Alexander is the 21st Republican senator to publicly oppose Kagan, so it’s not a surprise in that respect. But he is the first of the nine Republican senators who voted for Justice Sonia Sotomayor last year to come out against Obama’s second nominee to the Court. Two other GOP senators who voted for Sotomayor — Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Richard Lugar (Ind.) — have announced they will vote for Kagan.

In a statement, Alexander said his chief reason for opposing Kagan now — as it was when he opposed her confirmation as Solicitor General last year — was her decision as dean of Harvard Law School to restrict military recruiters’ access to campus facilities.

“In denying military recruiters equal access to Harvard Law students, Ms. Kagan ignored Harvard’s obligations under federal law,” he said. “Instead, she acted based upon what she thought the law should be. The use of her authority as dean in that way leads me to believe that she would use her authority as a Supreme Court Justice to advance her own policy preferences.”

This issue became a major point of contention during Kagan’s confirmation hearings several weeks ago, with witnesses appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend and criticize Kagan’s actions. During her testimony, the nominee defended the restrictions as a compromise that honored Harvard’s non-discrimination policies — the military was in violation of these policies because of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban — while also adhering to federal laws that require military recruiters be allowed access to schools that receive federal funding.

Assuming Senate Democrats maintain a united front — Ben Nelson (Neb.) appears to be the only wavering member of the caucus at this point — Kagan will have at least 61 votes in her favor, meaning Senate Republicans will not be able to launch a filibuster.

Update at 3:22 p.m.: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), another Sotomayor supporter, announced today she will vote for Kagan. This gives Kagan a likely 62 votes in the full Senate.

Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman told reporters after the 90-minute West Wing meeting that Obama held firm in his calls for a price on greenhouse gases. But they said the president acknowledged that he could agree to a more limited climate and energy bill than any the senators had previously drafted.

“We believe we have compromised significantly, and we’re prepared to compromise further,” Kerry said.

“The president was very clear about putting a price on carbon” and curbing greenhouse gases,  he added.

Lieberman said a couple of Republicans in the meeting promised to keep talking about the prospect of a less-ambitious climate program that includes a price on carbon, though he wouldn’t name names. [...]

Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, Judd Gregg, Richard Lugar, Lisa Murkowski, Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich also attended the White House meeting, but left with a very different message than their Democratic counterparts.

“We’ve got to take a national energy tax off the table in the middle of a recession,” said Alexander, chairman of the Senate GOP Conference.

The [EPA's] guidance for approving mining permits, based on these new scientific studies, will help control the damage caused by mountaintop removal mining. But the science shows us that if we are to truly protect our mountains, streams and the people who depend on them, we must bring the practice of mountaintop removal mining to an end.

Last year, Alexander and Cardin introduced legislation that would classify mining debris as a pollutant, which would force coal companies to truck their mining waste to off-site dumping grounds — something the industry claims would make mountaintop removal economically unfeasible (which, of course, is the whole point of the bill).

Last June, Cardin staged a hearing on the issue, the first of its kind in nearly a decade. At the time, the Maryland Democrat vowed to hold another, though none has yet been planned. The offices of both Cardin and Alexander are closed today for the Easter holiday.

Conveniently, Alexander has a bill that would do just that. The legislation, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), would redefine mining waste as a pollutant, thus barring companies from dumping debris into valleys below their mountaintop projects. The idea is that if it becomes too expensive to truck the debris off-site, then companies will stop blowing up mountains altogether.

“The new EPA guidelines are useful in stopping some inappropriate coal mining in Appalachia but Congress still needs to pass the Cardin-Alexander legislation that would effectively end mountaintop removal mining,” Alexander said in a statement issued Thursday. “By mountaintop removal, we mean blowing the tops off of mountains and dumping the waste in streams.”

Such statements put Alexander at odds with a number of Appalachian lawmakers, who view any new environmental protections in coal country as a threat to jobs in the region. But there’s good reason why Alexander has adopted his position. Tennessee is home to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, by far the most visited national park in the country. Last year, nearly 9.5 million people visited the Great Smoky, compared to 4.3 million visitors to the Grand Canyon, which ranks second.

Considering those tourism numbers, Tennessee’s lawmakers have no interest in wrecking the same mountains that are drawing those people in. Indeed, they’ve discovered a way to create sustainable local jobs without poisoning their waters and communities.

“Coal is an essential part of our energy future,” Alexander said, ”but it is not necessary to destroy our mountaintops in order to have enough coal to meet our needs.”

A group of Republicans this afternoon will meet with reporters to protest the Democrats’ plans to eliminate tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies to private companies that lend to students. The Democrats’ bill would have students borrow directly from the U.S. Treasury, which makes sense to supporters because it’s the Treasury that currently assumes all the risk for those loans anyway — a boon to private companies that assume no risk. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that eliminating the private middleman will save $67 billion over the next decade, most of which will go toward expanding college scholarships to low-income students.

