Fraud and circuses: the political trashing of Brett Kavanaugh

Perhaps the only thing Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, can agree on concerning the ongoing saga of Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court is that it has not closed the divide between the sides, but has driven them further apart.

Picking up where they left off after Borking a nominee in 1987, and conducting a high-tech lynching of another four years later, the Democrats on the Committee have a new theme: Obfuscate, assassinate, dance to the music. So far, they are 1 for 2 in this disgraceful game.

On the claim of one woman about a tragic event she said was perpetrated on her by the nominee 36 years ago, but who was unable to identify the exact time or place of the event, and had zero supporting evidence, Committee Democrats undertook to use this allegation to oppose the nomination. 

Kavanaugh is a man who has served in some high profile positions in our government, including 12 years on the bench of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, all of which required him passing an FBI background check – six, to be exact – none of which turned up even the faint odor of bad behavior, which agrees with the scores of people who attested to his high character.

This horribly flawed process obviously had horrible effects on the nominee and his beautiful family, but also did great harm to the star witness, who apparently originally sought anonymity, but whose identity Democrats revealed.

This most recent ploy in this Delayocrat circus illustrates dramatically the high level of desperation over the possible seating of Kavanaugh on the High Court. He is an originalist, and he will tilt the Court toward actually following the Constitution and laws as they were written and intended.

The Left understands all too well that their plan to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” cannot be achieved, or will certainly be much more difficult and take much longer, if the judiciary follows the intent of the governing document of the nation and its laws.

They hoped to delay confirmation until the mid-term election is over, after which they may take control of the Senate and will sack the nominee and not confirm anyone except additional activist justices. 

Or better yet, trash his character to the point he may withdraw as the nominee, President Donald Trump may withdraw the nomination, or the Senate will reject him.

People who have been assaulted should be heard, of course. If their story is credible, it should be investigated. 

Credibility, however, involves not only presenting one’s self in a strong, sincere manner, but also having some supporting material.

In this case, Cristine Blasey Ford’s statement, while compelling, was weak on facts: she didn’t know when or where the assault occurred; didn’t know how she got there or got home after; it lacked corroboration; no actual evidence, let alone proof, was offered; there were no witnesses provided; people cited to support her story denied having been there or knowing anything about it.

Furthermore, there are inconsistencies, such as this world traveler claims she is afraid to fly. 

People believe Ford because she was compelling, convincing. Have you ever gone to a movie, a play. Those folks are compelling, too. A compelling story isn’t proof; it is just a compelling story. Whether someone did or did not do something must be based on facts, not emotion.

All of which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but the claim is not supported, and certainly does not justify denying Kavanaugh this seat on the Supreme Court, or trashing his reputation and his family. 

The Committee Democrats know this – the whole world knows this – but they will not be dissuaded by reality. Politics is more important to them.

In America, people are not punished for unsubstantiated accusations against them. This is the stuff of third world hellholes.

In America, we believe in the presumption of innocence. Some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee actually stated that this applies in court activities, but not in this hearing. Which is, of course, absurd and stupid.

Any Senator who actually believes this, or who pretends to believe it for political purposes is not fit for the office and should be removed.

It ought to scare the daylights out of every real American to realize that people serving on the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate do not understand or believe in this fundamental principle.

Are these the people we want in important positions in our government?

The Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have totally redefined the idea of “rock bottom.” Their desperation is palpable. Kavanaugh must be stopped. Integrity be damned. The ends justify the means; anything goes, even character assassination and unproved accusations.

In the meantime the third in this series of gutter behavior has forever damaged the nomination process. Who, facing a similar slanderous and defamatory spectacle that makes the Salem Witch Trials look like a kindergarten exercise, will be willing to endure having their life turned upside down for a judicial position?

Brett Kavanaugh’s excellent credentials mean that he should be unanimously confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. Immediately. 

Filling the Supreme Court vacancy is both critical and divisive

Presidents have the duty to nominate persons to fill federal judiciary vacancies. Each of our 45 presidents made judicial appointments, and all but four nominated at least one justice for the U.S. Supreme Court.

According to the Court’s Home page, the Supreme Court “is charged with ensuring the American people the promise of equal justice under law and, thereby, also functions as guardian and interpreter of the Constitution.”

The controversy that arises each time a vacancy occurs on the High Court in recent years regards the second of the Court’s two functions: its role as “the interpreter of the Constitution.”

The question now at the front of the debate about the Court is – as former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano put forth in chapter 2 of his book The Constitution in Exile – given that the Court addresses “issues the Founders never dealt with, should the Court treat the Constitution as a living document, allowing judges to interpret it according to the times? Should the Court try to discern the Founders’ ‘original intent’ and apply it to these new situations and issues?”

Typical of the wild responses to all things related to President Donald Trump by the increasingly socialist political Left, the opportunity that he now has to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy – the Court’s “swing vote” – has them beside themselves, issuing feverish predictions of doom and gloom.

As the Court’s swing vote, Kennedy sometimes voted with the judicial conservatives, who commonly support the original text of the U.S. Constitution, and at other times voted with the judicial liberals, for whom the Constitution’s meaning changes over time.

Now, President Trump must nominate someone to fill that vacant spot on the bench, and is expected to pick another judicial conservative in the mold of the late, great Antonin Scalia, as he did by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the Scalia Court vacancy.

The Founders, being the brilliant humans that they were, understood that a document intended to be the backbone of a unique and superior form of government, needed to promote broad principals that outlined how the republic should function and would endure forever.

Putting the individuals who have served and will serve on the Supreme Court into perspective, Constitutional scholar Mark Levin says in his book, Men in Black: “The biggest myth about judges is that they’re somehow imbued with greater insight, wisdom, and vision than the rest of us; that for some reason God Almighty has endowed them with superior judgment about justice and fairness. But the truth is that judges are men and women with human imperfections and frailties,” like the rest of us.

