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The FBI Kavanaugh "Investigation" Is a Joke and the Democrats Know It |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 01 October 2018 08:41 |
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Ash writes: "Jeff Flake's mildly courageous acquiescence to demands by protesters and Democrats to slow down the Kavanaugh march induced euphoria on the left on Friday. It may have been premature."
Judge Brett Kavanaugh turns contentious during a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing to hear evidence that he sexually assaulted then Christine Blasey in 1982. (photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The FBI Kavanaugh "Investigation" Is a Joke and the Democrats Know It
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
01 October 18
 eff Flake’s mildly courageous acquiescence to demands by protesters and Democrats to slow down the Kavanaugh march induced euphoria on the left on Friday. It may have been premature.
Flake has forced an expanded FBI background check of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but the scope is so limited that it’s hard to imagine a result different in substance or effect from the report the FBI produced for George H.W. Bush and the Senate Judiciary Committee at the height of Anita Hill’s challenge to Clarence Thomas.
The report had no effect then and it’s not likely to have any effect now because the probe the FBI is conducting is not a real criminal investigation, the fact that real crimes have been reported notwithstanding.
In a real criminal investigation, the investigators go where the evidence takes them. There is no “limitation” to the scope per se. The simplest analogy for a real criminal investigation is the police officer who pulls over the motorist for speeding and observes contraband inside the vehicle. The contraband is fair game, and criminal charges may result. The investigation goes where the evidence takes it.
How limited is the scope of the FBI’s Kavanaugh probe? So limited, in fact, that they will not even interview Julie Swetnick regarding her allegations of criminal conduct by Brett Kavanaugh and others, or any of the several witnesses that corroborate her account. In fact, the probe is constrained to four witnesses, including Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. That’s not an investigation designed to uncover facts. It’s a sanitization and a whitewash.
Swetnick will not be the only accuser ignored by the FBI’s “one week only” probe. The mother of a fourth woman wrote a letter to Colorado senator Cory Gardner, a Republican, describing a sexual assault that her daughter and at least three other women witnessed. The incident, according to the letter, happened outside a Washington DC bar and involved Kavanaugh aggressively and non-consensually forcing himself against one of the women in the group while heavily intoxicated.
The letter writer opted to remain anonymous, but if the FBI were allowed to conduct a real investigation, which they are well capable of, the author, the victim, and all of the witnesses could be identified and interviewed. But none will be.
Breaking News: Donald Trump is lying.
When Donald Trump says the FBI will have “free reign” to conduct a full and thorough investigation, his words, unsurprisingly, stand in stark contrast to his actions. In fact according to The New York Times:
The White House will decide the breadth of the inquiry … The White House can order investigators to further examine the allegations if their findings from the four witness interviews open new avenues of inquiry … Investigators will interview one of the witnesses, a high school friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s named Mark Judge, about Ms. Swetnick’s accusations … The inquiry, which will last no more than a week, is a limited background check of Judge Kavanaugh, not a full-fledged criminal investigation.
So it’s readily apparent, Donald Trump holds all the cards, and he wants Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, as do the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Democrats, for their part, are well aware of all this. Sure, it’s great to see the Democrats celebrate the restoration of a modicum of regular order. But the silence from the Democrats on the reality of this toothless process is deafening. Right now this has Anita Hill redux written all over it. Where’s the outrage?
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Christine Blasey Ford's Experience Was Just as Bad as Anita Hill's - Maybe Worse |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=17265"><span class="small">Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 30 September 2018 13:56 |
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Talbot writes: "In some ways, Christine Blasey Ford's experience before the Senate Judiciary Committee, last Thursday, was as different from Anita Hill's as you would expect it to be, nearly thirty years later, in the midst of the #MeToo movement."
Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas testifying before the Senate in 1991. (photo: Paul Hosefros/Jose R. Lopez/NYT)
Christine Blasey Ford's Experience Was Just as Bad as Anita Hill's - Maybe Worse
By Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
30 September 18
 n some ways, Christine Blasey Ford’s experience before the Senate Judiciary Committee, last Thursday, was as different from Anita Hill’s as you would expect it to be, nearly thirty years later, in the midst of the #MeToo movement. When Hill, in 1991, described the sexual harassment that she said Clarence Thomas had subjected her to, she faced skepticism that such behavior even had relevance when it came to assessing the fitness of a nominee for the Supreme Court. Among the instructional moments that Hill endured was Senator Arlen Specter’s explanation that unsolicited discussion of large breasts in the workplace was “not too bad—women’s large breasts. That is a word we use all the time.”
When Ford appeared before the committee to make her allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, none of the senators overtly downplayed the gravity of the behavior she described. There seemed to be broad agreement that, if Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ford when they were teen-agers, it would render him unfit for a lifetime appointment to the Court.
Decades’ worth of research about the trauma of sexual assault made a difference, too. Ford spoke with disarming directness and vulnerability, occasionally using the language of research psychology, her field of scholarship. When Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her how she could be so sure that it was Kavanaugh who had attacked her, despite being unable to remember some other details about the event, she explained, “The level of norepinephrine and the epinephrine in the brain”—each a neurotransmitter released when a person is under stress—“encodes memories into the hippocampus. And so the trauma-related experience is locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.” It might have been a little technical for the Judiciary Committee, and most of the time Ford spoke much more colloquially. Still, invoking the workings of memory and trauma in such cases is now commonplace. When Senator Dick Durbin remarked, “A polished liar can create a seamless story, but a trauma survivor cannot be expected to remember every painful detail,” he was providing a social and psychological context that is far more recognizable to Americans today than it was in the past.
Finally, Anita Hill had to face a Senate Judiciary Committee made up entirely of white men; Ford’s questioners included four female senators. The Republicans, all men, evidently so doubted their ability to question a woman about an alleged sexual assault without bungling the job that they called in a sex-crimes prosecutor from Arizona, Rachel Mitchell, to do it for them. (When Kavanaugh testified, the Republican senators let Mitchell ask a few questions, then promptly took over.) In 1991, none of the Republican committee members appeared to have any concerns about the gender makeup of their panel.
But, in certain ways, Ford’s experience was just as bad as Hill’s, and maybe worse. The hearing unleashed in Brett Kavanaugh a bitter, partisan rage pumped up with conspiracy theory. It would have been strange if he were not rattled, especially if he is innocent. But Kavanaugh seemed to have very little command of his emotions. He described the handling of the allegations against him as “a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fuelled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election,” and went on about “revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” He said that his family and his name had been “totally and permanently destroyed.” He wept throughout his long opening statement—a performance that likely would have doomed a woman being evaluated for her jurisprudential temperament. When Senator Amy Klobuchar asked Kavanaugh if he had ever had so much to drink that he couldn’t remember all or part of what happened, he snapped at her, “I don’t know. Have you?” Nearly a dozen people who knew Kavanaugh in college described him to the Times as a heavy drinker, and, according to several classmates, his fraternity was well known at the time for being hard-partying—a relevant consideration if you’re investigating whether alcohol could have led to a sexual assault or made it difficult to remember one. (After a break, he apologized to Klobuchar.)
Clarence Thomas, in his hearing, denounced the Judiciary Committee for carrying out “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves,” but he did not specifically call out Democrats or invoke a revenge plot by politicians. The kind of vitriol that Kavanaugh displayed should be a red flag for the committee: elevating him to the Supreme Court after that rant will make it even harder to regard the Court as the impartial body it’s supposed to be.
Kavanaugh’s rage was pitched for the ear of the President who nominated him—loud, belligerent, and predicated on the Trumpian tactic of “Deny, deny, deny.” His sense of injustice was that of an entitled, upper-middle-class striver who, in his telling, “busted my butt” to get into Yale University and then Yale Law School, “the No. 1 law school in the country,” while doing service projects, keeping meticulous calendars, playing varsity sports, and being nice to women, with never a “whiff” of anything untoward, only to be detained at the threshold of the Supreme Court by a woman who remembered something very different about him.
