kavanaugh, brett hon

SEE TWO

NO MERRI

SEE LEO

capt 619 see bak 1219

djt sez more combative and did, vast conspiracy, big money, hit, clinton revenge...

violence?!

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see crc

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clerks = "the cabal"? feeder to clarence et al?

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bush v gore democ labs

Supreme Court has three lawyers who worked on Bush v. Gore

Justices Clarence Thomas voted to suspend the vote count in Florida that ended up with George Bush Jr. as president. Three other justices worked on the Bush team including John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett. All three were later appointed to the Supreme Court! Roberts was appointed by Bush

...

Kavanaugh. Presidential protector.

"Kavanaugh is a former Bush lieutenant who was not only a lawyer in the Florida recount of 2000, but inherited the pivotal job of staff secretary to the president. Legal experts see Kavanaugh as a presidential protector: He has radical views of executive power and privilege and has repeatedly raised doubts about whether presidents are accountable to other branches of government. This deference to presidential power is also a key reason Kavanaugh won the backing of President Trump. In his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh pointedly refused to comment on whether a sitting president must respond to a subpoena or has the power to pardon himself." - Rolling Stone

Rewarded by George Bush. George Bush nominated Kavanaugh in 2003 for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit...

The Federalist Society

https://fedsoc.org › bio › carrie-severino](https://fedsoc.org/bio/carrie-severino)

Carrie Campbell Severino is the president of the JCN, and co-author with Mollie Hemingway of the bestselling book Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh ...

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KICKASS 4 26

IF YOU GO BACK TO THE ORIGINAL BUG YOU ALSO SEE THE HONEST ELECTIONS PROJECT.

3:27

THIS WAS USED TO FILE AN AMICUS BRIEF IN THE SUPREME COURT WITHOUT DISCLOSING ITS AFFILIATION WITH THE JUDICIAL CRISIS NETWORK, WHICH SPENT

MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO GET THREE LEONARD LEO-SELECTED SUPREME COURT JUSTICES APPOINTED TO THE COURT.

---

omg

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-knew-brett-kavanaugh-during-his-years-republican-operative-don-ncna907391

no lnx

I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don't let him sit on the Supreme Court.

We were part of a close circle of cynical hard-right operatives being groomed for much bigger things.

Sept. 7, 2018,

ByDavid Brock

I used to know Brett Kavanaugh pretty well. And, when I think of Brett now, in the midst of his hearings for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, all I can think of is the old "Aesop's Fables" adage: "A man is known by the company he keeps."

And that's why I want to tell any senator who cares about our democracy: Vote no.

Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.

Brett Kavanaugh proves the Supreme Court swing vote is dead

SEPT. 4, 2018]

Brett actually makes a cameo appearance in my memoir of my time in the GOP, "Blinded By The Right." I describe him at a party full of zealous young conservatives gathered to watch President Bill Clinton's 1998 State of the Union address — just weeks after the story of his affair with a White House intern had broken. When the TV camera panned to Hillary Clinton, I saw Brett — at the time a key lieutenant of Ken Starr, the independent counsel investigating various Clinton scandals — mouth the word "bitch."

But there's a lot more to know about Kavanaugh than just his Pavlovian response to Hillary's image. Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. And it’s those controversial associations that should give members of the Senate and the American public serious pause.

[Related OPINION

GOP's maneuvering during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will seriously damage the Supreme Court's legitimacy]

Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence; House anti-Clinton gumshoeBarbara Comstockis now a Republican member of Congress. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge.

At one time or another, each of them partied at my Georgetown townhouse amid much booze and a thick air of cigar smoke.

In a rough division of labor, Kavanaugh played the role of lawyer — one of the sharp young minds recruited by the Federalist Society to infiltrate the federal judiciary with true believers. Through that network, Kavanaugh was mentored by D.C. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, known among his colleagues for planting leaks in the press for partisan advantage.

