Kavanaugh and Perjury

[_Some Schmo]

I wonder why I only see idiots questioning Ford's credibility. Interesting.

[_canpakes]

Final nail in the coffin.

Not sure how this explains Kavanaugh’s whiny ranting and conspiratorial accusations.

Maybe Hillary Clinton paid Ford to fly on a propeller plane as part of an elaborate, decades-long setup?

(It’s a rhetorical question. I don’t expect you to answer as I know that you can’t come out from under the bed for fear of having sexual assault allegations levied against you by random women. You said this would happen, so I’ll take your word for it.)

[_DoubtingThomas]

I support the Citizens United decision and think its opponents tend not to understand the underlying 1st amendment arguments in favor of it.

According to the Washington Post "91% of the time the better-financed candidate wins" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... bce3ed127b. According to PBS "94 percent of biggest spenders in House races won, up slightly from 2012 – 82 percent of biggest spenders in Senate races won, up from 76 percent in 2012". https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/m ... -elections.

Money in politics is getting climate change deniers to Congress. You do not think money in politics is a serious problem?

But I fully recognize that if Democrats get enough judicial power, one of the first things they'd be interested in doing is reversing that decision

How? Not with our all powerful conservative Supreme Court.

[_Chap]

And now there are conservatives who are beginning to feel that this man is not right for the Supreme Court bench. In The Atlantic:

I Know Brett Kavanaugh, but I Wouldn’t Confirm Him
This is an article I never imagined myself writing, that I never wanted to write, that I wish I could not write.
OCT 2, 2018

Benjamin Wittes
Editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution


Here are the start and finish of the article. Read the whole thing. It is weighty stuff, and to me it (regretfully, but definitively) buries Kanavaugh's nomination beneath Mount Doom.

If I were a senator, I would not vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.

These are words I write with no pleasure, but with deep sadness. Unlike many people who will read them with glee—as validating preexisting political, philosophical, or jurisprudential opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination—I have no hostility to or particular fear of conservative jurisprudence. I have a long relationship with Kavanaugh, and I have always liked him. I have admired his career on the D.C. Circuit. I have spoken warmly of him. I have published him. I have vouched publicly for his character—more than once—and taken a fair bit of heat for doing so. I have also spent a substantial portion of my adult life defending the proposition that judicial nominees are entitled to a measure of decency from the Senate and that there should be norms of civility within a process that showed Kavanaugh none even before the current allegations arose.

This is an article I never imagined myself writing, that I never wanted to write, that I wish I could not write.

I am also keenly aware that rejecting Kavanaugh on the record currently before the Senate will set a dangerous precedent. The allegations against him remain unproven. They arose publicly late in the process and, by their nature, are not amenable to decisive factual rebuttal. It is a real possibility that Kavanaugh is telling the truth and that he has had his life turned upside down over a falsehood. Even assuming that Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations are entirely accurate, rejecting him on the current record could incentivize not merely other sexual-assault victims to come forward—which would be a salutary thing—but also other late-stage allegations of a non-falsifiable nature by people who are not acting in good faith. We are on a dangerous road, and the judicial confirmation wars are going to get a lot worse for our traveling down it.


Despite all of that, if I were a senator, I would vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. I would do it both because of Ford’s testimony and because of Kavanaugh’s. For reasons I will describe, I find her account more believable than his. I would also do it because whatever the truth of what happened in the summer of 1982, Thursday’s hearing left Kavanaugh nonviable as a justice.

A few days before the hearing, I detailed on this site the advice I would give to Kavanaugh if he asked me. He should, I argued, withdraw from consideration for elevation unless able to defend himself to a high degree of factual certainty without attacking Ford. He should remain a nominee, I argued, only if his defense would be sufficiently convincing that it would meet what we might term the “no asterisks” standard—that is, that it would plausibly convince even people who vociferously disagree with his jurisprudential views that he could serve credibly as a justice. His defense needed to make it possible for a reasonable pro-choice woman to find it a legitimate and acceptable prospect, if not an attractive or appealing one, that he might sit on a case reconsidering Roe v. Wade.

Kavanaugh, needless to say, did not take my advice. He stayed in, and he delivered on Thursday, by way of defense, a howl of rage. He went on the attack not against Ford—for that we can be grateful—but against Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and beyond. His opening statement was an unprecedentedly partisan outburst of emotion from a would-be justice. I do not begrudge him the emotion, even the anger. He has been through a kind of hell that would leave any person gasping for air. But I cannot condone the partisanship—which was raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial—from someone who asks for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial actor. His performance was wholly inconsistent with the conduct we should expect from a member of the judiciary.