On Friday afternoon, as the Judiciary Committee prepared to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate, Senator Jeff Flake called for postponing the final decision by a week, so that the F.B.I. could conduct an investigation. But, even then, the saga will continue. What Ford would call the sequelae of the hearings will truly come into focus only with the midterm elections. The 1992 elections, after Clarence Thomas’s confirmation, brought a record number of women into Congress. Even more women are running this year: two hundred and thirty-nine, of whom a hundred and eighty-seven are Democrats. If the Republicans in the Senate listened politely to Ford only to ignore her, then they may pay the price on November 6th.
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Pack the Supreme Court |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44184"><span class="small">Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept</span></a>
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Sunday, 30 September 2018 13:53 |
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Hasan writes: "Despite telling brazen lies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and despite Christine Blasey Ford's compelling testimony, Republicans on the committee voted in favor of advancing Kavanaugh's nomination to the full Senate for a vote."
The Supreme Court building. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Pack the Supreme Court
By Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept
30 September 18
 rett Kavanaugh moved one step closer to the United States Supreme Court on Friday.
Despite telling brazen lies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and despite Christine Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony, Republicans on the committee voted in favor of advancing Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate for a vote. Only a new FBI investigation into Ford’s allegations, limited in time to one week, now stands in the way of Donald Trump entrenching a hard-right conservative majority on the Supreme Court for a generation or more.
To be clear, such a majority on the court would be an utter disaster for women, for people of color, and for the poor. One upside of Kavanaugh’s raw and angry rant on Thursday — he referred to the Democrats on the panel as “you people,” a “disgrace,” and accused them of exacting “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” — is that it exposed the Supreme Court for what it is: a partisan on the political battlefield, not a disinterested defender of the Constitution.
So it’s past time for liberals and the left to consider court packing: When they next have control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, Democrats should add at least two new seats to the Supreme Court and then fill them, ideally, with left-wing, well-qualified women of color. They could even call it “court balancing.”
“Pack the courts as soon as we get the chance,” tweeted Indiana University law professor Ian Samuel, the co-host of the popular Supreme Court podcast “First Mondays,” on the the day Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court in June. “‘Pack the courts’ should be a phrase on par with ‘abolish ICE.’”
This might sound extreme, but it isn’t. The Constitution allows for Congress to decide the number of Supreme Court justices. “There is nothing magical about the number nine,” HuffPost’s Zach Carter observed in June. “The court was founded in 1789 with just six justices and has included as many as 10, from 1863 to 1866 — when a Republican legislature intentionally shrank the court size to seven justices to prevent President Andrew Johnson from making any appointments.”
Nor is nine some sort of global norm: The U.K.’s Supreme Court consists of 12 justices; Israel’s has 15; in India, there are 25 Supreme Court justices (with a maximum of 31).
“The idea of expanding the size of the Supreme Court will get traction if the Democrats take the White House and Congress in 2020,” constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at University of California, Berkeley, told the Los Angeles Times in July. “It is the only way to keep there from being a very conservative Court for the next 10-20 years.”
***
I can hear the objections already, from timid liberals and outraged conservatives alike.
Isn’t court packing a tactic associated with authoritarian or dictatorial governments? Wouldn’t such a move undermine the Supreme Court’s legitimacy? Why go for the “nuclear option” of court packing when there are other less radical reforms on offer? And, of course, what’s to stop Republicans from doing the same when they’re back in charge?
Let’s deal with each of these in turn. First, the fact that the likes of Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and Viktor Orbán have packed the constitutional courts in their countries is irrelevant to the debate in the United States. “Court-packing is a tool,” argues Vox’s Dylan Matthews. “It can be used for authoritarian ends, or for democratic ones.” In 1863, for example, Abraham Lincoln added a 10th justice to the court in order to “further the federal war aims of preserving the Union and ending slavery.” Was that, morally or politically, the wrong thing for him to have done at that critical juncture in U.S. history?
Second, court packing would help, not hurt, the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. A hard-right court would be wildly out of sync with U.S. public opinion on a range of hot-button issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, consumer rights, environmental regulations, gerrymandering, and campaign finance. Meanwhile, the appointment of Kavanaugh would mean the Supreme Court has four justices (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote; two justices (Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh) accused of sexual misconduct and misleading the Senate; and one justice (Gorsuch) who effectively stole his seat from President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. How’s that for a crisis of legitimacy?
