Tag Archives: Brett Kavanaugh

national news

Judge shows his partisan streak

I now believe that if Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be disqualified from serving on the U.S. Supreme Court, he demonstrated that reason with his impassioned denial of the accusation of a sexual assault.

He came off as a partisan. Kavanaugh managed to blame the assault on his character on those who were angry that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election and “left-wing” political activists who oppose him for his judicial philosophy.

I am scratching my head and am trying to remember when I’ve ever heard a Supreme Court nominee resort to that kind of attack.

Robert Bork didn’t assert partisan angst in 1987; Clarence Thomas didn’t blame Democrats for the troubles he encountered in 1991. The Senate rejected Bork’s nomination and barely approved Thomas’s selection to the high court.

Brett Kavanaugh, though, has just revealed his deep bias against Democrats and political progressive who, in his mind, are out to destroy his nomination to the nation’s highest court.

I already have stated my belief in the accusation brought by Christine Blasey Ford who contends that Kavanaugh assaulted her sexually when they were teenagers. But when Kavanaugh sat down in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, his anger was palpable, as was his deep bias against those with political views that differ from his own.

Yes, I intended to keep an open mind with regard to Brett Kavanaugh. For the longest time I was able to meet that standard.

My formerly open mind has closed. I have heard enough, from Christine Ford and from Judge Kavanaugh. Moreover, I have seen enough from Kavanaugh to believe that he cannot interpret the U.S. Constitution dispassionately without regard to political motivations of those who might present cases before the Supreme Court.

Weird.

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Now the SCOTUS fight is on hold, waiting for the FBI

The U.S. Senate has done the correct thing in delaying the confirmation vote on the man who wants to join the U.S. Supreme Court. It will wait a week to allow the FBI to do — presumably — a thorough check on some serious allegations leveled against Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

It all came to a head this morning when Senate Judiciary Committee member Jeff Flake asked for the delay, sought the FBI investigation and seemed to attach his upcoming Senate vote on whether the Republican leadership would agree to his request.

It did. So now Kavanaugh gets to wait another week.

Christine Blasey Ford has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two of them were in high school. Kavanaugh denies her allegation.

I am one American who believes Ford, but I’m sitting out here in the Flyover Country peanut gallery.

The FBI probe well might produce some more evidence to either prove or disprove what Ford has alleged. The FBI ought to talk to a Kavanaugh friend who reportedly witnessed what Ford has alleged occurred.

I have to hand it to Sen. Flake, a lame-duck Republican, who’s going out with a serious bang. He isn’t running for re-election, but he isn’t going out quietly.

I have sought to keep an open mind on this nomination. I have concluded that I believe Ford. Thus, I don’t believe Kavanaugh should get a lifetime job handing out opinions at the highest level of our nation’s judicial system.

However, I want to maintain my open mind as far as the FBI probe goes. I just want it done thoroughly and that the FBI reaches some conclusion about the veracity of what has been alleged.

Let the probe begin.

national news

Senate causes heads to spin

My noggin is spinning.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 11-10 — along partisan lines — to recommend confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But, man, there’s a major catch in that vote.

One of the committee Republicans, Jeff Flake, wants the FBI to conduct an investigation into the allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Ford when they were in high school; he wants the Senate to delay its full floor vote for a week to enable the FBI to learn more about what allegedly happened.

It’s now up to Donald Trump, the president of the United States, to issue the order to the FBI.

Without an investigation, Flake might become a “no” vote if a full Senate vote occurs with an FBI probe. So might two other key GOP senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.

I’m doing the math. That leaves the Senate GOP with 48 votes to confirm Kavanaugh.

They need50.

Are we clear now? Clear as mud?

I’m thinking now of Winston Churchill’s classic analysis of democracy, how it’s the “worst system” of government ever devised … but it’s the best system we can have.

It’s messy, folks.

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SCOTUS picks, then and now

Let’s review briefly the course that two U.S. Supreme Court nominations took.

In early 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died. President Barack Obama not long afterward nominated Judge Merrick Garland to succeed the conservative judicial icon. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t wait for the nomination to come forward. He declared within hours of Scalia’s death that Obama would not replace Justice Scalia under any circumstance.

The SCOTUS seat remained vacant for the rest of that year. Donald Trump got elected president and then nominated Neil Gorsuch. The Senate heard from the nominee, then confirmed him.

It was the delay that enraged so many Americans.

