He’s not 100% legitimate, because he is being investigated for violating campaign finance laws.
Agreed. I vote exclusively Democratic these days but I break ranks when it comes to many liberal ideas of what constitutes justice. The issue of “power dynamics” brought up in the OP’s article is a perfect example. I’m all for the legislature crafting laws to take “power dynamics” into account, but until and unless they do, I don’t want the judicial branch viewing the law through that lens. Liberals typically do, and if they want to oppose Kavanaugh for that reason, great. That’s what democracy is all about.
As for continual whining about Trump winning the last election-- time to get over it. I want the Democrats to win the next election, and it doesn’t help if they sound like some Junior High school kid who got dumped by his first girlfriend and doesn’t know how to move on with his life. The Democrats are going to have a tough time winning back the WH if they keep blaming everyone else for their own failures. I likely won’t care too much for SCOTUS nominations by a Democratic president, but it’s a small price to pay for sanity otherwise. And elections have consequences, one of them being he winner gets to nominate the justices.
I expect that all human beings should be good and moral, and do whatever is in their power to promote goodness and morality. High-ranking federal judges have the power to do so to a greater degree, and that makes their obligation to do good greater, not lesser. The textualist position that a judge should not judge, and a justice should not pursue justice, is both absurd and corrosive.
So if a judge is consistently and always on the side of the corporation, regardless of the law, that’s a problem?
Well, aside from the plain text of the supreme law of the land, at least.
On the matter of liberal response: We can’t stop Kavanaugh from being seated. But we can point out the truth of how reprehensible he is, and how reprehensible the Republicans’ reasons for nominating him are.
The textualist position is that a judge should not pursue the abstract idea of justice outside the confines of the laws, as written. You and I might think SSM is good and just, but if the law says no SSM, then a judge does not overrule the law.
When the law is silent on an issue, then reasonable people can disagree on what bests serves justice.
Yes, that is a problem.
Then perhaps Garland should take his case to the SCOTUS and see what the verdict is. I suspect it’s no accident that he hasn’t.
Then you argue for the utter neutering of a branch of the Federal government. Remember, Congress passes all the laws. So if the judiciary is beholden to a single methodology of interpreting those laws, then it is just a slave to Congress.
Fortunately, I know from experience that what is described here is impossible. I know from Biblical literalism. I grew up in it. I was surrounded by it. And I know what actually happens when you defer to what some external source says. Your morality inherently still informs what decisions you make. You just now have an excuse.
The problem, however, is that literalism inherently is most attractive to the fundamentalists. Likewise, textualism is most attractive to conservatives. And that is why both were created, to empower those groups. It is easier to twist the law in a conservative than a progressive manner, since progressiveness means including the new.
So, rather than actually removing morality from the equation, it merely obscures it. The reason liberals hate it is that those who use it are obscuring conservative morals, hiding them as being “just what the law says.”
Well, yes. Everything you just said is true. That is why we no longer allow those things to happen. And why all those decisions are suspect and are reviewed.
First, I want to neuter ALL the branches. 2nd, the judiciary should be a slave to the constitution. 3rd, if it’s within congress’s authority to pass a law that doesn’t run afoul of the constitution, then the courts should be a slave to enforce those laws, no matter how abhorrent.
I would support judges basing their rulings on what is good and moral only if I get to decide what is good and moral.
It’s only a problem because you included the “regardless of the law” clause. If in fact the law consistently and always favored the corporation, then it would be appropriate for a judge to consistently and always side with the corporation.
I kind of hope the Democrats go to the mat on the Kavanaugh nomination. That and they bring up Garland every chance they get while campaigning. It would be amusing to watch.
Since you seem to like talking about Garland so much, perhaps you could provide me a list of the senators who voted against his confirmation?
I hope you’re just kidding. I would not support judges deferring to me on moral judgements as I don’t think that would result in a stable society. Democracy, with all its flaws, is the best way to go.
That’s not what the Constitution says, though.
We all see this claim–that Democrats are continually whining about Trump being elected–repeated all over the place, and with great frequency.
But does this (that Democrats supposedly ‘continually’ whine about the Nov. 2016 election) actually happen? Or is it merely a right-wing fantasy–akin to the fantasy that ‘Democrats want open borders’ and the like?
And, yeah: there is no liberal case for Kavanaugh. (Another right-wing fantasy?)
Yes. There’s no basis for this, but if they must use morality, I propose mine. But since that’s not realistic nor desirable, we create a system by which we individually vote for our representatives to craft the laws that the judges should abide by. If at some point we do not like the results, the process to change the law is available to us.
Wanting judges to circumvent this process is bad. Kavanaugh seems to take this view as well, and that is a point in his favor.
“he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint … Judges of the supreme Court…”
The plain text says that the president must obtain the advice and consent of the Senate before appointing judges. It doesn’t say that the Senate must give advice and consent. I would paraphrase it as: The president has the authority to nominate judges to the Supreme court and appoint them if he has the advice and the consent of the Senate. Without that consent, the nominee shall not be appointed.
Consenting is an affirmative act. No affirmative act, no consent.