[...]

There’s one more reason I could not vote to confirm Kavanaugh: His apparent lack of candor on the culture of drinking at Georgetown preparation and later is a problem of its own, quite apart from what it may indicate about the truth of Ford’s story. People throw around words like perjury too blithely. I won’t do so here. I will say that I do not believe he showed the sort of candor that warrants the Senate’s—or the public’s—confidence. To the extent some commentators on the right are defending Kavanaugh’s testimony as containing the sort of white lies that anyone might tell under the circumstances, let me just say that I don’t believe that Supreme Court justices get to tell self-exculpating white lies—and I don’t believe in white lies from anyone else either in sworn congressional testimony.

Over the weekend, I listened to a number of podcasts in which liberals mocked Kavanaugh as an entitled white male refusing to face accountability for what he had done. I find the tone of these discussions nauseating—undetained by the possibility of error. I, like Jeff Flake, am haunted by doubt, by the certainty of uncertainty and the consequent possibility of injustice. I spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about Oliver Cromwell’s famous letter to the Church of Scotland in which he implored, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” I also spent some time with Learned Hand’s similar maxim, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” We all need to think it possible that we may be mistaken; we all need to be not too sure that we are right.

But my bottom line is the opposite of the one Flake expressed in his statement: Faced with credible allegations of serious misconduct against him, Kavanaugh behaved in a fashion unacceptable in a justice, it seems preponderantly likely he was not candid with the Senate Judiciary Committee on important matters, and the risk of Ford’s allegations being closer to the truth than his denial of them is simply too high to place him on the Supreme Court.

We are in a political environment in which there are no rules, no norms anymore to violate. There is only power, and the individual judgments of individual senators—facing whatever political pressures they face, calculating political gain however they do it, and consulting their consciences to the extent they have them.

As much as I admire Kavanaugh, my conscience would not permit me to vote for him.

[_Kevin Graham]

Final nail in the coffin.

That's waterdog folks.

Par for the course for a mouth-breather who thinks an anonymous letter with a few unsubstantiated allegations, amounts to a "nail in the coffin."

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

If anybody wonders why the Democrats wanted to extend out the process we're seeing it now.

WD,

Who is the source for the letter? Like, is there a name and some sort of verifiable established history with Dr. Ford? This is a pretty damning letter, much more credible if verified, and much stronger than the hearsay and oddly connected to Kavanaugh statements the Democrats have been trotted out.

- Doc

[_Kevin Graham]

If anybody wonders why the Democrats wanted to extend out the process we're seeing it now.

Water Dog,

Who is the source for the letter? Like, is there a name and some sort of verifiable established history with Dr. Ford? This is a pretty damning letter, much more credible if verified, and much stronger than the hearsay and oddly connected to Kavanaugh statements the Democrats have been trotted out.

- Doc

Even if verified, how do negative comments from an ex-boyfriend outweigh first hand experience from several people who were Kavanaugh's classmates?

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Even if verified, how do negative comments from an ex-boyfriend outweigh first hand experience from several people who were Kavanaugh's classmates?

Because of the amount of time and first-hand experience someone spends with the other person? It's a witness character statement, and provides context to Dr. Ford's motivations, truthfulness, etc...

- Doc

[_Water Dog]

https://Twitter.com/charlescwcooke/stat ... 9089032192

Interesting letter from Chuck Grassley to Dr. Ford's lawyers—especially the highlighted part. I wonder what that's about.

For those that don't know how to read sarcasm, Cooke is referring to the media not reporting on this bombshell. Just go walk around and compare the different outlets and Twitter feeds. Huh. Virtually nobody reporting this. Except Fox. Except The Federalist. Except Daily Wire. Except Breitbart. CNN? Nope. MSNBC? Nope. HuffPo? Nope. NYT? Nope. WapPo? Nope.

Gee, wonder what that's about?





So, to answer the question, and Kevin's unoriginal stupidity, it wasn't an anonymous letter. It was a sworn statement under penalty of perjury sent to the Senate committee. Perhaps someone can explain the word "redacted" to Kevin.

[_Some Schmo]

For those that don't know how to read sarcasm, Cooke is referring to the media not reporting on this bombshell.

A letter making a request for evidence is what you consider a "bombshell?"

LOL

And Drumpf supporters apparently hate being called stupid. Interesting, nobody has thought to change the name of a spade.