Would be at least interesting if they actually still had to stand and talk.

 

as interesting as green eggs and ham on repeat

Would be at least interesting if they actually still had to stand and talk.

 

That's the house, and that still is the case.

 

Senate's purely procedural is mayyybe fine for policy but for nominations clearly has outgrown it's use once regional preference became outdated.

Good riddance to the filibuster.

 

McConnell crying about this "unprecedented obstruction" on the floor of the Senate is pretty ridiculous. Wish we had British Parliament rules where he could be openly and loudly mocked for that bulls***.

 

 

Re: Gorsuch, don't forget Gorsuch ruled that a truck driver should have possibly frozen to death and wait for assistance (iirc he'd already waited for some 5 hours) rather than leave his trailer behind and find a warm place to stay.

 

Cloture vote failed, Senate going nuclear, Maverick McCain saying he has to vote to change the rules despite saying it will cause "irreparable damage" to the Senate. Gorsuch will be confirmed by Friday night.

Cloture vote failed, Senate going nuclear, Maverick McCain saying he has to vote to change the rules despite saying it will cause "irreparable damage" to the Senate. Gorsuch will be confirmed by Friday night.

the dems brought this upon themselves. The Republicans keep getting dealt easy hands. There is no reason for them to keep folding to weaker ones time and time again.

the dems brought this upon themselves. The Republicans keep getting dealt easy hands. There is no reason for them to keep folding to weaker ones time and time again.

 

Oh hai Brett. You have been missed

Oh hai Brett. You have been missed

Best sarcasm of the board.

 

Can't believe I am actually upset at the White Sox winning right now.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/se...m=.ed1316b9ce77

 

Gorusch confirmed.

We don't have a full opinion from him yet, but we got a pretty good glimpse at Gorsuch today and he's going to be a hard right ideologue it seems.

We don't have a full opinion from him yet, but we got a pretty good glimpse at Gorsuch today and he's going to be a hard right ideologue it seems.

 

Playing dirty works.

Board still left leaning. Need one more conservative on the board to balance the board.

Board still left leaning. Need one more conservative on the board to balance the board.

 

Lol

Kavanaugh has some terrible views on, well, nearly everything, but especially criminal justice rights

 

Quote

 

Modern Americans take for granted that when police interrogate a suspect, they must first provide a “Miranda warning,” noting his or her right to remain silent and get a lawyer. Otherwise, any confession will be thrown out of court. Most people are also familiar with the stipulation that if police conduct an illegal search, they may not use any evidence it yields.

But these simple rules didn’t exist a few decades ago. Police routinely conducted searches without warrants in order to find evidence and win convictions. They also abused suspects in custody to get them to confess.

Things got better only when the Supreme Court acted to give real meaning to constitutional rights that had long been ignored. Rehnquist, however, never made peace with these decisions — and neither, apparently, has Kavanaugh.

The exclusionary rule forbids the use of evidence seized in an illegal raid. But Rehnquist thought it “was beyond the four corners of the Fourth Amendment’s text and imposed tremendous costs on society,” said Kavanaugh approvingly. “He believed that freeing obviously guilty violent criminals was not a proper remedy” and was not “required by the Constitution.” Rehnquist had the same objection to the Miranda warning rule, which sometimes means letting a criminal go unpunished.

 

 

33 minutes ago, StrangeSox said:

Kavanaugh has some terrible views on, well, nearly everything, but especially criminal justice rights

 

 

1) I like how this guy cites one general approving quote Kavanaugh made about Rehnquist (without any context really), then quotes Rehnquist opinions (not Kavanaugh's) as if they prove his point that Kavanaugh doesn't think criminals should have any rights. He may well be soft on this stuff, but an actual quote or two from his actual opinions would have been nice.

2) While those rights should be enforced pretty strongly, I also 100% agree that in some cases there should be an exclusion when a technicality is going to let an otherwise clearly guilty person go free. In the civil realm there are reversible errors and non-reversible errors. The same should be true in criminal court (and perhaps it is, that's not my wheelhouse). 

Edited July 13, 20187 yr by Jenksismyhero

Leahy is also hinting that they have proof that kavanaugh lied in his 2004 and 2006 hearings over his involvement with other Bush staffers who hacked Democrats' emails and passed them around to strategize on judicial nominees. Booker and others also brought up some emails related to "race profiling" but Grassley has marked all of this stuff Committee Confidential so they can't ask Kavanaugh about it 

All extremely normal governance, love my democracy. 