[Related OPINION

Tom Steyer and Ron Fein: Stop Kavanaugh's confirmation until Mueller's investigation is done]

When, as I came to know, Kavanaugh took on the role of designated leaker to the press of sensitive information from Starr's operation, we all laughed that Larry had taught him well. (Of course, that sort of political opportunism by a prosecutor is at best unethical, if not illegal.)

Another compatriot was George Conway (now Kellyanne's husband), who led a secretive group of right-wing lawyers — we called them "the elves" — who worked behind the scenes directing the litigation team of Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton for sexual harassment. I knew then that information was flowing quietly from the Jones team via Conway to Starr's office — and also that Conway's go-to man was none other than Brett Kavanaugh.

[Recommended OPINION

What could be Florida Gov. DeSantis’ undoing on the national stage? HBCUs.

OPINION

Trump's election plot was eye-opening. And the Senate is finally paying attention.]

That critical flow of inside information allowed Starr, in effect, to set a perjury trap for Clinton, laying the foundation for a crazed national political crisis and an unjust impeachment over a consensual affair.

But the cabal's godfather was Ted Olson, the then-future solicitor general for George W. Bush and now a sainted figure of the GOP establishment(and of some liberals for his role in legalizing same-sex marriage). Olson had a largely hidden role as a consigliere to the "Arkansas Project" — a multi-million dollar dirt-digging operation on the Clintons, funded by the eccentric right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and run through The American Spectator magazine, where I worked at the time.

Both Ted and Brett had what one could only be called an unhealthy obsession with the Clintons — especially Hillary. While Ted was pushing through the Arkansas Project conspiracy theories claiming that Clinton White House lawyer and Hillary friend Vincent Foster was murdered (he committed suicide), Brett was costing taxpayers millions by pedaling the same garbage at Starr's office.

A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.

[Related OPINION

Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination is the result of years of unopposed conservative organizing]

Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign. And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he's changed his stripes.

Like millions of Americans this week, I tuned into Kavanaugh's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee with great interest. In his opening statement and subsequent testimony, Kavanaugh presented himself as a "neutral and impartial arbiter" of the law. Judges, he said, were not players but akin to umpires — objectively calling balls and strikes. Again and again, he stressed his "independence" from partisan political influences.

But I don't need to see any documents to tell you who Kavanaugh is — because I've known him for years. And I'll leave it to all the lawyers to parse Kavanaugh's views on everything from privacy rights to gun rights. But I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense. He made up his mind nearly a generation ago — and, if he's confirmed, he'll have nearly two generations to impose it upon the rest of us.

https://www.republicreport.org/2018/who-kavanaugh-is-really-for-big-corporations/

ref

Brett Kavanaugh now faces a credible charge of sexual assault, as well as powerful evidence that he repeatedly lied to the Senate to conceal, among other bad deeds, his improper use of stolen documents as a Bush White House aide. Even religious conservatives and others at the grassroots who have supported Kavanaugh should take this moment to reconsider whether this particularly nominee is worth fighting for. Because, although as a Supreme Court justice Kavanaugh might well vote to advance the social conservative agenda, his real specialty as a judge has been supporting large corporations and harming the interests of American workers and consumers. And the millions of dollars supporting his candidacy are coming from a network of Washington lobbyists and big business interests.

Here are some of the key figures in the corporate special interest network that’s aiming to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court:

— C. Boyden Gray is the D.C. swamp personified. He’s a corporate lobbyist who was the White House counsel under President George H.W. Bush. He has been a central player in pushing GOP judicial nominees for decades, while also serving the interests of some of America’s wealthiest corporations. Gray published an essay this month arguing that Kavanaugh should be confirmed in part because he will protect the rights of small businesses over those of big business and big government. But the argument hardly seems credible coming from Gray, whose own business is based on trading on the relationships he developed as a top Washington insider to advance the interests of clients in the oil and chemical industries and other monied special interests.

