Tag Archives: Brett Kavanaugh

Looking For An Incident?

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On Wednesday, PJ Media reported that on Wednesday afternoon the FBI arrested Nicholas John Roske near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The article reports:

The list of weapons and gear the suspect had on his person reads like something out of a horror movie. Roske, who told police that he planned to assassinate Kavanaugh, was arrested with a suitcase containing “a black tactical chest rig and tactical knife, a Glock 17 pistol with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, screwdriver, nail punch, crow bar, pistol light, duct tape, hiking boots with padding on the outside of the soles, and other items,” according to the FBI.

…The suspect, who said he found the address of Kavanaugh’s home on the internet (that’s on YOU, left-wing whack jobs), told Montgomery County Police he was upset about the leaked draft opinion of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which could potentially overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, and also the recent school shooting in Uvalde. He admitted to targeting Kavanaugh because he believed the justice would “side with Second Amendment decisions that would loosen gun control laws.” He said he planned to kill Kavanaugh and then commit suicide to give his life purpose.

On Wednesday, Breitbart reported:

The Justice Department appears to still be allowing protesters to gather outside of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home even after police arrested a man who allegedly intended to assassinate him.

Video on Wednesday showed protesters marching in front of the justice’s home shouting pro-abortion slogans. The protesters also made their way over to Chief Justice John Roberts’ home as well.

I realize that protesting is legal, but once there is an actual murder attempt, shouldn’t it be curtailed. Aren’t there buffer zones around abortion clinics? Shouldn’t there be ‘protection zones’ around the houses of Justices who have been threatened?

Breitbart also reported on Wednesday:

The Justice Department appears to still be allowing protesters to gather outside of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home even after police arrested a man who allegedly intended to assassinate him.

Video on Wednesday showed protesters marching in front of the justice’s home shouting pro-abortion slogans. The protesters also made their way over to Chief Justice John Roberts’ home as well.

Despite McCarthy’s request, Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats failed to comply with McCarthy’s proposal to bring the bill to vote.

UPDATE:

Yahoo news reported on Thursday:

The House will vote next week on legislation to expand security for the families and staff of the Supreme Court justices, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Thursday. The Senate approved the legislation unanimously last month,

Stay tuned.

This Decision Does Not Protect Women

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Yesterday The National Review posted an article about the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Louisiana’s law regarding doctors at abortion clinics. The law in question required doctors at abortion clinics to have hospital admitting privileges. Because women can die from legal abortions, hospital admitting privileges are important. The Supreme Court struck down this requirement, putting the lives of women at risk. Chief Justice Roberts was the deciding vote on the issue, disappointing many Americans who expected him to be a conservative voice on the Court.

The article reports:

The conservative legal establishment has long been particularly enamored of this ideal: the umpire calmly calling balls and strikes. It is a very important virtue. But it is not the first virtue. An umpire who can be cowed by the crowd will not call the same strike zone for both teams. Without courage, good ideas about the law are just empty words on a page. Without courage, even the clearest-written rights are empty promises, the plainest limitations on power are easily overwhelmed, and the entire project of rule by written law becomes just another hollow formality.

Two of today’s Supreme Court decisions, on abortion and separation of powers, are further evidence of this. Chief Justice John Roberts has yet again shown the absence of courage that has so often undermined his Court. Roberts’s repeated demonstrations of lack of courage are rapidly becoming a threat to the Court itself, and to the conservative legal project.

First up, we have June Medical Services L.L.C. v. Russo, which by a 5–4 vote struck down a Louisiana abortion-clinic regulation challenged by the clinics. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch would have upheld the Louisiana law, but Chief Justice Roberts sided with the Court’s four liberals, claiming that his hands were tied by precedent.

In the 2016 case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Court ruled 5–3 against a Texas abortion law that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. States routinely impose such requirements on the practice of medicine, especially invasive or surgical procedures. As Justice Gorsuch observed, the Louisiana law “tracks longstanding state laws governing physicians who perform relatively low-risk procedures like colonoscopies, Lasik eye surgeries, and steroid injections at ambulatory surgical centers.” The Court in both Whole Woman’s Health and June Medical ruled that “unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion impose an undue burden on the right” to an abortion. Yet what the Court defines as an “unnecessary” requirement would be uncontroversially legal for any other medical procedure under the sun, and the “constitutional right” itself is, of course, nowhere even vaguely mentioned in the actual Constitution.

Chief Justice Roberts has been a disappointment almost from the beginning. His ruling on Obamacare was questionable at best. Please follow the link to the article to read further details regarding the contradictions between the decision on the Louisiana law and the previous opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts

Some Thoughts On Our Religious Liberty

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Yesterday Andrew McCarthy posted an article at The National Review about a recent Supreme Court decision. The title of the article is, “It wasn’t just religious liberty that Chief Justice Roberts strangled.” The article is detailed and complex, so I suggest that you follow the link to read the entire article. However, there are a few things I want to point out that I think are very significant.

The article notes:

Most startling was that Chief Justice John Roberts not only joined the court’s four left-leaning justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan) in declining to uphold religious liberty. Roberts also wrote a brief opinion explaining his decision. 

That opinion is an eye-opener. Roberts accords the right to worship no deference by virtue of its being a fundamental liberty expressly protected by the First Amendment. We are to see it as an activity like any other activity, commercial or social, the pros and cons of which technocrats must weigh in fashioning regulations. The opinion, moreover, champions the power of government officials to dictate to the people who elect them without “second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary” — exactly the power that the Bill of Rights, and the incorporation jurisprudence by which the court has applied much of it to the states, are meant to deny.

The article also points out:

In rejecting the religious liberty claim, Roberts counters that it is not a matter of unlawful discrimination if different things are regulated in different ways. Religious gatherings, he rationalized, are being restricted like gatherings that are physically similar, such as lectures, concerts, theater productions and spectator sports. He conceded that less intense restrictions have been imposed on other activities, such as shopping, banking and laundering. But that, he insists, is because of salient differences in the way they are conducted: small groups, no extended proximity, and so on.

But wait a second. What about the constitutional pedigree of religious exercise? That was the point pressed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a brief dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. (Justice Samuel Alito also opposed the denial of First Amendment relief but did not join Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion.)

The article concludes:

There is no recognition, in Roberts’ rendering, that there is another side to this equation — a side where 400 times the number of people who’ve died have lost their jobs, millions of them facing ruin. The stubborn message: Don’t expect the court to help you, you’re the ones who elected these people; if you don’t like what they do, un-elect them. If you’ve elected social engineers who say the Bill of Rights is above their pay grade, that’s your problem.

The justices are happy to order that abortion must be available, to decide which couples (or perhaps throuples) must be permitted to marry, and to dictate what’s ever next in the ceaseless march of progressive, organic “liberty.” But as for the liberties that are actually in the Constitution, we are on our own.

Unfortunately Justice Roberts has been something of a disappointment to those of us who expected him to be a responsible judge who would uphold the Constitution. He has wandered away from the constitutional role of the judiciary more than once.

Who Are The Factcheckers?

