Tag: Christine Blasey

Chief Justice John Roberts defended the independence of the federal judiciary in the wake of a tense confirmation battle for Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Roberts was at the University of Minnesota Tuesday as part of a lecture series with the law school, an appearance scheduled long before the hearings. But ahead of an interview with University of Minnesota law professor Robert Stein, the chief justice addressed what he called "the contentious events in Washington of recent weeks." He said the Supreme Court's role is clear — to be an independent arbiter of the U.S. Constitution. Asked if there was ever a chill in the room after a particularly divisive 5-4 decision, Roberts said no. And the way to do that is to get as many people on board as you can." Roberts said his bigger concern is ignorance about the court's role as an equal branch of government. "I think too many people think that when we reach a decision on a case, it's pretty much the same as Congress reaching a decision on a question of policy. Roberts said when he crafts opinions, he aims to write in a way that can be understood by people who are not lawyers or legal scholars. Even after the fight over Kavanaugh's confirmation, Roberts promised that the tradition of collegiality will continue, noting that all the justices shake hands ahead of every oral argument and before heading to the conference room to discuss the cases before them.

Many people are worried, rightly, about what the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh means for America in the long term. But Donald Trump quickly made it much worse, attributing protests against Kavanaugh to George Soros and declaring, falsely (and with no evidence), that the protesters were being paid. Senator John Cornyn declared, “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters.” No, the protesters aren’t being paid to protest, let alone by George Soros. Conspiracy theorizing has been a part of American politics from the beginning. When people who hold most of the levers of power do the same thing, their fantasizing isn’t a delusion, it’s a tool: a way to delegitimize opposition, to create excuses not just for disregarding but for punishing anyone who dares to criticize their actions. And now senior figures in the Republican Party, which controls all three branches of the federal government — if you had any questions about whether the Supreme Court was a partisan institution, they should be gone now — are sounding just like the white nationalists in Hungary and Poland. is an authoritarian regime in waiting. The senators parroting conspiracy theories about Soros-paid protesters? What we’ve learned in the past few weeks is that there is no gap between Trump and his party, nobody who will say stop in the name of American values. is an authoritarian regime in waiting, not yet one in practice.

Many people are worried, rightly, about what the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh means for America in the long term. But Donald Trump quickly made it much worse, attributing protests against Kavanaugh to George Soros and declaring, falsely (and with no evidence), that the protesters were being paid. Senator John Cornyn declared, “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters.” No, the protesters aren’t being paid to protest, let alone by George Soros. Conspiracy theorizing has been a part of American politics from the beginning. When people who hold most of the levers of power do the same thing, their fantasizing isn’t a delusion, it’s a tool: a way to delegitimize opposition, to create excuses not just for disregarding but for punishing anyone who dares to criticize their actions. And now senior figures in the Republican Party, which controls all three branches of the federal government — if you had any questions about whether the Supreme Court was a partisan institution, they should be gone now — are sounding just like the white nationalists in Hungary and Poland. is an authoritarian regime in waiting. The senators parroting conspiracy theories about Soros-paid protesters? What we’ve learned in the past few weeks is that there is no gap between Trump and his party, nobody who will say stop in the name of American values. is an authoritarian regime in waiting, not yet one in practice.

The Kavanaugh hearings, he wrote on Friday, constituted an “American nadir.” You often hear such phrases from people who think the biggest problem with the Kavanaugh battle is that the participants weren’t more courteous and open-minded. Implying, as Brooks, Flake, and Collins do, that America’s real problem is a lack of civility rather than a lack of justice requires assuming a moral equivalence between Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters and Christine Blasey Ford’s. If tribal implies unthinking or inherited group loyalty, then Democrats and Republicans were actually more tribal in the mid-20th century. The parties are so bitterly polarized not because they’ve become more tribal but because they’ve become more ideological. The “tribalization” of American politics, Brooks argues, “leads to an epidemic of bigotry. There is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by preppy lacrosse players and that faced by black males. Similarly, there is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by men accused of sexual assault and the “bigotry” faced by women who suffer it. In April 1963, seven white Alabama ministers and one rabbi wrote a letter to Martin Luther King Jr.. The problem that the Kavanaugh struggle laid bare is not “unvarnished tribalism.” The problem is that women who allege abuse by men still often face male-dominated institutions that do not thoroughly and honestly investigate their claims. Brooks, Collins, and Flake may decry the “tension” this exposes.