Third, how can you call court packing a “nuclear option” when six U.S. presidents — including Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, and Trump’s own hero Andrew Jackson — signed off on it? In addition, Franklin Roosevelt may have tried and failed to pack a reactionary Supreme Court in 1937, but, as HuffPost’s Carter reminds us, “even after FDR retreated from his proposal amid a profound outcry from Southern Democrats, the justices sitting on the Court got his message and began issuing more sympathetic rulings on the New Deal.”
Critics of court packing on the left have suggested that there are less radical alternatives to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy crisis. Why not, they say, bring in term limits for the nine justices? Or impeach Kavanaugh and even Thomas after the midterms?
Term limits, though, require a constitutional amendment, while impeaching a Supreme Court justice requires a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate. Adding new justices, however? That only requires a simple majority in Congress. “People tend to describe it as a radical proposal but it’s no more difficult than passing any other bill,” Samuel told me over the phone, when I reached him for comment on the Kavanaugh debacle on Friday morning. “You can do it, and it’s easy.”
Fourth, what about the possibility of escalation and retaliation? Why wouldn’t a Republican president in, say, 2024 cancel out the court-packing of his or her Democratic predecessor by adding more conservative justices to the Court? Samuel called this the “standard game theory objection, or tit for tat.” However, he pointed out, “that’s not what has happened throughout history, when the size of the court has been adjusted.”
Plus, suggesting Republicans will retaliate to Democratic court-packing by doing the same is absurd: the GOP has already packed the Supreme Court. In 2016, Republicans in Congress prevented a Democratic president who won two terms, with two clear majorities, from filling a Supreme Court vacancy; in doing so, the GOP deliberately reduced the size of the Court to eight justices for more than nine months. Senior Republicans even suggested they’d restrict the Court to eight justices for the entirety of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Then, within three months of Trump coming to office, Republicans confirmed the ultra-conservative Neil Gorsuch as the 112th Supreme Court justice.
To suggest Democrats would be emboldening or provoking Republicans, therefore, gets this whole dynamic the wrong way around. According to Samuel, “It’s the equivalent of saying, ‘If we invade Normandy, the Nazis will shoot at us.’”
Court-packing has to be near the top of a progressive agenda for 2020. Democrats will have to learn to “connect court-packing to popular progressive programs,” Samuel told me. For example, will “Medicare for All” ever be a possibility if there’s a decades-long conservative majority on the highest court in the land? Lest we forget, a Republican-led Supreme Court, without Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, was only a single vote away from abolishing Obamacare in 2012. How about fixing gerrymandering or voter suppression? Will progressives even manage to get elected to the White House or Congress if an emboldened and unchecked conservative-dominated Supreme Court ratchets up its defense of such practices, thereby bolstering the Republican Party’s electoral prospects?
Forget procedures; forget norms. There is too much at stake. Playing by the old rules while the Republicans tear them up won’t cut it. Deferring to a court composed of conservative ideologues masquerading as impartial judges, to an explicitly political yet unelected body bent on making sweeping, reactionary, unpopular changes to the United States, is a betrayal of liberal, democratic, and progressive values.
There is a perfectly legal and viable solution to all this: Pack the Supreme Court. Pack it as soon as possible.
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FOCUS: Willie Nelson Holds Austin Concert in Support of Beto O'Rourke |
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Sunday, 30 September 2018 11:54 |
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Pilkington writes: "Willie Nelson took to the stage in Austin on Saturday night wearing a 'Beto for Texas' cap over his trademark braided hair. It didn’t last long - within minutes he had flung the hat into the crowd and replaced it with his trusted red bandana."
