While stressing Kagan’s distinguished legal résumé–acclaimed Harvard Law School dean, first woman in that position, respected professor, seasoned former White House official–Leahy also launched the first of a series of attacks by committee Democrats on the “conservative judicial activism” of the current Supreme Court majority.

Sessions, on the other hand, criticized Kagan as too inexperienced, too liberal, too activist, too political, too friendly to big government, and too soft on illegal immigrants, among other things.

The committee’s other 11 Democrats and six Republicans mostly followed similar patterns in their own 10-minute opening statements. Today’s hearing began shortly after 12:30 p.m. and will end late this afternoon with Kagan’s own opening statement.

Leahy, suggesting that the Court’s conservatives are “partisans,” focused his fire especially on the 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore and this January’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC. In the latter, Leahy said, “five conservative justices rejected the court’s own precedent, the bipartisan law enacted by Congress, and 100 years of legal developments in order to open the door for massive corporate spending on elections.”

Citizens United held for the first time that corporations have First Amendment rights to spend unlimited amounts supporting and opposing political candidates.

Among the Democrats to second this theme, with more biting rhetoric, were Senator Charles Schumer of New York. Accusing the Court’s conservatives of “judicial activism to pull the law to the right,” Schumer likened the court’s conservatives to the reactionary majority that, Schumer said, helped bring about “the age of the robber barons” in the early 20th century by striking down labor-protection laws and other regulations.

In “case after case after case,” Schumer said, “it’s the American people who continue to bear the brunt of these types of rulings.” He added that “there’s hope” that Kagan and her much admired skills as a conciliator could help set other justices straight.

Sessions focused not on the court but on the nominee, painting a much different picture than the Democrats.

“Ms. Kagan has less real legal experience of any nominee in at least 50 years,” he said. “It’s not just that she has never been a judge. She has barely practiced law, and not with the intensity and duration from which real understanding occurs. Ms. Kagan has never tried a case before a jury.”

Sessions also stressed Kagan’s supposed hostility to gun rights and her role as “point person for the Clinton administration’s efforts to block congressional restrictions on partial-birth abortions.” Setting up a major Republican line of attack, he accused her of having “kicked the military out of the recruiting office” as dean of Harvard Law School.

Sessions even went back to Kagan’s senior thesis at Princeton University, which he said “seems to bemoan socialism’s demise” in New York City.

Amid the predicable critiques of Elena Kagan by Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans in their opening statements at her confirmation hearing today, one Republican stood a bit apart.

That was Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina. He was the most friendly and balanced in his remarks about Kagan. Not coincidentally, Graham was also the only committee Republican who voted last year to confirm Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Graham began by expressing satisfaction with Kagan’s work as solicitor general defending Obama administration positions on presidential war powers to detain suspected “enemy combatants”–positions much like those embraced by president Bush.

He said he hoped that the hearing would serve as a “teaching opportunity” for Kagan to speak about the need for strong presidential leadership in time of war.

Graham noted with pleasure that as dean of Harvard Law School, she had helped diversify the mostly liberal faculty by bringing in a few highly regarded conservative professors. And he noted with displeasure that as dean “you opposed military recruiting, which I think was inappropriate.”

Graham also stressed the support that Kagan has drawn from leading conservative luminaries including former solicitor generals Theodore Olson and Kenneth Starr and Washington lawyers including Miguel Estrada.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that you’re a liberal person,” said Graham, or that “I’m a conservative person.” But he added, unlike his colleagues: “You would expect a liberal president would appoint a liberal person,” that “elections do matter,” and that “I don’t expect your nomination to change the balance of power.”

All in all, Graham sounded pretty open to voting for Kagan if satisfied by her answers to questions at the hearing.

That makes him an increasingly rare bird: a senator open to the possibility of crossing party lines to confirm a Supreme Court nominee chosen by a president of the other party. That used to be the norm. It is no longer.

The first few senators to speak also heaped bipartisan praise on their late colleague, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who died today at age 92. Byrd was the longest-serving member of Congress in history.

There was also much praise–especially from Democrats–for 90-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, a 1975 Gerald Ford appointee who led the liberal bloc in recent decades and stepped down from the bench today after 34 years. That made Stevens almost the longest-serving justice in history.

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