then-Rep. John Sununu (R-N.H.), the son of George H.W. Bush’s former chief of staff of the same name, mounting a primary challenge to incumbent Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.). The younger Bush’s team made clear that it preferred Sununu over Smith, a perennial gadfly who once briefly bolted the Republican party.

After a bitterly contested race, Sununu ultimately prevailed — and Smith, apart from a public endorsement of his younger foe, notably declined to help Republicans hold onto the seat in the general election. In a post-election interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader that year, Smith was asked to address “unsubstantiated reports … that the Bush administration was hoping to lure Smith out of the Senate race by offering him a post in the administration.”

As Smith told the newspaper:

“No one ever spoke to me from the administration about a job, not at any time prior to the primary,” he said. “Nor did I ever receive word of an offer through any back channels.”

Smith’s use of the phrase “not at any time prior to the primary” sound somewhat loaded, considering a Roll Call report published in late October 2002 that featured Karl Rove dangling a job before Smith in exchange for a more full-throated show of support for Sununu:

Before Bush traveled to New Hampshire in early October to appear at a rally for Sununu, GOP sources said Rove called Smith three times to urge him to fly to Manchester with the president aboard Air Force One. Rove wanted a display of Republican unity that has been lacking in New Hampshire since Sununu beat Smith in the bitterly fought Sept. 10 primary.

Rove even suggested that there could be a potential payoff for Smith if he cooperated, hinting that a job with the Bush administration could be in the offing, said the sources.

Rove told Smith, who is attending the World Series this week, that he “needed to make a decision and it could affect his future,” said one GOP insider.

“Terrorism kills … and Barbara Boxer is worried about the weather,” Fiorina tells the TV camera following a short clip of the incumbent Democratic senator playing up the security risk of global warming — an issue that has concerned the Pentagon dating back to the Bush administration.

Fiorina has taken a progressively more skeptical line on climate change and the science underpinning it since she entered the Senate race, telling reporters in November that “we should have the courage to examine the science on an ongoing basis.” But just a month before that, Fiorina was cheering on Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) as they attempted to craft a consensus emissions-cutting bill that could clear the upper chamber of Congress.

As Fiorina told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto in October, according to the official transcript:

I was interested … to see an op-ed yesterday in The New York Times co-authored by Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Kerry of Massachusetts, because they are trying to take a bipartisan approach to the twin issues of climate change and energy independence.

I was delighted to see them call for bipartisanship and delighted, as well, to see them call for a recognition that both achieving energy independence and addressing climate change as equally important goals, and that, if we do it right, we can create opportunity, we can create jobs, and we can create American leadership.

Of course, Graham has since abandoned the front lines of climate negotiations, arguing that the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster precludes any successful deal to expand offshore drilling in a future bill. Those shifting sands provide Fiorina with political cover — but conservative primary voters in California might be surprised to hear her cheering on attempts to get a handle on “the weather” just eight months ago.

But considering the flood of liability claims and congressional inquiries facing BP and the contractors who worked on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig, their existing K Street help is sure to be followed by high-powered legal teams. And as the National Law Journal reported on Tuesday, the corporations on the hook for the Gulf disaster are hiring lawyers with high-level bipartisan political connections.

BP has signed up Jamie Gorelick, the Department of Justice’s No. 2 official during the Clinton administration and a former member of the 9/11 Commission. Gorelick, also a registered lobbyist with Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Door, told Greenwire that her duties would focus on responding to congressional requests rather than “advocat[ing] for any position.” Still, her status in the capital — Gorelick was said to be in the mix as a possible Obama Attorney General — makes her an invaluable ally for the beleaguered oil giant.

Cameron International Corp., the contractor that manufactured the “blowout preventer” that failed on the Deepwater rig, has signed up Williams & Connolly counselor Emmet Flood, according to the Law Journal. Flood is best known for serving as special counsel to then-President George W. Bush, when he was a leading player in the complex negotiations over which high-ranking White House officials would agree to testify about the U.S. attorney firings scandal. Flood’s official biography notes that he also represented Vice President Dick Cheney in the civil lawsuit filed by outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial.

Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater rig, has anted up by retaining John Beisner of Skadden Arps. Beisner is currently a registered lobbyist on judicial issues for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but the Law Journal points out that his most significant experience lies in high-profile corporate liability cases:

A decade ago, when Beisner was an O’Melveny & Myers partner, he represented Ford Motor Co. regarding defects in more than 60 million tires, and he was part of the legal team in 2007 for Merck & Co. in litigation over its prescription pain killer, Vioxx.