And consider: Even though the constitution says the president “shall nominate”, if the president were to fail in the duty of nominating a Justice, there would be no remedy other than impeachment and removal from office. If the Congress does not give advice and/or consent, there is no remedy at all from the other branches of government. No remedy means there can be no meaningful requirement. The only remedy is the voters voting the bums out. That didn’t happen.
I’m not sure if you you were directing that at me, but I did not claim that it was “repeated all over the place, and with great frequency”.
But it does happens here on this MB. It “continues” in the sense that it happened again in this thread, today. My point, if I wasn’t clear, is that the Democrats should not go into the next election following the lead of those who continue to make claims about illegitimacy in the last election. Not only is it a bad strategy, politically, but it’s bad psychology to blame your failures on others. Best to recognize the mistakes that were made, and don’t make them again. The Republicans seem to be able to win (at least sometimes) by sowing fear and hatred. For whatever reason, that doesn’t work so well for the Democrats. Which is OK with me, because I don’t like them doing it anyway.
Bone and John Mace are doing a great job in this thread, and anything I would add would merely be cumulative to the excellent (nay, to the devastating) points they have already presented.
I neither stated nor implied that you had said anything about “repeated all over the place” or “with great frequency.”
Link?
Or at the very least, post number. If it’s a long post, please specify the sentence or sentences that constitute what you see as the manifestation of your claim of “continual whining about Trump winning the last election.” Presumably if this is an example of “continual” whining, you can show evidence that the poster has made similar statements, well, continually. More than once, minimally.
Someone reading you post might reasonably think that you did.
Post #2. And no, I’m not going to link to other threads or posts along the same lines. If you haven’t see it or don’t want to see it, that’s fine. It was a hijack of this thread anyway.
Here’s the thing, though - “just applying the law” has led Kavanaugh to a fair number of minority opinions, including in cases where he was bizarrely off course. In those cases (just like throughout his entire legal record), he almost universally sides with the powerful -
He has written almost entirely in favor of big businesses, employers in employment disputes, and against defendants in criminal cases. In terms of agencies he has written in support of Homeland Security decisions and mainly in favor of FERC while he has had a more of a mix of opinions relating to EPA decisions. Judge Kavanaugh wrote multiple opinions relating to military commissions and mainly supported their establishment and actions. While he decided on behalf of the federal government in a majority of cases, he did not do so universally.
That’s weird. Right? Doesn’t that give you even a moment’s pause? Imagine if a judge universally wrote in favor of employees and defendants. Wouldn’t that raise an eyebrow among republicans?
And remember, these aren’t unanimous cases. These often aren’t cases where his opinion makes a goddamn lick of legal sense - in one such case, he dissented by insisting that illegal immigrants were not employees, when in fact they definitely were. In another such case, he rejected the (fairly fucking obvious) claim that a company had farmed itself out to a subsidiary in order to avoid working with the employee’s union. As CurrentAffairs puts it:
This case shows Kavanaugh’s bias. Because he clearly hasn’t spent any time among laborers or read much about labor politics and labor history, he doesn’t understand how companies work. He doesn’t, or won’t, realize that this exactly the sort of maneuver one would expect of a profit-maximizing company that was, as Island’s CEO was, frustrated with the costs of a unionized workforce. Kavanaugh’s bias means that when cases involving unions come to the Supreme Court, he’s not going to actually understand what’s going on, because he will have a conservative’s naive understanding of corporate motives. If Island v. NLRB is a clue, he will rule against workers even in cases where the law is on their side, because he sees the facts through a lens that is more sympathetic to business than business’s actual behavior warrants.
(Emphasis mine - Bone, take note.)
What we’re seeing here is an alleged textualist with a firm partisan and ideological bend in favor of the rich and powerful, who universally finds against workers even when the workers are definitely in the right. The scary thing about that is, you can’t fix that with Congress. Congress did pass laws in those cases, and Kavanaugh, were he not overruled by his colleagues on the court, would have ignored that. This is not some impartial judge, and the fact that he’s a republican and a self-described “textualist” should not distract us from the fact that he holds these biases, just as much as any alleged “activist” judge might.
Then I think you missed the point. Kavanaugh favors the powerful even when the law does not. Kavanaugh bows to power disparities when determining the state of the evidence, even when the law ignores them - see also his case surrounding indonesian Exxon workers. And not caring about the harm caused by the implementation of the law… Well, what if the law (like most laws crafted for the purpose of reducing harm) cares about the harm caused by its implementation? Kavanaugh doesn’t care about the harm caused by the law’s implementation even when the whole purpose of the law is to protect people from a certain kind of harm.
Most of this is a rehashing from that CurrentAffairs article (no, not the quiz), but it really does bear repeating - Kavanaugh is not some impartial party. The whole point is that he’s judging in favor of the powerful even when the law favors the weak.
Absolutely. However, nothing in these types of posts suggest that is what Kavanaugh is doing. Because he looks at a case of someone swimming with a killer whale and getting killed and holds that a worker in that position assumed the risk of the death or injury, it does not mean he “protects powerful corporations against the rights of workers.”