RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-abandon-the-constitution-1539645364

Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court has sparked a firestorm of outrage and recrimination on the left. Some attacks seem aimed at intimidating the justices into supporting progressive causes. “The Court must now prove—through its work—that it is worthy of the nation’s trust,” Eric Holder, President Obama’s attorney general, tweeted Oct. 6.

Yet the attacks go beyond ideology. Detractors of Justice Kavanaugh and President Trump are denouncing the Constitution itself and the core elements of America’s governmental structure:

• The Electoral College. Mr. Trump’s opponents claim he is an illegitimate president because Hillary Clinton “won the popular vote.” One commentator even asked “what kind of nation allows the loser of a national election to become president.” The complaint that the Electoral College is undemocratic is nothing new. The Framers designed it that way. They created a republican form of government, not a pure democracy, and adopted various antimajoritarian measures to keep the “demos” in check.

The Electoral College could be eliminated by amending the Constitution. But proposing an amendment requires two-thirds votes in both houses of Congress, and the legislatures of three-fourths, or 38, of the states would have to ratify it.

• The Senate. The complaint here is that the 50 senators who voted in Justice Kavanaugh’s favor “represent” fewer people than the 48 who voted against him. But senators represent states, not people.

Equal Senate representation for the states was a key part of the Connecticut Compromise, along with House seats apportioned by population. The compromise persuaded large and small states alike to accept the new Constitution. It was so fundamental that Article V of the Constitution—which spells out the amendment procedure—provides that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” That means an amendment changing the structure of the Senate would require ratification by all 50 states.

• Judicial independence. Commentators who disapprove of the Supreme Court’s composition have urged, as one law professor put it, “shrinking the power of the courts to overrun our citizens’ democratic decisions.” Some suggest limiting and staggering the justices’ terms so that a vacancy would come up every other year, ensuring that the court follows the election returns. That could be achieved via constitutional amendment, but it would go against the Framers’ wisdom. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, life tenure for judges is “the best expedient which can be devised in any government, to secure a steady, upright and impartial administration of the laws.”

Some of Justice Kavanaugh’s detractors have demanded that if Democrats take the House next month, they open an investigation into the sex-crime allegations Senate Democrats failed to substantiate. But although Congress has wide oversight powers with respect to the executive branch, it has no such oversight authority over the judiciary. The only way the House can legitimately investigate a sitting judge is in an impeachment proceeding.

And Justice Kavanaugh cannot be impeached for conduct before his promotion to the Supreme Court. Article III provides that judges “hold their Offices during good Behavior,” so that a judge can be removed only for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” committed during his term in office. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-am-an-independent-impartial-judge-1538695822

I was deeply honored to stand at the White House July 9 with my wife, Ashley, and my daughters, Margaret and Liza, to accept President Trump’s nomination to succeed my former boss and mentor, Justice Anthony Kennedy, on the Supreme Court. My mom, Martha—one of the first women to serve as a Maryland prosecutor and trial judge, and my inspiration to become a lawyer—sat in the audience with my dad, Ed.

That night, I told the American people who I am and what I believe. I talked about my 28-year career as a lawyer, almost all of which has been in public service. I talked about my 12 years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, often called the second most important court in the country, and my five years of service in the White House for President George W. Bush. I talked about my long record of advancing and promoting women, including as a judge—a majority of my 48 law clerks have been women—and as a longtime coach of girls’ basketball teams.

As I explained that night, a good judge must be an umpire—a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no political party, litigant or policy. As Justice Kennedy has stated, judges do not make decisions to reach a preferred result. Judges make decisions because the law and the Constitution compel the result. Over the past 12 years, I have ruled sometimes for the prosecution and sometimes for criminal defendants, sometimes for workers and sometimes for businesses, sometimes for environmentalists and sometimes for coal miners. In each case, I have followed the law. I do not decide cases based on personal or policy preferences. I am not a pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant judge. I am not a pro-prosecution or pro-defense judge. I am a pro-law judge.