Willie Nelson joins Beto O’Rourke at campaign rally in Austin, Texas, on Saturday. (photo: Drew Anthony Smith/Getty Images)
Willie Nelson Holds Austin Concert in Support of Beto O'Rourke
By Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
30 September 18
Nelson holds Austin concert in support of the Democratic candidate who is trying to unseat Ted Cruz from his Senate seat
 illie Nelson took to the stage in Austin on Saturday night wearing a “Beto for Texas” cap over his trademark braided hair. It didn’t last long – within minutes he had flung the hat into the crowd and replaced it with his trusted red bandana.
That Nelson was there in the heart of the capital to lend the power of his legend to Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat who is roiling the state with an insurgent attempt to unseat Ted Cruz from his US Senate seat, remained beyond doubt. He made no effort to remove his Beto T-shirt.
But he let his music do the talking. Literally, in the case of a new song that he gave its debut which left little to the imagination.
If you don’t like who’s in there, vote ‘em out
That’s what election day is all about
When they are gone, we will sing and shout
Nelson has been the unofficial figurehead of Texas since his return from Nashville to Austin in 1972. With lyrics that address the daily struggles of cowboys, farmers and lovers, he has managed to achieve the impossible: attracting the adoration of Texans across generations, spanning city and countryside and bridging the ever-widening political divide.
Who else can bring hippies, hipsters and Trump supporters under one roof?
This time, though, it was too much for many Cruz-supporting Texans. Previously diehard Willie fans erupted in anger after the Austin rally was announced, griping that his decision to appear for O’Rourke – Nelson’s first public performance for a political candidate – was beyond the pale.
But at 85, that didn’t seem to bother Willie. Besides, his new-found detractors should have known that his embrace of progressive and liberal politics is decades old, stretching back to the famous time he got high on the roof of Jimmy Carter’s White House.
The pre-rally hoo-ha appeared to faze Nelson not one bit. He came on stage with his arms around a visibly sweaty O’Rourke, who had just promised universal healthcare and immigration reform to an appreciative 30,000-strong crowd. The Democratic candidate, a US representative from El Paso, had also pledged legalization of marijuana – a favorite of Nelson’s, who has his own cannabis company selling in states in which the drug is already permitted.
The last time they appeared together, at Willie’s annual Fourth of July picnic, O’Rourke reprised his punk rocker past and played guitar during It’s All Going to Pot and Will the Circle Be Unbroken. This time he just sang along with the chorus, standing slightly to one side and looking a little awkward.
At least the song he came on for had a resonance for both men: On the Road Again. Nelson still spends most of his life performing with the Family, sustaining a grueling rate of about 150 gigs a year and returning rarely to his spiritual home in Austin.
That relentless record is capped only by O’Rourke’s, who framed his unlikely charge on Cruz’s seat with a year-long tour to every county in Texas: all 254 of them.
Among the largely young and politically fired-up crowd, there were some serious Willie Nelson acolytes. John Dromgoole, 71, aka the Natural Gardener, has been following the musician since his early Austin days at the Armadillo World Headquarters in the Seventies.
Dromgoole, who now runs a garden nursery, is friends with Nelson’s second wife (of four), Connie. One of the areas at his nursery is set aside as a quiet homage to Willie, featuring a replica in stone and vegetation of the star’s famous guitar, Trigger.
“It’s the music that brings us all together,” Dromgoole said, his hair braided in a mirror image of Nelson’s. “It’s real. It’s for each one of us – when you hear his songs each one of us hears that it is being sung only for us. That’s his art.”
Lane Mann, 25, was also in the crowd wearing an On the Road T-shirt. It’s an original, from the 1980s, and she was wearing it in honor of her grandfather Mike, a huge Willie fan who died this year.
Lane’s mother, Jules Mann, 59, was wearing a customized T-shirt that said: “Willie is My Spiritual Animal”. Mother and daughter sat side by side, but carried a slightly different perspective.
Lane Mann was there she said fifty-fifty: she loved Willie but really wanted to hear O’Rourke and to be uplifted by the hope of his politics. “He’s uniting us, travelling all over Texas and showing progressive people that they are not alone.”
Her mother was all-in for Willie: “He’s about the freedom of the open road, not giving a damn, and he writes sweet lyrics along the way.”
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s the F.B.I. began its investigation this weekend into allegations of sexual misconduct by 