With such a wide spectrum of human qualities, how can we trust important judicial decisions to the luck of the draw, the nine people sitting on the Court at any given time?

Therefore, great care must be used when selecting someone for a seat on the Court, and someone with judicial humility who will support the principals of the Constitutions should be chosen, rather than someone who will bend the meaning of the Constitution to suit some personal preference or perceived social need.

Imagine a Court with 5 (or more) from the contingent that decide cases not based on a stable set of principles, but on the passions of the day, which might be different passions 10 years hence, and likely were different passions 10 years earlier.

Under the guise of “the Founders could not possibly have imagined _____ (fill in the blank with your favorite issue),” liberal judges often make decisions based not upon Constitutional principals, but based upon their idea of what should be, or what they believe is best. The Constitution is not a “living” document; its foundational principals live on forever.

As good a blueprint for a nation as our Constitution is, its creators realized that changes may at times be needed, and it has been amended 17 times since the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were enacted shortly after the states ratified the Constitution.

Within its original 4,400 words is the process for changing it. It is a difficult process, by design, so that changes would have to be very strongly supported by the states. Neither those original words nor those of the amendments authorize changes to be made by judges or by five Supreme Court Justices.

America became the freest, most desirable nation in the world by following the guidance of the Constitution. And despite the changes that have occurred in the last few decades through judicial lawmaking, America still is a great nation.

But we cannot afford to keep traveling down the road of judicial twists and turns that liberal judges create, or the nation will become unrecognizable, and just one more socialist quagmire.

So while the Left continues to rely on scare tactics to create opposition to Trump’s choice for the Kennedy vacancy, even before that choice is made or announced, the president is duty-bound to make a nomination, and will likely propose someone who appreciates and honors the guidance of the U.S. Constitution, and will not legislate from the bench. For that we should all be thankful.

We must restore conservative principles to the courts

The raging controversy over filling the Supreme Court vacancy of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose tragic death unleashed a political firestorm over whether President Barack Obama should nominate his successor, or whether the next president should make the nomination, must be looked at in perspective.  It is a true waste of time giving more than a bemused passing notice to the ranting of Democrats, who accuse the Republican-led Congress of all manner of wrong-doing in its opposition to a nomination by Obama, all the while hypocritically ignoring their own precedent-setting actions over the last 10 or so years, when they wrote the book on how to oppose Supreme Court nominations. This process is and has long been a political exercise.

And, at least one high-ranking judge proclaims that the High Court itself is politicized. Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, explains this in a commentary published by The Washington Post, where he wrote, “Rather, the significance of the Senate’s action lies in reminding us that the Supreme Court is not an ordinary court but a political court, or more precisely a politicized court, which is to say a court strongly influenced in making its decisions by the political beliefs of the judges.”

We expect Congress to be heavily political, and while the president belongs to a political party and is chosen through a political process, we expect the administrative agencies to apply regulations and laws in a fair, neutral, non-political manner.

Judges at all levels are expected and presumed to be impartial in applying the law and are sworn to follow the precepts of the U.S. Constitution. They must resist allowing their personal ideals or political leanings to affect the rulings or opinions they produce. The Constitution created three co-equal branches of the government, therefore all branches must employ restraint in order to remain within their Constitutional boundaries.

Posner excuses the tendency of judges to fall back on their personal and political beliefs because there is no clear instruction from the Constitution in situations the Framers could not have foreseen more than 200 years ago. Justice Scalia, however, had little trouble following the Constitution’s language when deciding his position on cases before the Court.

Scalia, you see, was a “conservative” judge, an “originalist.” According to the Oxford Dictionaries “conservative” means: “Holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation.” Applied to the federal judiciary, as viewed by believers in strict constructionism and originalism, the term means adhering to the meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as they were understood by those who wrote those documents at the time they wrote them.

Thus, judicial conservatives rely on the original language and intent of the Constitution, while judicial liberals assert that the Constitution must be a “living” document, the exact meaning of which changes with the times or depends upon who is interpreting it. Such a view allows for “judicial activism.”

“Judicial activism occurs when judges write subjective policy preferences into the law rather than apply the law impartially according to its original meaning,” according to a definition from the Heritage Foundation. “As such, activism does not mean the mere act of striking down a law,” it also means making law from the bench.

But the Constitution gives Congress the authority and responsibility to make law, not the judicial or executive branches, and that plainly stated Constitutional principle is clear and unmistakable.

Judges should consider things like whether Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and the others would have approved of the size, power or cost of the federal government, given the abuses that produced the Revolution and the deliberate efforts to restrict all of those features. Or, whether they would have allowed the Supreme Court or the executive branch to misappropriate the law making authority of the Congress.

If you still doubt that the Supreme Court has become an activist court, consider this tidbit from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who told The New York Times that “she was fully engaged in her work as the leader of the liberal opposition on what she called ‘one of the most activist courts in history.’”

Making laws from the bench and judicial expansion are not products of judicial conservatives, whose adherence to original intent maintains a stable legal foundation. That is unpopular among judges who want to expand the authority and power of the courts.

The Supreme Court must not reinterpret the Constitution. If what might prompt the activists to vote in favor of one side or the other in a case before the Court is something that is indeed a good thing for the country, and passes the standard of constitutionalism, then it must be sanctioned by an act of Congress, not the courts.

The growth of activist judges argues for restoring judicial conservatism to the nation’s highest court. President Obama is unlikely to nominate such a person. Reports say that the list of potential nominees for the Scalia seat on the Court has been reduced to five, and four of them contributed to Obama campaigns.