Democrats tell us the real game again and again. The New York Times editorial board, featuring racist Sarah Jeong, wants to hit pause on the process, a blatant attempt to push for holding off till after the election. It mentions “evidence” in the subhead, then provides none in the screed. For them, preferably after the new Congress is seated with Democrats controlling the Senate. The Washington Post EB wants the FBI to investigate to run out the clock, despite knowing that the FBI doesn’t investigate local crimes. Also at the WP, E.J. Dionne
The Kavanaugh vote is bigger than politics
Who says politicians think only about the next election? In the battle over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the outcome each party respectively wants may hurt them in November’s elections.
But the stakes are so high that neither side can afford to focus on politics alone.
They got higher still on Wednesday when a new accuser, Julie Swetnick, said Kavanaugh was abusive to girls in high school and alleged he was present at a party where she was gang-raped. Kavanaugh vigorously denied the new charges, calling them “ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone.” But all ten Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said President Trump should either withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination or reopen his FBI background investigation.
More holes in that accusation than swiss cheese cheese cloth. Skipping to the end after all of the talk about turning this into politics for the mid-terms
Both parties have made electoral politics secondary because they know that history will weigh heavily in the coming days. In “Republican Ascendancy,” his classic book about the 1920s and early 1930s, the historian John D. Hicks noted that President Warren Harding got to make four Supreme Court appointments in his two and a half years in office. He named conservative former President William Howard Taft, as Chief Justice, while Harding’s other three appointments “fell also to men of ability, albeit in each case to an extreme conservative.”
Two of the four were still on the court when conservative justices created a judicial crisis in the 1930s by rejecting one New Deal program after another; the other two were replaced by conservatives named by President Herbert Hoover and were also broadly part of the anti-New Deal block. FDR’s court-packing fight ensued.
Conservatives now see a comparable opportunity to affect jurisprudence for decades, even as liberals are aghast at the damage an activist right-wing Court could do.
But with so many questions raised about Kavanaugh’s veracity, we can’t even get to ideology now. The best course would be to delay hearings and votes and take the time to reexamine Kavanaugh’s fitness for the court.
This is about denying Trump a pick for the Supreme Court, and doing it in the sleaziest of manners. This is what is meant by “bigger than Kavanaugh.” Daniel Hanninger calls this the Kavanaugh Standard
Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to replace Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court is a watershed event that will define America’s politics for years. If the Kavanaugh nomination fails because of the accusations made against him by Christine Blasey Ford and others, America’s system of politics, indeed its everyday social relations, will be conducted in the future on the Kavanaugh Standard. It will deepen the country’s divisions for a generation.
The Kavanaugh Standard will hold that any decision requiring a deliberative consideration of contested positions can and should be decided on just one thing: belief. Belief is sufficient. Nothing else matters. (snip)
Then something new happened. Half of the Senate Judiciary Committee created this standard: “I believe Christine.â€
It is an inescapable irony that the Kavanaugh Standard—“I believeâ€â€”is being established inside the context of a nomination to the highest U.S. court. This new standard for court nominees (and surely others in and outside politics) would be that judgment can be rendered in the absence of substantive argument or any legal standard relating to corroboration, cross-examination or presumption of innocence.
Democrats are setting political precedents that will come back to bite them where the sun don’t shine, much like it has with things like invoking the nuclear option when Harry Reid was in charge of the Democrat controlled Senate.
Here is Sen. Jeff Merkley's lawsuit filed today against Trump, Senate Republicans, and the National Archives: https://t.co/S8lddgI69J He's asking the court to block McConnell from holding a vote on Kavanaugh until the Senate gets all of Kavanaugh's records pic.twitter.com/F0A8JLyYgG
— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) September 26, 2018
This will go nowhere, but, is it wise for Jeff to do this? Democrats should just remember their games when Democrats are accused with zero proof, zero evidence, and zero corroboration the “I Believe” meme and the other things they did.
