Wait. Does that mean if I win the duel, then I get away with it?
Maybe the average joe on the street. But Supremes are 9 out of 350 million. For life. I like to think they are a little better than you and me - or at least sophisticated enough not to clearly convey their shortcomings.
:smack:
somehow, that’s not my fault.
The most likely result is something similar to what happened the last time a major American political party decided to ally itself with a foreign enemy – the Federalist Party shriveled away and the Democratic-Republican Party had a brief “Era of Good Feeling” dominant period after which its main factions split apart and formed new parties.
Bone and Bricker, care to chime in with your opinions on Kavanaugh, the allegations, and this process?
Yale Law School Dean drops her hat into the ring:
And I have to say, I am surprised by that interpretation. Double Jeopardy is based on the English concept of AUTREFOIS ACQUIT. That does forbid trial even by different jurisdiction if a person has already been acquitted or convicted. Obviously, US jurisprudence has deviated from that.
I think the person willing to return to form so to, speak would be Gorsuch, not Kavanaugh, since Gorsuch has a background in English law.
Here’s my best attempt to look at this from an objective perspective:
The Democrats in the Senate have attempted to use these allegations in the most effective way they could come up with to delay and attempt to block the nomination of Kavanaugh.
The Republicans in the Senate have attempted to pay the absolute minimum attention to the allegations as they possibly can get away with, and have shown very little interest in fact-finding with regards to the allegations, as well as very little interest in probing whether Kavanaugh has lied in his explanations for some of the surrounding facts and circumstances of the allegations.
You have a short memory. We’ve already had these discussions, and you may recall that, although dogs are fine, the negotiations reached a total impasse over the issue of cats. It became an intractable obstacle just like in the current NAFTA negotiations – although they’re arguing about tariffs, not cats! Lookit my avatar, fer chrissakes! 
I agree. I wonder what would happen if the parties in the situation were reversed. What if the D’s were the majority and this was happening to Garland and it’s close to the election and the D’s didn’t think the election was going to swing their way? If the same kinds of allegations came out about Garland, would the D’s still be calling for investigations, delaying the vote, and that he should withdraw his nomination? I’m not so sure. I think the D’s have more integrity around these kinds of sexual assault accusations, but I think they’d be very seriously weighing the consequences of not getting him on the court.
We certainly saw this with the way Clinton’s accusers were handled, although that was somewhat of a different cultural environment. Back then, the D’s were calling them liars and trying to discount their claims as much as possible. I don’t think it would be exactly the same as that today in 2018, but I do think there would be a lot of strategizing by the D’s on how to handle the accusations and get Garland on the court.
There is absolutely nothing stopping the GOP from confirming someone during the lame duck. The reason they don’t want to do so is that they don’t want a lose a fight because partisanship, and because they know that Kavanaugh is much more of a party hack than the alternatives–as we all learned yesterday.
With Flake voting yes with the explanation that there just is not enough evidence on either side, it becomes clear that the Republicans only held this hearing so that they could say that they addressed the situation. They don’t want an investigation because they don’t care about the truth; they just wanted to be able to say that they looked into it but there was just not enough evidence. That is why they are ignoring the other allegations. On the one hand, I feel sorry for Ford being used as a pawn by the Republicans like this but on the other hand I am reassured that she got to tell her story and a lot of people believe and support her.
I don’t think the D’s would be in as much lock step today on this. While I feel that the majority of them would still support, say, Garland based on the level of actual data we have thus far, there would be a large minority of D’s that couldn’t comfortably support him in the face of even this level of accusation, because their voters would be outraged. JMHO, but I think that if the situation were perfectly reversed that the D’s wouldn’t be able to get the votes to confirm with just their own party, since I think their electorate is different than the R’s wrt this sort of accusation.
We have to be careful with false equivalencies. Sure, both parties are politically motivated to get their nominee confirmed. What is striking about this situation is the Republicans’ complete and transparent lack of integrity and ethics, absolutely no interest in the facts.
Agreed.
I agree with that assessment.
There is much ado about how Feinstein handled this whole thing, but I can’t really fault her. And I consider it irrelevant in terms of where we are today (or where we were when this whole thing came to light). There was no good, non-political reason for the Republicans to refuse to agree to an FBI investigation. And as things stand now, I am unchanged in what I said earlier in the week: I could not, in good conscience, vote for Kavanaugh without, at a bare minimum, that FBI investigation.
I listened to Graham’s tirade live. There were a lot of words, but all I heard was “Damn you, Democrats, for not telling Ford to shut up and keep what happened to her to herself”.
Please. If let’s say Kavanaugh is confirmed and then 10 years from now is seen as a liberal leaning moderate like Souter became, then you can be assured the Democrats will remember the current battle as “yeah there were complaints and we heard a lady, but come on, presumption of and innocence and all that”, while Republican will say “yeah, he was a serial rapist!!!”and try their hardest to make people forget they confirmed him.
Same way as before November 2016, Democrats all insisted that Bill Clinton’s accusers were not credible, and now that the Clintons are out of political influence and #metoo is in full throttle, suddenl6 they erred back in the 1990’s.
There is nothing about anything here which is not about political power. From both parties. And that’s politics.
For another example, look at the UK. You have Remainer PM, May, leading the Brexit negotiations, while a known Eurosceptic leads the Labour Party, which opposes the diet of leaving the UK.
One more dishonest Kavanaugh tactic that bears mentioning:
They dug up some random Twitter user’s insane ramblings and interviewed Kavanaugh about it even though no one else had raised it. Then Kavanaugh used that as proof that the Senate Democrats were conspiring against him. It was a total lie.
The Democrats booted Franken and Schneiderman just in the last year. The Republicans embraced Roy Moore (and Donald Trump, obviously). Maybe they hemmed and hawed about it a bit, but the party apparatus, and most senior Republicans, supported Roy Moore, and very, very few (only Flake and Kasich, I think) opposed him and supported Doug Jones.
Contrast this to the 90s: in 1990, President George Bush took out ads in Louisiana for the Democratic candidate for Governor, Edwin Edwards, and was strongly critical of the Republican candidate, David Duke (former head of the KKK). And in the late 90s, Democrats made excuses for Bill Clinton and attacked those who accused him of sexual assault and harassment.
Since then, the Democrats as a party have significantly improved in how they handle sexual assault. They take allegations seriously, and if there are multiple credible allegations, force their own officials to resign. The Republicans haven’t improved at all – in fact, they may have gotten even worse. The party of tolerating rape and sexual assault.
Guilty as charged. (I like dogs, too, and have a dog.)
Yup. But who will buy this?