No matter. “Such a move,” the Republicans’ release claims, “is an abuse of the legislative process that will eliminate borrower choice and competition, destroy tens of thousands of jobs, and add to the country’s long-term debt.”

The group includes Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference; Rep. John Kline (Minn.), the senior Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee; and Rep. Brett Guthrie (Ky.), the top Republican on the higher education subpanel.

It’s worth noting that not all conservatives agree. In fact, President George W. Bush proposed similar reforms as part of his annual budget proposal during three years of his tenure. More recently, The Weekly Standard blasted the current system of guaranteed loans as “a textbook example of crony capitalism or (if you prefer) corporate socialism.”

The government assumes all the risk while doling out contracts to favored businesses, who then reap the profits. With student loans, the lender gets preening rights in the bargain, marketing itself as a Merchant of Dreams, a benefactor of America’s youth, a sweet-tempered Mr. Jaggers to a nation of eager Pips.

In truth, the only people who like the system of guaranteed loans are the student loan industry — now handling more than $90 billion a year — and the congressmen whose districts contain large numbers of people who work in the student loan industry.

Earlier this month, Rep. Thomas Petri (Wis.), a senior Republican on the Education and Labor Committee, also condemned the current lending framework as a boondoggle enriching private lenders at the expense of taxpayers and students.

“Private loans are much more expensive for borrowers — and much more profitable for lenders,” Petri wrote in Roll Call. “We’ve seen how this plays out — and it isn’t in the form of true choice or competition for students.”

Perhaps GOP leaders knew where Petri stood when they skipped over the 16-term Wisconsin Republican to install Kline — a more conservative four-termer — atop the GOP team on the Education and Labor panel.

Forget policy for a second. Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on the meaning of English words. We’ve seen the evidence in recent weeks as the sides have jousted over the definition of bipartisanship (see here and here and here). And now we’re seeing some lawmakers grappling with an even much simpler concept: that of sponsorship.

(To clarify: When bills are introduced on Capitol Hill, the authors are known as the sponsors, or chief sponsors, who usually try to recruit other lawmakers to sign on in support. These after-the-fact supporters are known as co-sponsors. Bills with a great number of co-sponsors are thought to have a better chance of getting floor time, and therefore have a better chance of becoming law.)

With that in mind, recall a few weeks ago when six Republican co-sponsors of a deficit task-force bill experienced a last-minute change of heart, voting against their own bill after President Obama endorsed it. Funny way to show support for a thing, but they’re not alone. Fast forward to yesterday. Here’s Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) telling The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein that, despite his co-sponsorship of a sweeping health-care reform bill authored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Robert Bennett (R-Utah), he feels the legislation is too comprehensive to actually support.

The Wyden-Bennett bill was simpler, with fewer surprises, and more straightforward. I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it. But over the past two years, I’ve looked at all these issues and come to the conclusion that the policy skeptics are right. We don’t do comprehensive well in the Senate. It’s not because we don’t do our job well. It’s because we’re such a complicated country.

Which begs the only relevant follow-up question: huh?

Then again, both the deficit task force and Wyden-Bennett bills were bipartisan. Maybe this trend isn’t so confusing after all.

No matter. Today, during a Senate Budget Committee hearing, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) implied that the failure of the deficit task force bill was somehow Obama’s. Grilling Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, Alexander wondered what “problems” prevented the bill’s success the first time through.

You might want to consider a suggestion about bringing [the Conrad-Gregg proposal] up again, amending it, and finding out what the problems are. It had 16 Republican votes. If the president with 59 or 60 votes can’t pass something that’s important to him, it’s going to be a long four years.  So that’s a good start and maybe there are some adjustments that could be made in the statutory commission.

Or maybe there are some adjustments that could be made in the Republican strategy of blocking everything the White House supports, just for the opportunity to call the president ineffective.

“The benefits haven’t run out yet,” Kyl said. “We’re going to pass this before the benefits run out.”

It’s tough to decipher exactly what he means. Roughly 400,000 folks exhausted their federal unemployment benefits in September, with another 200,000 projected to do the same by the end of October, according to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group. By the end of the year, NELP estimates that 1.3 million Americans will have exhausted their benefits unless Congress steps in with an extension. Each day the Senate dallies, another 7,000 people go off the rolls.

The crisis is due most simply to a dearth of available jobs in a down economy. But there are also regional factors. State-based unemployment benefits normally run for 26 weeks, but the federal government has stepped in during the recession with several extensions pegged to the severity of a state’s jobless rate. That disparate federal intervention — combined with the vastly different management of state unemployment programs — has created a patchwork of different benefit systems across the country. And as ProPublica has pointed out, some states have managed the chaos much better than others.

