With the risk being that there’s a chance that Dems could take the chamber. (not likely IMHO.)
God forbid Dems invoke the McConnell Rule and not vote on any Supreme Court nominees until 2021. I mean, that would be unfair. Wouldn’t it?
I think Lindsey has been grooming himself to take Sessions job. He said jeff would be replaced, weeks ago, and he’s acting sycophantic to the point of surreality.
He wants to be close to the center of power when the whole thing blows up. He thinks he is going to be untouched and in power at that point. He knows that kavanaugh is a terrible choice but that fits in perfectly with his ambitions. He’ll say “nominate him again” because he thinks the blowback will be against trump, and not him.
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…and we will deserve it.” - Lindsey Graham 3 May 2016
Just doing his part in service to the self fulfilling prophecy.
Not at all. I think he’ll be a fine Justice. The point is that if you believe that RBG can be trusted to fairly set aside her personal animosity for President Trump and give his administration a fair hearing when his staff appears before the Court, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe Kavanaugh can do likewise.
I think at this point it’s fair to characterize Avenatti’s client as having “imploded”. YMMV.
Your wrong about that, and you’re just gonna have to live with it. Anyway, I don’t know about congressional procedures. I do know that Democrats sat on their hands when Republicans refused to hold hearings, because they tried to play a longer game and have Hillary nominate someone after she won. And I long for the day when Democrats grow spines and fight for a change, instead of settling for being pushed around.
But really, it’s nice that you’re satisfied.
I never saw RBG exhibit “animosity” for trump. She is entitled to respond to public life in a proportional way without being characterized that way. The whining and bitching about “anti-trump” stuff is absurd.
I can’t see anything the two have in common. She has not launched into paranoid, alcoholic, denialist rants while being confirmed, for just one thing.
I don’t know if you were unaware of this or if you don’t consider it an expression of animosity:
https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/politics/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-donald-trump-faker/index.html
You don’t think “animosity” is a fair characterization of that?
Did you see the hearing? That’s what a judicial temperament looks like?
Not quite all of it, but I saw significant portions of it, including Kavanaugh’s opening statement.
I think if his temperament were not appropriately judicial, you’d have something more than a few angry minutes while he was in the midst of confronting a slew of ridiculous and salacious accusations against him to draw from. He’s been on the DC Circuit for years. Does he have a lengthy history of blowing up at people in his courtroom? If not, I think it’s a reasonable conclusion that he’ll be fine (temperament-wise) on SCOTUS.
Benjamin Wittes who knows Kavanaugh well takes a remarkably measured approach and comes to the conclusion that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed.
This is like arguing about the Theory of Relativity and kicking it off with “I don’t know about physics.”
He blamed Democrats for destroying his family. I can buy that his temperament was not an issue before the hearing - even though he relished his role in trying to impeach Clinton - but I think he now has scores to settle.
Even when Klobuchar started a pretty tame series of questions, and he said that he enjoyed their meetings together, he literally started demanding that she answer his questions about beer. I fully expect him to just rule against Democrats out of spite for the rest of his judicial career, and there really isn’t anything anyone can do about it.
Yes, I know, and I admit it. I also know that Democrats gambled and lost when they should have put up a fight.
But… their ability to fight is based on the exact thing you don’t know anything about. If there was a way for them to force a vote on Garland, one of the clever folks here, who DO know about congressional procedures, would have mentioned it.
If Kavanaugh had answered the questions in a less weasely way, ie. “So the vomiting that you reference in the Ralph Club reference, related to the consumption of alcohol?” “Yes.” or even “I don’t recall the intimate details of the inside jokes that we made in high school.”, would there have been any negative ramifications for him? I suppose the tactic was for people to draw the inference that Kavanaugh = heavy drinker = probably blacked out a lot = plausibly sexually assaulted someone while blacked out, but IMO that last step is a pretty big leap, and I think he could have have owned up to having been a heavy drinker in the past without that significantly hurting his standing with the senate or the public. The way he handled the questions was rather bizarre IMO.
His conclusion.
Lindsey Graham was at least as critical of Trump during the campaign. It seems he has set aside his animus now that Trump is the putative leader of the GOP.
…I think its much fairer to say that Avenatti oversold his client.
Do you have the same expectation about RBG and President Trump? Has she dishonorably revealed her bias in your eyes and is likely to just rule reflexively against the Trump Administration? Should she be recusing herself from all cases that the Trump Administration is a party to? Should she have resigned her seat? Should she be impeached?
I suspect you believe she’s capable of being a bit more dispassionate than that in her role as an Associate Justice. Why do you not extend that same bit of faith to Kavanaugh? I’d like to think, with you at least, it’s something more than just partisan political preferences. But what is it? Is it just that he was more fiery in his animosity than RBG? Something else?
To make this something more than an us-vs-them thing, the late Justice Scalia once said “If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag.” Should that display of personal antipathy have been disqualifying? Should Scalia have recused himself from any case involving flag desecration? or beards? Or do you accept that he too was largely able to set aside his personal feelings on litigants and make rulings with sufficient dispassion?