The Republican Senate majority had no problem dragging its feet to await the outcome of the 2016 election.

What a change has occurred.

Justice Anthony Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court. The president then nominated Brett Kavanaugh to succeed him. Judge Kavanaugh went through the confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee. Then a woman came forward to allege that the nominee assaulted her sexually when they were in high school. Then we hear from two more women who said essentially the same thing.

The GOP majority was having none of it. The committee heard from one of the women and from Kavanaugh.

Now the Judiciary panel is going to vote today whether to confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination. The majority says it cannot wait. It has to rush this nomination forward. The questions about what happened in the early 1980s? Hey, minds are made up.

Let’s rush forward.

So … one president’s nomination gets stonewalled for a year. Another one’s selection hops on the fast track.

To think that Majority Leader McConnell has the gall to accuse the other side of “playing politics.”

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After the hearing, they’re going to vote anyway … wow!

A congressional hearing that was billed as a seminal moment in U.S. political history has produced, um, apparently nothing.

The Senate Judiciary Committee — which heard from two people at the center of a firestorm — is going to vote Friday on whether to confirm one of those principals to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

To which I only can say: Holy cow, man!

Judge Brett Kavanaugh denied passionately the accusation leveled by Christine Blasey Ford. They both talked to the Senate committee. Ford said Kavanaugh attacked her when they were both in high school; Kavanaugh denied it.

Who’s more credible? I believe Professor Ford.

Thus, I would hope the Senate panel would delay this confirmation vote until it could gather more information.

The so-called “elephant in the hearing room” was a man who reportedly witnessed the alleged attack. That would be Mark Judge, a friend of Kavanaugh. Judge has been nowhere to be seen or heard.

I believe Judge should testify as well.

It won’t happen, apparently. The Judiciary Committee is stampeding forward — or so it appears — with a vote on whether to recommend Kavanaugh’s nomination.

This process has been called a “disgrace” and a “sham” by those who support Judge Kavanaugh. I agree with them. It has been both of those things.

The disgraceful sham, though, well might play out when the Senate Judiciary Committee rushes to judgment with its vote.

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The accuser is believable

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Christine Blasey Ford was a believable accuser today.

The question now, in my mind, is whether the man she accused of assaulting her when they were both teenagers should take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

I don’t believe he should.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh defended himself vigorously today in testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He was angry at what he called a hit job by left-wing supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald J. Trump.

He cried a bit, too.

Kavanaugh has called his confirmation process “a national disgrace.”

It wasn’t pretty, this hearing today. Indeed, it was damn ugly. It was hideous.

But at the end of it, I came away believing the woman who has accused the Supreme Court nominee of a sexual assault.

This means the Senate panel that will recommend whether to confirm or reject Kavanaugh should vote “no” on this nomination.

I realize fully that my feelings on this matter won’t surprise regular readers of this blog. I wanted to watch the two principals face the Senate panel. I wanted to read their body language. I wanted to keep an open mind, and I believe I did.

My mind is now made up. Christine Ford made the case to my satisfaction. This American, yours truly, does not want Brett Kavanaugh to be granted a lifetime job in which he would interpret the constitutionality of federal laws.

I believe the president should look elsewhere.

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Strangest Senate hearing in history? Yep, it sure is

Congratulations, my fellow Americans.

We likely are witnessing the most bizarre Senate confirmation hearing in the history of the republic.

Brett Kavanaugh is trying to protect his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court against an allegation by a college professor that he assaulted her when they were both in high school.

Kavanaugh has denied the allegation vehemently; Christine Blasey Ford, the alleged victim, has just as vehemently asserted the veracity of the accusation she has leveled.

The weirdest part of this hearing has been the way the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted its questioning.

Republicans who support Kavanaugh didn’t question Ford directly. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley brought in a ringer, a sex crimes prosecutor from Arizona named Rachel Mitchell to speak on behalf of Republican senators. The panel’s Democratic members did question Ford directly.

When it was Kavanaugh’s turn to answer questions, he fielded them from senators from both parties.

I have drawn one conclusion from the tactic employed by the GOP side with regard to Ford. It is that the GOP senators — all of whom are men — don’t have the confidence to ask a female accuser intensely personal questions involving an alleged sex crime.

What might have spooked them? It must be that they couldn’t engage in a discussion without uttering something, anything that observers would deem offensive.

