Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation Hearing

[Cartmann99]

Grassley basically says there's plenty of documents for you people to review, so hush.

Protesters again.

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana is up.

Kennedy: Protect the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and write cleanly and legibly.

Kennedy: Too many Americans think the American dream is dead. Likes the president's tax bill.

Kennedy: Middle class people are being hurt and it's the job of Congress to fix not the Supreme Court.

Kennedy: Law is politics pursued in another way.

Kennedy quotes Justice Curtis in the Dredd Scott case.

Senator Hirono of Hawaii has the floor.

Hirono questions why they don't have any docs from Kav's time in the Bush White House.

[Cartmann99]

Hirono asks why they should rubber stamp Trump's choice to protect him from legal trouble.

Hirono discusses the orgs who put together his list of SC nominees. Says that Trump does stuff to protect himself, and picks judges for the lower courts that will help him with this goal. Wants to do the same with SC.

More discussion of judges Trump has picked.

Civil rights are in danger, only need one vote to change many things if Kav gets on the SC.

Be careful, Gorsuch made promises he didn't keep after getting on the SC.

Hirono wants all Kav docs to be released, and hearing postponed until senators have time to review docs.

[Cartmann99]

Senator Crapo of Idaho has the floor.

[fraurosena]

Jeff Flake:

 

[Cartmann99]

Crapo: Kav knows his stuff, is great judge, we've had plenty of time to review docs. He's imminently qualified, and Kagan didn't release all of her docs because the Obama White House said they were sensitive. Dems are just trying to delay this process.

Crapo: Dems can't accept the results of the last election. Kav has a record of being fair and follows the law. Kav is a judge's judge.

Kav understands a judge is a servant of the law. Kav has backing of former colleagues and is imminently qualified.

Senator Booker has the floor.

Booker apologizes to Grassley about their disagreements today.

Booker talks about how what goes around comes around and how he would react if he was a Republican today. Who would buy a house after only seeing 10% of the house?

Booker: We had a huge document drop last night, why can't we wait and read everything?

[Cartmann99]

Booker: Why are we rushing? Let's evaluate the docs. 

Booker: Not unreasonable to wait, let's not rush through documents.

Grassley: We got rid of duplicates.

Booker: You still don't have all of the docs you requested.

Grassley: You can read the docs right now online. Go on to your opening statement.

Booker talks about how Russia attacked us and the Mueller investigation. Kav was not on the original list of SC noms, added to protect Trump if he was put on SC.

Booker: Kav should agree to recuse himself from Russia stuff if put on SC. 

Booker: Labor rights will become limited by this Supreme Court. How will SC protect those with pre-existing conditions if a case like that reaches the SC?

[Cartmann99]

Booker: Large corporations are driving small farmers out of business. Insurance rates go up, people die.

Booker: Too much dark money in system,black and brown people at risk in criminal justice system.

Booker: Americans struggle with discrimination, powerful win, little people lose.

Booker: Founders were flawed people. Americans are not homogeneous, people of color have suffered over time in this country. Protect rights that were gained.

Booker speaks about the Little Rock Nine and the fear of people's rights being rolled back. Talks about a low income community in his home state.

Senator Tillis of South(?) Carolina has the floor.

Tillis: You Dems have enough docs and are going to vote against Kav anyway. Had plenty of time to review docs.

[Cartmann99]

Tillis: Dems are fear mongering, don't blame SC, fix problems in Congress.

Tillis: Kav is imminently qualified.

Tillis talks about how things will go tomorrow in terms of procedure. Compliments Kav.

Senator Kamala Harris has the floor. Discusses Kagan's docs that were witheld, says they were from cases that were not yet resolved. Wants more time to go through docs from last night.

Harris: Discussed the low percentage of records they have received in contrast to the total records on this nominee.

Harris: Why not give us the r records? Show us how upstanding you are by giving us more records.

[AmazonGrace]

hope he will be haunted by this photo

[Cartmann99]

Harris: Tells story of how desegregation opened doors, where would she be without the opportunities it gave her? Discusses healthcare issues including access to abortion. Discusses Trump's legal issues and how it may end up before the SC.

Kav has brought his socially conservative views to the bench, and they affect his rulings.

Harris: Kav 's view on whether a  President is subject to the same laws as regular citizens are is troubling. Fears his loyalty to Trump will affect rukings.