Kyl claimed that Democrats are to blame for stalling legislation to extend unemployment benefits because party leaders are resisting consideration of several unrelated GOP amendments.

“We could have been done with this bill 24 hours ago,” Kyl said. “We didn’t ask for the delay.”

But Republicans also don’t seem to be in much of a hurry. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the slow pace of the Senate is a blessing of design, shielding the country from de Tocqueville’s feared “tyranny of the majority.”

“Unlimited debate. Unlimited amendment,” Alexander said. “There’s no need for the United States Senate if we don’t have that. … This is the body that protects the minority view.”

Earlier in the day, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) offered his own theory about why some lawmakers seem content to crawl toward passage of the unemployment benefits extension: they’ve simply been sheltered from the crisis.

“Not very many of our colleagues really know any unemployed workers,” Brown said. “We don’t spend our time with people who are really suffering.”

I respectfully urge you to disclose as much information as you can about these policy advisors and “czars.”  Specifically, I ask that you identify these individuals’ roles and responsibilities, and provide the judgment(s) of your legal advisors as to whether and how these positions are consistent with the Appointments Clause.

Politico’s take here is — shockingly! — a bit misleading and over-wrought. In addition to Feingold’s letter, there’s Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) saying that “you need to have confirmation” for powerful advisers. There’s Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who wants more oversight but avers that the way “czars” are defined in the press is wildly misleading: “I don’t think it’s quite fair to call, for example, David Hayes at the Department of Interior a czar.” Somewhat surprisingly, conservative-leaning Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) dismisses the “czar” panic as “something that some talk show hosts have made a great deal out of.” And there’s an eight-month old letter about “czars” from Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). Politico packages this as evidence of Democrats “joining the czar wars.”

It’s hard to overstate what a fantastic issue this is for Republicans if it’s covered hysterically. The 40 Republican members of the Senate have filibustered or put holds on many of the president’s nominees, including Dawn Johnsen for the Office of Legal Counsel and Tom Perez at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. They subjected Cass Sunstein to an eight-month series of holds and filibusters which ended only last week — and they continue to include Sunstein in the roll calls of “unaccountable czars.”

Thanks to lazy and sensationalized journalism, Republicans are able to put the breaks on the president’s nominees while complaining, as Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) did yesterday, that President Obama’s appointees are “unaccountable to the American people through their elected representatives.” The fact that Republicans, instead of asking questions, are quietly placing “holds” on qualified nominees who have been submitted to the Senate, goes utterly unmentioned.

Feingold’s letter:

Dear Mr. President:

From the beginning of your administration, you have made an admirable commitment to transparency and open government.  You showed the strength of your commitment by sending a memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies within a week of your inauguration, stating: “My administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use.”

As you know, there has been much discussion about your decisions to create and assign apparently significant policy-making responsibilities to White House and other executive positions; many of the persons filling these positions have come to be referred to in the media and even within your administration as policy “czars.”  I heard firsthand about this issue on several occasions from my constituents in recent town hall meetings in Wisconsin.

The Constitution gives the Senate the duty to oversee the appointment of Executive officers through the Appointments Clause in Article II, section 2.  The Appointments Clause states that the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise proved for, and which shall be established by law.”  (Emphasis added.)   This clause is an important part of the constitutional scheme of separation of powers, empowering the Senate to weigh in on the appropriateness of significant appointments and assisting in its oversight of the Executive Branch.

As a member of the Senate with the duty to oversee executive appointments and as the Chairman of the Senate Constitution Subcommittee, I respectfully urge you to disclose as much information as you can about these policy advisors and “czars.”  Specifically, I ask that you identify these individuals’ roles and responsibilities, and provide the judgment(s) of your legal advisors as to whether and how these positions are consistent with the Appointments Clause.  I hope that this information will help address some of the concerns that have been raised about new positions in the White House and elsewhere in the Executive Branch, and will inform any hearing that the Subcommittee holds on this topic.

Thank you for considering my views on this important matter.  I very much appreciate your commitment to transparency and open government and look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,

Russell D. Feingold

United States Senator

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

“The current administration claims to be the most transparent in American history, yet it’s been hiding a report showing its cap-and-trade energy plan would cost up to $200 billion every year,” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

Lamar’s statements also disregard the Department of Treasury’s debunking of the “secret” memo. “The reporting on the Treasury analysis is flat out wrong,” said Alan B. Krueger, Treasury assistant secretary for economic policy. “Treasury’s analysis is consistent with public analyses … and the reporting and blogging on this issue ignores the fact that the revenue raised from emission permits would be returned to consumers under both administration and legislative proposals.”