Kennedy to retire - USSC will swing even further right

this is actually worth listening to

 

Is he on the committee to screen Kavanaugh or to campaign for him? The undisguised manner in which he delivers his 'congratulatory' speech made me want to puke.

This is a joke and a waste of time. They should just get to the partisan vote and be over with it.

 

here's the whole thing (Sasse's remarks).

 

Agreed, you will have a lot of Democrats refuse to vote for him for partisan reasons, but I think more will break ranks than you are thinking.

 

Thats simply cos most politicians (on either side) have no conscience nor care about the wishes of the electorate. All they want is to keep their mega donors happy and keep themselves in DC.

 

Actually it's because they know that if they vote against him it'll be used in campaigns against them....and they care about keeping their jobs, which means keeping the electorate happy, more than they care about what the extremists in their party want them to do.

 

this is just sad

 

SCOTUSblog with links to early commentaries on day one

http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/09/a...day-of-judge-kavanaughs-confirmation-hearing/

 

Neutral arbiter neutrally gets the **** out when a grieving parent of a mass shooting victim confronts him by...extending his hand


Listen- we all know Kavanaugh and the rest of the pale hacks who came before him (Gorsuch, Alito, Roberts, Thomas and the whole lot of them) are paid to deliver the goods for the powerful at the expense of the powerless- that is their raison d'etre.

But at least Scott Foster shakes Mike Dantonio's hand prior.

 

Has Alex Jones checked in yet with his thoughts?

Did Bash has an issue with Pizza Gate or any of the other bullshit conspiracies that Trump championed that helped his wife get where she is?

Yeah all of the conspiracy theories are BS I just don’t remember those that benefited from them speaking up speaking up before.

 

Sasse should primary Two Scoops in 2020.

 

honestly, why doesn't someone like this run . . . and we end up with Trump? geez

 

very good editorial. and yes haters, I know the difference between and opinion piece and factual news reporting. This is an EDITORIAL OPINION PIECE. "About half of the Democrats on Judiciary are running for President, but have they consulted their Senate colleagues running for re-election this year?"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kavanaugh-histrionics-1536103645?mod=hp_opin_pos1

The Kavanaugh Histrionics
Senate Democrats turn the hearing into a presidential campaign.

131 Comments
By
The Editorial Board
Sept. 4, 2018 7:27 p.m. ET

Expectations were low for Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, and Senate Democrats on Tuesday wasted no time meeting them. We can’t tell if they’re going through the histrionic motions or if they might actually try to block a confirmation vote.

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley couldn’t finish his first sentence before California Democrat Kamala Harris interrupted to demand a hearing delay. Democrats continued to speak over the Chairman even after they were ruled out of order to the jeers of protestors who had to be removed from the hearing room. Democrats interrupted 44 times in the first hour, part of what NBC reported as a “plotted, coordinated strategy” organized by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over the weekend.

The main charge is that Mr. Grassley is “denying” crucial documents to “hide” Judge Kavanaugh’s record. The Senators are ignoring the 307 opinions he has written, and the 17,000 pages of material he provided in response to the committee’s questionnaire—the most extensive ever demanded of a nominee. The Senators have already received more than half a million pages about his time as a lawyer and judge—more documents than were provided for the past five Supreme Court nominees combined.

Democrats haven’t found a killer issue in all of this, so they are demanding documents from Judge Kavanaugh’s time as a staff secretary in the Bush White House. The documents would reveal little about Judge Kavanaugh’s legal thinking, since as staff secretary his job was to vet and monitor what President Bush saw each day.

Most of these documents are privileged, and for good reason. They represent high-level deliberations that require honest advice. When Democrat Pat Leahy ran the Judiciary Committee, he didn’t even ask the Obama White House to provide documents from Elena Kagan’s tenure at the Solicitor General’s office, though they surely were relevant to her legal views.

Jeff Sessions, a GOP Senator at the time, asked Ms. Kagan during her 2010 hearing about the need for such privilege. She agreed that such documents “ought not to be produced” since it would undermine the “confidentiality” necessary for “effective decision-making.”