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On Friday, Judicial Watch posted the following under its Corruption Chronicles section:

The recently appointed Facebook oversight board that will decide which posts get blocked from the world’s most popular social networking website is stacked with leftists, including a close friend of leftwing billionaire George Soros who served on the board of directors of his Open Society Foundations (OSF). Judicial Watch conducted a deep dive into the new panel that will make content rulings for the technology company that was slammed last year with a $5 billion fine for privacy violations. The information uncovered by Judicial Watch shows that the group of 20 is overwhelmingly leftist and likely to restrict conservative views. More than half of the members have ties to Soros, the philanthropist who dedicates huge sums to spreading a radical left agenda that includes targeting conservative politicians. Other Facebook oversight board members have publicly expressed their disdain for President Donald Trump or made political contributions to top Democrats such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. As one New York newspaper editorial determined this month, the new Facebook board is a “recipe for left-wing censorship.”

Among the standouts is András Sajó, the founding Dean of Legal Studies at Soros’ Central European University. Sajó was a judge at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for nearly a decade. He also served on the board of directors of OSF’s Justice Initiative. Sajó was one of the ECHR judges in an Italian case (Latusi v. Italy) that ruled unanimously that the display of a crucifix in public schools in Italy violates the European Convention on Human Rights. The decision was subsequently overturned. Sajó’s deep ties to Soros are also concerning. Through his OSF Soros funds a multitude of projects worldwide aimed at spreading a leftist agenda by, among other things, destabilizing legitimate governments, erasing national borders and identities, financing civil unrest and orchestrating refugee crises for political gain.  Incredibly, there is a financial and staffing nexus between the U.S. government and Soros’ OSF. Read about it in a Judicial Watch special report documenting how Soros advances his leftist agenda at U.S. taxpayer expense.

At least 10 other members of the Facebook oversight board are connected to leftist groups tied to Soros that have benefitted from his generous donations, according to Judicial Watch’s research. Alan Rusbridger, a former British newspaper editor and principal at Oxford University, serves on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which received $750,000 from OSF in 2018. Rusbridger also served as a governor at a global thinktank, Ditchley Foundation, that co-hosted a conference with OSF on change in the Middle East and North Africa as well as understanding political Islam. Afia Asantewaa Sariyev, a human rights attorney, is the program manager at Soros’ Open Society Initiative for West Africa. Her research includes critical race feminism and socio-economic rights of the poor. Sudhir Krishnaswamy, an Indian lawyer and civil society activist, runs a progressive nonprofit called Centre for Law and Policy Research that focuses on transgender rights, gender equality and public health. The group is a grantee of a justice foundation that received $1.4 million from OSF between 2016 and 2018. Krishnaswamy’s Centre also received money from a radical pro-abortion group, Center for Reproductive Rights, generously funded by the OSF.

The list of Facebook judges connected to Soros and the organized left continues. Julie Owono is the executive director of a Paris-based nonprofit, Internet Sans Frontieres, that advocates for privacy and freedom of expression online. In 2018, Internet Sans Frontieres became a member of the Global Network Initiative, an internet oversight and policy consortium handsomely funded by Soros. Nighat Dad is a Pakistani attorney and the founder of the Digital Rights Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Pakistan that has received $114,000 in grants from OSF. Dad’s group also gets funding from Facebook Ireland. Ronaldo Lemos, a Brazilian law professor, served on the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation, which collected $350,000 from OSF in 2016 and was also a board member at another group, Access Now, that also got thousands of dollars from Soros. Tawakkol Karman, a journalist and civil rights activist, sits on the advisory board of Transparency International, which gets significant funding from Soros’ OSF.

Rounding out the Soros-affiliated field on the new Facebook censorship board are Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Catalina Botero-Marino and Maina Kiai. Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark’s former prime minister, sits on the board of the European Council of Foreign Relations, which took in more $3.6 million from OSF in 2016 and 2017. She is also a trustee at the International Crisis Group which has collected over $8.2 million from OSF and includes George and Alexander Soros on its board. The former Danish prime minister is also a member of the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board, which received approximately $325,000 from OSF in the last few years and the European Advisory Board of the Center for Global Development, which got north of half a million dollars from OSF in 2018. Botero-Marino is the dean of a Colombian law school called Universidad de Los Andes that obtained more than $1.3 million from OSF between 2016 and 2018, the records obtained by Judicial Watch show. Botero-Marino also sits on the panel of experts at Columbia University’s Global Freedom Expression Project, which gets funding from OSF, and she was a board member at Article 19, a group that got about $1.7 million from OSF between 2016 and 2018. Kiai is the director of the Global Alliances and Partnerships at Human Rights Watch, which accepted $275,000 from OSF in 2018. He is also a member of OSF’s Human Rights Initiative advisory board and was the founding executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, which got $615,000 from Soros in the last two years.

Others on the Facebook board have slandered President Trump in social media posts and donated money to high-profile Democrats. Taiwanese communications professor Katherine Chen’s Twitter account includes retweets of numerous anti-Trump and pro-Obama posts and articles. Nicolas Suzor, a law professor in Australia, retweeted a column implicitly comparing Trump to Hitler and Columbia University law professor Jamal Greene has made campaign contributions to Obama, Hillary Clinton and Warren. Pro-Trump impeachment Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, who took a cheap shot at President Trump’s teenage son during the Brett Kavanaugh impeachment hearings, has also contributed money to Obama, Hillary Clinton and Warren. The new board has only a few token conservatives such as Stanford law professor Michael McConnell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The overwhelming majority of those making Facebook’s “final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed,” are leftists. They represent a new model of content moderation that will uphold “freedom of expression within the framework of international norms of human rights.” Facebook’s economic, political or reputational interests will not interfere in the process, the company writes in its introduction to the new board. Eventually the board, which will begin hearing cases later this year, will double in size. “The cases we choose to hear may be contentious, and we will not please everyone with our decisions,” Facebook warns.

Make no mistake–this is about influencing the November elections. Millennials get their news from social media. If they vote (they have a very spotty voting record) based on what they see on social media, then social media becomes very influential. If social media is censoring the news, controlling the narrative, the decisions made by voters who depend on it will not be based on facts.

Reaping What You Have Sown

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Mollie Hemingway posted an article at The Federalist today about the charges against  former Vice-President Joe Biden.

The article reminds us of some of the details of the charges against Brett Kavanaugh:

…the Washington Post carefully packaged and presented Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh had tried to rape her when she was in high school. The media and Democrats immediately latched onto the accusation in a desperate attempt to keep Kavanaugh from being confirmed.

It wasn’t the quality of the allegation that led to this reaction. Blasey Ford had no evidence she had ever met Kavanaugh, much less that he had tried to rape her. She wasn’t sure about any detail related to the event other than that she had precisely one beer and that Kavanaugh had tried to rape her.

She didn’t know how she got to the alleged event, where it was, how she got home, or whose house it was. None of the four witnesses she identified to reporters as having been at the event in question supported her claim. That included her close friend Leland Keyser, who was pressured by mutual acquaintances to change her testimony that she had no recollection of the event in question. Kavanaugh had an army of close friends and supporters who testified to his character throughout his adolescence and adulthood.

Justice Kavanaugh’s remarks at the time were a foreshadowing of what is happening now:

I understand the passions of the moment, but I would say to those senators, your words have meaning. Millions of Americans listen carefully to you. Given comments like those, is it any surprise that people have been willing to do anything to make any physical threat against my family, to send any violent e-mail to my wife, to make any kind of allegation against me and against my friends. To blow me up and take me down.