Halliburton, another contractor on the Deepwater rig, has turned to a counsel with less time in the corporate misconduct trenches and fewer political connections but a strong background in the oil industry. Jeffrey Turner at Patton Boggs, reported as Halliburton’s point man on the Gulf spill, currently lobbies for the Ad Hoc Deep Water Exploration and Production Coalition, a group of oil companies (including BP) that has spent years fighting congressional attempts to rewrite offshore drilling royalty contracts that helped corporations reap a windfall during the Bush administration.

A still from a TV ad by the NRA during the 2008 presidential campaign (YouTube)

As House Democratic leaders raced to round up votes before the Memorial Day recess for a pivotal economic aid bill, trimming it by more than $70 billion to avoid a revolt by members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, the party made another concession on its agenda to far less fanfare. Last Thursday afternoon, hours before the House Rules Committee was set to take up a measure aimed at mitigating the fallout from Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of campaign cash — the meeting was scrapped.

[Congress1] Democratic aides depicted the delay as a consequence of a packed legislative calendar, predicting that the money-in-politics bill would come to the House floor after the recess. But some government watchdogs backing the majority’s effort saw a more dire sign in the Rules Committee postponement: that behind-the-scenes lobbying by some of Washington’s biggest campaign spenders, on both the left and the right, had spooked enough Democrats to make the legislation impossible to pass in its current form.

“I’m extremely concerned about what’s going to happen with this bill,” said Craig Holman, the longtime campaign-finance lobbyist at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “It’s taken months to produce a bill that was reasonably good because a number of forces were whittling this one down. … Now, suddenly, it’s been pulled again.”

Upon hearing of the Rules Committee cancellation, Holman said, “I thought, ‘Oh, no. The NRA [National Rifle Association] succeeded.’”

The post-Citizens United bill, dubbed the DISCLOSE Act by its sponsors, sets a series of new disclosure rules to shed light on the sources of campaign commercials, issue mailers and other election-season speech. Corporations, unions and politically active non-profit groups would be required to report donors who finance such political activity above certain thresholds, and the company that primarily pays for TV or radio campaign ads would have to add a disclaimer message recorded by its CEO.

Lloyd Leonard, director of advocacy at the League of Women Voters, acknowledge the grim political reality the bill faced last week. “If you have the votes, vote; and if you don’t have the votes, talk,” he said. “Obviously, proponents of the DISCLOSE Act didn’t have the votes to move ahead, or not all the details had been worked out.”

Generally speaking, the principle of disclosure has broad support on the Hill and from the Supreme Court. While the justices voted 5-4 in favor of letting corporations go beyond political action committees (PACs) to pay for electioneering ads out of their general treasuries, they released a separate but less well-known 8-1 ruling in the Citizens United case that affirmed the constitutionality of campaign-finance disclosure requirements.

But the prospect of donor disclosure has proven unpalatable to the NRA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Right to Life Committee, all of which fired off blistering critiques late last week in a bid to push the DISCLOSE measure from the House calendar. In a May 27 letter to lawmakers, the NRA charged that the legislation would force it “to turn our membership and donor lists over to the government” and decried the bill’s “byzantine disclosure requirements that have the obvious effect of intimidating speech.”

And conservative groups have not stood alone in chafing at the current scope of the bill’s new restrictions. As Holman put it, “Traditional Democratic allies provided the NRA with a great deal of credibility in this negotiation than they wouldn’t otherwise have.” Liberal-leaning advocacy groups reportedly expressing concerns with elements of the proposal include the Alliance for Justice (AFJ) and the Sierra Club. Though the AFJ’s president warned that Citizens United would likely unshackle far more campaign cash from the corporate world than from non-profits, the group still advised other eligible tax-exempt organizations to “take advantage of” the unlimited election-year playing field set by the high court.

Abby Levine, the AFJ’s deputy director of advocacy, underscored in an interview that her group is “in favor of meaningful disclosure.”

“The question then becomes, what is meaningful?” she added. “We want the relevant information without casting too wide a net.”

Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest union federation, has so far declined to endorse the DISCLOSE bill and vowed only to “carefully review this complex legislation.” That reticence has not stopped the Chamber and other conservative critics of the bill from accusing its authors of handing a victory to unions by cracking down harder on corporate political activity.

“The Chamber has done a really good job of scaring people, saying this is somehow going to help unions, and when you look at the bill, it’s clear that it’s not,” said a spokesman for one union closely following the bill.

The broad array of potential stumbling blocks raised by individual non-profits — many of which are well positioned to punish or reward lawmakers for their votes by directing ads during the coming midterm elections — underscores the delicacy of talks now going on among Democrats and affected groups. “The thing about this bill is that there is disclosure that wasn’t required before of all entities” in the politically active tax-exempt world, said U.S. Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) democracy advocate Lisa Gilbert. “These are things people aren’t accustomed to doing.”