Once they got past this procedural tantrum, Democrats used their opening statements to take shots at Judge Kavanaugh’s integrity. Ms. Harris (#KamalaIn2020) derided him as a partisan who would not be loyal “to the people of the United States.” Is he a traitor? Several Senators claimed Donald Trump chose Judge Kavanaugh to protect the President from indictment or impeachment or something. Never mind that Judge Kavanaugh has written opinions that are skeptical of unchecked presidential power.

Democrats portray Mr. Kavanaugh as some Trumpian legal gargoyle, but he’s the epitome of a mainstream legal conservative that any GOP President would have had on his short list. Some 97% of the opinions and orders that Judge Kavanaugh took part in over 12 years on the federal bench were unanimous. He was in the majority 98% of the time.

Of his 62 dissents, the Supreme Court has adopted his legal reasoning in at least nine cases—an extraordinary number for an appellate judge. He’s a center-right version of his colleague on the federal bench, Merrick Garland, whom Democrats continue to laud as an ideal Justice.

The political question is whether this is all for show, or are Democrats willful enough to use Senate rules to block the nomination from proceeding to a vote? They could do so for a while if they stage a walkout, and Tuesday’s melodrama suggests they might be up for such a self-defeating gesture. About half of the Democrats on Judiciary are running for President, but have they consulted their Senate colleagues running for re-election this year?


​

 

Lawfare has some clarification on those 102k pages "subject to" executive privilege:

"The {fifth} category is worth deeper explanation. According to Bush’s legal team, 27,110 documents totaling 101,921 pages were not provided to the committee because the Trump White House, in consultation with the Justice Department, identified the content of the documents as traditionally protected by constitutional privilege and 'directed' that the documents not be provided to the committee. Note, the objection here did not come from the Bush team but from the Trump administration.

"Neither the Bush team nor the Trump administration actually asserts any privilege over the documents; rather, the documents are said to contain information that could be protected under privilege. The Bush team has deferred to the current Justice Department on matters of asserting privilege over the Kavanaugh documents. Their letter even specifies that former President Bush instructed that the documents be reviewed 'with a presumption of disclosure.' But the letter also states that the Trump administration has said information identified in the documents has been 'traditionally protected by constitutional privilege'—phrasing that suggests that the White House hasn’t directly asserted privilege (at least not yet)."
​

Hence the ambiguity that made the earlier discussion a bit confusing. Neither the Post nor the Times had reported this quite clearly enough.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/day-1-brett-kavanaugh-hearings-documents-delayed-and-documents-denied

 

I am sure he was talking about the specific situation but the great reporting captures all protesting. The scene yesterday wasnt pretty.

 

actually the Post misses the fact that the protests are in fact illegal, USC Chap 40, Section 5104, TO "willfully and knowingly"

with the intent to disrupt the orderly conduct of official business, enter or remain in a room in any of the Capitol Buildings set aside or designated for the use of either House of Congress or a Member, committee, officer, or employee of Congress, or either House of Congress; or utter loud, threatening, or abusive language, or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place in the Grounds or in any of the Capitol Buildings with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either House of Congress, or the orderly conduct in that building of a hearing before, or any deliberations of, a committee of Congress or either House of Congress.​

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/40/5104

with penalties of up to six months in federal prison, Chapter 40 , Section 5109(b) :

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/40/5109

 

This appears to be an inaccurate description of the interaction.

 

but what about those 42,000 extra pages that got dumped in Corey Booker's lap on Monday night?

Kathleen Parker writes:

"So what about those 42,000 pages? It is a rather large cache, you have to admit. And what about the last-minute dump? Isn’t that an act of bad faith? Not necessarily.

"First, the last-minute dump is a time-honored tradition in the nation’s capital and a common tactic in litigation. Lawyers will do what lawyers do. As for the whining about needing more time, really? This is Washington, folks, where Starbucks is literally on all four corners of a downtown park. Teams of fast skimmers and a case or two of Red Bull could have produced a rash of salient bullet points by breakfast — if Democrats were really curious. Happens all the time. Indeed, Garrett Ventry, Grassley’s communications adviser, tweeted Tuesday afternoon that the senator’s legal documents team did review the full stack Monday. 'We had 15 people working on it.' "​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...f4f84429666_story.html?utm_term=.dd73a3ae6393