Kennedy to retire - USSC will swing even further right

Harrisment · Sep 6, 2018

Damn, Booker actually did it.

NewRoxFan · Sep 6, 2018

Harrisment · Sep 6, 2018

LOL, and now Republicans are saying this is no big deal because they cleared the documents already. Yet they threatened kicking Booker out of the senate if he released them.

They really think their base are morons.

biina · Sep 6, 2018

Harrisment said: ↑

LOL, and now Republicans are saying this is no big deal because they cleared the documents already. Yet they threatened kicking Booker out of the senate if he released them.

They really think their base are morons.
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and they are probably right

NewRoxFan · Sep 6, 2018

Oh my... this is awkward...

dc rock · Sep 6, 2018

NewRoxFan said: ↑

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SamFisher · Sep 6, 2018

dc rock said: ↑

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If he wasn't a rich white conservabro (albeit, rich but financially poor because the dumbass ran up huge credit card debts for Nationals tickets, lol) he would be Mirandized by now.

Nook · Sep 6, 2018

It is naive to believe that politics do not play a part of the Court........ but this is pretty over the top.

dc rock · Sep 6, 2018

Manuel Miranda:

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Manny_Miranda

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/03/wheres-manny

Os Trigonum · Sep 6, 2018

Harrisment said: ↑

Damn, Booker actually did it.
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lol. Booker is a weenie

"Bill Burck, Bush’s presidential records representative, said later Thursday, 'We cleared the documents last night shortly after Senator Booker’s staff asked us to. We were surprised to learn about Senator Booker’s histrionics this morning because we had already told him he could use the documents publicly. In fact, we have said yes to every request made by the Senate Democrats to make documents public.' ”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powe...01309990777_story.html?utm_term=.e5c984892203

Os Trigonum · Sep 6, 2018

followup to the Booker comment. Jonathan Tobin opines that Kamala Harris has "won" the Democrats' Kavanaugh Presidential Primary, easily defeating Booker, Klobuchar, and others with her performance during the hearings.

Kudos to Kamala!!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/kamala-harris-wins-democrats-brett-kavanaugh-primary/

Kamala Harris Wins the Democrats’ Kavanaugh Primary
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
September 6, 2018 2:00 PM

Some of the 2020 presidential contenders competed in the Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings. The most hostile inquisitor won.

From the opening moments of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Democratic caucus made it clear they knew they couldn’t stop his confirmation. Faced with a choice between a dramatic walkout to protest their inability to scrutinize every piece of paper the nominee has handled throughout his long government career and an attempt to disrupt or postpone the proceedings, the Democrats decided on the latter.

That choice ensured that the first days of the hearings would be a circus, replete with repeated outbursts and disruptions by audience members (most of whom appeared to be affiliated with the Women’s March, an anti-Trump resistance group) and tedious orations from the Democrats about their futile fishing expedition for something that might sink Kavanaugh’s nomination even as Republicans countered with softball questions and references to the judge’s record as a girls’ basketball coach.

With Kavanaugh gamely sticking to the “Ginsburg rule” — so named for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to give an opinion about any issue that might conceivably come before the Supreme Court during her hearings — during the first day of questioning, none of the Democrats were able to outwit or trick him into making a statement that might derail his confirmation. That made for an apt illustration of the dysfunctional nature of Congress (a point that Senator Ben Sasse made ably during his comments on the first day) as well as an unedifying spectacle that demonstrated that all the talk about bipartisanship and civility at the John McCain funeral last weekend from members of the Washington establishment was as hypocritical as it was empty.

But the proceedings were not bereft of interest for those interested in the ongoing competition for the leadership of both the resistance and the Democratic party. With three possible candidates for the presidency among the Democrats on the committee, the confirmation hearings were not so much a test of the minority’s inability to thwart the nomination as a competition that might be best described as among the first cattle calls for 2020 hopefuls. Senators Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris all got a leg up in the race just because of their presence on the committee, and each performed according to his or her reputation. But while their speeches and questions didn’t do them any harm, there was no doubt that Harris emerged as the winner of the Democrats’ Kavanaugh primary.

Although Senator Mazie Hirono matched her for sheer hostility, with a prosecutorial style that seemed more in place at a Stalinist show trial than at a confirmation hearing, among the 2020 contenders Harris was the toughest questioner of the trio. And by deliberately insinuating that Kavanaugh was somehow connected to the Trump administration’s efforts to defend itself against the Russia-collusion probe led by Robert Mueller, Harris not only gained the kind of publicity that is fundraising gold for a potential candidate, she also made it clear that she would stop at nothing in her efforts to smear opponents. If Democrats are looking for someone who is willing to be ruthless enough to take on President Trump even if that means engaging in gutter politics — and that seems to be exactly what their base is longing for — then Harris’s approach may give her the boost she needs to fuel interest in her presidential prospects.