Senator Graham of South Carolina is up.

Graham: Dems are being hypocrites. 

Graham: Both sides use Roe on campaign trail.

Graham: Dems must have candidate that supports Roe.

[Cartmann99]

Graham: Trump didn't pick Kav to save him. Quotes from when Clinton was being impeached, calls Dems hypocrites. 

[fraurosena]

Cory Booker:

 

[Cartmann99]

Graham: Reads about when Dems were upset with Comey 's actions during 2016 election. Calls them hypocrites, says he will protect Mueller and allow him to do investigation. Says he voted for Kagan and Sotomeyor (Sp?) because they were qualified. Brags on Trump for picking Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Don't get to pick judges if you lose election.

Grassley: We're gonna take a break now for fifteen minutes. Chastises Dems for earlier behavior today.

[fraurosena]

Sen. Schatz from Hawaii: 

 

[Cartmann99]

Condoleezza Rice is introducing Kavanaugh and speaking of the time they were in the Bush White House together.

Rice: Kav knows his shit and is smart, funny, and wise. Listens to others.

Rice: Founders were brilliant and designed institutions to constrain us.

Rice: I attest to his character.

Senator Rob Portman of Ohio is speaking.

Kav has good judgement, compliments wife, family, and parents.

No better qualified person for SC.

No one more qualified and very respected by peers.

Kav's views are mainstream.

[Cartmann99]

Kav feeds the homeless through his church. Coach for daughter's team.

Kav takes a girl whose father died to a Father-Daughter dance every year.

Lisa Blatt is now speaking. She is a liberal Democrat and is pro-choice, but supports Kav for the SC.

Kav is prepared and fair, and is endorsed by the ABA.

Kav promotes women and mentors them. 

Kav is the best choice that liberals can hope for under this administration.

Kav is in the mainstream of legal thought.

Kav is now speaking for himself.

[Cartmann99]

Kav: I've met with 65 of you, and thanks for your time. Impressed with Trump's careful consideration of me for SC. I understand the responsibility I bear. I served as Kennedy's law clerk, ( proceeds to compliment Kennedy). 

Now talking about his mom when she was a teacher in D.C., and how she taught him about equality. (Brags about mom going to law school and becoming a judge.)

Says he gives his all in every case. Compliments Merrick Garland. (Describes positive traits of a good judge.) Talks about how he's ruled his cases by following the law. Supreme Court is the last defense in our system. Would strive to be a team player if put on SC. (Talks about coaching and helping the homeless, compliments teachers.) Talks about hiring women and minorities to be his law clerks. Talks about his father and their love of sports. Brags about his daughters. Brags about his wife, and we are told for the 10,000 time today that she's from West Texas. 

Grassley: We've been here all day long, we will recess until 9:30am. Everyone gets to ask questions tomorrow. 

[fraurosena]

The presidunce has weighed in:

And of course, the highest praise he could ever give anyone, a quote from... himself.

Do read the comments on these tweets...

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus.

 

Here's a video, and more info on her:

 

[formergothardite]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Senator Tillis of South(?) Carolina has the floor.

Tillis: You Dems have enough docs and are going to vote against Kav anyway. Had plenty of time to review docs.

Timid Tillis is of my state NC. He is awful. 

[Cartmann99]

9 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

Timid Tillis is of my state NC. He is awful. 

Thank you! The chyron started fading out before I could catch which of Carolinas he was from.

[WiseGirl]

Very proud to be represented by Blumenthal.

 This whole thing is a sham/charade and when Trump goes down in flames this asshole should be thrown out of the Supreme Court. 

What the hell does Trump have in all these "leaders"?

[GreyhoundFan]

From Dana Milbank: "Never have we seen such a spectacle"

Spoiler

Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing is scheduled to last all week. Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley lost control after just 13 words.

“Good morning,” he said. “I welcome everyone to this confirmation hearing on the nomination of —”

“Mr. Chairman?” interrupted Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), a junior Democrat on the committee and prospective presidential candidate.

She protested that the administration had dumped 42,000 pages of Kavanaugh’s writings the night before, leaving no time to review them.

“You’re out of order,” Grassley informed her.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), another prospective presidential contender, jumped in. “This hearing should be postponed,” she said.

Grassley, ignoring her, welcomed the nominee’s friends and family.

