The vote broke largely on partisan lines — all 12 Democrats on the committee voted for Kagan while six of the seven Republicans voted against her. Only Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) broke GOP ranks to vote in her favor.

As Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) spoke about his decision to vote for Kagan, he bemoaned the committee’s partisan divide on the vote, noting that it reflects the battle over the Court’s ideological bent. He added that despite Republican colleagues’ concerns about Kagan’s association with former Justice Thurgood Marshall, he hoped she would follow his example.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said prior to the vote that he felt partisan divisions would prevent Kagan from garnering more than a few Republican votes in the full Senate.

“Sadly, it appears election-year politics may deprive her of the vote total that her nomination deserves,” he said.

The committee’s endorsement of Kagan was never in doubt — just the margin. Attention today focused on Graham, the only swing vote whose stance on Kagan was unknown going into today’s session. He was always the Republican most likely to break ranks in Kagan’s favor — he was the only member of his party to support Justice Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation last year.

Graham noted as he announced his decision earlier today that while he would not have nominated a justice who shared Kagan’s political ideology, Obama had a mandate from the voters to choose a nominee.

“I’m going to vote for her because I believe this last election had consequences,” he said.

Other committee Republicans were not so charitable, using their time today to criticize Kagan’s lack of judicial experience and her stances on some hot-button issues.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the committee’s ranking member, criticized Kagan in part because she had restricted military recruiters while dean of Harvard Law School. He and other Republicans brought up that issue repeatedly during Kagan’s confirmation hearings.

“Throughout her career, Ms. Kagan has placed her politics above the law,” Sessions wrote in a USA Today op-ed published today.

C-SPAN reported that the full Senate will likely take up Kagan’s confirmation starting Aug. 2.

Updated at 1:12 p.m.

“I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time exactly to what Justice Marshall would have said,” Kagan said. “I love Justice Marshall, but if you confirm me, you’ll get Justice Kagan, not Justice Marshall.”

Kyl has used a great deal of his 30-minute question time today to attack Marshall’s judicial philosophy, which he has insinuated she might share because she clerked for Marshall during the Court’s 1987-1988 term. As my colleague noted earlier, the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee have already repeatedly used Kagan’s Marshall connection as a line of attack over the course of the hearings.

As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.

“Justice Marshall’s judicial philosophy,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, “is not what I would consider to be mainstream.” Kyl — the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event — was ready for a scrap. Marshall “might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge,” he said. [...]

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the panel, branded Marshall a “well-known activist.” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Marshall’s legal view “does not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) pronounced Marshall “a judicial activist” with a “judicial philosophy that concerns me.”

This isn’t the first time Republicans have attacked Kagan for her praise and admiration for the late justice; shortly after her nomination, RNC chairman Michael Steele blasted Kagan for her ties to Marshall:

RNC Chairman Michael Steele targeted her praise for the jurisprudence of Marshall, a liberal icon, and a speech in which Marshall called the Constitution “defective.” [...]

“Given Kagan’s opposition to allowing military recruiters access to her law school’s campus, her endorsement of the liberal agenda and her support for statements suggesting that the Constitution ‘as originally drafted and conceived,’ was ‘defective,’ you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions to ensure the American people can thoroughly and thoughtfully examine Kagan’s qualifications and legal philosophy before she is confirmed to a lifetime appointment,” Steele said in the statement.

As for yesterday’s hearing, TPM’s Christina Bellantoni kept a tally, and found that Republicans mentioned Marshall a whopping 35 times. At the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen sees this as evidence of a coordinated attack on Justice Marshall’s views, and marvels at the spectacle of GOP senators ”condemning one of the most venerated Supreme Court justices in American history.”

For my part, I’m not too surprised to see Republicans target Thurgood Marshall for attack; not only was he one of the most liberal justices in Supreme Court history, but his tenure on the Supreme Court was relatively recent. Indeed, some longer-serving GOP senators are old enough to have railed against Marshall for “activist judging” in the 1980s or early 1990s, before he died. And while liberals might find conservative attacks on Marshall offensive, it’s worth noting that they’ve focused their fire on his theory of jurisprudence and not his work for the NAACP. The former is untoward; the latter, genuinely objectionable.

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.

O’Connor was unanimously confirmed.

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