GOP to attack Kagan's gun control work for Clinton

Get ready for the next Republican attack line on Elena Kagan: 1990s gun control issues.

Kagan had a hand in multiple gun control measures during her stint in the Clinton administration, according to info from newly released Clinton library documents that was sent my way -- and I'm told Republicans will grab on to the revelations to paint her as hostile to the Second Amendment.

But a high profile member of the Clinton administration, in an interview with me, dismissed the notion that her work on these issues suggests she's hostile to gun rights.

As deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council under Bill Clinton, Kagan supervised work implementing the Brady law, which implemented a background check system, info from the newly released docs show.

Kagan also worked on a 1997 executive order related to the assault weapons ban -- an order that updated an earlier one prohibiting the importation of firearms not usually used for sporting purposes. And she worked on various Clinton-era poroposals to strengthen regulation of child-safety locks and to toughen up restrictions on adults from making guns too readily available to children.

Republicans are going to grab onto these issues to raise questions about her commitment to the Second Amendment, I'm told.

But Bruce Reed, who worked directly on these issues with Kagan, argues in an interview that she's in no way hostile to the Second Amendment.

"In all these cases, Clinton had already settled views on these questions," Reed tells me. "Our job was to make sure the government's policy reflected what he wanted. He'd already made up his mind on most of these contentious issues."

Reed adds that the policies Kagan did help draft had bipartisan support and weren't even particularly controversial. "We were facing a Republican Congress," Reed says. "The debates we had were kind of at the 50 yard line."

Indeed, the Republican plan to revive 1990s-era arguments about gun control seems more about riling up the base and appearing to take a stand against Kagan, and doesn't seem likely to create any real problems for Kagan with the mainstream.