You sowed the wind. For decades to come, I fear that the whole country will reap the whirlwind.

We are currently reaping that whirlwind. Time will tell whether or not the charges against Joe Biden are true, but we have opened up a Pandora’s Box in politics that was better left closed.

 

Going Back To The Origins Of The Problem

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I’ve done a couple of articles recently on the charges against Brett Kavanaugh (here and here), but there is one fact that is continuously overlooked by people reporting the story. On September 4th, Townhall posted an article with the following headline, “Christine Blasey Ford’s Lawyer: Okay Fine, Protecting Abortion Was Part of Why She Accused Kavanaugh.” What? So it’s okay to attempt to ruin a man’s marriage, career, and life in order to protect abortion?! That’s sick.

Then we have another article from Townhall about The New York Times again bringing up those charges in a new attempt to smear Justice Kavanaugh. But there is a problem. The supposed victim has no memory of the incident described by Max Stier who coincidentally represented Bill Clinton when Clinton was accused of exposing himself to a woman in a hotel room.

This is disgusting, and it needs to end. It is time for Justice Kavanaugh to sue the people making the allegations and demand to see the proof of those allegations. The allegations are at least thirty-five years old, and there seems to be no evidence of a pattern. I suspect that certain Democrat operatives would pay serious money for any woman willing to come forward and charge Justice Kavanaugh with improper conduct some time in the past ten years. However, at this point no one who is paying attention would believe the charges. The Democrat slander campaign has backfired.

A Few Notes On A Previous Post

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Yesterday I posted an article about the latest attack on Justice Kavanaugh published in The New York Times. As more information comes out, it becomes even more obvious that this is a political hit job. Below are a few sources and quotes.

From The Daily Caller today:

The Washington Post passed on a thinly sourced, unproven allegation about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before the New York Times published it in a misleading article in Sunday’s paper that has since been corrected.

From The Federalist today:

The New York Times has finally admitted that the premise of its much-hyped story about an alleged incident with United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was false, as the alleged victim says she has no recollection of the incident in question.

The admission undermines what was an already weak story of dubious credibility.

From PJ Media yesterday:

On Saturday, The New York Times ran a story repeating allegations that Brett Kavanaugh was drunk at a party in college and had his genitals thrust into a woman’s face. The allegation has not been confirmed, and friends of the alleged victim say she has no recollection of the events. The man telling the story, Max Stier, represented Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was accused of exposing himself to a woman in a hotel room.

The mainstream media used to do investigative reporting. The fact that they no longer investigate allegations against conservatives or Republicans is one of the reasons the alternative media is flourishing. The New York Times story is a prime example of a political hit job disguised as a news article.

As I have previously stated, there should be a penalty for making unsubstantiated allegations against any public figure.

It’s Time For People Making Unsubstantiated Allegations To Pay A Price

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Donald Trump is President and Brett Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court Judge. Those are facts. Unfortunately the political left’s personal destruction machine has been doing its best to undo these facts. The latest charges against Justice Kavanaugh are not even remembered by the person supposedly involved.

The National Review posted an article today about the ‘new’ charges.

The article reports:

If you opened Twitter on Sunday morning, you were likely greeted with the bombshell headline of the top trending news story: “NYT reporters’ book details new sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.”

The allegation, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly write in a New York Times story adapted from their forthcoming anti-Kavanaugh book, is this: “We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation.

I am not repeating the charge because this blog is rated G.

The article continues:

None of these details corroborates her accusation against Kavanaugh. But the story is framed to make it seem like Kavanaugh was the type of privileged jerk who might expose himself in front of an under-privileged college classmate.

As I wrote last October, here’s why Ramirez’s allegation was dubious:

Deborah Ramirez is the Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s who now claims that Kavanaugh exposed himself as a college freshman at a party. Ramirez’s claim was already dubious because (1) named eyewitnesses deny the allegation and (2) Ramirez herself wasn’t sure in recent weeks if Kavanaugh had done what she now alleges. “Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself,” the New York Times reported. Ramirez was only willing to make the allegation, the New Yorker reported, after “six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney.”

This is a ridiculous attempt to smear a Justice the left does not like. One article I read noticed that the timing of this might be an indication that the left is worried about the health of Justice Ginsburg.

The article concludes:

Pogrebin and Kelly write that a couple of students say they had heard about the alleged incident in the days after it allegedly occurred, but the authors provide no indication there is any first-hand witness to corroborate the allegation. 

We already knew before Kavanaugh was confirmed last October that the “corroborating” source for Ramirez’s claim, classmate Kenneth Appold, was not present when the alleged incident occurred, but Appold told the New Yorker he was “one-hundred-percent-sure” he heard about it from an eyewitness. Shortly before Kavanaugh was confirmed, the New Yorker reported that Appold’s supposed eyewitness “said that he had no memory of the incident.”

Maybe Pogrebin and Kelly’s book is stronger than their essay. But I’m skeptical. “In the end they turn up no smoking gun,” Hanna Rosin writes in her New York Times review of the book.

Until there is a penalty paid for unsubstantiated charges, the accusations will continue. For further information about the validity of the charges against Justice Kavanaugh and the motives behind those charges see this September 4th article at Townhall. The people behind the false charges need to pay a price.

Repeating A Failed Strategy

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I vaguely remember the Anita Hill hearings. I do remember wondering at the time why Anita Hill would follow a man who was sexually harassing her from job to job. Why didn’t she just say good riddance and stay in the job she had instead of moving on to the next job working with him? If the harassment was real, I seriously doubt she would have followed him. At any rate, there are some interesting similarities between the attempted destruction of Clarence Thomas and the attempted destruction of Brett Kavanaugh.There is also some revising of comments made during the Anita Hill testimony being done.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist posted an article yesterday citing some of the revised history now being spouted.

The article at The Federalist notes:

“Not only didn’t I vote for Clarence Thomas, I believed her from the beginning. I was against Clarence Thomas, I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas and he won by the smallest margin anyone ever won going on the Supreme Court,” Biden told “The View’s” Joy Behar.

That is the current statement.

The article notes past statements:

But in 1998, Biden admitted to Specter (Senator Arlen Specter ) that “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying” about a key part of her testimony. The exchange was published in Specter’s 2000 memoir, “Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton.”

The issue is important, as the media and other partisans rewrite the historical record about Hill and her accusations. The widely watched hearings revealed inaccuracies in Hill’s various versions of events and ended with 58 percent of Americans believing Thomas and only 24 percent believing Hill. There was no gap between the sexes in the results. In the intervening years, activists have relentlessly attempted to change the narrative, writing fan fiction about Hill, bestowing honors on her, and asserting that her disputed allegations were credible.

The article also notes:

Finally he asked Hill about a USA Today article that claimed, “Anita Hill was told by Senate staffers her signed affidavit alleging sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas would be the instrument that ‘quietly and behind the scenes’ would force him to withdraw his name.”

Specter read from the article: “Keith Henderson, a 10-year friend of Hill and former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, says Hill was advised by Senate staffers that her charge would be kept secret and her name kept from public scrutiny.” Later it said, “They would approach Judge Thomas with the information and he would withdraw and not turn this into a big story, Henderson says.”