Klobuchar’s interest in the presidency is well known, but if she has gotten the least buzz among the many Democratic senators thinking about 2020, the reason for that was seen in the hearings. Her approach to questioning was entirely conventional. Though her barbs aimed at Kavanaugh and attempts to get him to declare his opposition to liberal legal sacred cows was intended to spark controversy, she didn’t succeed. In a forum in which demonstrating hostility to the nominee and all things conservative and Trump was the objective, Klobuchar was just too “Minnesota nice” to make much of an impact.

Booker did better, though he had to break the committee’s rules to do so. To score points on the issue with the resistance, the New Jersey senator tried to highlight Kavanaugh’s views on race, but he had to try to trick the nominee. At one point during his questions, he cited an email with language about racial profiling and race-based government policies. But it was only after some pushback from Kavanaugh that listeners realized that the judge was the recipient of the communication, not its author. Not only was it clearly unfair to quiz Kavanaugh about a document he couldn’t see, the email (which dated to his period of service in the George W. Bush White House) was among those classified as confidential by the committee, and Booker broke Senate rules in publicizing and then saying he would release it.

Booker did his best to milk this for all it was worth, even saying that it was his “I’m Spartacus” moment, and was able to get the rest of the Democrats present to back him as part of their ongoing effort to make their complaints about process and access to documents the focus of the hearings. But while his backers were reportedly sending out fundraising appeals during the hearings, if Democratic activists were looking for a tough guy, Booker’s personality did not serve him well here. He is always eager to please and to seem agreeable, and his exchanges with Senator Chuck Grassley, the committee chairman, were often friendly. Nor did he demonstrate the kind of implacable hostility to the nominee shown by many of the Democrats. In a competition where being nice may be seen as liability, Booker fell short.

Harris had no such problems.

She first earned notoriety in the Senate last year by demonstrating open incivility bordering on bullying when she interrogated Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the national-intelligence chiefs. Bullying witnesses and cutting them off before they have a chance to answer is her modus operandi during hearings. She scored with the Left by abusing Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and then gained more applause from the same sector by playing the victim who was being “silenced” when Senate Republicans attempted to intervene on behalf of those being interrogated.

The same qualities were on display during her questioning of Kavanaugh. But while, like the other Democrats, she never succeeding in outsmarting the judge, she was the only one to momentarily flummox him by bringing up the Mueller investigation.

She started with an impossibly general and specious query about whether he had ever discussed the Mueller probe with “anyone.” Kavanaugh was clearly perplexed by that, since she was referring not to narrowly legal questions but to even casual conversation about a leading topic of interest. He eventually agreed that he had. Harris next asked if he had done so with a member of the firm of Kasowitz Benson Torres, one of whose partners is President Trump’s attorney. When Kavanaugh, who couldn’t possibly be expected to know whether he had ever talked with one of the firm’s hundreds of lawyers, demurred, Harris then seemed to imply there was something fishy about this and cautioned him in a way that seemed as if she had executed a perjury trap. But when Kavanaugh asked if she had anyone in mind, it was Harris who played coy, in a manner that seemed to imply that she had some evidence of wrongdoing or inappropriate communications, even though there is no reason to believe she has any such proof at her disposal.

This earned her ecstatic reviews from liberal pundits who enjoyed her ability to wrong-foot the nominee and admired her sly, if entirely inappropriate, effort to somehow link him, without the slightest proof, to Trump’s legal problems. While Booker seemed to make the most of the Democrats’ procedural complaints, it’s difficult for even the most ardent supporters of the resistance to get too worked up about their efforts to lay their hands on every email the judge has ever sent. But by asserting, even by implication, that Kavanaugh might somehow be part of the Russia-collusion discussion, Harris gave liberal Democrats exactly the kind of red meat they crave.

Along with her snide and disrespectful prosecutorial tone, that made her the winner of the first day of the Kavanaugh primary.

Over the course of the long journey to 2020, the Kavanaugh hearings were just one small step toward the Democratic presidential nomination. Like most of the other 2020 hopefuls, Harris has yet to prove she’s truly ready for the scrutiny and the pressure of a presidential race. But as Democrats cope with the frustration of being in the opposition, her combative style provides them with the same element that endeared Trump to so many Republicans in 2016. Though there’s no guarantee she will run or outlast other possible candidates, her conduct in the Kavanaugh hearings was an important first step.
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tallanvor · Sep 6, 2018

mtbrays · Sep 6, 2018

tallanvor said: ↑

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madlads

Os Trigonum · Sep 6, 2018

tallanvor said: ↑

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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cory-booker-is-embarrassing-himself/

