They were certainly deceptive and misleading even if they were never, technically, lying.
You wouldn’t let your child get away with that kind of bullshit equivocating.
“If I leave the room with you unsupervised, will you take a cookie from the cookie jar?”
“Mother, again, I would tell you that take cookie vs not take cookie, decided last Wednesday, is a precedent of this family. It has been reaffirmed. The reliance interest considerations are important there, and all of the other factors that go into analyzing precedent have to be considered. It is a precedent of this family. It was reaffirmed by my sister Casey on Friday and in several other cases. So a good child will consider it as precedent of this family worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.”
Under the Code of Judicial Conduct, judges, or judicial candidates may not comment on how they might rule on cases that may come before them.
At least in modern history, NO judges ever answer that type of question.
I’m pretty sure they can comment on cases that happened 50 years ago.
Right, but not by how they would rule in the future. Therefore, they didn’t lie, let alone commit perjury.
They said Roe was settled, and didn’t actually act as though they thought it was settled, that’s a lie.
I don’t think the judges lied in their confirmation hearings FWIW, it is essentially correct that the standard for years has been a nominee will not make any specific promise about how they would rule on a specific case. There are good reasons for this even if it can be frustrating. There is a difference between saying you will acknowledge and respect precedent, and saying “that I won’t overturn it.” You also get into real problems with any even fictional concept of an independent judiciary if judges were making promises on how they would rule on specific cases to the politicians who confirm them.
I do think it is possible either Kavanaugh lied to Collins in their private meeting or she lied to the press about the content of their private meeting, but that is a bit different.
It would be a bit absurd for any judge to say that they would never overturn precedent on nearly any issue, maybe barring something bedrock like Marbury. When a case comes to the SCOTUS, it ostensibly means that the case deals with something that either wasn’t addressed by existing precedent or has some unforseen problem with precedent. For a judge to commit to never overturning precedent would basically mean that they had already considered all possible problems with applying that precedent to unknown future cases.
Of course stuff like abortion cases aren’t really that. Everyone knows these cases are deliberately designed to ask the questions the SCOTUS wants them to ask to be able to get a preferred policy outcome on abortion rights. But the whole political system participates in the kayfabe so you can’t blame the judges any more than, say, Susan Collins.
This is pure speculation obviously but it seems extremely unlikely to me that Kavanaugh would say something all that different to Collins in private than he did in public. I mean he has to be worried it would get to some of the conservative senators if he made a commitment not to overturn Roe behind closed doors.
It’s not rocket science. Everyone, including the nominees, knows exactly what is being asked of them when a senator mentions Roe. Also, after 50 years there really is nothing new when it comes to abortions in the US. There are no new set of circumstances that would make a court think that this is an entirely new and unprecedented set of facts which changes everything. It is nothing other than a never-ending parade of someone trying to place more restrictions on abortion. The fundamentals never change. The question always has been how much restriction is allowed.
The nominees knew they needed to placate the senators on this to get the job so they fudged the answer. Saying it was settled law, in that circumstance, certainly implied that Roe would fundamentally remain. Now they are voting (probably) to completely end it. They were deceptive. Plain and simple.
Right. Maybe I was inaccurate in saying the parties involved “can’t” try to provoke a Col. Jessup Moment, and it’s more along the lines that the people involved, as of this date, won’t try to. And if a liberal Senator tried, the GOP committee chair would have just ruled them out of order, and as commented earlier the result would not have changed (*)
If we want to be cynical, we can say it’s only a matter of time until enough candidates of a certain flavor are elected that they won’t have any shame in demanding overt commitment to ruling in favor of establishment of christianity, suppression of voting and LGBTQ rights and legislatures overriding popular vote. But we are not there … yet.
( * “oh but then everyone will know his decisions are not legitimate when he fails to recuse himself”. Uhuh. Here’s $3, go get a tall latte.)
I don’t really agree they were deceptive. All of the recent Republican nominees are Federalist society members which means they explicitly are in favor of overturning Roe. All 100 Senators know this, Democrat, Republican, “moderate” Republican like Murkowski and Collins. I disagree with claiming the justices deceived the Senate mostly because I think it passes the buck–the Senators who voted to confirm Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett all knew exactly what they were doing in regard to Roe, not a single one of those Senators had a genuine belief that these justices would uphold Roe, and any attempts by any of them to aw shucks they said Roe was settled law, are deception.
Roe was settled law. So was Plessy. So was Dred Scott. The Supreme Court as one of its powers gets to decide settled law changes sometimes, that was also known by every Senator involved. A simple statement of the status quo is not a pledge to not alter the status quo.
Well, two of them claim to have been deceived, though if you want to say that they are in fact, being deceptive about their claims of being deceived, I can’t really argue with that.
Two very different sentiments:
Was anybody in the Senate deceived? No. Was anybody being deceptive? They were all being deceptive. The senators, the judges, all of them.
The most generous description of these proceedings is that it’s like a magic show, where everyone knows the illusionist is performing tricks but there’s a kind of social contract that you agree to become part of the deception for the sake of the performance.
Is an illusionist lying when he claims to be doing magic, even though we know he’s not? Or is it just part of the show? Is a judge lying when he refuses to say how he feels about Roe, even though we know exactly how he feels? Or is just part of the show?
What’s worse is there seems to be no way to pull back the curtain.
Even if you 100% believe a judicial nominee is lying their ass off. Even if you can point to a lengthy track record of them being utterly opposed to Roe there is no stopping them. They were asked about Roe and they piously tell us Roe is settled law.
I’m not sure why we bother with the nomination process. It’s just theater now.
I agree. The judges, police chiefs and electoral officers are much, much less politicised than in the U.S. Yes, even in Québec.
More worryingly, I don’t know what prevents them from becoming politicised 20 years from now. Much of it is down to tradition and convention and idealism and good will, which populists care little about. I see that Pierre Poilievre wants to get the Bank of Canada under direct control of politicians, for starters.
Honestly, Collins and Murkowski claiming they were fooled just doesn’t fly with me. They were just getting a fig leaf to vote the party line.
The oath they took asked them to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. Did they really do that?
Is it the “whole truth” to say that Roe is “settled” when you intend and expect to unsettle it the moment it hits your desk? I don’t think that’s the whole truth at all, I think that’s a pretty big omission to the truth, something deliberately left unsaid that absolutely changes the meaning of the testimony.
“You are under oath, Mr. Smith. Did you murder Mr. Jones?”
“I can honestly say that Mr. Jones was alive when I left him.” (Omitting the fact that Mr. Jones was in the process of bleeding out when Mr. Smith left.)
Yes, I would say it is. You can actually try asking a judge specifically “How will you rule in this case?” All they are going to say is “I’ll use precedent and apply my legal knowledge and experience.” If the judges are literally just making promises on how they will rule on specific cases, then the judiciary isn’t a branch of government–it is a third legislature. I think whatever our collective problems with the current right wing majority (and they are numerous), this line of discussion is focusing on the wrong thing.
There is not a single Senator in that body who did not know how these guys would rule, and they did not explicitly lie. They are simply not required to tell you exactly how they will rule, and they simply refuse to answer that question. The Senate has the option to decide that is disqualifying–and has not. The core problem is the process and the way it intersects with politics. Democrats need to understand the default process works a certain way, not some way they dream it worked, and have to plan to respond accordingly–under our current system the only likely option we have is court packing if we ever have a big enough majority. Court packing is a terrible option but I think the more substantive reforms would be too hard to get passed.
How about:
Question to Nominee: Do you think Roe v. Wade was properly decided?