Specter asked her if this was true, attempting to find out what Senate Democrats had arranged with Hill. Nine times she denied the claim, demurred, or otherwise attempted to get away from the question. She said she could vividly remember events related to Thomas from many years prior, but couldn’t quite remember this conversation from weeks prior.

Somehow this all seems too familiar. I am grateful for men who do not back down when faced with accusations that have no evidence and no collaboration. If women are serious about ending the sexual harassment of women, they also need to be serious about ending false accusations against men whose politics they may disagree with.

 

When You Lose One Fight, Revisit Another One

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It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for angry Democrats and Trump-haters. The Mueller Report was just not useful in the quest to impeach President Trump, the economy is doing better than expected, unemployment is low, the stock market is high, and the workforce participation rate is slowly climbing back to pre-2008 levels. Meanwhile, President Trump’s rallies are extremely well attended. So what can an angry Democrat do now? Rewrite history and get angry at Justice Kavanaugh.

The Washington Free Beacon posted an article yesterday with the headline, “Dark Money Leftist Group Runs Facebook Ads Targeting Kavanaugh.” The man was confirmed, the allegations were never proven, there was a lack of consistency in the story told, and Justice Kavanaugh is considered innocent until proven guilty. It’s time to let it go.

The article reports:

A dark money progressive organization hoping for a leftward turn on the courts is targeting Justice Brett Kavanaugh with advertisements, suggesting the Court is illegitimate following his elevation last October.

“Brett Kavanaugh’s performance during his testimony in front of the Senate was a disgrace. His blatant partisan attacks and hostile behavior towards senators calls into question his ability to serve as a fair and impartial judge. His conduct undermines the legitimacy of his decisions and the entire Supreme Court,” the ad reads.

“We’re calling on Congress to open an investigation into Kavanaugh right now.”

Other ads by the group Demand Justice alleged there was “overwhelming evidence that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury during his confirmation hearings before the Senate” and also urged George Mason University to “fire” Kavanaugh from teaching a summer course at the Virginia school.

The article concludes:

Carrie Severino is chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, which, according to its website, advocates for the rule of law consistent with the “Constitution and the Founders’ vision of a nation of limited government.”

She says Democrats and others on the left failed at phase one and two of their campaign, to delay and then defeat Kavanaugh’s nomination, and have moved on to phase three: discredit.

“Knowing that they failed even with historic levels of dirty politics, smear campaigns to get him off the court, they’re hoping they can discredit him at every future decision that he makes,” Severino told the Washington Free Beacon.

“It’s the last refuge of scoundrels,” she added later. “If you can’t actually win on the merits of your arguments, you can’t say ‘well, he’s wrong on the law,’ and then explain your constitutional or legal reasoning, then you just go for ad hominem attacks. This is a variation of that theme.”

Requests for comment to Demand Justice were not returned.

If this continues, is anyone going to want to accept an appointment to high office or want to work for the government? The group can buy all of the ads they want, but the American people need to be smart enough to ignore those ads and make them a waste of money.

There Is A Difference Between Affectionate and Being Creepy

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The media has written a lot about Joe Biden’s style in the past few days. Today the Associated Press posted an article stating that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has stated that Joe Biden needs to understand that people have personal space that needs to be respected. Yesterday The American Thinker posted an article noting that even after the dawn of the #MeToo movement, Democrats do not seem overly concerned about Joe Biden’s behavior. Remember, this is the party of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton,  etc. Joe Biden’s behavior seems tame. There are numerous pictures showing questionable behavior by Joe Biden, but he gets a pass. There was no actual evidence against Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh, but they were viciously attacked. The Lt. Governor of Virginia is still in office despite reports of sexual assault that were reported at the time of the incident. There seems to be a bit of a double standard here.

The American Thinker concludes:

My guess — and it is a pure guess, as I have no connections with the Dems’ inner circles — is that Joe Biden is going to see the wisdom of withdrawing from the race, especially since his son Hunter’s connections in Ukraine are at risk.  He’s old and has been making scads of money giving lectures.  He has a choice: retire and reap gratitude, honors, and many more lucrative speaking gigs, or else press forward with his candidacy and become an icon of perversion, with his son facing Trump treatment by the media, an old white male whose apologies for his privilege only further enrage the aggrieved.

I think Joe Biden is probably a very nice man, but I don’t want a man who has no respect for personal space as President. I realize that the media will pretty much leave him alone because he is a Democrat, but there would always be a controversy about his behavior swirling around him.

 

If You Voted Democrat, Was This What You Voted For?

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Yesterday The Federalist posted an article about some of the plans the Democrats have now that they will be the majority party in the House of Representatives. The dominant aspect of their plans has been obvious for a while–do anything they can to derail the Trump Agenda. That is rather logical considering that they are the opposition party, but I think some voters will be surprised at how far they are willing to go with this.

The article reports:

Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., revealed plans for House Democrats to investigate and impeach Justice Brett Kavanaugh for alleged perjury and investigate and impeach President Donald Trump for alleged treasonous collusion with Russia.

In post-election chats with various callers while riding the Acela train from New York to Washington, Nadler gave advice to a newly elected representative and discussed potential 2020 Democratic presidential nominees with another. He also lamented identity politics and the thriving economy and worried about Democrats losing working-class voters while gaining elite former Republicans and suburban women.

Although I hesitate to give the Democrats good advice, I would like to remind them what happened when the Republicans impeached President Clinton–the American people did not view the efforts favorably and the Republicans lost Congress. If the Democrats want to take that chance, they are welcome to, but it is a fool’s errand. The House of Representatives needs a simple majority to impeach, but the Senate needs a two-thirds vote–67 votes. That is highly unlikely. A very wise man once said, “Do not strike the king unless you kill him.” The political repercussions of attempting to impeach a Supreme Court Judge and a President would be overwhelmingly negative.

There is one other aspect of this I would like to mention. In recent years, more government policy has been set by the courts than by Congress. The political left is well aware of that fact. The biggest danger to the left from President Trump is the fact that he is naming judges who will follow the Constitution. That is the reason for the attack on both President Trump and Justice Kavanaugh. Congress has given over so much of its power to the courts that Congress is very close to irrelevant.

It Only Matters When It Can Be Weaponized

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The political left loves to scream that President Trump has a bad attitude toward women or that Judge Kavanaugh was guilty of sexual assault and should therefore be disqualified as a judge, but how good are they at policing their own. If last night’s election results are any indication, not very good.

Fox News posted an article today reminding us that four of the Democrat candidates who won their elections last night are facing sexual misconduct controversies.

The article reports:

House Reps. Keith Ellison, Tony Cárdenas and Bobby Scott, and Sen. Bob Menendez, all came out victorious on Tuesday, despite being accused of misconduct.

Their election raises questions whether the Democratic Party, which went all-out to stop now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the face of assault claims and stressed the importance of believing women’s allegations, is selectively tapping into the #MeToo movement.

I guess #MeToo only matters if you are a Republican.

The article includes the names of the candidates and the charges:

Ellison, the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was one of the highest-profile candidates who won the election. He became the state attorney general in Minnesota despite allegations of domestic violence.

Karen Monahan, the Democrat’s former girlfriend, alleged that he once dragged her off a bed while shouting profanities and sent multiple abusive text messages. She also published a 2017 medical document that identified Ellison as the abuser who caused “emotional and physical abuse.”