This time, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) interrupted, saying the lack of documents “turns this hearing into a charade and a mockery of our norms. . . . I therefore move to adjourn.”

Demonstrators in the audience shouted echoes:

“This is a mockery and a travesty!”

“Adjourn the hearing!”

Protesters raised signs. Republicans called for order. Grassley tapped his gavel ineffectually.

As police removed protesters, Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), yet another Democratic presidential aspirant, appealed to Grassley’s “sense of decency and integrity” in asking him to wait for the missing documents.

Grassley complained: “You are taking advantage of my decency and integrity.”

There has never been a disruptive spectacle like this at a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. But then there has never been a Supreme Court nomination like this.

Kavanaugh may not become the most conservative member of the court, but his background suggests he would be the most partisan. Working for Kenneth W. Starr in the 1990s, he was involved in the Vincent Foster and Monica Lewinsky probes, proposing an explicit line of questioning for President Bill Clinton with graphic queries about genitalia, masturbation, phone sex and oral sex. And as a young lawyer under George W. Bush, Kavanaugh was involved in Bush v. Gore, the probe of Clinton’s pardons and legal decisions about torture.

Hence the importance of the “documents.” Democrats say the committee received only 7 percent of Kavanaugh’s White House documents — and some of those have been altered, while half cannot be discussed publicly.

Why? They would likely reinforce what is already known about Kavanaugh as a nakedly partisan appointment, solidifying the court’s transition from a deliberative body to what is effectively another political branch.

This transition began with the Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, and accelerated during the Bush v. Gore ruling that gave the White House to a Republican president and the Citizens United ruling that advantaged Republicans. It climaxed when Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell refused for a year to hold hearings on President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. McConnell, having essentially put the Supreme Court on the ballot, then changed procedures to have President Trump’s nominees approved by a simple majority — thereby ending any possibility of consensus.

And now Senate Republicans are pushing to have Kavanaugh confirmed on a party-line vote before the public knows what he did in the White House. This will have him seated on the high court in time to consider whatever challenges emerge from Trump’s legal problems. Trump is quite literally choosing his judge and jury.

Yet Kavanaugh, like his predecessors, said without irony Tuesday that “the Supreme Court must never — never — be viewed as a partisan institution.”

Among the Kavanaugh documents that have been released: an email sent to him in 2002 by a White House spokeswoman about a column I was writing. “Dude, you’ve got trouble,” it says, informing Kavanaugh that I wanted to discuss Clinton pardons and his work for Starr.

Kavanaugh’s two-word reply: “uh oh.”

Kavanaugh didn’t talk for the piece, which argued that “a cynical view of Kavanaugh’s actions would be that he bases his legal reasoning on his conservative views — that he supports broad powers for a Republican president and circumscribed powers for a Democratic president.”

What has emerged about Kavanaugh — particularly his vulgar plan to humiliate Clinton — reinforces that cynical view. This is why Kavanaugh’s defenders don’t want the documents to come out — and why Democrats, and their Greek chorus in the audience, made it their focus Tuesday.

The protest continued steadily for 75 minutes, then intermittently. Dozens were arrested. A midday Republican tally claimed 63 Democratic interruptions and 80 complaints about documents — and still hours to go. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) decried “mob rule” and said Democrats would be “in contempt” if the hearing room were a court. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said the protesters “shouldn’t even be allowed in the doggone room.”

But five hours into the hearing, hecklers still shouted:

“Release all the documents!”

“What are you hiding?”

A weary Grassley, near day’s end, vowed to regain control of proceedings. “If you don’t run the committee,” he said, “it runs you.”

Booker's mistake was in appealing to Grassley's "decency and integrity", since he has neither.

[Howl]

4 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Condoleezza Rice is introducing Kavanaugh and speaking of the time they were in the Bush White House together.

Rice: Kav knows his shit and is smart, funny, and wise. Listens to others.

Rice: Founders were brilliant and designed institutions to constrain us.

Rice: I attest to his character.

From the comments section over at Talking Points Memo: 

Spoiler

@CondoleezzaRice says that Brett Kavanaugh is an “old soul” with a “great sense of humor.” Couldn’t we just nominate Betty White?‬

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The GOP’s contempt for democracy is on full display at Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing"

Spoiler

On Tuesday, Democrats in the Senate attempted to take control of the first day of confirmation hearings for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and the result was chaos — or at least, what passes for chaos in the context of a Judiciary Committee hearing, meaning senators politely interrupting each other and raising their objections in measured tones.