As Justice Kennedy showed us, a judge must be independent, not swayed by public pressure. Our independent judiciary is the crown jewel of our constitutional republic. The Supreme Court is the last line of defense for the separation of powers, and for the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

At last count more than 1,700 law professors have signed an open letter complaining that Judge Brett Kavanaugh “displayed a lack of judicial temperament” in responding to uncorroborated sexual assault accusations against him. In his 12 years on the federal bench, Judge Kavanaugh has produced ample evidence of his judicial temperament. If anyone’s temperament should be of concern to these professors, it’s that of their students, enthralled by identity politics and victim ideology.

Immediately after President Trump nominated Judge Kavanaugh in July, hundreds of Yale law students, alumni and faculty signed a petition claiming the nomination presented an “emergency . . . for our safety.” When Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations became public in September, Yale law students convened a town hall to combat a “culture” on campus “that privileges power and prestige over safety and wellness, [and] that precludes many of us from flourishing in this space.”

When the New Yorker published its own uncorroborated account of lewd conduct purportedly committed by Mr. Kavanaugh as a Yale freshman, Yale law-school alumnae organized an open letter supporting “all women who have faced sexual assault, not only at Yale, but across the country.” Thirty-one Yale law professors canceled classes to facilitate student protests against Judge Kavanaugh, both in New Haven and on Capitol Hill. The Office of Student Affairs put out a plate of cookies to let students “know we are thinking of you.”

Not to be outdone, Harvard law students walked out of their classes the day after the New Yorker article appeared, wearing pink buttons declaring “I Believe Christine Blasey Ford.” America must “stand by these survivors,” the president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association told the crowd. The dean of students announced, “We are supporting our students as they grapple with these issues.” Whether she provided cookies is unknown.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kavanaugh-and-the-senates-honor-1538695662

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a Senate vote for Friday morning to close debate and move Brett Kavanaugh toward a final confirmation vote on Saturday, and it’s about time. The undecided Senators have had their extra week for an FBI probe, the review has turned up nothing to support the assault accusations against him, and now Senators should vote to put a worthy judge on the Supreme Court.

Democrats are complaining that the FBI report is incomplete, but then no report would satisfy them unless it found evidence that apparently doesn’t exist. “The most notable part of this report is what’s not in it,” said Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She thinks accusations that have no corroboration are credible because the FBI can’t prove that something didn’t happen.

***

The FBI was always likely to turn up little new evidence because Christine Blasey Ford recalls so little about the assault she says took place 36 years ago. The witnesses she says were there, including her best friend, say they don’t recall the party or refute that it happened. There are no corroborating witnesses and no incriminating evidence, and Ms. Ford’s story about key details also keeps changing.

The best summary of her case is in the memo by Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona prosecutor who specializes in sexual-assault cases and was invited to question Ms. Ford by Judiciary Republicans. “A ‘he said, she-said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that,” Ms. Mitchell wrote. “I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee. Nor do I believe that this evidence is sufficient to satisfy the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/04/science-shows-people-regularly-remember-thing

In 2015, the National Academy of Sciences released a report summarizing decades of rigorous evidence demonstrating that people regularly ‘recall things we never experienced.’

“Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.” — George Santayana, “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”

In 1975, a young woman was brutally raped in her home while she was watching TV. Shortly thereafter, she identified her assailant as Dr. Donald Thomson. On the basis of her compelling and apparently credible testimony, Thomson was arrested and charged despite having an irrefutable alibi.

In an ironic and exculpatory turn of events, authorities discovered that, prior to the attack, the woman had been watching Thomson on live TV discussing the inaccuracies of eye-witness testimony and simply confused his face with that of her rapist’s. As bizarre as this incident may appear, false memories in concert with compelling but false testimony is often the rule rather than the exception.

For example, the failure of memory and recall contributed to the wrongful criminal convictions of 75 percent of the first 250 cases in which DNA evidence exonerated the incarcerated individuals. In 2015, the National Academy of Sciences released a reportsummarizing decades of rigorous evidence demonstrating that common cognitive processes lead us to “recall things we never experienced.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/04/the-campus

The polarizing atmosphere of the university has now spread to Congress.

During the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, we witnessed how college values have become the norms of the Senate. On campus, constitutional due process vanishes when accusations of sexual harassment arise. America saw that when false charges were lodged against the Duke University lacrosse players and during Rolling Stone magazine’s concocted smear of a University of Virginia fraternity.