…Cárdenas, a California Democrat, meanwhile, easily cruised to victory in the state’s 29th Congressional District, receiving nearly 80 percent of the vote, while being the subject of a lawsuit claiming he drugged and sexually assaulted a 16-year-old teenager in 2007.

A Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that “a reasonable and meritorious basis” existed for the case to proceed and Cárdenas was publicly identified as the accused person. He denied the accusations.

…Old allegations of misconduct also came back to haunt Menendez, the incumbent New Jersey senator, who won the closer-than-expected race as well.

Republican candidate Bob Hugin revived salacious allegations that Menendez had sex with underage prostitutes during past trips to the Dominican Republic.

…Virginia Democrat Bobby Scott won Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District thanks to nobody challenging him, even after he was accused of sexual misconduct in 2017.

A former Congressional Black Caucus Foundation fellow. M. Reese Everson, claimed that the congressman sexually harassed her in 2013, and that she was fired and blacklisted from further work on Capitol Hill after she refused his advances.

One standard for me, and one standard for thee.

Something To Think About

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The confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh was ugly. He was confirmed, but there are those who will ignore the exculpatory evidence that has come out since the hearing and choose to believe he was guilty of the charges. There are two recent articles that detail that exculpatory evidence. Since the mainstream media will probably ignore these stories, I would like to summarize them. However, I also want to remind everyone that it is becoming obvious that an innocent man was almost destroyed for political reasons. That is totally unfortunate and unacceptable.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article yesterday about one of the charges against Justice Kavanaugh.

The article reports:

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released a 414 page report on Brett Kavanaugh over the weekend and confirmed that there is no credible evidence to support the sexual assault allegations.

The Committee interviewed 45 individuals and took 25 written statements relating to the various allegations against Kavanaugh, the Senate Judiciary said.

This is one of the most important facts uncovered in the report:

Grassley’s probe also revealed details behind ‘mistaken identity’ claims from two other witnesses who came forward claiming they were the ones who had the encounter with Christine Ford, not Brett Kavanaugh.

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed in late September that they were talking to two men who thought they had the “encounter” with Christine Ford, not Brett Kavanaugh.

The Federalist posted a summary of the report yesterday.

These are some highlights from the article in The Federalist:

Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee differed in many respects from statements she made to her therapist, the Washington Post reporter who broke the story, and even from her initial letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Ford’s story morphed from a sexual assault by four boys in the mid-1980s, while she was in her late teens, to a sexual assault by one boy at a party attended by five people in 1982, when she was 15.

…In addition to these inconsistencies in Ford’s story, following the Senate hearing the public learned of another problem with her testimony when a former longtime boyfriend came forward. He contradicted Ford’s claim that she had never “had discussions with anyone, besides [her] attorneys, on how to take a polygraph,” and had never given “advice to somebody who was looking to take a polygraph test.”

The ex-boyfriend stated that “contrary to Dr. Ford’s testimony, she had helped prepare her roommate, former FBI agent Monica McLean, for a polygraph examination.” Grassley’s report includes the letter from Ford’s former boyfriend detailing his claim.

…Ford expanded on the effects, stating: “I struggled academically. I struggled very much in Chapel Hill and in college. When I was 17 and went off to college, I had a very hard time, more so than others, forming new friendships and especially friendships with boys, and I had academic problems.”

However, a former college acquaintance told the Judiciary Committee that Ford had “a fairly active and robust social life” in college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His letter added that Chrissy “seemed to have a number of other non-dating male friends, more guy friends perhaps than females,” and that she attended “frat house parties, some crowded and lasting very late in the evening,” as well as “smaller gatherings in male friend’s rooms or apartments.”

…Throughout the entire ordeal, many commentators—myself included—suggested that while Kavanaugh did not assault Ford, someone else may have. After hearing Ford’s Senate testimony, Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins similarly concluded that Kavanaugh was not Ford’s assailant but “that she was assaulted.” By whom and when, though, Collins did not know.

It is unlikely the public will ever know what happened to Ford, if anything. But Grassley’s report supports the possibility that the encounter Ford described involved other boys and different facts. Specifically, the report summarized statements made by two men who believed they might have been involved in the encounters Ford described, albeit with it being consensual.

…Grassley’s memorandum discussed Deborah Ramirez’s claim that, in the 1980s while attending Yale University, Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her, thrusting “his penis in her face.” Kavanaugh denied Ramirez’s charge and Ramirez admitted she was intoxicated at the time and wasn’t sure Kavanaugh was the flasher until she spent a week thinking it over and talking with her attorneys. Grassley’s report concluded there was no verifiable evidence supporting Ramirez’s claim that Kavanaugh had exposed himself.

In fact, the committee received evidence indicating that another Yale student had been a known flasher at the time. A witness told the committee investigator that a different classmate, who was a member of the same fraternity as Kavanaugh, “had a reputation for exposing himself publicly.” This witness provided the investigator a yearbook photo showing that individual sans pants.

The article lists more problems with the charges against Justice Kavanaugh. Please follow the link to read further details.

The bottom line here is simple–an innocent man’s career was almost destroyed by false testimony. I don’t know if Dr. Ford actually believed what she testified to, if she was simply confused,  or if she was simply being used for political purposes. I do wonder what the consequences of making false charges against someone during a Congressional hearing should be. My impression of Dr. Ford is that something traumatic did happen to her in high school and that she should be treated gently. However, there do need to be some consequences for the false charges she levied. Behavior that is not dealt with will continue. I think we need to send a message that this sort of circus at a confirmation hearing will not be tolerated. There also need to be some rules about introducing inflammatory charges just before a committee is going to vote.

There Is (And Should Be) A Penalty For Dishonesty

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The Gateway Pundit is reporting today the Senator Chuck Grassley has criminally referred another Kavanaugh accuser to the Justice Department for investigation. The Kavanaugh confirmation hearing was turned into a circus when Diane Feinstein withheld charges of sexual assault against Justice Kavanaugh until the last day of the hearing. The chargers were unsubstantiated, and there was some suspicion of misconduct by the lawyers of the accused. The actions of the lawyers are being investigated. Now another accuser has admitted that she made up the charges, and she has been referred to the Justice Department for investigation.

The article reports:

Senator Grassley sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions regarding “fabricated allegations” the Senate Judiciary Committee received.

Brett Kavanaugh was previously questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee after an anonymous letter signed ‘Jane Doe’ alleged he and a friend raped an Oceanside, CA woman in a car.

The hand-written letter was sent to Democrat Senator Kamala Harris.

…The accuser, Ms. Judy Munro-Leighton, now admits it was a “ploy” and she just wanted to “get attention.”

…The Senate Judiciary Chairman recently referred creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti and his client Julie Swetnick to the DOJ for a criminal investigation for false statements and deliberate obstruction of a congressional investigation (violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 371, 1001 and 1505).

Grassley then hit Avenatti with a second criminal referral regarding another declaration he submitted to the Committee related to the second, anonymous Kavanaugh accuser he brought forth with allegations of gang rape.

Falsely accusing someone during a Senate hearing should have consequences. Thank goodness President Trump, Senator Grassley, and other Senators did not let this false charge ruin a man’s life. What a travesty that would have been.

