Brett Kavanuagh is a DC insider, i.e. he's a Bush Administration stooge who has helped the Bush Administration with misleading the public on Iraq and god knows what else! Such a judge shouldn't even be on the circuit much less as a Supreme Court nominee.
New hearing revives question of whether Kavanaugh lied under oath Rachel Maddow looks at Brett Kavanaugh's testimony in his previous Senate confirmation hearing and how facts learned subsequently contradict his answers, an issue likely to come up now that he faces a new confirmation hearing for a seat on the Supreme Court.
Brett Kavanaugh has used government power to hold back an immigrant from seeking federally and medically approved services and instead imposed his religious views on her. That is not just unconstitutional that is kidnapping by the State...
U.S. women see reason to reject Trump SCOTUS pick Brett Kavanaugh Rachel Maddow outlines the historic depth of the unpopularity of Donald Trump's pick for Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, and and unearths audio of Kavanaugh looking for legalistic excuses to keep a 17-year-old pregnant immigrant from exercising her constitutional right to an abortion.
Kavanaugh accused of misapplying SCOTUS precedent on abortionNancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, talks with Rachel Maddow about why her organization has officially opposed Donald Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, the first time in the organization's 25-year history that it has taken such a position.
Kavanaugh behavior on bench suggests opposition to Roe v. Wade Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Brett Kavanaugh's apparent resistance to allowing a pregnant immigrant access to an abortion contributes to the notion that he would help overturn Roe v. Wade if he were faced with that issue on the Supreme Court.
GOP's War On the Constitution
GOP are continuing with their unconstitutional and immoral behavior;
Ahead of Kavanaugh hearings, GOP prefers secrecy to transparency
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) last week helped organize a curious political stunt. The Utah Republican wrote a joint letter with Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to the panel’s Democratic members, explaining how impressed they are with the committee’s Republican chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and the work he’s done ahead of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmations hearings.
The point of the partisan endeavor was apparently to tell Dems, in writing, how impressed Republicans are with themselves. Indeed, among other things, Hatch’s letter commendedGrassley for conducting “the most thorough and transparent vetting possible.”
I especially enjoyed the use of the word “possible” – as in, there’s simply no way anyone, at any time, could’ve done a more thorough and transparent job in reviewing a high court nominee’s professional background. It’s not even possible.
Meanwhile, in reality, there’s a nearly three-year period from Kavanaugh’s tenure in the Bush/Cheney White House that senators were supposed to be able to review as part of the vetting process, but which Senate Republicans have declared off limits for reasons they haven’t fully explained.
Late last week, “the most thorough and transparent vetting possible” became even less thorough and far less transparent.
The Trump administration is withholding more than 100,000 pages of Brett Kavanaugh’s records from the Bush White House on the basis of presidential privilege ahead of the Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation hearing.The Senate Judiciary Committee was notified of the action Friday. George W. Bush’s attorney Bill Burck told the panel it had essentially completed its work compiling documents, according to a letter obtained by The Associated Press. Bush directed them to err “on the side of transparency and disclosure, and we believe we have done so.”But the current administration is also able to review the records, and the Trump White House “has directed that we not provide these documents,” the letter says.
If there’s a sensible defense for this, it’s hiding well.
The context, of course, deserves special attention: Team Trump waited until late on a Friday, ahead of a holiday weekend, to announce that it’s decided to hide more than 100,000 pages from Kavanaugh’s records.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, “We’re witnessing a Friday night document massacre. President Trump’s decision to step in at the last moment and hide 100,000 pages of Judge Kavanaugh’s records from the American public is not only unprecedented in the history of Supreme Court nominations, it has all the makings of a cover-up…. What are they trying so desperately to hide?”
By way of comparison, it’s important to note that one of Barack Obama’s nominees for the high court, Elena Kagan, also had White House experience. And yet, the total number of pages the Democratic president kept hidden from the Senate was zero.
There’s no shortage of substantive concerns related to Kavanaugh’s nomination. In the coming days, senators should grapple with his far-right worldview, his eagerness to advance his political agenda, the evidence that suggests he may have lied to the Senate under oath, and even his controversial finances.
And while each of these angles matters a great deal, there’s a foundational controversy that should, in theory, halt the process before it even begins: senators will not have an opportunity to review the nominee’s record before weighing whether to reward him with a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court.
