Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court has cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee with a 13-6 vote. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who announced his choice in an op-ed in USA Today last week, voted in Kagan’s favor but once again sprinkled in his criticisms of the nominee’s dodging of his questions.

Kagan did not “answer questions which I think ought to have been answered,” Specter said. “And I say that especially in the context of her now-famous article in the University of Chicago Law Review in which she chastised nominees by name … and castigated this committee for not doing an adequate job in eliciting answers.”

Still, Specter said Kagan got his vote by saying Justice Thurgood Marshall was her mentor and by supporting Specter’s pet cause of getting the Supreme Court televised.

The vote was mostly a party-line affair, though Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., bucked his GOP colleagues to back Kagan because "the last election had consequences" -- referring to Barack Obama's presidential win.