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New SCOTUS Judge II: The Wrath of Kavanaugh

varwoche said:
I recall that the videos he rented came into play.
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You are conflating Bork with Thomas. During the Anita Hill soap opera, some people tried to bring up video rentals by Thomas.

At least, that's the way I remember it.

The most commonly remembered bit from the Bork hearings was Ted Kennedy talking about how, in Robert Bork's America, civil rights would go out the window. Senator Kennedy was surely guilty of hyperbole, but it wasn't fabrication. The fact is that Bork was no fan of most civil rights legislation, and thought that most interference in economic affairs was unconstitutional. I was a young man back then, but I remember reading that he felt federal minimum wage laws, anti-trust laws, and many environmental regulations were all unconstitutional. Of course, Roe v. Wade was a terrible ruling, in his view. That's what I mean by Bork being a right wing judicial activist.

Unfortunately, the main legacy of those hearings was to get future nominees to clam up about Roe v. Wade, or any other case. Bork was the last nominee to actually answer questions about his actual opinion on any controversial subject. It's weird that we talk about the hearings as a job interview, but it's a very strange job interview where a candidate won't say how he would do his job, or even comment about whether the outgoing or past employees did their jobs.
 
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quadraginta said:
I'm pretty sure that keeping Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court wouldn't keep some other conservative off the Supreme Court. Even if the Dems manage to get the Senate in November.

Maybe, just maybe, they wanted to keep this conservative off the Supreme Court, as opposed to one whose loyalty was to the law, rather than to the Party [of Trump].
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ftfy

Wonder if Justice Roberts gets to do some dressing down?
 
varwoche said:
No it was Bork. link
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I stand corrected. I don't remember that, perhaps because, as the Wikipedia article on him put it,

"His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. "


The incident I remembered was this one, from the Wikipedia article on Clarence Thomas' nomination.


"According to Mayer and Abramson, soon after Thomas was sworn in, three reporters for The Washington Post "burst into the newsroom almost simultaneously with information confirming that Thomas' involvement with pornography far exceeded what the public had been led to believe."[63] These reporters had eyewitness testimony and video rental records showing Thomas' interest in and use of pornography.[64] However, according to Jeffrey Toobin, because Thomas was already sworn in by the time the video store evidence emerged, The Washington Post dropped the story."

There had been rumors of his video rental habits during the hearing, but the committee wouldn't entertain those rumors openly. (I won't vote for Biden in the primaries because he's too darned old, but I've voted for him in the past, and I really respected the way he handled the Thomas hearings.)
 
Ziggurat said:
It may surprise you to find out that in the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court did not actually rule on whether the government had a compelling interest in providing access to birth control. This is what they said:

We will assume that the interest in guaranteeing cost-free access to the four challenged contraceptive methods is compelling within the meaning of RFRA, and we will proceed to consider the final prong of the RFRA test, i.e., whether HHS has shown that the contraceptive mandate is “the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling govern-mental interest.”
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The most straightforward way of doing this would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections.​

In other words, the conservative wing of the court has already accepted government-provided birth control as constitutional. I think it's a pretty safe bet that the liberal wing wouldn't have a problem with that either. Birth control isn't about to be denied to people by this court.
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So Hobby Lobby and the nuns that refused to have birth control included in the health insurance they provided employees and the nuns who wouldn't allow the government to supplement the cost so the nuns could say they weren't paying for it weren't really impacted by SCOTUS decisions?

These people want the government to support their pushing their religion on other people. (It's not Sharia Law we have to worry about, but I digress.)
 
Dr. Keith said:
His chances were ultimately not hurt because those who voted for him would have voted for him even if he had chugged a forty and pissed all over the desk before walking out of the hearing.

But that certainly wouldn't have made it easier for them to vote for him. Flake had to push for an investigation because the testimony was not enough to close the door on the issue. Graham had to interrupt the proceedings because Kav was doing such a poor job. He was amateurish, but he was their amateur and they had already invested too much to admit that he was an amateur.
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I think Graham and Flake and probably a few more GOP Senators were in denial about Kav's lack of fitness for the job.
 
sylvan8798 said:
Personally, I have at least a nanogram more respect for those who basically said straight out that it didn't matter what he did in his past over those like Susan Collins who said they believed Dr. Ford but didn't believe that it was actually Brett Kavanaugh. At least they are having some honesty about it, however minute.
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Is it honest to be in denial? Collins cherry picked, I don't think that was honest.
 
quadraginta said:
Maybe, just maybe, they wanted to keep this conservative off the Supreme Court, as opposed to one whose loyalty was to the law, rather than to the Party.
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I think maybe his new colleagues will not like that he was so open, even aggressive, in declaring his partisanship. I wonder how that will play out.
 
 
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