(Oct. 6) AP WASHINGTON – Brett Kavanaugh's ascension to the Supreme Court over the weekend, far from settling the fierce debate over his confirmation, has inflamed the nation's political and cultural fissures for the midterm elections next month and well beyond. Sen. Joe Manchin, running for re-election in West Virginia, a state that Trump carried by a wide margin in 2016, was his party’s only vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination. Another Democratic incumbent running in a red state, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, acknowledged that her vote to oppose Kavanaugh bolstered the odds that Republican challenger Rep. Kevin Cramer would defeat her on Election Day.One Democratic senator running for re-election in a state that Trump carried in 2016, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, became the only person in his party to vote in favor of Kavanaugh's nomination. "The politically expedient vote here was a 'yes' vote," Heitkamp said on CBS' "60 Minutes." Democrats said Kavanaugh's confirmation could boost the party's efforts to gain control of the House, however, by rallying voters who believe the president and Senate Republicans refused to treat seriously women's accusations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh. Democrats need to flip 23 Republican-held seats to win a majority. VOTE REPUBLICAN!" If Democrats win the House, the Judiciary Committee will open an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and perjury against the justice, according to New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who is in line to be the committee's chairman. Meanwhile, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan expressed concern about whether Americans would continue to have faith in the high court as independent and fair-minded. "In other words, people thinking of the court as not politically divided in the same way, as not an extension of politics, but instead somehow above the fray."

What we saw in these hearings was the unvarnished tribalization of national life. Those who support Republicans side with Kavanaugh's narrative and see holes in Blasey's. How do we measure these testimonies when all of cognitive science tells us that people are really bad at spotting falsehood? Commentators and others may have acknowledged uncertainty on these questions for about 2.5 seconds, but then they took sides. If they couldn't take sides based on the original evidence, they found new reasons to confirm their previous positions. This, of course, led to an upsurge in base mobilization. The core problem behind all of this is a complete breakdown in the legitimacy of our public institutions.The Supreme Court is no longer a place where justices dispassionately rule on the Constitution. They fall into predictable party-line formation and then invent post-hoc, bad-faith rationalizations to give cover to their ideologically driven positions (Drank too much! People who don't have regular contact with people they disagree with become intellectually dishonest quickly. But this movement will not succeed if it becomes a pinball in the partisan politics of personal destruction.

Campaign finance experts told ABC News that while precise figures may be hard to tally, the level of outside spending from deep-pocketed groups on both sides this year appears to be unprecedented. Both sides are spending well into the millions of dollars, the records show. Kavanaugh himself decried the spending campaign targeting his nomination during his most recent testimony, saying he believed “millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups” were behind the effort to sink his court bid. Other groups opposing Kavanaugh, including Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America, have also poured in money. ABC found that since August, Planned Parenthood spent about $110,000 in airing ads just on a local television station in Anchorage, Alaska, and about $33,700 in a station in Portland, Maine, according to an analysis of political ad buy records filed to the Federal Communications Commission. Overall, NARAL has spent at least $2.5 million on campaigns against Kavanaugh, including $1.25 million on television and social media ads, according to a NARAL spokesperson. “Women and allies won't forget this fight- not now, not in November, and not in 2020,” NARAL spokesperson told ABC News in a statement. The conservative-leaning nonprofit Judicial Crisis Network has pumped $12 million into television and digital ads targeting the key states since Kavanaugh’s nomination, according to JCN Chief Counsel Carrie Severino. America First Policies has spent at least $105,000 on television ads in Indiana, and more than $153,000 in North Dakota, FCC records show. Like their opponents, the pro-Kavanaugh efforts have focused attention on key swing senators, pressuring vulnerable Democrats up for re-election in red states in November, including Sens.