Gray, a wealthy heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, has served on the board of the corporate-backed legal group the Federalist Society as well as of Citizens for a Sound Economy, a business group that was founded by the billionaire oil and chemical industry Koch brothers and later morphed into the Koch advocacy mega-operation Americans for Prosperity. Gray invited President Trump to his fancy Georgetown home earlier this year for a dinner with wealthy Republican donors, including other lobbyists and oil and banking executives, as part of efforts to raise $100 million this year, mostly in big donations, to support Trump and GOP candidates.

—The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) is the conservative advocacy group that is leading a multi-million dollar public campaign, with heavy TV advertising, to confirm Kavanaugh. JCN is guided by Leonard Leo, who is also the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, and the man who has Trump’s ear when it comes to picking judges. The “dark money” JCN doesn’t reveal its donors, but it’s tied to the political network of the Koch brothers, Boyden Gray, and mysterious wealthy contributors. JCN was launched with seed money from real estate magnate Robin Arkley II — who has made big money foreclosing on the homes of working people.

— Jon Kyl was, until recently, a lobbyist at the DC mega law firm Covington & Burling, which has represented big tobacco’s Philip Morris, oil giant BP, retailer Wal-mart, energy and construction titan Halliburton, and other big corporations. Last year, the Judicial Crisis Network paid Kyl, who had been a U.S. senator from Arizona, to push the nomination of Trump’s previous Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch. The Trump administration this year hired Kyl to shepherd the Kavanaugh nomination, a role that ended when Arizona’s governor tapped Kyl to return to the Senate to take John McCain’s seat and, presumably, to vote to confirm Kavanaugh for the high court.

— Lisa Blatt wrote an article last month entitled, “I’m a Liberal Feminist Lawyer. Here’s Why Democrats Should Support Judge Kavanaugh,” and she introduced Kavanaugh at his Senate hearing. Each time, in vouching for Kavanaugh as a person of integrity and empathy, Blatt stressed her liberal credentials as well as her impressive background as a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court more times than any other woman. What Blatt failed to explain is that she’s a partner at the big DC corporate law firm Arnold & Porter, where she represents giant tobacco and pharmaceutical interests seeking to defeat claims by workers and consumers.

We haven’t heard from the feminist Blatt in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during high school, but a group of D.C. Republican women have spoken out on his behalf. As Politico reports, there are a lot of lobbyists for big corporations, like Dow Chemical and Citigroup, in this band of women for Kavanaugh.

—The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) is running a “Confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh!” campaign on its website. State attorneys general frequently represent their states before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the concept of a group of them lobbying for their own Supreme Court justice is ethically concerning. But it’s worse when you consider that RAGA’s activities are funded by big corporations. RAGA’s biggest donor — providing $2.9 million in 2017 and $1.7 million already in 2018 — is the Judicial Crisis Network. It also gets money from numerous large corporations including Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Facebook, Altria, Coca Cola, Wal-Mart, Mastercard, Johnson and Johnson, UPS, and Murray Energy, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Rifle Association (RAGA’s second largest donor in 2017).

— The Ethics and Public Policy Center is a Washington think tank whose president, Edward Whelan, briefly shook up the Kavanaugh debate Thursday night when he played Twitter Sherlock Holmes and accused a Kavanaugh classmate by name as the possible assaulter — only to delete his thread and apologize the next morning for “an appalling and inexcusable mistake of judgment.” Whelan is a close friend of Leonard Leo and of Brett Kavanaugh, with whom he worked in the George W. Bush White House. In devising this Twitter rollout, Whelan was advised by the big DC PR firm CRC Public Relations; CRC’s clients include the Judicial Crisis Network ($3 million from JCN to CRC in 2016), the Federalist Society, and the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity, as well as corporations:{ including Chevron, Visa, and Microsoft. UPDATE 09-22-18 11:30 am: Garrett Ventry, a Grassley Judiciary Committee communications aide on leave from CRC, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[resigned this morning:{ after it was reported that he left his previous job amid a charge of sexual harassment.] The Ethics and Public Policy Center has received }:funding:{ from the family foundations of the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers as well as other wealthy interests.}:

Why are all these corporations and swampy DC lobbyists fighting so hard for Brett Kavanaugh? They have important interests, every year, in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court — cases that decide whether companies can bust unions and discriminate against workers, whether banks must treat customers honestly, whether companies must treat investors fairly, whether big tech companies can charge tolls to use the Internet and can spy on customers, whether predatory for-profit colleges can get away with deceiving students, whether makers of defective products and dangerous pharmaceutical can get away with harming consumers, and whether companies can create monopolies that allow them to control markets and jack up prices.