Before Kavanaugh was even chosen for the vacancy, GOP leaders realized his extensive paper trail could pose a political problem. Trump and his Republican allies have found a way around that problem: they decided not to care.
Postscript: Last night, Bush lawyer Bill Burck, a former Kavanaugh colleague, released another 42,000 pages of materials from the Supreme Court nominee’s past to the Senate Judiciary Committee (not to the public). If you’re wondering how senators and their aides can read 42,000 pages of documents in one night – the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings begin this morning – the answer is they can’t.
- Update Sep 5, 2018-
GOP carries Kavanaugh weight to protect legally precarious Trump Rachel Maddow points out that while many judges are as reliably conservative as Brett Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh is distinct for his opposition to prosecuting presidents, which likely explains the lengths to which Republicans are going to conceal Brett Kavanaugh's past record and rush him onto the Supreme Court.
GOP's "Height Of Hypocrisy" Series
Parkland victim's father: Kavanaugh turned away when I brought up my daughter Fred Guttenberg gets The Last Word on the day that Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee turned away from him when he tried to introduce himself at Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Guttenberg explains what happened and why he is concerned about Brett Kavanaugh’s record.
The NRA, Right Wing & Guns
- Update Sep 6, 2018 -
Kavanaugh continues to prove that he shouldn't be a Judge in a Democracy (maybe that's why Trump wants him?)...
Sen. Amy Klobuchar: Kavanaugh has ‘very expansive’ view of executive powerSen. Amy Klobuchar steps out of the hearing with Brett Kavanaugh to share her impressions of the judge, who she says has "very expansive view of executive power."
Veracity of Kavanaugh testimony under oath challenged at hearingRachel Maddow reviews highlights of Brett Kavanaugh's Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearing, from his ducking questions about prosecuting presidents to questions about whether he was truthful in his past Senate testimony.
Kavanaugh ducks answering on points of personal controversy Senator Cory Booker talks with Rachel Maddow about his frustrations getting straight answers from Brett Kavanaugh at today's Supreme Court confirmation hearing, compounded by Republicans withholding information about Kavanaugh's record.
- Update Sep 7, 2018 -
Only the brave can win fair maidens heart...er, I mean fighting liars can only be done with bravery if you are to fulfill your oath to the Constitution and your responsibilities to the people...
Senator Cory Booker blasts SCOTUS hearing Senator Cory Booker dares Republicans to expel him for violating what he calls a sham rule in the Senate confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Overlap in Kavanaugh nomination, Trump Russia probe becomes clear Rachel Maddow points out that between the selection of Brett Kavanaugh for his position on presidential prosecutions and the choice of a lawyer for witnesses in the Trump Russia investigation to process Kavanaugh documents, the Kavanaugh nomination and the Russia investigation are more related than they appear on the surface.
Swalwell: Kavanaugh 'the wrong judge at the wrong time' Rep. Eric Swalwell talks with Rachel Maddow about why the Trump Russia investigation should not just preclude Donald Trump from naming a Supreme Court justice, but should also rule out Brett Kavanaugh.
Nixon's White House counsel to testify against Kavanaugh FridayRachel Maddow alerts viewers that among the witnesses to testify in the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hearing on Friday will be John Dean, Richard Nixon's former White House counsel, who will speak against Kavanaugh's views on investigating a president.
Kavanaugh denies discussing Russia probe with Trump lawyer's firm Senator Kamala Harris talks with Rachel Maddow about Brett Kavanaugh's evasiveness on whether he discussed Robert Mueller's Trump Russia investigation with anyone from the law firm of Marc Kasowitz, a lawyer retained by Donald Trump.
Also, media is gossiping like high school children, certainly not doing thier jobs (flashback?);
The apathy in the media regarding Brett Kavanaugh is a national scandal
Picture this: A controversial, deeply unpopular president mired in scandal makes a Supreme Court nomination that his party is desperately trying to jam through the process before virtually anything is known about the nominee. Then, in the middle of it, an anonymous senior official in the president’s administration pens an op-ed in The New York Times that lays out serious questions about the president’s fitness for office and the dangers he poses to the country. You’d think that conversation in the media would focus on the fact that this president -- who is so unstable that his own senior staff members are sounding the alarm -- is about to make a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
You’d be wrong.