Could the NRA or other groups succeed in watering down the bill enough to alienate the watchdog groups that now support it? Leonard, of the League of Women Voters, pointed to a proposed amendment from Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) as a possible deal-breaker for his group. The Shuler amendment [PDF] would exempt any 501(c)4 non-profit that finances election ads using only individual donations, as opposed to corporate money, from the bill’s disclosure and coordination rules.

Bridgett Frey, spokeswoman for the bill’s chief House sponsor, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), said via email that her boss would examine specific amendments after the details of the bill are finalized. “Throughout this process, Congressman Van Hollen has met with any group or organization that has had questions or concerns about the DISCLOSE Act, and he continues to do so. He is open to accommodating reasonable concerns, but is committed to a bill that ensures transparency and protects our democratic process.”

The office of House Administration Committee Chairman Robert Brady (D-Pa.), which sent the bill to the Rules Committee last month, also indicated that negotiations over the bill would continue during this week’s recess.

“There’s no hard and fast line at which point disclosure would be weakened to the point at which it would become irrelevant,” Brady spokesman Kyle Anderson said via email. “We’ve gone to great lengths to address concerns expressed by both House Republicans and the groups and organizations that raised them. That process is ongoing.”

The process, however, cannot go on for too long without the new campaign-finance rules having a diminished effect on this November’s midterms. The DISCLOSE bill includes language implementing its new rules within 30 days of passage, sidestepping the need for prolonged regulatory debate at the Federal Election Commission, but Senate Democrats have already vowed to approve their version by July 4 to set up a final vote before the month-long August recess.

“If they don’t make it by July Fourth,” Holman said, “the bill will lose a great deal of momentum.”

The Chamber, for its part, is already betting on Democrats to lose — if not in the House, then in the Senate. The first hint of the DISCLOSE bill’s fate could come as soon as next week, when Democrats are likely to know more about the time frame for a House floor vote.

Palin experienced the value of contested primaries firsthand, having toppled Lisa Murkowski’s father, Frank, in a hotly contested 2006 GOP gubernatorial primary that launched the future vice-presidential nominee onto the national stage. Palin couched her endorsement of challenger Joe Miller over Lisa Murkowski as a rejection of the Washington Republican establishment rather than a sign of any “feud or bad blood” between the two women — although media coverage of the move has focused on little else.

“Palin vs. Murkowski” aside, it’s worth asking: Who is Joe Miller?

Miller entered the race against Murkowski in April, with Todd Palin appearing at one of his early fundraisers. His official biography mentions decorated service in the 1990s Gulf War as well as a term as a magistrate judge in Fairbanks, adding that Miller was “the youngest then serving in that federal position, not only in the state, but also in the entire nation.”

Miller, his campaign just confirmed to me, is the same Fairbanks attorney Joe Miller who served as an interior regional chairman of the Alaska GOP during Palin’s time as the state governor. According to wire reports from mid-2008, he aided a failed attempt to remove Randy Ruedrich — a political foe of Palin’s — from command of the state party.

On the legislative front, Palin drew many of the same Miller-Murkowski comparisons that the challenger features on his campaign website. “Joe believes that we must repeal the new Obamacare health care mandate … Lisa opposes repealing the law,” Palin wrote on her Facebook page. (That might come as a surprise to Murkowski, who submitted an op-ed to Alaska local papers last month headlined, “Congress must repeal healthcare plan.”)

Palin also touted Miller’s opposition to cap-and-trade climate change legislation. In fact, Miller goes a bit further on his website by questioning the science behind global warming (“dubious … at best”). Murkowski does state that she thinks “climate change is a real threat that must be addressed,” though so far she has focused more on blocking Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate emissions than on striking a bipartisan deal to move forward on a climate bill.

The Republican primary for Alaska’s open Senate seat will take place in August.

But it’s rare to see House Democratic committee chairmen joining the chorus of critics of Hiatt’s page, as the Appropriations Committee’s David Obey (D-Wis.) and the Education and Labor Committee’s George Miller (D-Calif.) did in a terse letter this morning.

Obey and Miller took aim at Post editorial writers for criticizing Democrats’ $23 billion bill intended to stave off an estimated 100,000 looming teacher layoffs across the country. Calling the education jobs package “shallow,” the Post editorialized on Friday that “it’s certainly not a uniquely effective way to stimulate the economy” and suggested that teachers’ unions had inflated predictions of job losses that would occur in the absence of extra federal funding.

