New SCOTUS Judge

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tyr_13 said:
Except that doesn't in any way change what I said nor the validity of it.
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It speaks to the relevance of that post. The complaint about Kavanaugh's statement on birth control is based on a lie. Do you dispute this?
 
varwoche said:
That wouldn't prompt an FBI referral.
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You're right. I mean, maybe if he had arranged for an illegal abortion but it was legal everywhere by then - I even remember the standard price, $300. Thankfully never a decision I had to make.

Something he wrote?
 
Minoosh said:
You're right. I mean, maybe if he had arranged for an illegal abortion but it was legal everywhere by then - I even remember the standard price, $300. Thankfully never a decision I had to make.

Something he wrote?
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Maybe not a crime, but if he paid to help someone exercise a right that he wants to take away from everyone, it's certainly a political issue, and won't help him with his base either.
 
Although a lot of people assume conservative justices can't wait to overturn Roe v. Wade, I'm not sure that's correct.

I think it's possible that pro-lifers suspect that if abortions become much harder to obtain, that will affect poor women more - poor women who are more likely to be minorities. That could accelerate the demographic changes that already unsettle some Trump supporters.

Kavanaugh's stance on protecting sitting presidents from prosecution is more concerning IMO. I suspect that is Trump's real litmus test, not Kavanaugh's views on abortion.
 
Bob001 said:
Sen. Leahy says Kavanaugh lied at previous hearings.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...e8-b79f-f6e31e555258_story.html?noredirect=on
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I can't see this until I clear history. Another article I read indicated that the breadth of the committee's questions gives Kavanaugh an out. IMO senators do tend to ask wordy, multi-part questions that give nominees some cover. I will try to read the WaPo article.

ETA: I was thinking specifically of Al Franken's questioning of Sessions during Session's confirmation hearings. Listening to it again, I do think Sessions lied when he said he hadn't had any contact with Russians. But he didn't answer Frank's actual question at all, which was a bit rambling and basically asked what Sessions would do if he became aware of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia. There is just a tiny bit of ambiguity, though. All Sessions had to say that he wasn't aware of close contact, but he then answered a completely different question. Inaccurately, as it turns out; but it's not clear he actually understood the question until he realizes that he's just blurted out a falsehood that he could easily have avoided. Again IMO of course.
 
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Slings and Arrows said:
On a Friday night forty years ago in the backseat of a friends car, high school student Brett Kavanaugh made his move, he tried to go from first base to second base.

Been there, done that!
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Would you feel the same way if it was a Liberal Democrat.
I doubt it.......
 
dudalb said:
Would you feel the same way if it was a Liberal Democrat.
I doubt it.......
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Can’t speak for others but I would not consider this to be important regardless of party.
Of course we don’t really know the full allegations and if they are backed up.
 
Minoosh said:
I can't see this until I clear history. Another article I read indicated that the breadth of the committee's questions gives Kavanaugh an out. IMO senators do tend to ask wordy, multi-part questions that give nominees some cover. I will try to read the WaPo article.

ETA: I was thinking specifically of Al Franken's questioning of Sessions during Session's confirmation hearings. Listening to it again, I do think Sessions lied when he said he hadn't had any contact with Russians. But he didn't answer Frank's actual question at all, which was a bit rambling and basically asked what Sessions would do if he became aware of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia. There is just a tiny bit of ambiguity, though. All Sessions had to say that he wasn't aware of close contact, but he then answered a completely different question. Inaccurately, as it turns out; but it's not clear he actually understood the question until he realizes that he's just blurted out a falsehood that he could easily have avoided. Again IMO of course.
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I read the article using incognito mode. IMO the instances described could be better understood via a specific and detailed refutation by putting things on a time line and detailing who said what, when.
 
We have gotten to a point we could see coming as technology made it much easier to dredge up the past. Now, we are digging into the high school history of a 53 year old man. The day is coming, very soon, when high school photos, stories, and behavior of people who run for president will all be debated and discussed. It's not a positive change.