Let’s start at the beginning. In late June, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, and President Donald Trump moved quickly to nominate Brett Kavanaugh -- a former George W. Bush administration official who currently sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- to replace him. Kavanaugh’s path to confirmation has carried all the hallmarks of the Trump administration: conflicts of interest, unprecedented secrecy, violations of norms, whiffs of corruption, and lies.
Senate Republicans have assisted the Trump White House in obscuring Kavanaugh’s full record, particularly related to his time at the Bush White House. Senate Judiciary Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) requested only 10 to 15 percent of the documents available from Kavanaugh’s time at the White House. According to Democrats, just 4 percent of Kavanaugh’s White House records were made public at the outset of confirmation hearings. Some 101,921 pages were not released due to a dubious, last-minute claim of executive privilege by the Trump administration. Additionally, mere hours before Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing was to begin, the administration dumped over 40,000 documents on the committee for members to somehow review before the hearing began.
On top of that, the documents were vetted and cleared by an outside team led by a Republican operative, attorney, and personal friend of Kavanaugh named William Burck before they were released to the Senate Judiciary Committee. This was an unprecedented move that the National Archives, which normally conducts such reviews, went out of its way to distance itself from the document production process, issuing a statement saying that this “has never happened before” and that it did not “represent the National Archives or the George W. Bush Presidential Library.”
Burck was a close colleague of Kavanaugh’s in the Bush administration, and more recently, as reported by Vox, he also “represented at least three current or former Trump White House officials” -- White House counsel Don McGahn, former Trump chief of staff and Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, and former senior White House adviser Steve Bannon -- in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russia. But that’s not all: Apparently, Republican leaders did initially think a more complete review of Kavanaugh’s record was appropriate … until they held a private meeting with McGahn in July and abruptly reversed course.
Even still, using the paucity of documents made available, senators have all but accused Kavanaugh of lying under oath during his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings to become a federal appeals court judge. Back then, to quote Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) from Wednesday’s confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh was questioned“extensively” about a Bush administration-era scandal in which “two Republican [congressional] staffers … regularly hacked into the private computer files of six Democratic senators,” stole thousands of files, then used those files “to assist in getting President Bush's most controversial judicial nominees confirmed.” At the time, as Leahy explained, Kavanaugh repeatedly denied that he had any idea about these activities and claimed he had never received any of the stolen materials. We now know that’s a lie. During Kavanaugh’s first day of questioning, Leahy confronted him with an email clearly showing Kavanaugh was in possession of some of the stolen documents and strongly suggested that Republicans were withholding documents that showed that not only did Kavanaugh receive stolen documents, but he also knew damn well they were stolen. (Leahy showed additional stolen emails sent to Kavanaugh during the second day of questioning, including one with the subject line “spying.”)
Normally, a Supreme Court nominee apparently committing perjury during a confirmation hearing would be explosive news that’s covered extensively. Normally, reporters would be shouting about the records that continue to be withheld. Normally, they would ask, “What are they hiding?” Such scrutiny is even more important considering the the other major news story of the day -- that a senior administration official published an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times confirming numerous other reports that the White House is a volatile shitshow run by a madman whose fitness for office is routinely questioned by the very people working for him.
If you thought that would be the tenor of the evening news coverage on September 5, you’d be wrong. For instance, none of the broadcast newscasts reported on the very real possibility -- raised by evidence presented in the hearings -- that Kavanaugh lied under oath about knowingly receiving stolen documents when he worked in the Bush administration. And the controversy surrounding the withholding of documents about his record was hardly mentioned at all. ABC and NBC News made no mention of the extremely contentious issue, while CBS News simply reported that “several Democrats also complained today, like they did yesterday, that they needed more documents to consider this nomination, but Republicans said that was just politics, that they had more documents on Kavanaugh than any nominee in history.”
Instead, the Beltway press has been far more interested in gossiping about the chaos within the White House than discussing what it expected to be “very long days” filled with “long, boring” testimony. A Media Mattersreview of the broadcast networks’ morning and evening news programs, for instance, showed that since the first day of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings ended, the networks have spent over twice as much time covering leaked passages of Bob Woodward’s upcoming book Fear -- which reported what we already knew about the volatile environment within the White House -- and the anonymous op-ed than they did covering the Kavanaugh hearing.