Americans may disagree about the relative credibility of either Kavanaugh or his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. But they all witnessed how the asymmetry of the campus governed the hearings.

Ford’s veracity hinged on empathy and perceived believability. There was little requirement of corroborating testimonies, witnesses and what used to be called physical evidence. In contrast, Kavanaugh was considered guilty from the start. He had to prove his innocence.

One belief of the university is the postmodern idea of relativist truth.

On campus, all can present equally valid narratives. What privileges one story over another is not necessarily any semblance to reality, at least as established by evidence and facts. Instead, powerful victimizers supposedly “construct” truths based on their own self-interests. As a result, self-described victims of historical biases are under no obligation to play by what they consider to be rigged rules of facts, evidence or testimony.

This dynamic explains why Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J) insisted that Dr. Ford told “her truth.” In other words, evidence was not so relevant. Ford’s story of events from 36 years ago inherently would have as much claim on reality as Kavanaugh’s rebuttal—and perhaps more so, given their different genders and asymmetrical access to power.

There was little interest in discovering the ancient idea of the Truth. To do that would have required the messy work of taxing the memories of teenage behavior nearly four decades prior.

Truth-finding would have required difficult, time-honored examinations of physical evidence, the testimony of witnesses, and even unpleasant cross-examinations about the time and place of the allegations. Feelings might have been hurt. Motives might have been questioned, as they are under constitutional norms of due process.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/2001_video_shows_obama_admitting_being_a_thug_fighting_drinking_drugging_in_high_school.html

The standards being applied to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness for high office would have killed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, among other recent Democrats (Clinton and Kennedy, for starters). Bill Clinton has adopted a low public profile, and deployed Hillary’s ”Bimbo Eruptions” squad to silence and discredit the women “survivors” of his sexual aggression. But Barack Obama went on the record in 2001, and nobody cared about behavior in high school they now feign outrage over in the case of judge Kavanaugh.

Kudos to Ryan Saavedra of The Daily Wire for uncovering a video from 17 years ago in which Barack Obama discusses his own behavior in high school. Evaluating it in light of the claims used to pretend that Brett Kavanaugh was too degenerate in high school and college to merit membership on the Supreme Court reveals the utter hypocrisy of Kavanaugh’s opponents.

While it is true that the unsupported claims of rape attributed to Kavanaugh have no counterpart in Obama’s admissions, the “evidence” against Kavanaugh’s character including drinking and “ralphing” is pale compared to what Obama admits to.

-“I was a thug,” a “mischievous child”
-“I got into fights.”
-“I drank and did–and consumed substances that weren’t always legal.”
-“I might have drank a six-pack in an hour before going back to class”

In point of fact, most people not crazed by desire to maintain the Supreme Court as a means of imposing progressive social policy that is too unpopular to pass Congress understand that childhood foibles should not be held against anyone.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271502/investigate-senate-democrat-wrecking-machine-michelle-malkin

How did we get here? The Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination circus didn’t happen by accident. The emergence of incredible — and by “incredible,” I mean the literal Merriam-Webster definition of “too extraordinary and improbable to be believed” — accusers in the 11th hour was no mistake.

It is my contention that this grand unearth-and-destroy spectacle was planned, coordinated and facilitated by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats and their staffers.

After the FBI finishes its Freshmen Booze Investigations, Federal Barfight Interrogations and Fraternity Barfing Incidents probe of every last Yale and Holton Arms acquaintance and publicity hound ever photographed with Judge Brett Kavanaugh, every cog in the Resistance Wrecking Machine must be investigated:

Protest Orchestration. The hearings were doomed from the very start, when 70 screaming demonstrators (including Women’s March holy warrior Linda Sarsour and actress Piper Perabo) systematically infiltrated the Hart Senate Office Building and disrupted the proceedings in Hour One of Day One. Day Two saw another 72 social justice mobsters arrested, with more than 200 total taken into custody by Capitol Police by the end of Day Three.