Democrats can divide even when the president would seem to be uniting them. The biggest upshot of the Brett Kavanaugh saga is that winners may be losers and losers winners. The head-spinning three weeks since Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her allegation appear to be winding toward a conclusion. A Senate cloture vote is on track for Friday, with a final confirmation vote possible by Saturday night. A flashback from 13 months ago: President Trump calls her to the stage at a North Dakota event and describes Heitkamp — who was considered for a Trump Cabinet role early on — as "a good woman." ABC News' "Start Here" Podcast. President Trump participates in a Defense Industrial Base Report Presentation in the Oval office at 1:45 p.m. Tune in Friday, Oct. 12 at 10 p.m. The district, which voted for Barack Obama before flipping to Trump in 2016, is a key target for Democrats. The Note is a daily ABC News feature that highlights political analysis of the day ahead.

WASHINGTON — With the U.S. Senate set to vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination Friday and Saturday, it’s still unclear whether he’ll be confirmed or defeated, although the expectation is that he’ll survive along (mostly) party lines. But one thing’s for sure: The votes will reverberate beyond this election season. Four GOP senators up for re-election in 2020 hail from states that will be top battlegrounds in the next presidential election — Sens. Gardner has been supportive of Judge Kavanaugh throughout the nomination. Nothing in the report changed his mind and he remains supportive of Judge Kavanaughs nomination.” Colorado, of course, is a state that Hillary Clinton won by 5 points in 2016. After that vote, which will last about 30 minutes, there will be up to 30 hours of debate on the nomination – equally divided between Republicans and Democrats – after which they will hold the final vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination. Kavanaugh in the Wall Street Journal: “I was very emotional last Thursday" Out of everything that happened during last Thursday’s Kavanaugh-Ford testimony on Capitol Hill, maybe the most striking was Kavanaugh’s partisan tone in his opening remarks. We said, unequivocally, that each of us, on numerous occasions, had seen Brett stumbling drunk to the point that it would be impossible for him to state with any degree of certainty that he remembered everything that he did when drunk.” But also writing in the Washington Post, Mark A. Perry – a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who clerked with Kavanaugh at the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1990s – stands up for the nominee. “While I didn’t know Kavanaugh in high school, college or law school, I have known him for virtually all of his professional life — his time as a lawyer and judge, which led to his nomination to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court. These state elections are the most under-reported story in politics, with control of chambers likely tipping from Republicans to Democrats.”

Tensions heightened on Capitol Hill as the Senate braced on Wednesday for the results of an FBI investigation into allegations of sexual assault against Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Republican senators said they expected to receive transcripts of interviews from the abbreviated background check into Kavanaugh as early as Wednesday, one day after Trump inflamed an already toxic political brawl over the judge’s nomination by mocking a woman who has accused his nominee of sexual assault. Three key Republicans condemn Trump for mocking Christine Blasey Ford Read more In a letter addressed to the committee’s chairman, Chuck Grassley, and signed by eight of the panel’s 10 Democrats, they challenged the veracity of a tweet sent on Tuesday by the Republican majority that said: “Nowhere in any of these six FBI reports, which the committee has reviewed on a bipartisan basis, was there ever a whiff of ANY issue – at all – related in any way to inappropriate sexual behavior or alcohol abuse.” Democrats said the information is “not accurate” and demanded the Republicans correct the statement. Following the hearing, Flake triggered the fresh FBI investigation of Kavanaugh last Friday when he agreed to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination – but only if there was a week delay for law enforcement to investigate allegations of serious sexual misconduct against the judge. Ford and Kavanaugh have not yet been interviewed. The findings will be shared with the White House and with the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will make it available to all the senators and a handful of aides. In short, cloture is a way of cutting off debate and ending a filibuster on a particular issue before the US Senate – part of a multi-step process that culminates in a final vote on legislation or a nomination. In the case of judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, must first file for cloture, which will set the stage for a final vote on Kavanaugh's supreme court nomination. Republicans have a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate and could vote to invoke cloture without support from a single Democrat. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell repeated his vow to hold a cloture vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination by the end of the week, saying: “It’s time to put this embarrassing spectacle behind us.” The findings, which will include interviews with key witnesses, will be relayed to the White House and the Senate Judiciary Committee.