What should have already been a newsworthy story about a scandalous process including a potential cover-up should have been even more newsworthy when you consider the fact that this was all happening in order to rush through a Supreme Court pick chosen by a person whose own staff says he isn’t fit to be in office.
You’d think the press would be interested in covering it.
- Update Sep, 2018 -
Being a "partisan warrior", while being perfectly in line with Republican propaganda and politics, is completely inappropriate for the impartiality expected of an American judge. Maybe Russia would be a better place for him?
Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh called GOP ‘partisan warrior’Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh was described as ‘a partisan warrior’ by journalist David Brock, who penned an opinion alleging Kavanaugh is ‘in his bones a Republican operative’—not impartial. Joy Reid is joined by Brock on his allegations, then she and her panel discuss.
Documents expose Kavanaugh as political operator in GOP machine Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and legal correspondent at Slate, talks with Rachel Maddow about what Brett Kavanaugh's past documents and contradictions in his testimony reveal about his political nature.
By calling birth control pills "abortion inducing drugs" Brett Kavanaugh is supporting an ancient Roman Catholic Church belief (also in context of a a religious group) which is so unconstitutional that I'm surprised he's even a judge (i.e. choosing religion over the Constitution). This also fits the right wings abortion terrorism movement and suggests even worse things about Brett's character.
Hearing highlights extent of Kavanaugh's anti-abortion extremism Rachel Maddow looks at how Brett Kavanaugh's views on abortion and even birth control were revealed in the course of his Senate confirmation hearing.
Media is continuing its war on the people (by not presenting/pushing essential information to the public, such as FOX NEWS IS LYING)...
13 critical moments of Brett Kavanaugh's Senate hearing Many media outlets downplayed the hearings, but they were full of newsworthy moments
The two days of public questioning of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have featured explosive, important, and revealing moments -- at least when Democrats were asking the questions. However, the public may have missed these instances because the evening news shows on three major cable news channels and broadcast networks paid insufficient attention to the hearing, breaking off from it hours early or devoting more coverage to dysfunction in the Trump administration.
According to some media reports, Republicans were confident that the hearings would go smoothly and that efforts of Kavanaugh’s opponents “failed to get serious traction” before the hearings began. Perhaps that’s because in the lead-up to the hearing, the network evening news shows barely even mentioned Kavanaugh’s name, and as the hearing continues, they are focusing much more coverage on the latest revelation of chaos in the Trump White House. And let’s not forget that Associated Press wire stories about the Supreme Court nominee in the first six weeks since Kavanaugh’s nomination featured about 50 percent more pro-Kavanaugh voices than anti-Kavanaugh voices. News organizations have been treating Kavanaugh’s nomination as an inevitable confirmation -- but some revelatory exchanges from the hearing should change that.
Here are some of the most illuminating moments you may have missed:
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) repeatedly questioned Kavanaugh on his use of documents stolen from Democratic staffers when Kavanaugh worked on judicial nominations for the George W. Bush White House. He further explored whether Kavanaugh’s claim that he didn’t know the documents were stolen is believable: ...
Read full article here.- Update Sep 12, 2018 -
Clearly Brett Kavanaugh would be bad for Native Americans and represents a long tradition of Southern Genocide and general Christian based religious meanness to the Natives of this great land...
Murkowski gets local pressure to vote against Kavanaugh Rachel Maddow reports on how Brett Kavanaugh's record on indigenous people's rights is of particular concern to Senator Lisa Murkowski's constituents in Alaska.
How can a judge not be impeached for lying under oath?
Kavanaugh called out for false statements on stolen documentsLisa Graves, former Senate Judiciary Committee chief counsel for nominations, argues that Brett Kavanaugh has lied in past testimony under oath about stolen Democratic documents and should not only not be confirmed to the Supreme Court, but should be impeached from the bench.
- Update Sep 20, 2018 -
Sam Bee breaks down Brett Kavanaugh's latest scandal;
Brett Kavanaugh: No More Nineties Reboots, Please | September 19, 2018 Act 1 | Full Frontal on TBS
Republicans are doing what they do best. Treason.
Lawrence: Sen. Grassley proves that Sen. Grassley is lyingIn 1991, The Senate Judiciary Committee pushed for the FBI to investigate Anita Hill's claims against Clarence Thomas. But now, Chairman Grassley is refusing the request by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford for an independent FBI investigation into her allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.
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