While a range of Americans are focused on the impact of a five-justice conservative bloc on issues like civil rights, reproductive choice, and other political values, perhaps the most powerful and unifying feature of such a bloc would be its deference to the interests of big business over workers and consumers.

Brett Kavanaugh’s record as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit shows that he has usually sided with big business interests — like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute — in cases involving protection of labor, consumers, health, safety, and the environment.

That’s why big money and big corporations want so badly to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, despite enormous questions about his honesty and integrity.

620

justice Roberts took ‘clear swipe’ at Kavanaugh in opinion siding with liberals in religion case: report

Matthew Chapman / Raw Story

On Friday night, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, holding that California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s restrictions on church gatherings are not a…

kos 1219

shadowy and immensely powerful Federalist Society is a driving force behind the right-wing takeover of the federal judiciary. It is responsible for the mob of ultra-conservative federal judges attacking our civil rights and giving free rein to massive corporations, including the right-wing extremist majority on the Supreme Court.

Right now, the Federalist Society is also working overtime to rehabilitate the reputation of disgraced Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women, and they have a powerful ally: Facebook. Facebook was a “Gold Circle” sponsor – the highest level – of the Federalist Society's annual black-tie gala, where Kavanaugh was the keynote speaker and honored with a standing ovation. Facebook apparently decided it could curry favor with right-wing, pro-corporate Republicans by helping to rehabilitate Kavanaugh. And this isn't the first time Facebook has sided with Kavanaugh – one of its top executives even sat behind him at his confirmation hearing just after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that he had sexually assaulted her.

Facebook is already reeling from scandals and facing waves of investigations and fines for data breaches and potential fraud, and we need to let them know: We stand with survivors, and Facebook’s support for Kavanaugh and the right-wing institutions responsible for his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court is unacceptable.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/mysterious-dark-money-group-got-22-million-to-get-trump-scotus-pick-kavanaugh-confirmed/

A just-published report by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics’ award-winning OpenSecrets.org reveals the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative secretive dark money group received $22 million from anonymous donors pledged to spend as much as $10 million to ensure Kavanaugh’s confirmation — the same amount that it spent to help confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017,” Anna Massoglia and Andrew Perez at OpenSecrets reveal in their report Friday.

“JCN has close ties to Trump’s judicial adviser Leonard Leo, a longtime executive at the Federalist Society, the influential conservative and libertarian lawyers network based in Washington, D.C.”

If you’re not familiar with the Judicial Crisis Network, here’s one of their ads you may have seen on TV in the run up to the Kavanaugh confirmation vote:

[vid]

Here’s where it gets even more disturbing.

“The bulk of JCN’s funding has typically come from the Wellspring Committee, another secretive nonprofit run by operatives who wear multiple hats in a larger network of opaque groups.”

That “larger network of opaque groups” links to another OpenSecrets report: “New clues link $1 million Trump inauguration mystery money to secretive ‘dark money’ network.”

OpenSecrets adds, “Wellspring has continued to send massive annual endowments to JCN since the group launched in 2005. JCN, in turn, has continued to pour tens of millions of dollars into every subsequent Supreme Court nomination fight and working to reshape the judiciary. Wellspring reported donating almost $15 million to JCN in 2017, on top of $23.5 million in 2016. Neither organization discloses the sources of its funds.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/fox-news-analyst-andrew-napolitano-stunned-by-kavanaughs-latest-ruling-i-did-not-see-this-coming/

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano on Monday said he was surprised to see Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh siding with the court’s liberal members in a recent 5-4 decision.