 

welp someone leaked those "committee confidential" emails and, surprise, Kavanaugh is lying through his teeth during this hearing and his previous ones. Keeping him off the SC isn't enough. He should be impeached and removed from the judiciary all together.

 

Quote

 

Other documents provided to The Times included a document showing that in September 2001, after the terrorist attacks, Judge Kavanaugh engaged with a Justice Department lawyer about questions of warrantless surveillance at the time that lawyer wrote a memo an inspector general report later portrayed as the precursor to the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.

On Wednesday, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, seemed to allude to the existence of such an email, grilling Judge Kavanaugh about whether his testimony at his May 2006 appeals court hearing that he had not seen or heard anything about the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program before its existence leaked the previous December was accurate.

 

Quote

 

Another document shed further light on the extent to which Judge Kavanaugh was viewed inside the Bush administration as playing a significant role in trying to get a disputed appeals court nominee, Charles W. Pickering Sr., confirmed.

During his own appeals court nomination, Judge Kavanaugh had distanced himself from that nomination, omitting it from a list of the major ones he worked on and telling senators that it was not one of those he “primarily” handled, and in August Democrats — based on documents they were allowed to make public — had accused him of having been misleading, while hinting that more details were in the still-confidential documents.

Judge Pickering, who retired in 2004, later told the National Review that another White House lawyer, Noel Francisco, the current solicitor general, was his liaison and that he did not recall interacting with Judge Kavanaugh or knowing his name at the time.

But one of the newly obtained documents shows that when another White House lawyer, Brad Berenson, was invited to a meeting in March 2002 with two top Republican senators, he referred to both Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Francisco as two colleagues who were “much more involved" in that nomination.

 

and Kavanaugh himself laid out why the whole "settled law" dodge is irrelevant when it comes to SC justices

 

Edited September 6, 20187 yr by StrangeSox

why were any of these marked "confidential" in the first place? solely to protect Kavanaugh.

 

I don't get it, a Supreme Court nominee, and people are hiding things. I love when these types rip others patriotism. 

 

Gorsuch wasn't pressed as much as Kavanaugh, but even so, this is the worst performance I've seen from a nomination hearing.

 

Booker lead the charge, but multiple dems are now saying they will release "committee confidential" emails and documents. Technically, they can be expelled from the Senate for this. This is a big, big stand they are taking to expose Kavanaugh's real views and his many lies to the Senate.

2 minutes ago, bmags said:

Gorsuch wasn't pressed as much as Kavanaugh, but even so, this is the worst performance I've seen from a nomination hearing.

 

His avoidance of Harris's direct question on whether he discussed Mueller's investigation with Trump's personal lawyer/lawfirm was pathetic.

 

8 minutes ago, StrangeSox said:

His avoidance of Harris's direct question on whether he discussed Mueller's investigation with Trump's personal lawyer/lawfirm was pathetic.

 

His mouthing of sounding out Kasowitz was just tremendous acting. 

19 minutes ago, Dick Allen said:

I don't get it, a Supreme Court nominee, and people are hiding things. I love when these types rip others patriotism. 

 

Yes you do. Come on, you're surprised by any of this? This is a guy who has been a Republican legal advisor for 2 decades and you're surprised that there's documents of him taking strong opinions against abortion and how to make it illegal, receiving illegally obtained documents gathered to help in campaigns against Democrats, lying about all that under oath, and then just expecting to cover all that up?

17 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

Yes you do. Come on, you're surprised by any of this? This is a guy who has been a Republican legal advisor for 2 decades and you're surprised that there's documents of him taking strong opinions against abortion and how to make it illegal, receiving illegally obtained documents gathered to help in campaigns against Democrats, lying about all that under oath, and then just expecting to cover all that up?

He wasn't just a legal adviser but also a Clinton conspiracy nut. He pushed Ken Starr to open a huge investigation into Vince Foster.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/why-was-kavanaugh-obsessed-with-vince-foster.html

 

He's going to be a worse partisan hack than even Alito.

Strict scrutiny would mean these programs would be struck down. There was no reason for these documents to be withheld from the public aside from protecting Kavanaugh from questioning.

If this is what they decided was good to release to the Senate, what is in the 102k documents they're still hiding?

Edited September 6, 20187 yr by StrangeSox