As Alex Pareene noted below, voting against Elena Kagan's Supreme Court nomination figures to be a political no-brainer for any Republican senator seeking reelection this year. For the record, there are 11 of them -- and they all voted "no" when Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed (on a 68-31 tally) last year:
Richard Shelby (Alabama)
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
John McCain (Arizona)
Johnny Isakson (Georgia)
Mike Crapo (Idaho)
Chuck Grassley (Iowa)
David Vitter (Louisiana)
Richard Burr (North Carolina)
Tom Coburn (Oklahoma)
Jim DeMint (South Carolina)
John Thune (South Dakota)
But maybe there is one wild card: Bob Bennett, the generally conservative three-term Republican whose political career probably ended at Saturday's Utah GOP convention. There's not much in Bennett's background to suggest he'd buck his party on a vote like this, and he did vote against Sotomayor last year. Then again, he knew he'd be facing a tough convention when Sotomayor's nomination came up, so his hands were tied. But unless he actually does try to mount a write-in campaign, he now has much less incentive to cater to the GOP base -- and, given the circumstances of his defeat, far more incentive to spite it.
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