Os Trigonum · Sep 6, 2018

Booker sinking in the Presidential polls as we speak

http://reason.com/volokh/2018/09/06/thoughts-on-the-kavanaugh-racial-profili

Thoughts on the Kavanaugh Racial-Profiling E-Mails Revealed by Sen. Cory Booker
Conservative support for racial profiling is deeply problematic. But the e-mail leaked by Sen. Cory Booker actually shows Brett Kavanaugh advocating "race-neutral" post-9/11 security policies.
Ilya Somin|Sep. 6, 2018 2:29 pm

The big supposed bombshell of this morning's Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was Democratic Senator Cory Booker's release of a series of e-mails on racial profiling in post-9/11 security policy that Kavanaugh wrote in 2001-2002, while he was working in the George W. Bush White House. Booker leaked the e-mails even though they were marked "committee confidential," and therefore not supposed to be released to the public. He stated that he would release the e-mails despite the potential risk of punishment, including even potential exclusion from the Senate.

I think Booker was right to suggest that this e-mail chain should never have been withheld from the public in the first place. There is no classified national security information there, or anything else that, as far as I can tell, needs to be kept secret. Terrorists did not need these e-mails to figure out that the use of racial profiling was considered as a possible tactic in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. More generally, Booker and other Democrats have good reason to suggest that the decisions on which documents to release should have been handled by a neutral body, not by former Bush Administration official Bill Burck, who is also a lawyer for several prominent figures associated with the Trump administration.

Substantively, however, the e-mails don't seem to be a major damaging revelation. If anything the contents should be reassuring to critics of racial profiling, myself included.

In the most notable e-mail in the sequence, Kavanaugh wrote the following:

The people who favor some use of race/nat[ional] origin obviously do not need to grapple with the "interim" question. But the people (such as you and I) who generally favor effective security measures that are race-neutral in fact DO need to grapple -- and grapple now -- with the interim question of what to do before a truly effective and comprehensive race-neutral system is developed and implemented.

The e-mail is part of an exchange between different Bush administration officials, some of whom apparently favored the use of racial and ethnic profiling in post-9/11 security policy, and others who oppose it. Kavanaugh quite clearly includes himself in the latter camp. He did, potentially, leave open the possibility that there might be racial profiling in a temporary "interim" policy. That is problematic, but somewhat understandable in the hectic, fearful atmosphere of the immediate post-9/11 period. The e-mail in question was written on January 17, 2002, just four months after the 9/11 attack.

Few mainstream judges and legal scholars contend that the government should abjure racial classifications in every conceivable situation, no matter what. A tightly limited, short-term "interim" policy might pass even the rigorous "strict scrutiny" standard the Supreme Court imposes on governmnt policies that discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity.

What is most notable here is that Kavanaugh did not favor the routine, institutionalized use of racial profiling, which was apparently supported by some others in the administration. Had the e-mails revealed that Kavanaugh was an advocate of routine racial profiling, I think that would have been a serious strike against him as a Supreme Court nominee. But the messages revealed by Booker actually suggest the exact opposite.

I have long argued that racial profiling in law enforcement is both unjust and unconstitutional (e.g. here, here, and here), and that conservatives who support it are undermining the ideal of color-blindness in government policy that they claim to espouse elsewhere. The policy is also counterproductive in that it predictably poisons the relationship between law enforcement agencies and minority communities - the very people whose coooperation is often essential to effectively combat criminals and terrorists. See also this critique of racial profiling by my George Mason University colleague and prominent conservative legal scholar Nelson Lund. I take the issue of racial profiling very seriously, and I would not want a Supreme Court justice who gives law enforcement agencies a blank check in this field.

The e-mails revealed by Booker provide only a partial window into Judge Kavanaugh's thinking on this subject. But what we do have indicates that he strongly prefers "race-neutral" law enforcement policies. If Booker and other senators have material showing that Kavanaugh actually does support racial profiling, I hope they reveal it. But what has been released so far strikes me as far more reassuring than not.

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University and the author of Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain.
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Bobbythegreat · Sep 6, 2018

Oh no, I bet only 4 or 5 Democrats will vote to confirm him now....devastating.

TheresTheDagger · Sep 6, 2018

NewRoxFan said: ↑

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Bobbythegreat · Sep 6, 2018

I think the funniest thing about this process thus far is when we found out that the protesters embarrassing themselves and being tossed out of the hearings were being paid by a George Soros funded organization to do so.

NewRoxFan · Sep 6, 2018

TheresTheDagger said: ↑

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I don't know how compelling the argument that he released the documents at 4am or posting a Daily Caller tweet. What does appear to be important, these emails and other documents that had been requested for a while sure seem to suggest that Kavanaugh has not been truthful and appears to not respect precedence.

Astrodome · Sep 6, 2018

Bobbythegreat said: ↑

I think the funniest thing about this process thus far is when we found out that the protesters embarrassing themselves and being tossed out of the hearings were being paid by a George Soros funded organization to do so.
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Does he pay their bond too? Because new rox fan hasn't missed a beat with his propaganda.

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