But this was unusual, because the Democrats implemented an uncharacteristically coordinated strategy to stop the confirmation hearing as it began. Their objections centered on the Trump administration’s refusal to release tens of thousands of pages of documents from Kavanaugh’s time as a government lawyer, and the fact that just last night, 42,000 pages of documents were finally turned over to the committee.

The idea that the senators could have reviewed them before this morning was ludicrous, so Democrats demanded a delay in the hearings — one after the other, in a series of motions and objections. They repeatedly interrupted the committee chair, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who seemed flummoxed by the Democrats’ refusal to simply let him keep the proceedings moving along. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), mustering all the outrage he could, called it “mob rule.”

This is all theater, of course. But it’s important theater, because the stakes are impossibly high.

The Republican strategy on Kavanaugh’s nomination is clear: to make these confirmation hearings as boring, free of substance, and brief as possible, so Kavanaugh can be confirmed with the public barely realizing it happened.

As they have in previous Supreme Court nominations, Republicans are mounting a campaign of deception, in order to propagate the falsehood that Kavanaugh has no ideological beliefs other than a commitment to the sanctity of the Constitution. He will be purely objective, calling balls and strikes. Not only will he not answer questions about issues that might come before the court, there’s not much point in anyone else debating those issues, either. All they care about is that he’s a man of qualifications and integrity.

This is utter nonsense, just as it was when they played the same game for the confirmations of Neil M. Gorsuch, John G. Roberts Jr., Samuel A. Alito Jr., and Clarence Thomas, the conservatives with whom Kavanaugh will launch a radical revolution in American law, a revolution that will affect all our lives. Ironically, the only person in the GOP who’s remotely honest about this fact is President Trump, who said forthrightly during the campaign that he’d appoint justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

But that’s only the beginning.

How far will they go? Having already gutted the Voting Rights Act, they could eliminate almost all campaign-finance laws, as Richard L. Hasen explains. They could strip the government of its ability to enforce laws against discrimination. They could continue to enhance the power of corporations at the expense of workers. They could strike down any limits on gun proliferation. They could strike down future legislation passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president, on health care or regulation of Wall Street or environmental protection or virtually any subject they choose. And of particular relevance to our current moment, they could declare that the president must be immune from any legal accountability regarding his corruption or misdeeds (so long as the president is a Republican).

Not only could they do these things, they almost certainly will. The closest thing to a swing vote on the court will be Chief Justice Roberts, who only looks like something less than the conservative ideologue he is because he sits beside unrestrained radicals such as Alito and Thomas.

There is a simple reason Republicans want to do everything they can to conceal that agenda and pretend that Kavanaugh will be, as he will say later today in his opening statement, “a neutral and impartial arbiter” who doesn’t “decide cases based on personal or policy preferences.” It’s because they know how unpopular that agenda is with the public.

But they’ll carry it out anyway, for a simple reason: because they can. As I have explained before, we are living in an age of minority rule, in which the system allows the Republican Party to control the presidency, the House and Senate even at times when it has won fewer votes for all three. Despite the fact that Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections, five of the nine seats on the Supreme Court will have been filled by Republican presidents. And in Kavanaugh’s case, a justice appointed by a president who got fewer votes than his opponent will be confirmed by a group of Republicans who hold a slim majority despite the fact that in elections for the current Senate, 15 million more votes were cast for Democrats than for Republicans.

There is one final reason Democrats have every right to be outraged that Republicans are trying to sail Kavanaugh’s nomination through with the smallest amount of scrutiny possible. The only reason he will be able to move the court so dramatically to the right if he is confirmed is that Senate Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat, refusing to allow Judge Merrick Garland to even get a hearing, let alone a vote, when he was nominated by President Barack Obama to fill a vacancy in 2016.

So spare us their huffing and puffing about Democratic obstruction. Democrats could glue the doors to the Judiciary Committee’s hearing room shut, and it would not be even a fraction as offensive to democracy or the Constitution as that despicable act, which was supported by not just every Republican senator but by the entire Republican Party. If we lengthen Kavanaugh’s confirmation process by a day or a week so we can discuss the implications of his nomination in some more detail, it’ll be more than worth the trouble.