 

 

Abandoning What You Probably Never Read

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Yesterday The Wall Street Journal posted a commentary with the headline, “Democrats Abandon the Constitution.” Actually they did that a long time ago, which is why they were so upset at the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh–he might work to bring it back.

The commentary goes on to list some of the basic tenets of the Constitution that the Democrats are currently railing against:

Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court has sparked a firestorm of outrage and recrimination on the left. Some attacks seem aimed at intimidating the justices into supporting progressive causes. “The Court must now prove—through its work—that it is worthy of the nation’s trust,” Eric Holder, President Obama’s attorney general, tweeted Oct. 6.

Yet the attacks go beyond ideology. Detractors of Justice Kavanaugh and President Trump are denouncing the Constitution itself and the core elements of America’s governmental structure:

  • The Electoral College. Mr. Trump’s opponents claim he is an illegitimate president because Hillary Clinton “won the popular vote.” One commentator even asked “what kind of nation allows the loser of a national election to become president.” The complaint that the Electoral College is undemocratic is nothing new. The Framers designed it that way. They created a republican form of government, not a pure democracy, and adopted various antimajoritarian measures to keep the “demos” in check.

The Electoral College could be eliminated by amending the Constitution. But proposing an amendment requires two-thirds votes in both houses of Congress, and the legislatures of three-fourths, or 38, of the states would have to ratify it.

  • The Senate. The complaint here is that the 50 senators who voted in Justice Kavanaugh’s favor “represent” fewer people than the 48 who voted against him. But senators represent states, not people.

Equal Senate representation for the states was a key part of the Connecticut Compromise, along with House seats apportioned by population. The compromise persuaded large and small states alike to accept the new Constitution. It was so fundamental that Article V of the Constitution—which spells out the amendment procedure—provides that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” That means an amendment changing the structure of the Senate would require ratification by all 50 states.

  • Judicial independence. Commentators who disapprove of the Supreme Court’s composition have urged, as one law professor put it, “shrinking the power of the courts to overrun our citizens’ democratic decisions.” Some suggest limiting and staggering the justices’ terms so that a vacancy would come up every other year, ensuring that the court follows the election returns. That could be achieved via constitutional amendment, but it would go against the Framers’ wisdom. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, life tenure for judges is “the best expedient which can be devised in any government, to secure a steady, upright and impartial administration of the laws.”

What we have hear is a living example of what happens when you don’t teach American history and the principles of the Constitution in schools. The people calling for these changes have no concept of how our government was designed or the safeguards that were put in it. Their desire is to take those safeguards out and institute mob rule. That has not worked well in other places, and I seriously doubt it would work well here. It was what our Founding Fathers sought to avoid.

The commentary concludes:

The anger and disappointment of Justice Kavanaugh’s opponents is understandable, as would be that of his supporters if the vote had gone the other way. They are perfectly entitled to pursue political remedies, including using his appointment as a campaign issue. They also are entitled to pursue amendments to the Constitution that would make our system of government more responsive to the popular will. What they cannot do is overturn the Connecticut Compromise guaranteeing each state equal representation in the Senate, or launch unconstitutional investigations or impeachment of a sitting Supreme Court justice. The Constitution protects all of us, even Supreme Court justices.

True.

In Keeping With His Efforts To Further The Careers Of Women In The Law Profession…

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The Federalist Papers reported today:

Brett Kavanaugh, the newest Supreme Court justice, just made history, even though he’s been on the job barely 24 hours:

A day after the bitter fight over his nomination ended in his elevation to the Supreme Court, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh was in his new chambers on Sunday, preparing for the arguments the court is to hear as it enters the second week of its term. …

Justice Kavanaugh met with his four law clerks, all women — a first for the Supreme Court — in chambers that had until recently been occupied by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who has moved to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s old chambers. …

Justice Kavanaugh said in his testimony last month that he had started to take action to address the underrepresentation of women among law clerks after reading a 2006 article in The New York Times noting that only seven of 37 Supreme Court clerks were women.

“A majority of my 48 law clerks over the last 12 years have been women,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “In my time on the bench, no federal judge — not a single one in the country — has sent more women law clerks to clerk on the Supreme Court than I have.”

Indeed, as Liptak notes, he can expect to see some familiar faces:

This term, six of his former clerks are working at the Supreme Court, double the number of any other appeals court judge. Four of them are women.

The article also notes that Brett Kavanaugh has also appointed more African-Americans than Ruth Bader Ginsburg has in her entire career.

The article also mentions Judge Kavanaugh’s role in helping women become law clerks at the Supreme Court:

On the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh hired 25 women and 23 men as law clerks. His four clerks from 2014 to 2015 were women, and 21 of the 25 he hired went on to U.S. Supreme Court clerkships. His 48 clerks represented diverse background and viewpoints.

With Kavanaugh’s elevation, law school graduates lose an opportunity for an appellate clerkship with one of the top “feeder judges” to the justices who are now his colleagues.

Kavanaugh sent 39 of his 48 clerks to the Supreme Court, including clerks serving justices in the current term. Although most of those clerks have gone to the conservative justices—with Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. hiring 13, the largest number—Kavanaugh sent two each to justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, and one to Stephen Breyer. No former Kavanaugh clerk has gone on to clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The man the Democrats and the media attempted to paint as a monster who abused women turns out to be one of the major mentors of women working in the law profession in Washington. So much for the honesty and reliability of information provided by the Democrats and the media.

This Says A Lot About How Things Work In Washington

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Yesterday The Daily Wire reported the following:

A Democratic staffer arrested last week on charges that he revealed the personal information of several Republican Senate Judiciary Committee members was not an “intern” for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), as originally reported. The 27-year-old career staffer, Jackson Cosko, was, instead, reportedly a “fellow” paid by an “outside institution” who served as a primary adviser in Lee’s Congressional office.

This wasn’t some unpaid intern–it was an advisor in a Congressional office.

The article notes:

As the Tennessee Star points out, that raises questions: “It seems clear Cosko isn’t some unlucky and overzealous intern who got caught being a naughty boy. Rather, it seems Cosko might be a Democratic operative, paid by an outside organization, planted in an unpopular congresswoman’s office possibly so he could engage in exactly the type of behavior that just got him arrested.”

Cosko was arrested last week after federal investigators discovered he was responsible for editing a Wikipedia article revealing the personal names, addresses, and phone numbers of several Republican senators, almost immediately after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) concluded a fiery speech defending then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

This is simply another example of totally unacceptable behavior by Democrat operatives. This creates a nightmare for the security details of these Senators. The Senators are considerably safer when the crazies out there don’t know where they live. How many attacks on Senators do we need before we admit the need for absolute secrecy regarding their home addresses?

Hopefully this paid operative will spend some time in jail.

This Is What Sore Losers Look Like

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Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article about some recent comments by former Attorney General Eric Holder.

The article reports:

Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who is considering running for president in 2020, called into doubt the legitimacy of the Supreme Court following the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Court by a 50-48 vote in the Senate on Saturday. Holder on Friday used incendiary rhetoric to call on liberals to use their “rage” to vote to “be rid of these people”–singling out Republicans in the Senate who support Kavanaugh and have used their majority power to control nominations to the courts.

