As the Republicans count on the wavering R Senators (Flake, Murkowski, Collins), the rest of us watch and wait for the FBI. And you know what? No one knows what happens next. If you want an expert opinion, find the person who predicted Flake’s move last Friday.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
But note the message in the ads: They show footage of Kavanaugh describing the process as “search and destroy.” A narrator says liberals are trying to “ruin a good man with smears,” intoning that “Kavanaugh fought back, clearing his name, defending his honor,” and calling on Democrats to “stand with President Trump” against the liberal smear merchants.
In other words, at the core of the final push to save Kavanaugh is the idea that the real stakes in this affair turn on whether the destruction of a good man will be legitimized. If Kavanaugh is not confirmed, we will have destroyed him, and that would be terribly unjust.
But what this argument really means, inescapably, is that Ford’s claims should never have gotten the examination they are now getting. Note that Graham is claiming this whole process has been deeply unfair to Kavanaugh. The ads on his behalf claim that Democrats are trying to “ruin” him with “smears” — but what they’ve really done is insist on a fuller inquiry than Republicans wanted.
Benjamin Wittes/Atlantic and a very good read:
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.
f 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….
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...
As Charlie Sykes, a thoughtful conservative commentator sympathetic to Kavanaugh, put it on The Weekly Standard’s podcast Friday, “Even if you support Brett Kavanaugh … that was breathtaking as an abandonment of any pretense of having a judicial temperament.” Sykes went on: “It’s possible, I think, to have been angry, emotional, and passionate without crossing the lines that he crossed—assuming that there are any lines anymore.”
Kavanaugh blew across lines that I believe a justice still needs to hold.
Yahoo:
The bar fights back at Kavanaugh
But perhaps most important, Kavanaugh said a number of things during his testimony that are contradicted by other evidence. He also declined to call for an FBI investigation into Ford’s charge that he sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers or to have investigators talk to Mark Judge, a high school friend who Ford said was present at the time of the assault. Some legislators, including Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., are already claiming that Kavanaugh committed perjury during the confirmation process.
Hours after Kavanaugh concluded his testimony, the American Bar said the Senate should not move forward until an FBI investigation into the sexual assault allegations have been completed.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
In defending Brett Kavanaugh, many Republicans have insisted that decades-old misbehavior should not be disqualifying in a Supreme Court nominee. Which most people would agree with, depending on the severity of the misbehavior.
But at this point, we have to ask another question: Just how much dishonesty would it take to disqualify someone?
It’s not a simple question; we might decide that if a candidate shaded the truth a time or two in his or her confirmation hearings without lying outright, we’d let it go. But Kavanaugh has piled up an extraordinary number of falsehoods, misleading characterizations, and statements that are, though perhaps not provably false, utterly impossible to believe.
Monkey Cage/WaPo:
What’s behind the roiling public reaction to Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which Christine Blasey Ford and Brett M. Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, testified about her allegations that he sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers?
Polls conducted after the hearing show a public strongly divided by gender and party. But gender and party don’t tell the whole story. Our recent work suggests that among those factors are attitudes toward women — in particular, a concept that researchers call “hostile sexism.”
Geoffrey R. Stone/Huffpost:
Confirming Brett Kavanaugh Now Would Destroy The Supreme Court As We Know It
Senate Republicans have used every available device and distortion to create a rock-solid right-wing five-member majority that will vote the straight-up Republican Party line on such fundamental issues as gun control, campaign finance reform, labor unions, abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, gerrymandering, corporate and commercial speech and minority voting rights, without regard to any serious, consistent or principled theory of constitutional interpretation.
The confirmation of Kavanaugh would represent the triumphant completion of this strategy and the culmination of the Senate Republicans’ reprehensible treatment of Garland. This should not be permitted to happen. If it does, it will destroy the integrity and credibility of the Supreme Court for decades to come.
To someone like myself, who has devoted his entire adult life to teaching, writing and speaking about the Constitution of the United States, this is truly devastating. What we need now — what our nation deserves now — is the appointment of a relatively moderate justice, like Garland or Souter, whose presence on the court will enable it to retain its identity as a court rather than as a partisan political actor.
Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi distinguished service professor of law at the University of Chicago.
Cathy Young/Arc Digital with a counterpoint:
Truth, Justice, and the Gender Wars
Dispatches from the war zone
For the record, I think that the Republicans’ obstruction of the Merrick Garland nomination was a disgrace. I also think that, whatever the outcome of the confirmation battle, this episode has badly damaged the Supreme Court as an institution.
Beyond that, here’s what I think about the past week’s events.
The allegations against Kavanaugh are deeply troubling, whether true (in which case a man with a history of sexual assault has a good chance of being on the Supreme Court) or untrue (in which case an innocent man may lose his career and his reputation). So was his stridently partisan, conspiracy-flogging rant against the Democrats during last Thursday’s hearing. So was the Democrats’ behavior in withholding Ford’s accusation until the last minute and then allegedly leaking it to the press. So was Ford’s apparent belief that she could torpedo Kavanaugh’s nomination simply by making a behind-the-scenes allegation, without having to come forward or give Kavanaugh a chance to respond. There is a lot of bad to go around.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
Brett Kavanaugh Is Patient Zero
President Trump’s nominee would bring a virus of illegitimacy and partisanship to the Supreme Court.
Kavanaugh’s behavior has irrevocably marked his possible tenure on the Court. With such a partisan route as his pathway, a Justice Kavanaugh would arrive at the Supreme Court as a patient zero, carrying a virus of illegitimacy to its decisions. Since Kavanaugh declared his hostility to the Democratic Party and the left so openly and with such ferocity, it has seemed inevitable that tens of millions of Americans will never see him as an impartial judge.
That would create a stark equation for Roberts, who must surely realize that much—perhaps most—of the nation would question the validity of every 5–4 party-line decision in which Kavanaugh would provide the deciding vote. In the past, fear of further eroding the Court’s legitimacy has provided a limited (though hardly uniform) check on Roberts’s willingness to force major decisions on party-line votes. But if the Senate confirms Kavanaugh, it will present Roberts with a justice whose every decision will be viewed through the lens of the partisan and tribal animosities he inflamed to defend his nomination.
and in non Kavanaugh news, Will Bunch/Philly.com:
Nighttime in Trump’s America: A void of child gulags, rising mercury and unheard prayers
With its population of child detainees skyrocketing from 400 in June to a predicted 3,800 by the end of 2018, Tornillo is the biggest outpost in an American archipelago of gulags that was once unfathomable. And the reason that both the number of kids in these detention camps and the length of time they are staying there have skyrocketed can be summed up in one word: Fear. That's because the Trump administration's willingness to sic the attack dogs of the president's not-so-secret police force called ICE on immigrants, even those with no criminal record, has terrified the sponsors who in past crises stepped forward and offered loving homes to such children.
For the following story, why Iowa, you ask? Because the Nunes family farm moved from California a decade ago. He doesn’t want you to know that.
And the blockbuster:
It's not surprising that Trump has been a tax cheat since he was a toddler, given that he is still a toddler.