Oh, well. Here we are. I, and I suspect most people, really don't care what Kavanaugh did as a seventeen year old. I don't want interviews with his classmates. I don't want to know what really happened at that party. Seventeen year olds are not nominated to the Supreme Court, and whatever that kid may have done at seventeen really doesn't have anything to do with who he is today.
 
Ziggurat said:
It speaks to the relevance of that post.
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No, it really doesn't. You know how this works; this is a skeptics forum. Calling out stupendously fallacious reasoning presented as an argument is relevant.

The complaint about Kavanaugh's statement on birth control is based on a lie. Do you dispute this?
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I've said nothing about that.

Do you dispute that accusing person of action A does not mean you are not accusing them of action B? That was what I was addressing in my post. Slings and Arrows did not argue in that post that the accusation was wrong because it was not true; they argued that if they accuse Kavanaugh of saying contraceptives are abortion inducing then they can't be accusing him of opposing the Mueller investigation. Your subsequent points doen't make that reasoning valid, regardless of if either of those accusations are accurate. Hell, it wouldn't even matter if either of those accusations were not being made at all. The reasoning is still staggering wrong.
 
Meadmaker said:
We have gotten to a point we could see coming as technology made it much easier to dredge up the past. Now, we are digging into the high school history of a 53 year old man. The day is coming, very soon, when high school photos, stories, and behavior of people who run for president will all be debated and discussed. It's not a positive change.


Oh, well. Here we are. I, and I suspect most people, really don't care what Kavanaugh did as a seventeen year old. I don't want interviews with his classmates. I don't want to know what really happened at that party. Seventeen year olds are not nominated to the Supreme Court, and whatever that kid may have done at seventeen really doesn't have anything to do with who he is today.
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Society will adapt. Someone's nude shots or sexting being leaked will be almost entirely irrelevant to anyone my age and younger, as it should be.

However, depending on what happened, and what happened after that, I could care, perhaps deeply. I don't like the concept of 'ruined forever' and it's practically impossible to hold any group to the standard of having never done something stupid or embarrassing. I'm even for forgiveness for major transgressions.

IF the person made amends, improved, and otherwise 'served their time'. If they 'got away with it', didn't make amends with the wronged party, and just pretended it never happened, if bad enough, I would say it's completely fair to hold that against the person, especially for a position such as SCOTUS.

I'll build a hypothetical example: Let's say Kavanaugh raped a girl then insisted she get an abortion. He made no amends, and trashed the girl to all. If there is substantive evidence of it, I wouldn't give a Canadian long tonne of damns that he was 17 and has been 'clean' ever since. That would be disqualifying for me, and I would hope any moral person.

As always, context and details matter. (I am not holding my breath on this one though.)
 
tyr_13 said:
Society will adapt. Someone's nude shots or sexting being leaked will be almost entirely irrelevant to anyone my age and younger, as it should be.
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When it comes to embarrassing behavior, we've already adapted, as witnessed by the last presidential election. We have also already had a nude model elected to the senate. (Scott Brown) However, if the behavior was more than embarrassing, i.e. if it could be considered illegal or unethical, I think we will see anything and everything dredged up.

The biggest problem with that is that most of us have some sort of "borderline" behavior. I had a ton of underage drinking, and although I was never arrested, I sometimes drove a car when drunk. (For the youngsters in the audience, times really have changed. It was possible for an underage driver to get pulled over by a policeman, be drunk, and be told to go home. For the record, I think the modern approach to drinking and driving as a vast improvement, but my seventeen year old self took advantage of the much less strict enforcement, and lesser penalties even if caught and prosecuted.) If I run for Senate some day (not going to happen) will someone dredge up that?


Well, probably not. But wait. There are certain conversations that could conceivably have been taped, and I used the N-word. I wasn't even a teenager. I bet it happened as late as, let's say, 25 years old. Oh, noes!