I hate to say this, but this brings to mind how unpolitical the actions of the Senate were when Barack Obama nominated judges to the Supreme Court. The Democrats held the majority in the Senate when Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. Fifty-nine Democrats voted for confirmation (Ted Kennedy was not present) and nine Republicans voted for confirmation. When Elena Kagan was nominated for the Supreme Court, the Democrats also held the majority. The vote was 63-37 with five Republicans voting for confirmation. The Republicans acted like gentlemen, and the judges were confirmed. Both judges were known as liberal judges, but no one questions the legitimacy of the Supreme Court after they were confirmed.

The duly-elected President is the person the Constitution gives the power to select Supreme Court Justices. The Senate’s role is Advise and Consent. I believe that in the hearings for Judge Kavanaugh the Senate abused that role. There is nothing illegitimate about the Supreme Court now that it includes Justice Kavanaugh.

The article continues:

On Friday Holder expressed similar concerns in comments but also exhorted his supporters use their “rage” about how the Republicans who control the Senate used their power to confirm Kavanaugh and fill other judicial seats to “be rid of these people.” While Holder wrote he was urging people to vote to “be rid of these people”, his choice of language encouraging liberals to ‘use their rage’ to ‘be rid of these people’ is deliberate.

“Reputation and credibility of Supreme Court at stake with upcoming vote. How the Court is viewed. For years. Bigger than one individual. There are conservative acceptable alternatives…As you lament the Merrick Garland outrage never forget that McConnell and R’s did not fill lower court seats for YEARS. Those are the seats being filled now. Use the rage of today to get people out to vote and be rid of these people. Your voice matters. Your vote counts. VOTE!”

I really don’t think Eric Holder’s statements add anything to the civility of our political discourse.

A Short History Lesson

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Remember Herman Cain? He ran for President, but dropped out of the race after sexual allegations. So what happened next?

A site called Yahoo Answers explains:

What ever happened to the women that accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment?

I know that Sharon Bialek has a history of lawsuits against her and I believe that she wanted to use Herman Cain to her own advantage by supposedly coming out about this so called sexual harassment. Then Karen Kraushaar the last time I have heard filed a complaint at her new job. According to the huffington post “two former supervisors say she initially demanded a settlement of thousands of dollars, a promotion on the federal pay scale, reinstated leave time and a one year fellowship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of government.” Why do women like them think they can do these things abuse the sexual harassment policy against male supervisors?

This is the “Biden Rule” as stated in Politifact:

“Mr. President, where the nation should be treated to a consideration of constitutional philosophy, all it will get in such circumstances is a partisan bickering and political posturing from both parties and from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. As a result, it is my view that if a Supreme Court Justice resigns tomorrow, or within the next several weeks, or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not — and not — name a nominee until after the November election is completed.”

Biden said if Bush were to nominate someone anyway, “the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over.”

Let’s fast-forward to the sudden death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016.

Politifact reported:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell invoked the so-called “Biden Rule” to justify why the Senate should not consider the nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court in an election year.

Chuck Shumer was fine when the Biden Rule was used in the George Bush administration. He was not fine when it was used in the Obama administration.

That tweet illustrates part of the reason for the brutal attack on Judge Kavanuagh. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Hillary was supposed to win the election, and Loretta Lynch was going to be named to the Supreme Court.

Today ABC 7 News is reporting:

With the Senate voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, Christine Blasey Ford has no further plans to pursue her sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh, according to her lawyers.

Ford only wanted to speak with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, her attorneys told CNN on Friday. Ford does not want the situation to “drag on into the next Congress should Democrats end up winning control on Capitol Hill,” the network reported.

When asked about the possibility of impeachment proceedings, attorney Debra Katz told the network: “Professor Ford has not asked for anything of the sort. What she did was to come forward and testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and agree to cooperate with any investigation by the FBI, and that’s what she sought to do here.”

Judge Kavanaugh has been confirmed. Professor Ford’s charges did not cause him to withdraw from the race. Unfortunately, her charges, though unproven, will have a negative impact on Judge Kavanaugh’s spotless record and on his family. Now, with a serious amount of money from her GoFundMe Account, Professor Ford will go on her way, leaving a trail of destruction behind her.

It’s funny how unsubstantiated charges of sexual misconduct seem to magically disappear when they are no longer useful.

Congratulations to Judge Kavanaugh for standing firm and beating back the mob.

This Is A Scary Statement

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On Wednesday, The Independent Journal Review posted an article that included a very interesting quote.

The article reports:

Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) claims that having strong emotional reactions could be grounds to disqualify Judge Brett Kavanaugh from serving on the Supreme Court.

During a press conference on Tuesday, Booker said that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed, regardless of the conclusion of the FBI investigation.

“Ultimately — not whether he’s innocent or guilty, this is not a trial … have enough questions been raised that we should not move on to another candidate?” said Booker.

The senator questioned if the uncorroborated accusations against Kavanaugh were enough to deny him a seat on the Supreme Court. He also brought up Kavanaugh’s emotional testimony and labeled it as shocking.

“Is this the right person to sit on the highest court in the land for a lifetime appointment — when their credibility has been challenged by intimates, people that knew the candidate well as a classmate, when his temperament has been revealed in an emotional moment where he used language that, frankly, shocked a lot of us?” asked Booker.

So let me get this right. A man accused of a vicious crime with no supporting evidence reacts to the charges. Therefore he is unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. Imagine if this set a precedent for future Supreme Court hearings. Find someone the person knew in high school and make up a great story. Professor Ford may have been telling the truth as she believed it, but it is telling that there were a few obvious lies in her testimony–she is obviously not afraid of flying, the front door was to run a business out of her house, and she had previously coached a friend for a lie detector test. Interestingly enough, that friend is a former FBI agent who was present at the hearing, sitting behind her. It is also interesting that all the people that she claimed as witnesses denied the story.

This whole charade was a little too much like the Salem Witch Trials to belong in today’s America. Hopefully there will be enough of a backlash so that the Democrats do not do this to the next Supreme Court nominee.

Who Were Those Women?

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Most of us have seen the video of Senator Jeff Flake accosted in the elevator before the Senate Judiciary Committee vote to move the Kavanaugh nomination out of committee. Many of us have little doubt that it was staged. If nothing else, it provided cover for the actions of the spineless Senator.

Yesterday John Fund posted an article at the National Review which sheds some light on exactly what happened. Mr. Fund notes that the two women had to get past reporters and security officers in order to block a senators-only elevator in the U.S. Capitol. That should cause some concern about the safety of our legislators. Considering the 3017 attack on Republicans while they were playing softball, I would think the security at the Capitol would be better.

Let’s take a look at who those two women are. The article reports:

Ana Maria Archila and Maggie Gallagher were the two women who confronted Flake inside the elevator to express, as the New York Times put it, “a rising anger among many who feel that, too often, women’s voices are silenced and their pain ignored.”

Perhaps because the women expressed such raw emotion, few media outlets dug into their political activism. Archila is an executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy; she had spent the previous week in Washington engaged in protests against Kavanaugh. Gallagher is a 23-year-old activist with the group. The Center is a left-wing group that is heavily funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Indeed, as of 2014, the Open Society was one of the three largest donors to the group.

