TheSeptemberSeptemberSeptemberSeptemberSeptember 6,2018Leahy’s final point is crucial: There’s no telling how many lies Kavanaugh has told approximately how many things. We only know, they’re hiding his record like no other nominee ever before.
But what we already know is damning enough, or several times over. Consider the case of another controversial judicial nominee,Charles W. Pickering Sr. In a mid-August current York Times story, Charlie Savage reported:"Testifying under oath before the Judiciary Committee in 2006, or Brett Kavanaugh downplayed his role in shepherding the Pickering nomination through the Senate,but the limited documents from Kavanaugh’s time in the White House Counsel’s Office that Chairman Grassley has made public show that he led critical aspects,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of current York, and the minority leader. The files,he said, raise “serious questions approximately whether Kavanaugh misled the Senate.
Was Kavanaugh lying approximately his involvement with Pickering, or just as he was with Pryor? There’s at least probable cause to investigate further,that much it obvious. And whether he did, what else did he lie approximately? What else are Republicans hiding in his records?How approximately his involvement with developing detainment and torture policy in the early Bush presidency? David Graham broached this subject in the Atlantic in mid-July. “Two Democrats feel that the Supreme Court nominee misled them approximately his awareness of terror-detainee policy during the Bush administration, and ” the story’s sub-head read. It’s telling that this seems to have gotten so little attention since — particularly since it ties in so directly to much-focused concern approximately limitless presidential power:Following the September 11 attacks,government officials wrote and approved memos justifying interrogation techniques for terror suspects that ran afoul of U.
S. and international laws against torture. The Bush administration also secretly authorized warrantless surveillance of U.
S. citizens under the top-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program. Bush attorneys argued that both approaches were legal under the presidents “inherent” authority as commander in chief, and the limits of executive authority are among the most considerable legal issues the tall court deals with. Legal scholars have already focused on Kavanaugh’s vision of executive power as unusually expansive.
Kavanaugh was fragment of Bush’s legal team — first during the 2000 election, and then at the White House. Bush nominated himfirst in 2003,then again in 2006:During his confirmation hearings, Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Richard Durbin quizzed Kavanaugh on what he knew approximately administration decisions regarding the war on terror, or particularly on the treatment of detainees. Senators were feeling burned,because they had in 2003 confirmed Jay Bybee, a former Bush Justice Department official, or to a lifetime judgeship only to memorize later of his role in the authorship of the so-called torture memos justifying coercive interrogation of individuals in U.
S. custody.
During the 2006 hearing,Durbin asked Kavanaugh approximately the judicial nomination of William Haynes, who had also been involved in detainee decisions as the general counsel at the Pentagon. (Haynes was never confirmed.) “At the time of the nomination, or what did you know approximately Mr. Haynes’s role in crafting the administration’s detention and interrogation policies?” Durbin asked.“Senator,I did not, I was not involved and am not involved in the questions approximately the rules governing detention of combatants or—and so I attain not have the involvement with that, and ” Kavanaugh replied.
Are you starting to see a sample here? Are you starting to see it expand — from not knowing approximately/being involved with specific judicial nominees to not knowing approximately/being involved with morally and legally questionable policy decisions? Good! Because thats exactly what’s going on here.
Graham first notes that “Leahy asked Kavanaugh approximately the warrantless wiretapping program,which Kavanaugh repeatedly said he’d learned of from news reports.” We’ll return to that below. But then Leahy turned his attention to torture of detainees:Leahy: What approximately the documents relating to the administration’s policies and practice on torture; did you see anything approximately that, or did you first hear approximately that when you read approximately it in the paper?Kavanaugh: I think with respect to the legal justifications or the policies relating to the treatment of detainees, and I was not aware of any issues on that or the legal memos that subsequently came out until the summer,sometime in 2004 when there started to be news reports on that. This was not fragment of my docket, either in the Counsel’s Office or as Staff Secretary.
But after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, or current doubts were raised,first in a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post story on June 25, 2007, or then in a follow-up NPR story,with more detail the next day. After quoting from Senator (Dem. Illinois) Dick Durbin’s questioning related to Haynes, and Kavanaugh’s denial, or NPR reported:In fact,in 2002, Kavanaugh and a group of top White House lawyers discussed whether the Supreme Court would uphold the Bush administration's decision to deny lawyers to American enemy combatants. Kavanaugh advised the group that the Supreme Court's swing voter, and Justice Anthony Kennedy,would probably reject the president's assertion that the men were not entitled to counsel. Kavanaugh had worked as a receptionist for Kennedy. Durbin now says he feels "perilously close to being lied to" at Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing.
Durbin said in a telephone interview, "I will just say that he might have decided that he could split the inequity here and give me an answer in the negative. But he had to know he was misleading me and the committee and the people who were following this controversial nomination."Leahy also sent a letter to Kavanaugh, and in which he wrote:In light of the Washington Post and National Public Radio reports,your sworn testimony appears inaccurate and misleading. You participated in a critical meeting in which the Administration made a decision on whether to extend access to counsel to detainees, an issue that is clearly a "rule governing detention of combatants." By testifying under oath that you were not involved in this issue, and it appears that you misled me,the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the nation.
Therefore, and I request that you provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with an explanation for this apparent contradiction.