Will every single thing we've ever done be considered relevant to running for office?

However, depending on what happened, and what happened after that, I could care, perhaps deeply. I don't like the concept of 'ruined forever' and it's practically impossible to hold any group to the standard of having never done something stupid or embarrassing. I'm even for forgiveness for major transgressions.

IF the person made amends, improved, and otherwise 'served their time'. If they 'got away with it', didn't make amends with the wronged party, and just pretended it never happened, if bad enough, I would say it's completely fair to hold that against the person, especially for a position such as SCOTUS.

I'll build a hypothetical example: Let's say Kavanaugh raped a girl then insisted she get an abortion. He made no amends, and trashed the girl to all. If there is substantive evidence of it, I wouldn't give a Canadian long tonne of damns that he was 17 and has been 'clean' ever since. That would be disqualifying for me, and I would hope any moral person.
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No, for me, I just wouldn't care, at least not much. It wouldn't be the thing I base the judgement on, unless perhaps it was really, really close to the borderline anyway. i.e. I was going to vote for candidate A, but then I heard about some really bad behavior when he was 17. I can't see myself changing to candidate B because of that unless I was pretty undecided in the first place.

It sees to me that in your hypothetical, one person was caught at 17, punished, publicly repented in the face of social pressure, and went on to lead a decent life afterwards while a second person got away with it, never did anything like it again, probably regretted it but because it never went public no one ever knew about it, but then it was put into public view 30 years later, and we should hold it against him, but not against the one who got caught at 17? No, I'm not seeing it.

If we were to discover that Kavanaugh actually raped someone at 17, maybe it would influence me, a little. In the situation that exists right now with judge Kavanaugh, if we were to discover that he did that, it would influence me, only because he denied it today. If we were to subsequently discover that, well, yes, it did happen, then that would mean he is lying today, and we would be judging him on his behavior today, not when he was 17.
 
C_Felix said:
Protip: Find a way to bring up Hillary.
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Hillary's getting stale and tired. The Democratic party needs a fresh new face, and it appears they found one:
“I think he’s the most deplorable, the most despicable human being I’ve ever encountered. After we impeach Trump, we’ll go after Mike Pence. We’ll get him.”
-- Maxine Waters (Sept 6, 2018)​

Although, the word "deplorable" does sound vaguely familiar.
 
Meadmaker said:
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Oh, well. Here we are. I, and I suspect most people, really don't care what Kavanaugh did as a seventeen year old. I don't want interviews with his classmates. I don't want to know what really happened at that party. Seventeen year olds are not nominated to the Supreme Court, and whatever that kid may have done at seventeen really doesn't have anything to do with who he is today.
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We mostly don't want to know, except if the truth might have changed the course of his life or hers. The allegation is that he and a buddy attempted to assault a teenage girl at a party. Suppose, for the sake of argument, she had complained at the time. Suppose the police had investigated and determined that there were no grounds for prosecution. There would still be a police report. Suppose the school had disciplined him. That might have kept him out of Yale. If he had gone to a less prestigious college, would he have gotten into Yale Law? Without that credential, would he have gotten coveted clerkships with distinguished federal judges? Would he be a federal judge today?

And what about her? Did she drop out of school? Transfer? Get bad grades in her senior year that kept her out of a top-rank college?

It's easy to say it doesn't matter now, but we can all imagine moments when our lives changed direction -- or could have, or should have. This guy might have been getting a free pass for 30 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/us/politics/kavanaugh-assault-allegation-letter.html
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news...ugh-stirs-tension-among-democrats-in-congress
 
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LSSBB said:
Amazing how the sex allegation gets all the attention, and not the memogate, etc. from Sen. Leahy. If I were him I'd be pissed at the other allegations stealing the attention away.
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"Memogate" depends to some degree on proving that he really knew what he claims not to have known. But we can all understand allegations of a crime.
 
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