“One would think it is in the weeds, but it’s not. We all have apps on our phones — some for free and some you buy from Apple. So people sued Apple saying why do I pay $99 for an app worth $20 or $30. And the courts threw the case out, saying you can’t sue Apple in a class-action. You have to sue the originator of the app,” Napolitano explained to Fox News host Bill Hemmer. “This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States radically expanded plaintiff’s rights to commence class-actions against deep pocketed corporations. And what alliance was it? It was the four liberal members of the court and its newest member Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing a decision that is a plaintiff’s lawyers delight.”

“I did not see this coming,” Napolitano continued. “All the indications about Brett Kavanaugh were that he was a monolithic conservative that wouldn’t even listen to the other side and during the course of the unfortunate hearings that he had, when he was allowed to talk about his political philosophy, he said I am not a monolithic anything, I listen to the facts and I apply the law. Today he and the four liberal members of the court radically expanded the rights of plaintiffs to bring class-actions.”

Watch the video below:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26102018/children-climate-change-lawsuit-trial-delayed-supreme-court-kavanaugh

A federal judge in Oregon has delayed a lawsuit brought by 21 children and young adults to force government action on climate change, pending a decision by the Supreme Court on whether to dismiss the case before trial. Opening arguments had been set for Monday.

The government has repeatedly tried to halt the case. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to a temporary stay while it considers the Justice Department's argument that a trial would cause the government "irreparable harm." The decision to delay the case at this early stage was highly unusual.

The plaintiffs and their lawyers say the government is trying to deprive them of their right to a fair hearing.

"Since the early days of the Republic, our judiciary has grown to be the last line of defense against governance that threatens the public good and destroys the lives of our people," Julia Olson, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. "These young people deserve that chance to present their case against those who govern and let the light fall where it may."

If successful, the lawsuit could result in a court order that the federal government develop and implement a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. If the plaintiffs ultimately lose, a trial would still present a public forum on climate change and the grave risks it poses to the nation. A trial could also force the Trump administration into the embarrassing position of publicly admitting the facts about climate change while arguing that it need not address the problem.

The government's lawyers haven't contested the children's central claims—that climate change is real and is causing them harm. Instead, the lawyers have argued that the federal government is not responsible and that the court has no place ordering political branches what to do.

The Supreme Court is now considering those questions. In July, the court denied an earlier attempt by government lawyers to halt the case. It's unclear why the court changed its position now.

David Bookbinder, chief counsel for the libertarian Niskanen Center, which filed a brief supporting the youths' case, said the only thing that has changed is the replacement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's controversial pick whose record as a federal judge includes ruling against some environmental regulations.

"They're willing to step in and look at this earlier than the court normally would because it's a climate case," he said. One of the few other cases in which justices have issued such a ruling at this stage, he said, was when they halted implementation of President Barack Obama's proposal to limit emissions from the electricity sector. "Climate is just different."

Like Brown v. Board of Education with school integration or Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a right to marriage for same-sex couples, the case is pushing a novel claim for constitutional rights, legal experts say. It will also test core questions about the separations of powers. The plaintiffs argue that, as in Brown, the Constitution's checks and balances require the courts to step in because the political branches are failing citizens, in this case by neglecting to protect them from climate harm. The government has argued that existing laws and environmental regulations take precedence and any action by the court would overstep its authority.

"For three years, my co-plaintiffs and I have been waiting for our voices to be heard in court," Hazel V., a 14-year-old plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. "But the U.S. government is doing everything it can to silence us, all while we watch it continue to make the climate crisis worse.

https://www.alternet.org/taught-rule-scholar-privilege-explains-why-elite-men-brett-kavanaugh-lie-and-cheat-without

consequences

murkowski

native am key to her write-in win, pressure on brett k

https://www.alternet.org/lisa-murkowskis-facebook-page-flooded-rape-threats-and-accusations-after-no-vote-kavanaugh

https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/buying-time-supreme-court-advertisements

july 2018

Estimated Total TV Spending:

$9,545,920

Sponsor Estimated Spending Market Breakdown Supports or Opposes Kavanaugh?

