Conservative legal groups have called for Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to face a Senate Judiciary Committee Investigation after she failed to recuse herself from a climate case expected to be heard in the Court’s next term.
In a letter sent to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders, Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, Oversight Project President Mike Howell, and others, wrote that her “irregular recusal practice in cases on which she has staked a position in public undermines confidence in the impartiality of the Court.”
Discussing the case expected to be heard in October 2026, the organizations argued that Kagan previously authored a foreword to a manual published by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, where she “specifically addressed” what the letter described as “related climate litigation.”
Because the “state and local climate lawfare cases are undeniably interlinked legally, and due to Justice Kagan’s obvious and public prejudgment of the material legal questions,” the groups wrote, the “only ethical option for Justice Kagan is a blanket recusal from participating in any one of them.”
The letter goes on to detail Kagan’s “inconsistent recusal history.”
If Kagan does not recuse herself from climate cases, the letter concludes, then the “Committee should investigate and hold hearings in order to uphold the public’s substantial interest in ethical rigor from the justices on our nation’s highest court.”
Calls for Kagan’s recusal come as she, as well as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, are scheduled to testify before the House Appropriations Committee on July 14.
