More than once this week, he testified in a way that appeared to directly contradict evidence in the record.
As we’ve learned with each new trickle of previously withheld documents, Judge Kavanaugh didn’t start misleading senators just this week.
For example, he testified that Roe v. Wade is “settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court.” But he said essentially the opposite in a 2003 email leaked to The Times. “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” he wrote then.
At his 2004 confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee, he denied any involvement in the vetting of a controversial judicial nominee while serving as one of President George W. Bush’s White House lawyers. The nominee, William Pryor Jr., had among other things called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.” In fact, Mr. Kavanaugh was more than a little involved, as emails from that period— which Senate Republicans had withheld until early Thursday morning — made clear.
told Congress, under oath, that he knew nothing about the extensive theft of secret strategy documents from Democratic senators’ computers by Republican staffers. As it turns out, he did in fact receive those documents or summaries of them. But he now claims that he had no reason to believe that they had been stolen, even though one email he got had the subject line “spying” and began, “I have a friend who is a mole for us on the left.”
Then there are the persistent doubts about his truthfulness in telling senators in 2006 that he had no knowledge of Mr. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program or his detainee treatment policy — claims that have been called into question by yet more emails, which showed he knew about both of those things years before they became public.
He misstates facts under oath, and Republicans cover for him by making it hard, if not impossible, to get the documents proving it. With the help of the White House and a personal lawyer for Mr. Bush, Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has subverted a long-established, nonpartisan process and hidden more than 90 percent of the material pertaining to Judge Kavanaugh’s time in government.
Far from being embarrassed by all this, Judge Kavanaugh is acting like someone who knows there is virtually nothing he can do to imperil his nomination.
That is more or less how Judge Kavanaugh got through his hearings. But his ideological agenda is well known, which is precisely why he’s been on Republican Supreme Court shortlists for the last decade. That agenda includes, for starters, a well-established hostility to women’s reproductive rights and a stunningly expansive view of presidential power and impunity..
The people deserve to know everything possible about nominees to a lifetime seat on the highest court in the land, and they depend on their senators to seek out that information and share it.
The Constitution calls this process advice and consent. Until the last few years, Republicans claimed to take that responsibility seriously. Now they are making a mockery of what is meant to be a careful and deliberative process by playing three-card monte with the American people. They did the same with last year’s tax bill, rushing it through in the dead of nightwith virtually no debate or review.
The Republicans engage in this sort of subterfuge for an obvious reason: While they hold unified power in Washington, most of their agenda is hugely unpopular. So they hide as much of it as possible out of a fear that if more of it came to light, they will pay at the polls. Come November, voters can make that fear come true.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
As we’ve learned with each new trickle of previously withheld documents, Judge Kavanaugh didn’t start misleading senators just this week.
For example, he testified that Roe v. Wade is “settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court.” But he said essentially the opposite in a 2003 email leaked to The Times. “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” he wrote then.
At his 2004 confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee, he denied any involvement in the vetting of a controversial judicial nominee while serving as one of President George W. Bush’s White House lawyers. The nominee, William Pryor Jr., had among other things called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.” In fact, Mr. Kavanaugh was more than a little involved, as emails from that period— which Senate Republicans had withheld until early Thursday morning — made clear.
told Congress, under oath, that he knew nothing about the extensive theft of secret strategy documents from Democratic senators’ computers by Republican staffers. As it turns out, he did in fact receive those documents or summaries of them. But he now claims that he had no reason to believe that they had been stolen, even though one email he got had the subject line “spying” and began, “I have a friend who is a mole for us on the left.”
Then there are the persistent doubts about his truthfulness in telling senators in 2006 that he had no knowledge of Mr. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program or his detainee treatment policy — claims that have been called into question by yet more emails, which showed he knew about both of those things years before they became public.
He misstates facts under oath, and Republicans cover for him by making it hard, if not impossible, to get the documents proving it. With the help of the White House and a personal lawyer for Mr. Bush, Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has subverted a long-established, nonpartisan process and hidden more than 90 percent of the material pertaining to Judge Kavanaugh’s time in government.
Far from being embarrassed by all this, Judge Kavanaugh is acting like someone who knows there is virtually nothing he can do to imperil his nomination.
That is more or less how Judge Kavanaugh got through his hearings. But his ideological agenda is well known, which is precisely why he’s been on Republican Supreme Court shortlists for the last decade. That agenda includes, for starters, a well-established hostility to women’s reproductive rights and a stunningly expansive view of presidential power and impunity..
The people deserve to know everything possible about nominees to a lifetime seat on the highest court in the land, and they depend on their senators to seek out that information and share it.
The Constitution calls this process advice and consent. Until the last few years, Republicans claimed to take that responsibility seriously. Now they are making a mockery of what is meant to be a careful and deliberative process by playing three-card monte with the American people. They did the same with last year’s tax bill, rushing it through in the dead of nightwith virtually no debate or review.
The Republicans engage in this sort of subterfuge for an obvious reason: While they hold unified power in Washington, most of their agenda is hugely unpopular. So they hide as much of it as possible out of a fear that if more of it came to light, they will pay at the polls. Come November, voters can make that fear come true.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