Judicial Crisis Network $3,692,730

National Cable: $1,557,000

North Dakota: $739,970

Indiana: $567,210

West Virginia: $458,410

Alabama: $262,460

Washington, D.C.: $107,680

Supports

National Rifle Association/NRA Institute for Legislative Action $1,243,070

National Cable: $144,930

West Virginia: $281,580

Indiana: $198,980

North Dakota: $221,000

Alaska: $90,840

Montana: $305,740

Supports

Demand Justice Initiative $1,127,320

North Dakota: $147,490

West Virginia: $208,850

Indiana: $148,420

Maine: $357,680

Washington, D.C.: $79,480

Alaska: $171,250

Nevada: $12,610

Colorado: $1,540

Opposes

America First Policies, Inc. $1,109,950

Indiana: $477,420

North Dakota: $372,260

West Virginia: $240,730

National Cable: $19,540

Supports

NARAL Pro-Choice America $484,100 Maine: $484,100 Opposes

State Government Leadership Foundation $473,230 Maine: $473,230 Supports

Planned Parenthood Action Fund $404,530

Maine: $246,940

Alaska: $106,080

Washington, D.C.: $51,510

Opposes

One Nation $404,440 Maine: $404,440 Supports

Vote Vets Action Fund $179,510

Maine: $154,010

Alaska: $25,500

Opposes

45Committee $118,490

National Cable: $73,070

Washington, D.C.: $45,420

Supports

The ACLU of Maine $117,880 Maine: $117,880 N/A *

End Citizens United $73,420 National Cable: $73,420 Opposes

Protect Our Care $42,710

Maine: $26,210

Alaska: $16,500

Opposes

The ACLU of Alaska $39,420 Alaska: $39,420

N/A *

Citizens United $27,490 National Cable: $27,490 Supports

Great America PAC/Great America Alliance $5,550 National Cable: $5,550 Supports

American Civil Liberties Union Incorporated $2,080 West Virginia: $2,080 Opposes

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/05/jon-tester/how-much-dark-money-fueling-kavanaugh-confirmation/

How much dark money is fueling the Kavanaugh confirmation fight?

By John Kruzel on Friday, October 5th, 2018 at 3:05 p.m.

Brett Kavanaugh faces Senate confirmation hearing on Sept. 6, 2018.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., waded into Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and the millions of dollars that has been spent both for and against the would-be justice.

"Dark money is paying for over 80 percent of (Kavanaugh’s) ads," Tester said in Sept. 29 debate. Tester has said he would vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Much of that funding has taken the form of "dark money," which refers to political spending by unknown donors for the purpose of influencing public opinion.

We found no one who knows how much money in total has been spent in support of Kavanaugh's nomination. On top of that, the dark money groups aren't required in most cases to report their expenditures.

But many of those organizations like the publicitly and announce that they're spending millions to get Kavanaugh on the court. And those amounts are substantial.

Amount of 'dark money' unknown

Tester’s campaign pointed us to a slew of announcements from eight groups that are funding pro-Kavanaugh ads. Here’s their tally as of Oct. 2:

Funding for pro-Kavanaugh ads

Group

Amount

Judicial Crisis Network

$6 million

Great America Alliance

~ $4.5 million

America First Policies

~ $2 million

NRA-ILA

$1 million

Americans for Prosperity

$1 million

Citizens United

$250,000

45Committee

$650,000

Great America PAC

$448,000

TOTAL: ~ $15.84 million

With the possible exception of Great America PAC, none of these groups needs to disclose their donors or their expenditures.

