Is this really a thing that happens? And if so, is it common in sexual assault cases?
Oh come on. If a friend of yours comes up to you and says, “Hey, X raped me at a party last month. I’m not going to the cops about it, but I want my friends to know,” do you just ignore that and keep hanging out with X? Do you act like this is just a baseless allegation and do nothing? I wouldn’t, and I think most people wouldn’t.
Okay, so is this you walking back various statements you made throughout the other Kavanaugh thread, including the one made in the OP? That is, that if this sticks, republicans will never confirm another supreme court nominee?
I read a lot of leftist and liberal media. And what I’m seeing is absolutely not this. What I’m seeing is calls for investigation. Demands that we slow down the process so that we can look into these allegations. Claims that, because of how hard it is to work around evidence of sexual assault, we should consider another candidate instead. Appeals to how Ford seemed trustworthy, while Kavanaugh seemed unhinged and lied a lot. Hey, here’s the latest from CurrentAffairs. Missing from it: any claim that Kavanaugh committed sexual assault. Funny, that.
And yeah, no shit the dems are gonna milk this. When your political opponent is accused of doing something horrible, it would be borderline negligent not to make hay out of it, unless the allegation is obviously and trivially nonsensical - and even that rarely, if ever, stops the republican party. (Swift Boats and Vince Foster, anyone? Virtually everything said about Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 election, anyone?)
Can you quote one senator saying that?
One congressperson?
One nationally syndicated leftist columnist?
One democrat with any significant influence and reach who declared Kavanaugh guilty when the allegations came out?
If not, I would encourage you to stop. Stop seeing witch trials when there are none. Stop acting like the democratic position on this is far more extreme than it actually is. This is hysterical, and it’s exactly what shitheels like Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson want you to think - they want you terrified that we’re going to convict an honest man over raw accusations. But to my knowledge, nobody is demanding that, save a handful of fringe people on Twitter or Medium.
Who? A congressman? A liberal judge? A talking head on MSNBC? Or some fucking rando on Twitter? This is the same asymmetry we see in the SRIOTD thread and the SLIOTD thread - the former contains almost exclusively quotes from big-name republican politicians and pundits. The latter contains mostly random people on twitter. But these two things aren’t equivalent. I can find random assholes on twitter who are saying basically anything. But they aren’t responsible for the laws we live under. :mad:
Kavanaugh repeatedly and demonstrably lied under oath to congress.
One of these things is not like the others. :rolleyes:
Kavanaugh claimed these accusations were the result of a conspiracy from the Clinton administration. Even if he was baited or hurt by the media accusations, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t get to be a supreme court justice after saying that. You trust this man to be a fair and impartial justice? After that shitshow? Hell, you brought up Clarence Thomas, but did Clarence Thomas blame Anita Hill on the Carter administration and promise revenge? No, because that would have sounded fucking insane. He said his piece, he remained calm, and he got the job.
The standards for the supreme court, a lifetime appointment to one of the most important government positions we have, should be really fucking high. It should be higher than this. It shouldn’t be that you get accused of sexual assault by multiple people, lie repeatedly in your hearings, throw out insane partisan rhetoric while losing your cool in your hearings, and then get confirmed nonetheless.
We always have a certain asymmetry when hiring people. The cost for passing up a good candidate is almost always fairly mild - there are other very qualified people for the job. Kavanaugh was one of a slate of 25 judges recommended by the Federalist Society. However, the cost of hiring a bad candidate can be very severe. This goes double and triple for a nominee to an important job where it takes a literal act of congress to get them removed.
And, as Nathan Robinson says in the articles linked above:
At this point, my position on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination is quite simple: you cannot flagrantly violate a sworn oath and be placed on the Supreme Court. Someone who lies to the Senate in sworn testimony is not just unqualified to be a justice, but they should not be any kind of judge at all. Judges must take oaths seriously, because if they treat them as meaningless, then it’s unclear why they should mean anything to anybody. If Brett Kavanaugh lied to the Senate in his testimony, his nomination must be withdrawn, and he must be impeached and removed from office. Alger Hiss was sent to prison when he lied to Congress, Roger Clemens was prosecuted just for allegedly lying to Congress about baseball. I do not think there is much room for disagreement about this principle.
Good question.
