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Report: Kavanaugh won’t commit to recusal from Trump/Mueller related matters

Kavanaugh and the Politics of Bad Faith


About more than Kavanaugh.


Activists in Maine opposed to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court are trying to put pressure on Susan Collins, the state’s Republican senator. If Collins votes for Kavanaugh, they say, they will donate substantial sums to her opponent in the next election.

Whatever you think of Kavanaugh, this is surely a legitimate tactic: Donors and activists try to influence politicians’ votes all the time, often by warning of adverse electoral consequences if the politicians make what the activists consider the wrong choice. Last year, for example, major Republican donors openly threatened to withhold contributions unless the party gave them a big tax cut.

But now Collins, other Republicans and conservative activists are describing the pressure over Kavanaugh as “bribery,” “extortion” and “blackmail.” And some of those claiming that normal political activism is somehow illegitimate are the very same big donors who warned Republicans to pass tax cuts or else.

Calling this about-face hypocrisy is fair, but feels inadequate. We’re looking at something much bigger and more pervasive than mere hypocrisy: We’re talking about bad faith on an epic scale.

“Bad faith” is, by the way, a legal term, referring to “entering into an agreement without the intention or means to fulfill it, or violating basic standards of honesty.” In politics, it usually means pretending to be committed to principles you abandon the moment they become inconvenient. And bad faith in this sense pervades almost everything the modern G.O.P. says and does.

The very process that brought Kavanaugh to the brink of a lifetime Supreme Court appointment was saturated in bad faith.

Remember, Republicans wouldn’t even give President Barack Obama’s nominee a hearing, claiming that because Obama was late in his second term the process should wait, leaving a court seat vacant for more than a year, to let voters weigh in. Now they’re trying to ram Kavanaugh through in a matter of weeks, despite incomplete vetting of his legal record and major questions about his personal history. (Explosive sexual charges aside, will anyone ask about his huge personal debts?)

Why the rush? Because there’s a chance the G.O.P. will lose the Senate soon. That whole thing about letting the voters have their say was dishonest from the beginning.

And there are many more examples. Remember when Paul Ryan posed as the ultimate guardian of fiscal responsibility, releasing manifestoes warning in dire terms of the “crushing burden of debt”? The moment Republicans found themselves in control of the White House, Ryan helped ram through a huge tax cut that will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit.

Ryan’s hyperventilating about the deficit was focused mainly on social programs; in particular, he proposed large cuts to Medicare, converting it into a voucher program that would eventually receive far less money than the existing program. Some pundits praised his courage in making such a proposal. But now a political action committee tied to Ryan is running ads falsely accusing Democrats of … planning to cut Medicare.

Wait, there’s more. For years, Republicans tarred their opponents as unpatriotic. Remember the whole thing about Obama supposedly apologizing for America? Now we have a president who praises brutal foreign dictators and whose national security adviser and campaign chairman were both undisclosed foreign agents — and it doesn’t seem to bother the G.O.P. at all.

Oh, and let’s not forget that Bill Clinton was impeached over a consensual affair, because Republicans insisted that the president’s personal behavior must be above reproach. Need I say more?

And there are many, many more such stories. In fact, what’s really hard is to come up with significant areas of politics or policy where Republicans are acting in good faith, where their deeds really correspond to the principles they claim to have. Offhand, I can’t come up with any examples.

Why has the G.O.P. become the party of bad faith? Mainly, I suspect, because its core policy agenda of cutting taxes on the rich while slashing social programs is deeply unpopular. So to win elections it must obscure its true policies — like the Republicans now claiming, falsely, that they want to protect Americans with pre-existing medical conditions — and constantly pretend to stand for things it doesn’t actually care about, from fiscal probity to personal responsibility.

The key thing to realize about the G.O.P.’s near-total commitment to bad faith is that voters aren’t the only victims.

It’s true that many Trump supporters will get a rude shock if Republicans hold Congress, imagining that they’re making America great and losing their health care coverage instead. But bad faith takes a moral toll on Republican politicians, too. We keep seeing people who once appeared to have some sense of decency turn into abject apparatchiks. Remember when Lindsey Graham seemed to have some independent conscience?

Is Susan Collins next? Instead of attacking those activists back in Maine, she should be thanking them, for giving her one last chance to save her political soul.
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Boys Will Be Supreme Court Justices: Kavanaugh’s accuser is credible. Will it matter?

Obviously, I believe Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who says that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school while his friend Mark Judge watched and, at moments, egged him on. I believe her when she says that Kavanaugh, who she says was drunk, held her down, covered her mouth when she tried to scream, and ground against her while attempting to pull her clothes off. I believe her when she says this incident haunted her all her life.

There’s rarely hard evidence in a case like this, but Blasey — the surname she prefers to use publicly — has done everything possible to substantiate her claim. Speaking to The Washington Post, she produced notes from a therapist she saw in 2012, whom she’d told about being attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who grew up to become “high-ranking members of society in Washington.” According to her husband, that year she identified Kavanaugh to him by name. When Kavanaugh appeared on a shortlist of potential Supreme Court picks — but before his nomination had been announced — Blasey contacted both The Post and her member of Congress, Anna G. Eshoo of California. By all indications, she wanted to head his nomination off without being forced into the spotlight.