Taxpayers have a right to know who sponsored the deliberate sabotage and abuse of the gallery pass privilege, which has been in place since 1890. As the U.S. Senate website notes, “A code of conduct for visitors to the galleries is set by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and is enforced by the doorkeepers … each gallery pass requires the ‘signature’ of a senator or officer of the Senate.” We’ve seen this partisan-organized circus mayhem before.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/its-all-gone-the-democrats-dead-ideals/

As the spurious case against Brett Kavanaugh disintegrates, splinters, and re-forms into a cacophony of whiny, irrelevant expostulations, it is instructive to step back and survey the field upon which this battle took place.

The ground is littered with dead and wounded ideals: civility, dead; basic decency, dead; the presumption of innocence, gravely wounded, ditto for the idea of due process. And this disgusting carnage is all on you, O ancient one, Dianne Feinstein, and your self-important, preposterous colleagues. You were desperate to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court so you abandoned any semblance of decency and respect. You travestied the processes of the United States Senate for the sake of a cynical grab at power. I’d say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but, like the thugs that you are, you have no shame. You believe the acquisition of power is a magical antidote to shame. You are wrong about that, and one can only hope that you will one day reap some portion of the obloquy you have sowed.

It is not yet clear what the snarling, incontinent attacks on Brett Kavanaugh will mean for him and his family. Early indications are not encouraging.

For many years, Judge Kavanaugh has taught a course at Harvard Law School. A couple of days ago, that Cambridge-based plutocratic bastion of privilege, smugness, and political correctness announced that Judge Kavanaugh was no longer welcome to teach there. Later, a coven of lonely and unappealing Harvard feminists filed a battery of groundless Title IX claims against him.

Hundreds of alumni, students, and faculty of Yale Law School have signed an open letter denouncing the school’s implicit support of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Among other things, the signatories of this malodorous missive say that Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination represents “an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country. … Without a doubt, Judge Kavanaugh is a threat to the most vulnerable. He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are.”

What are these people talking about? But it is not insanity that moves them. It is malice and the desire for power.

Judge Kavanaugh mentioned in his testimony that one of his delights was coaching girls basketball. Will he be allowed to do that in the future? It is unclear. A putrid column in USA Today by Erik Brady — silently redacted after a cataract of outrage — said that “he should stay off basketball courts for now when kids are around.”

Who knows what toll the mob hysteria against him has taken on his wife and two young daughters. One of the most moving moments of his testimony last week came when he mentioned that one of his daughters suggested during evening prayers that they ought to pray for Christine Ford, the hysteric who first accused Judge Kavanaugh of committing an impropriety 36 years ago at a high school party. A wretched cartoonist for a large national newspaper — I won’t say which one, and I will forbear to link to that piece of filth — depicted the judge’s daughter on her knees praying that God forgive “my angry, lying, alcoholic father for assaulting Dr. Ford.”

There are not words sufficiently contemptuous to describe this repulsive display. Several commentators have drawn parallels between the unfounded attacks on Judge Kavanaugh and the tirades of Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. A better parallel, perhaps, is the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was ritually humiliated, drummed out of the French army, and given a sentence of life imprisonment on trumped up charges of espionage. He was eventually cleared, years later, but his career had been shattered and his life ruined. “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/christine-blasey-ford-lawyers-withhold-information-pending-fbi-interview/

Lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to sexually assault her, are refusing to turn over to Congress certain pieces of evidence she has cited to the Senate until she has been interviewed by the FBI, which is investigating the allegations.

Notes from Ford’s therapy sessions that mention the assault as well as the results of a polygraph test she took will be turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee only after the FBI interviews her, her attorneys said in a letter to Committee chairman Chuck Grassley.

“Dr. Ford is prepared to provide those documents to the FBI when she is interviewed,” the letter said. “We have not yet heard from the FBI about scheduling an interview with her.”

The California psychology professor says Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her at a party when they were both in high school, pinning her to a bed, covering her mouth, and trying to undress her before she managed to escape. She testified to Congress on Thursday about the alleged assault, and Kavanaugh afterwards presented the Committee with an emotional defense, categorically denying all accusations against him.

Grassley requested the documents Tuesday evening in a letter to Ford’s attorneys.

A sworn statement from an ex boyfriend of Ford’s suggested that she may have perjured herself and raised “specific concerns about the reliability of her polygraph examination results,” the Iowa Republican warned. “The Senate therefore needs this information,” he wrote.rassley said Wednesday that a cloture vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination could come as soon as Friday.