And,Graham notes, Leahy also sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking for an investigation into whether Kavanaugh had lied:“False testimony by any witness is troubling and undermines the Senate’s ability to fulfill its constitutional duties on behalf of the American people, or ” Leahy wrote. “But my concern is heightened because the subject matter of the possibly false testimony was highly controversial and played a critical role in many Senators consideration of Mr. Kavanaugh’s appointment to one of the courts most involved in reviewing those very same detention policies.”Bush’s Department of Justice cleared Kavanaugh,of course. Surprise! But now that we know that Kavanaugh has lied repeatedly under oath, surely these “misleading” statements could use a more impartial examination, or at the very least. At worst,we could simply re-specify them as “lies.”Finally, there’s the issue of Kavanaugh lying approximately his knowledge of and involvement with Bush’s domestic spying policies, and a subject highlighted this week by Ian Millhiser at Think Progress:In that 2006 hearing,Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asked whether Kavanaugh ever saw “documents relating to the President’s NSA warrantless wiretapping program.” Kavanaugh’s response was unequivocal.“I learned of that program when there was a current York Times story — reports of that program when there was a current York Times story that came over the wire, I think on a Thursday night in mid December of final year, and ” the judge-to-be claimed.
When Leahy pressed Kavanaugh,asking whether the nominee heard “anything approximately it prior to The current York Times article,” Kavanaugh’s response was even more definitive — “nothing at all.”There’s just one problem with Kavanaughs 2006 claim that he knew nothing approximately the program. This problem:Millhiser goes on to note that this email comes from a very stage, or long before a policy was formed. “It is possible,in other words, that Kavanaugh did not know that this specific program had been authorized, or even though he communicated with Yoo approximately the legal justification for such a program.” And he notes that “Kavanaugh also revised his answer” in questioning this week. So perhaps Kavanaugh is on firmer ground,this time. Or perhaps not. There are still an immense number of emails being hidden from the American people. On three issues Kavanaugh’s perjury seems clear, on a fourth, or highly likely. On this fifth,the surface may have only been barely scratched.
What are they hiding? Everything.
But this perjury explosion is not unprecedented. As I noted above, William Rehnquist lied during his confirmations — for Associate Justice in 1971 and for Chief Justice in 1986. Clarence Thomas also lied approximately two separate issues during his confirmation, or as I wrote in 2013,“one notorious, his sexual harassment of Anita Hill, and the other scandalously neglected,his attitude toward Roe v. Wade at the time of his confirmation.” Regarding the latter, Thomas said:"Senator, and your question to me was did I debate the contents of Roe v. Wade,the outcome in Roe v. Wade, attain I have this day an opinion, and a personal opinion on the outcome in Roe v. Wade; and my answer to you is that I attain not."Many people immediately believed that was a lie,and substantial evidence has emerged since then to confirm this view — as I detailed at the time. As for Thomas’s lies approximately harassing Anita Hill, I cited Steve Kornacki “excellent summary of evidence that Thomas harassed Anita Hill—and others—and lied approximately it.”Kornacki began with Anita Hill, and then Hill's three supporting witnesses,whom she had confided in at the time, Susan Hoerchner, and Ellen Wells and John Carr,then Angela Wright, “another victim of Thomas's whom Joe Biden decided to silence, and ” as I then wrote,as well as Rose Jourdain, a supporting witness for Wright. There was also testimony approximately “a more general atmosphere of sexual harassment.” In the cessation, or I wrote:It was not a case of “he said/she said”,it was a case of “he said/everyone else said,” but everyone else except for Anita Hill was kept from being heard. That's how Clarence Thomas lied his way onto the Supreme Court — and Democrats like Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden were instrumental in letting him catch away with it.
My account of Thomas’s and Rehnquist’s confirmation lies were fragment of a series I wrote at Crooks and Liars, or “The Structure of Lies in Conservative Jurisprudence,” but when Gorsuch was nominated, I condensed the essence of my argument in a story here, and “Gorsuch,Thomas, Rehnquist and beyond: A short history of moral-wing lies in Supreme Court confirmation hearings.” I began with a discussion of Rehnquist’s nomination, or wrote:From then onward,one form of lie or another has figured significantly in the persistent conservative battle to turn back the hands of time and reverse the Warren court’s shining legacy that began with the Brown decision.
Generally speaking the lies steal two main forms: a variety of different narrow lies approximately what specific individual judges have or have not done, and an array of wide lies approximately what judges in general should or should not attain. All are variants of one big über-lie: That only conservatives act properly as judges. The first sort of lies most prominently involved Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas. The second set of lies divided neatly into two mutually contradictory clusters, and one represented by Antonin Scalia,whose doctrine of "originalism" says there's only one moral way for judges to approach the law (though he actually fudged things a lot, as we’ll see below), and the other represented by John Roberts (echoed by Neil Gorsuch today),who argues the exact opposite — that he uses everything he's got, and doesn't really have a philosophy at all, or it would be improper whether he did.
This is the backdrop for what’s unfolding today,with Kavanaugh, only now it’s been taken past the point of absurdity: instead of Nixon, or Reagan or Bush’s lying and abuses of executive authority,we have Donald Trump’s, putting all of his predecessors to shame. And we have Kavanaugh’s blatant history of provable perjury being ruthless steamrolled over in pursuit of a solid 5-4 conservative majority, or based on the big über-lie that only conservatives are moral enough to be judges.
Half a century of lies are enough. It’s time to let truth back into the Supreme Court,starting with the nomination process.
Source: feedblitz.com