…Archila has another role beyond her duties as co–executive director of the Center. She is also a member of the national committee of the Working Families Party (WFP), a New York–based fringe political party that exercises outside influence in the Empire State because of the state’s unique law allowing candidates to run on more than one party line.

…The WFP was founded in 1998 by the leaders of ACORN, the now disbanded and disgraced group of community organizers for whom Barack Obama served as a lawyer, in Chicago in the 1990s.

The article concludes:

I have no doubt that the vast majority of protesters who want to stop Brett Kavanaugh are sincere and are merely exercising their constitutional rights. But imagine if two women had cornered a Democratic senator in an elevator and demanded an investigation of who had leaked to the media Christine Blasey Ford’s letter alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. (Senator Lindsey Graham said today that he planned to investigate the leak.) There would have been sputtering outrage in media circles, and reporters would have breathlessly hunted down any ties between the women and outside groups.

It’s a sign of media bias that the people from the well-funded groups behind the anti-Kavanaugh protests are described merely as “activists” and that their political motives and origins are largely unexplored.

The fact that these fringe-left groups are fighting so hard to stop Judge Kavanaugh convinces me that he needs to be confirmed. He represents a return to Constitutional Law that the political left does not want. He summed up his views when he reminded Congress that it was their job to make laws–not the Supreme Court’s. It is time to get back to the Representative Republic our Founding Fathers designed.

Adding To The Circus

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Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about an accusation against Judge Kavanaugh that has already been proven false.

The article reports:

Mr. Jeffrey Catalan accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting a woman on a boat in Rhode Island. Mr. Catalan first sent the accusation to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the primary Democrat operatives who was helping to construct the attacks against Judge Kavanaugh. Senator Whitehouse simultaneously informed the media and the Judicary Committee of the allegations. Mr. Catalan later recanted his story, saying he made it all up.

Today, Senator Chuck Grassley requested a criminal investigation of Mr. Catalan for making false accusations.

The investigation may also include Senator Sheldon Whitehouse for assisting and promoting the false accusation:

WASHINGTON – The Senate Judiciary Committee today referred for criminal investigation apparent false statements made to committee investigators alleging misconduct by Judge Brett Kavanaugh. In a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Chris Wray, Chairman Chuck Grassley sought a criminal review of the actions by a named individual who provided Congress with the information, diverting Committee resources from an ongoing investigation.

This is the part of the story that I think is interesting:

While Whitehouse referred the accuser to a reporter, the committee took the claim seriously and questioned Judge Kavanaugh about the allegations under penalty of felony. Judge Kavanaugh denied any misconduct. After the transcripts of that interview became public, the individual recanted the claims on a social media post.

Why would you refer the accuser to a reporter rather than have the committee quietly investigate the charges? If you refer the accuser to a reporter, you are letting the accuser know that the accusation is going to be made public without any confirmation of the charges. That is exactly what happened. It should also be noted that it is (possibly remotely) possible that Professor Ford did not want her name made public with the charges. However, our justice system provides that the accused be able to confront his accuser, so at some point her name was going to become public.

This was a false charge which the person making the charge admitted that he made up. It illustrates that damage that can be done to a public figure by someone who simply makes something up.

Rewriting The Constitution As You Go Along

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The mass hysteria over the idea that Judge Kavanaugh might be confirmed has gotten a little out of hand. On Thursday, Newsbusters posted an article about some comments by ABC’s Terry Moran.

The article reports:

While CBS was conceding that Brett Kavanaugh will probably make it onto the Supreme Court, ABC’s Terry Moran on Thursday fumed about how “millions of women” will feel “annihilated” if the Judge is confirmed. He also warned Kavanaugh not to rule against abortion or the high Court will lose “legitimacy.” 

Moran lamented, “I can’t imagine the feeling of the millions and millions of women, and others who found Dr. Ford very, very credible.” Conceding a Kavanaugh victory, the ABC journalist stooped to extreme hyperbole on female reaction: “If, as seems likely, Republicans are able to get… Judge Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court, they’re just going to feel annihilated inside.” 

But Moran wasn’t done. He lectured a potential future Supreme Court justice Kavanaugh: “Well, he had better take into that lifetime appointment a sense of the woundedness [sic] of so many people in the country.”

I mean, overturning Roe vs. Wade by an all-male majority, two of whom have had credible accusations of sexual misconduct lodged against them would not be a legitimate action. And that is the question of the court. Legitimacy. It has always had a high place in American, in the American popular opinion, and it could lose it if it loses legitimacy. 

Wow. Let’s just ignore the rule of law and do what I want.

There is nothing in Brett Kavanaugh’s professional history that confirms any of the allegations against him. It is possible that he drank too many beers in high school and college, but that should not disqualify him from the Supreme Court. He has obviously been an upstanding citizen during his adult life.

This is a quote from an article at Red State on September 26th:

In the early part of 1863, Major General Ulysses Grant was beset with difficulties and setbacks on his approach to the Vicksburg, MS. A group of his political foes visited President Abraham Lincoln and demanded Grant be superseded by one of the politician-generals that staggered about the military landscape of the Civil War. They topped the story by claiming Grant was a drunk (he actually was). Lincoln asked them what brand he drank because he wanted to send a barrel of it to his other generals.

If Brett Kavanaugh has accomplished more as a sloppy drunk than his critics have sober it tells us a lot more about the staff of the Washington Post and BuzzFeed “News” than it does about Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe they should take up drinking. Then maybe they could get their sh** together and act like adults.

I sincerely hope Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as a Supreme Court Judge.

There Seems To Be A Lack Of Ethics Among Some Of Our Senators

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This post is not directly related to the Senate hearings yesterday, but it may be an indication of the ethics of the people involved.

The Washington Post posted an article yesterday about something that happened to the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee as the hearings were going on.

The article reports:

Several Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had their home addresses and phone numbers released to the public on their Wikipedia pages during Thursday’s hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination.

The victims included Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

According to Caleb Hull, editor of the Independent Journal Review, the wife of Mr. Hatch “has been receiving calls nonstop ON HER BIRTHDAY and their home address was made public.”

The article explains what happened:

CongressEdits, a bot account that for four years automatically retweets edits to Wikipedia made anonymously from IP addresses associated with the U.S. Congress, said the information was also posted on Mr. Lee and Mr. Graham “from US House of Representatives.”

The article auto-posted screen shots supporting the edits being made and noting the inclusion of private information, a practice known as “doxxing.”

The Gateway Pundit reported yesterday:

The private information on the Republican Senators is coming from a computer from the House of Representatives!

Congress reporter for Politico Burgess Everett tweeted: “Someone is doxxing GOP senators on a computer from the House of Representatives, began shortly after the Graham speech. I’m not going to retweet the account where this is posted.”

The person who leaked this information needs to go to jail. He has put members of Congress at risk.

This is a new low in American politics, and one has to wonder what it is about. What is the threat that confirming Judge Kavanaugh represeents? Why are the Democrats willing to go to such lengths to block him?

I suspect that if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed, we will know the answers to those questions fairly quickly. We have watched the Advise and Consent process turned on its head. A strategy that failed with Anita Hill was retried. Hopefully it will fail again. The politics of personal destruction should not be a part of the confirmation process–particularly when an allegation is not able to be proved. If you are going to make a charge that has the potential of ruining a man’s career, come with evidence.