the questions raised about Judge Kavanaugh in his first hearing will be submerged by the onrushing tide of scandal, as they were for Justice Thomas.
.. I do think it’s unfortunate that the cynicism and racial politics that infused the nomination of the underqualified 43-year-old Judge Thomas to a lifetime position in the seat once held by Thurgood Marshall has been erased from public memory.
.. It matters that the man President Bush called “the best man for the job on the merits” was unwilling or unable under the senators’ questioning to deviate an inch from his prepared talking points; that although he was a sitting federal appeals court judge (albeit for only 18 months) his knowledge of recent Supreme Court decisions was shaky at best; or that he made the implausible claim that he had never expressed a view, even in conversation, about Roe v. Wade, a precedent that he then voted, in dissent, to repudiate when the opportunity arose during his first year on the Supreme Court bench.
.. who would turn the constitutional clock back to the 18th century if he ever found four colleagues to agree with him, distanced himself during his confirmation hearing from the extreme conservative views he had spent years espousing in speeches. Those were, he claimed, nothing more than the musings of a “part-time political theorist.” Pressed to explain his position that there was a “natural law” higher than the Constitution, he uttered perhaps the most candid line of the entire proceeding: “I certainly never thought I’d be having this discussion.”
.. What were those earlier vulnerabilities? His work for the George W. Bush White House, many details of which have never been fully disclosed. His willingness last year, as a judge, to delay an undocumented teenager’s access to an abortion to which she was legally entitled, along with the not inconsiderable prospect that he would provide the long-awaited fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. More fundamentally, there is the weighty argument that a president who may not have been legitimately elected, and who had already filled a Supreme Court seat that everyone knows was President Barack Obama’s to fill, had not earned the right to project onto the court a minority constitutional vision and lock it in place, probably for decades.
The Yale Secret Society Brett Kavanaugh Joined Was Mostly About Drinking, Yale Alumni Say
“Yale in the ’80s was very sexually liberal,” she said — but with the idea that someone who had “partied” so liberally might take part in overturning Roe v. Wade. “It’s the height of hypocrisy,” Sherry said.
Booker Releases Confidential Documents Related to Kavanaugh Nomination
In violation of rules, Democrats unveil pages from Supreme Court nominee’s time in George W. Bush administration
Separately, in a March 2003 email from Judge Kavanaugh reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Judge Kavanaugh took issue with the notion that the Roe v. Wade case, which established the right to an abortion, is “settled law.”
“I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since [the] Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” Judge Kavanaugh wrote. That email was first reported by The New York Times.
Democrats argue that there is no reason for such material to be designated confidential. Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) said he was willing to work with Democrats on specific documents they wanted released, and other GOP senators said unilaterally releasing documents wasn’t an acceptable solution.
.. The documents that Democrats planned to release didn’t appear to involve any classified national security information. Rather, they were internal administration documents from the Bush years, given to Congress in exchange for keeping them confidential.
.. Republicans note that restricting access to some sensitive documents to senators-only has happened in previous nomination fights, including during the successful nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama.
.. During the Kagan nomination, then-chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) agreed to accept documents from the Clinton administration as long as they were kept confidential and limited to senators and their staff.
.. The law governing information from former White House occupants gives former presidents some control over their documents. In many cases, presidents or their lawyers can control the release of information for a certain period of time after they leave office.
Mr. Booker’s actions drew protests from Republicans on the panel, who accused Mr. Booker of grandstanding for a future presidential campaign.
The surprising story of how American politics polarized | The Ezra Klein Show
- Trump identified a huge gap between Republican leadership and voters.
- Trump in office is not much different than a Ted Cruz or Bush government. Trump has been more than happy to give away the store to party elites.
If you want to know how the Republican party consolidated, it was not Donald Trump, it was
(49 min) Trump has managed to combine the things that voters and elites felt most strongly about
- Voters: group identities: racial, demographic, nationalistic change: Immigration, Trade, NFL players
- Party Elites: low taxes, overturning Roe, appointing judges, anti-administrative state, anti-Obamacare
He went out his way to say unorthodox things about taxing Hedge Fund managers, protecting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Instinctively lied about those things.
European parties have big state for nativists
The real test of how weak the Republican State would be if he went after the economic elites.
The Democrats are becoming more orthodoxly liberal.