Blasey passed a polygraph administered by a former F.B.I. agent. The utility of polygraphs is dubious, but her willingness to take one is evidence of her sincerity. According to Axios, some Republicans wanted to call on Blasey to testify publicly, assuming she’d decline. But on Monday morning, Blasey’s lawyer, Debra Katz, said that her client is willing to appear before Congress.

Kavanaugh denies the allegation unequivocally; on Monday he said he’s willing to rebut it before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Judge, who wrote a memoir of his teenage alcoholism, has veered between denying the incident and saying he doesn’t recall it.) But it’s a sign of how credible Blasey seems that, since this story broke, much of the public debate has been less about whether her accusations are true than whether they are relevant.

Some conservatives — though not just conservatives — insist that it is unfair to judge a middle-aged man for things he did as a kid. On Fox News, the former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer pondered the weight of high school misbehavior. “Should that deny us chances later in life?” he asked. “Even for Supreme Court job, a presidency of the United States, or you name it?”

Such arguments would be more convincing if people on the right weren’t so selective in their indulgence. Donald Trump called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were 14 to 16 years old when they were arrested. (They’ve since been proven innocent.) Children are regularly put on sex offender registries, sometimes for their entire lives, for conduct less serious than what Kavanaugh is accused of. In a sour irony, some legal experts think Kavanaugh’s confirmation could imperil Miller v. Alabama, a 2012 decision banning life sentences without parole for most teenage convicts.

Anyway, this is no longer just about what Kavanaugh might have done 36 years ago. We need to determine, as best we can, if he’s lying now. The Judiciary Committee will be able to begin trying to do that at a public hearing next Monday — called by the committee's head, Charles Grassley, under pressure from some members of his own party.

Senators should also demand that Kavanaugh’s old friend Judge, who grew up to become a right-wing writer, testify, though Kavanaugh would surely prefer other character witnesses. (“Oh for the days when President George W. Bush gave his wife, Laura, a loving but firm pat on the backside in public,” Judge once wrote. “The man knew who was boss.”)

There is a small, dark part of me that thinks it would be fitting if Republicans shove Kavanaugh through despite the allegations against him. Anyone Trump nominates is going to threaten Roe v. Wade. Kavanaugh would at least make plain the power dynamics behind forced pregnancy. We would lose Roe because a president who boasted of sexual assault, elected against the wishes of the majority of female voters, was able to give a lifetime Supreme Court appointment to an ex-frat boy credibly accused of attempted rape. Kavanaugh, helped by an all-male Republican caucus on the Judiciary Committee, would join Clarence Thomas, whose confirmation hearing helped make the phrase “sexual harassment” a household term. They and three other men would likely vote against the court’s three women. The brute imposition of patriarchy would be undeniable.

If the Kavanaugh nomination is scuttled, chances are Republicans will try to replace him with someone like Amy Coney Barrett, who is in some ways more conservative. She would put a softer, female face on the culture war. But that’s a fight for another day. On Sunday, Politico quoted a lawyer close to the White House as saying that the administration had redoubled its support for Kavanaugh in light of Blasey’s claims: “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.” If the Kavanaugh nomination goes forward, it’s because Trump and his allies believe that a certain class of men accused of sexual assault deserve impunity. The question now is whether any Republican senators believe otherwise.
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As of now, Grassley is refusing to allow Dr. Ford's psychiatrist and her husband from testifying to her telling them about the assault more than six years ago when Kavanaugh was already a lifetime appointee.

Of course, a pregnant white girl and her Kenyan hubby did conspire to have a baby in Kenya but illegally get a birth certificate and birth announcement in Hawai'i
 
 
They're trying to discourage her from speaking. I'm not sure what Kavanaugh plans to do in his testimony. I also don't know how the Republican Senators can avoid looking bad when questioning her.
 
Yep, they set up a hearing without finding out if she could be there at that time. Ideally they're hoping she cannot, they can say "WELP, we tried," and let Kavanaugh testify about how hard this has been on his family.
 
I mean they think doomsday scenario if he’s not confirmed. This means he doesn’t get confirmed, the Democrats take the house and the senate in 6 weeks, Trump and their agenda is dead in the water, investigations of all the corruption and trump, trump is a dead weight sinking them down further as he flails and flails, the democrats say no to any judge because an investigated/impeached president shouldn’t nominate a justice, the court remains 4-4 so all lower rulings stay, the dead weight rube piece of shit results in a 2020 wipe out, confirmation of a liberal justice, 1950s dream dead.
 
avalon said:
Yep, they set up a hearing without finding out if she could be there at that time. Ideally they're hoping she cannot, they can say "WELP, we tried," and let Kavanaugh testify about how hard this has been on his family.
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Fuck her. She had 35 years to get her shit together. Now it’s time for this attention whore to stage exit left. Her purpose for the D’s has been served
 
No Gasshat you stupid bastard. It is the D’s who are freaking out and pulling all manner of shit to sling at the wall like the fuggin monkeys they are.
 
PhDeac said:
They're trying to discourage her from speaking. I'm not sure what Kavanaugh plans to do in his testimony. I also don't know how the Republican Senators can avoid looking bad when questioning her.
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They are not discouraging anything. They know this chick is going to make a dam fool out of herself. Dems know this..

Hers was never a legitimate charge. This was a stall plain and simple.

Kavanaugh and Judge day they were not there. So you ain’t got shit on the legal end either. One big Democrat lie
 
So which is it, did the event never happen or did it happen and just isn't a big deal because Kavanaugh was "just 17?"
 
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