By Jack Le Moine
Given what happened during the confirmation process, this is a significant event in current history. Here are some thoughts.
There is a big difference between a cause and a case. It is the difference between the general and the specific.
- General: Murder is wrong; robbery is wrong; extortion is wrong; embezzlement is wrong; and rape is wrong, too.
- Specific: The individual that is accused on committing one of those specific crimes may be innocent of doing that.
- Question: If the accused are all guilty, then why do we have trials at all?
Whenever a defendant in a murder trial is found innocent does that automatically mean that murder is ignored? Is it possible that the wrong man was accused and someone else did the crime? Remember that one of the principal arguments against capital punishment is that there have been so many cases where the wrong man was convicted.
Back to sexual assault: Could the wrong man have been convicted in the court of Democratic Party opinion in this case?
The folks that supported the Clintons against the women who accused him of sexual harassment and, in Juanita Broderick’s case, outright rape, are now against Bret Kavanaugh. – And vice versa.
Were those women just a part of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” as Hillary Clinton claimed at the time?
To the extent that the #MeToo Movement is weaponized against Republicans, this will increase skepticism in future cases, especially when Republicans are targeted, and that skepticism will come from both men and women.
Making #MeToo another weapon in a politician’s bag of tricks hurts both the target and the women making accusations. Insisting that #MeToo should be a cause instead of a weapon will keep the whole nation unite behind it.
It has been repeated over and over that the principal accuser, Dr. Ford, was a credible witness. But was she? If women are equal and are to be treated equally, then should not their testimony be treated equally to men’s testimony?
Here are some problems with Dr. Ford’s testimony:
- She passed a lie detector test. As a Professor of Psychology she advised at least one other person on how to beat a lie-detector. So, how big a deal that Dr. Ford passed a lie-detector test?
- She did not want to testify to the Senate Committee because she claimed to be afraid of flying. Since that claim was made, it became known that she had flown often throughout the USA and even overseas. How could she not have remembered that when she made that claim?
- She did not know that the Senate Committee had offered to travel to her own town to interview her. How could she not have remembered that?
Both of these last two claims were made through her lawyers. How could any lawyers make such claims on a client’s behalf without their client’s knowledge and consent? — Malpractice? — Or does Dr. Ford just have a terrible memory – even of events in the last few weeks?
Survivors may not remember many things but it takes a special kind of stupid not to remember that a Senate Committee has offered to travel to one’s town to interview oneself. – Especially in the recent past. – Especially when this offer was the #1 news item for days.
Is this how Americans seeking employment can be expect to be treated in the future? — Accusations alone can sink one’s prospects and not a search for the truth?
At the time (2016) that Garland’s appointment was active it seemed that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump and then be able to appoint a more left-wing person than Garland to the Court. I remember that I believed that Clinton would win and that the Republicans had made a mistake in not confirming “the devil they knew” rather than the one they did not.
The Republicans stalled Merrick Garland based on a claimed principal, not on character accusations. In his interview on Fox News this morning, Mitch McConnell backed off that principal he claimed to have as regards future occurrences of appointments in a Presidential Election Year. Shame on him for that.
On the other hand, Donald Trump himself has waged personal attacks on multiple people. A few examples:
- His attacks on Ted Cruz’s wife.
- His attacks on Ted Cruz’s father. The accusation that the father was involved with the John Kennedy murder was ridiculous.
- He repeatedly said that if elected he was going to throw Hillary Clinton in jail.
And, of course, there were many more personal attacks by Donald Trump. Shame on him, too, for that. Note how these personal attacks have diminished his credibility and his public approval despite other good actions on his part.
Will those who continue the personal attacks on Kavanaugh suffer the same consequences as Donald Trump has?
The trouble was that there were so very many documents to examine. Kavanaugh’s government career had been at the highest levels so very long that the following statements are now both true:
- More documents were produced for this nominee than for the last three nominees combined.
- More documents were not produced for this nominee than for the last three nominees combined.
The most important documents were his past rulings and dissents during his many years as a judge.
There were only a limited number of witnesses that could have provided first-hand information relevant to Dr. Ford’s accusation. They were all interviewed. The other two accusations were not credible. (Ms. Ramirez is an extremist left-wing activist.) As for drinking in college, so what?
The Democrats in the Committee hearing repeatedly called for a limited investigation and based their claims of cover-up on that. They repeatedly asked why not hold up the nomination for just a few days as there were so few people that needed to be interviewed. The demands for yet more investigation with yet more delays seemed to be just moving the goal posts.
The ranking Democratic Party member on the Senate Judiciary Committee sat on the Dr. Ford letter for a month and a half. The reason cited for not doing anything about it was keeping Dr. Ford’s identity a secret. There were multiple ways that the accuser’s identity could have been kept a secret while the accusation was investigated. Senator Feinstein chose to pursue none of those ways.
Is this to be the future of how such matters are to be treated: seriously but Feinstein style? Or, to put the same point but in other words: seriously, kinda, sorta, maybe?
Justices Kagan and Sotomayor stated that the departure of Justice Kennedy meant the departure of the last swing justice. Clearly, they were not offering themselves as swing justices. This amounted to a virtual confession of their own partisanship.
The bottom line of these controversial confirmations is that the Supreme Court has intruded so much into political policy-making that each confirmation is as much political as anything else. What deepens the divide is the deception that the confirmations are not about politics. At bottom, the discussions are not honest.
Note that this last point is not about #MeToo or sex scandal. It is about politics in the judicial branch of the government, about how political it has become.
Perhaps the best long-term fix is for a new constitutional amendment placing checks and balances on this third branch such are in place for the other two branches.
Jack, anything I can say at this point would put a major divide between us. All I will say is that I have met way to many jaded women that have been treated badly by scumbag men. To discount the #MeToo movement as a “another weapon in a politician’s bag of tricks” is unchristian. Bret Kavanaugh’s testimony before congress, a job interview, demonstrated that he is not worthy to be a judge on any court.
Just because other men were scumbags does not mean that Kavanaugh was one. I did not “discount” the #MeToo; I note how others on the left are doing so.