Sen. Sessions: 'Deeply Disturbed' Over Kagan's Role in Obamacare

Republican pressure is growing for Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to step down from the vital hearing that will decide the future of America’s healthcare next year.

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions is leading the charge saying that newly released emails seem to show that Kagan was heavily involved in policy discussions on how to make sure Obamacare passed through Congress.

Now Sessions is putting pressure on embattled Attorney General Eric Holder – who, at the time was Kagan’s boss – to come clean on what she knew and when she knew it.

Sessions, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Holder he is “deeply disturbed,” that the emails were not released at Kagan’s confirmation hearings in June last year.

Kagan is responsible for making the decision whether she should recuse herself from the case when the Supreme Court hears challenges to President Barack Obama’s signature law next spring. A decision on the constitutionality of the law is expected by late June or July, just in time for the two political parties’ National Conventions.

She has to decide whether her role as Obama’s Solicitor General at the time the law was drawn up and passed could be seen as an unacceptable conflict of interest. The law says, “Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

It goes on to say they should also quit a case “where he has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party.”

Sessions, who was attorney general of Alabama before he took his seat in the Senate in 1997, fired off a letter to Holder on Tuesday, demanding written testimony on why the emails were not presented before.

“I am deeply disturbed by these developments and believe that the Justice Department should have provided these documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee during Justice Kagan’s confirmation hearing,” he wrote.

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