So they handed the heavy lift off to the prosecutor who, in my view, did a credible job on behalf of the Senate committee Republicans.

Still, it was downright weird to watch a surrogate do the work that should have been done by the men who comprise slightly more than one-half of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Indeed, this confirmation process is exhibiting signs that it is hurtling toward an equally weird conclusion.

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Is this confirmation turning into a stampede?

Well, here we are, ladies and gentlemen.

Brett Kavanaugh and a woman who has accused him of sexually assaulting her are going to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Kavanaugh has been nominated by Donald Trump to join to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The testimony will occur on Thursday. What happens the next day? Oh, the committee is scheduled to vote on whether to confirm Kavanaugh to the court.

Hey, it gets better. The full Senate, all 100 of ’em, then might get to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination as early as next Monday!

Let us not forget that two more women have leveled similar accusations against the proposed justice to the nation’s highest court. The Senate is moving at breakneck speed on a matter that to my way of thinking needs a good bit more time.

Does this look as much to you like a stampede as it does to me?

Christine Blasey Ford, who will testify Thursday, has done a remarkable thing. She has dropped the name of Kavanaugh’s supposed good friend — Mark Judge — as a witness to what she alleged occurred in the 1908s at a high school party. Why in the world would she expose this friend to intense public scrutiny if she is making all this up?

I continue to believe there needs to be a thorough investigation by the FBI to determine the veracity of what Ford has alleged. The FBI also ought to look carefully at the accusations leveled by the two other women.

Will the world stop spinning if Kavanaugh’s confirmation is delayed while the FBI gumshoes do their job? Of course not!

I am trying like the dickens to avoid passing judgment on Judge Kavanaugh. I merely want these accusations to be examined fully and carefully.

I do not want to witness a Senate stampede.

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Sen. and Mrs. Cruz get mistreated … enough already!

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife, Heidi, have been treated badly by those who are angry over his support of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

There’s a certain irony in the way the Cruzes were forced to leave a trendy Washington, D.C., restaurant. A crowd of protesters accosted them verbally at the restaurant, criticizing the senator for his support of Donald Trump’s selection to the highest court in America.

Kavanaugh, in case you’ve been in outer space for the past few weeks, has been accused of sexual assault on a woman when he was a teenager.

To be totally candid, as much as I dislike Sen. Cruz and want him to lose his re-election bid in November, I also dislike the manner in which these protests have been targeted against some political leaders and their family members. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family got the same kind of treatment; so did former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt. Let me be clear: I disapprove of those who would badger and hassle public officials who seek some private time.

And so, now it’s Ted and Heidi Cruz’s turn. Oh, the irony?

The man against whom Cruz is running, Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke, has gained a lot of political momentum by calling for a return to the better angels of our political society. O’Rourke has been lambasting the politics of division, of rancor, of hatred.

By my way of looking at it, this is the kind of behavior that O’Rourke should condemn in the strongest terms possible.

legal news

If you think the Kavanaugh battle is tough, just wait

The fight to seat Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Supreme Court has turned into a donnybrook, with charges of sexual assault coming from two women who contend the high court nominee misbehaved seriously when he was a much younger individual.

The battle was joined actually before that, when Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh to succeed Anthony Kennedy on the nation’s highest court.

From a philosophical standpoint, though, I remain somewhat perplexed as to progressives’ angst over the thought of Kavanaugh joining the court. He is a conservative who would replace another conservative on the nine-member Supreme Court.

Yet the fight has been joined. Progressives don’t want Kavanaugh on the court because they fear he could overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that in 1973 made abortion legal in this country.

If you think that this has been the Mother of Supreme Court Battles, just wait — heaven forbid — Trump gets a chance to nominate someone to replace one of the court’s four remaining liberal justices.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg keeps emerging as the next likely jurist to leave the court. She said she isn’t going anywhere as long as Trump is president. I’ll take her at her word, provided she can control her own destiny … if you get my drift.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonja Sotomayor and Elena Kagan? They aren’t leaving on their own while Trump is in the White House.

Fate does have a way of intervening, so it’s wise to keep your minds open to potential shock waves when any of the four progressive justices decide it’s time to go.

If you for a moment thought this fight over Brett Kavanaugh is as bad as it gets, then you need to take another look across the political landscape and anticipate the eruption that would occur if Donald Trump gets to find someone to replace one of the court’s liberals.

We’d all better hold on with both hands.