Obey and Miller were even more direct in their takedown of the editorial:

We have two choices: We can sit, frozen in the ice of our own indifference, as Franklin Roosevelt once said, or we can take action to save these jobs.

By arguing that we should “Fail this jobs bill,” as the headline on a May 28 editorial put it, The Post has made the wrong choice. Many members of Congress agree; 62 even asked to co-sign this letter.

Meanwhile, the teacher-aid legislation appears stalled for the time being after Senate education committee chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) acknowledged that he lacked the necessary GOP votes to move the $23 billion. (Thirty-four Republican senators voted for the 2008 Wall Street bailout, which carried an estimated price tag more than 20 times higher than the education bill and was not offset by corresponding spending cuts.)

The chief of DoJ’s Environment and Natural Resources division, Ignacia Moreno, and civil division leader Tony West were sent to New Orleans early on, Holder told reporters, “to lead our efforts to protect not only the people who work and reside near the Gulf, but also the American taxpayers, the environment and the abundant wildlife in the region.”

Indeed, Moreno is no stranger to the complex process of navigating corporate liability claims in the aftermath of large-scale contamination. Before joining the DoJ, she was a leading player in the longstanding Superfund battle between General Electric and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — on the side of GE.

ProPublica reported in May 2009 that several EPA attorneys were privately echoing the frustrations of anti-pollution groups with the choice of Moreno to head environmental enforcement at DoJ. From their story:

When Moreno’s nomination was announced in mid-May, she was actively defending GE against charges brought by the very division of the Justice Department that she has been appointed to lead.

In court documents filed in that case, the EPA said that GE owes the federal government nearly $10 million for the government’s cleanup of 800 barrels of toxic waste that GE improperly disposed of at a Superfund site in New Hampshire.

GE, with the help of Moreno, argued that it was not responsible for the Superfund site because it thought it had sold the waste to a company that was going to reuse it to make paint. GE said it didn’t know that the waste was instead being dumped, according to court filings.

Before getting confirmed by the Senate, Moreno promised to recuse herself from any GE-related matters that could arise during her tenure at DoJ. Following another prolonged court battle over Superfund law, GE last year began a cooperative effort with the EPA to dredge contaminated sediment from the Upper Hudson River in New York.

The dismissal by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Comer v. Murphy Oil came after half of the court’s 16 judges recused themselves from hearing the appeal, effectively negating an October decision by a three-judge panel on the same court that allowed the case to proceed. The Comer class action suit was filed by Gulf Coast residents seeking financial damages from more than two dozen oil and coal companies for the local havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, which the plaintiffs argued was exacerbated by the effects of global warming.

The plaintiffs now must decide whether to seek a hearing in the Supreme Court, an outcome deemed all but inevitable by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) in a Friday blog post reacting to the dismissal.

“Expect more appeals and suits from plaintiffs hoping to hit the jackpot and environmental activists trying to create a carbon-command-and-control economy through the courts,” NAM’s Carter Wood wrote. The group is a vocal critic of congressional climate legislation and filed a brief supporting an en banc hearing of the Comer case by the full Fifth Circuit after the initial ruling allowing the case to proceed.

Greenwire reported today (sub. req’d.) that the high number of Fifth Circuit recusals in Comer — generally an indication that judges have personal ties to the companies or law firms involved, such as stock ownership — “infuriated environmentalists” who viewed the moves as a sign that industry has all but captured the appeals court in the Gulf region. But a legal analysis published last month by the firm McGuire Woods suggested that the nation’s highest court could face similar recusal hiccups in deciding whether to hear a Comer appeal:

[T]he mass recusal of members of the 5th Circuit in Comer begs the question as to whether such recusals would be an issue for the U.S. Supreme Court as well. Initial analysis suggests it would. Justice Samuel Alito has recused himself on several occasions from cases involving ExxonMobil due to his ownership of its stock. See, e.g., Exxon Shipping v. Baker; American Isuzu v. Ntsebeza. Likewise, Justice Steven Breyer has recused himself from cases involving BP due to his ownership of its stock. See, e.g., New Jersey v. Delaware; Morgan Stanley Capital Group v. Public Utility Dist. 1. Both ExxonMobil and BP are defendants in the Comer suit.

Similarly, Justice Sonia Sotomayor would also likely recuse herself due to her participation in the Connecticut v. American Electric Power case [another high-profile climate case] when she was on the 2nd Circuit. … Indeed, it may not even be possible for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear any appeal in Comer.

The recusal issue, as Greenwire notes, could also come into play as lawsuits stemming from BP’s role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster move forward. We have a call in to the plaintiffs’ counsels in the Comer case, seeking word on whether they plan to petition for a Supreme Court hearing, and will update this post as more becomes known.