In addition to data flagged by Tester’s campaign, the Brennan Center for Justice compiled data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks television ad buys in national markets. Here's their list of pro-Kavanaugh ads as of Oct. 3:

Kantar Media data (via Brennan Center for Justice; current as of Oct. 3)

Judicial Crisis Network [wtf?]

$3,692,730

NRA-ILA

$1,243,070

America First Policies

$1,109,950

State Government Leadership Foundation

$473,230

One Nation

$404,440

45Committee

$118,490

Citizens United

$27,490

Great America PAC

$5,550

TOTAL: $7.07 million

To be clear, this is an estimate of dark money spending.

However, groups like the National Republican Congressional Committee have also spent on advertisements in support of Kavanaugh.

Such groups do have to disclose their donors and expenditures, but don't need to do so until the next deadline for the Federal Elections Commission. That means no one can put together a total ad budget favoring Kavanaugh.

Without those reports, no one can have a complete accounting of the pro-Kavanaugh ad spending.

Nevertheless, Anna Massoglia, an analyst who tracks the flow of dark money at the Center for Responsive Politics, said this type of spending played a significant role in the Kavanaugh confirmation fight.

" 'Dark money' does make up a substantial portion of spending on the Supreme Court confirmation fight," she said. "But I would be reluctant to classify all spending on Kavanaugh as 'dark money' due to the structure of some of the entities spending on ads."

Our ruling

Tester said, "Dark money is paying for over 80 percent of (Kavanaugh’s) ads."

We did our best to tally up the outside spending on the Kavanaugh confirmation fight. But it’s difficult if not impossible to conclusively say how much money is involved.

Experts said dark money comprises a substantial portion of spending on the Supreme Court confirmation fight. It’s even possible dark money makes up 80 percent or more of the overall share, as Tester said. But we simply can’t be sure. Neither can Tester. And his precise-sounding statement leaves out that important context.

We rate this statement Half True.

Kavanaugh Also Lied About His Environmental Record

The upper chamber of the Senate is set to vote at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time Friday on whether to end debate on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. If the motion passes, the Senate could vote whether to confirm him Saturday, CNN reported.

Much of the outcome will depend on whether key swing voters believe Christine Blasey Ford's testimony that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when they were both in high school, or if they accept Kavanaugh's denials. But anyone paying attention to how he represented his environmental record would have reason to doubt his credibility, The Intercept reported Thursday,

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh presented himself as pro-environment overall. "In some cases, I've ruled against environmentalists' interests, and in many cases I've ruled for environmentalists' interests," he said.

But an analysis from Earthjustice found that of 26 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cases he had written opinions for, he had ruled for rolling back clean air and water protections 89 percent of the time. The Natural Resources Defense Council came out against a Supreme Court nomination for the second time in 25 years to oppose his advance to the nation's highest court. And an analysis by William Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, found that in 18 decisions he had made on wildlife cases, including split ones, he had ruled against protecting animals in 96 percent of them.

"He lied. He abjectly lied," Snape told The Intercept of Kavanaugh's testimony. "And if he's going to lie about his record on environmental cases, what's he not going to lie about?"

In one moment in particular during his testimony on Sept. 5, Kavanaugh said he had upheld environmental regulations in several cases, including what he described as "the Natural Resources Defense Council case versus EPA, a ruling for environmentalist groups."

When senior NRDC attorney John Walke, who argued the case in question before Kavanaugh, heard his testimony, he was stunned.

"My immediate reaction was, I thought I had misheard him," Walke told The Intercept. "But as he kept talking, I realized he was talking about my clean air case before him. And then, I honestly could not believe that a federal judge and Supreme Court nominee was misrepresenting my case to U.S. senators in order to bolster his environmental credentials."

Walke wrote a Twitter thread explaining how Kavanaugh had misrepresented his own ruling. Walke pointed out that Kavanaugh had ruled against the NRDC and the Sierra Club, who had also participated in the case, on three out of four counts. He upheld lax pollution limits for soot, lead, arsenic and other metal emissions from cement plants and let the EPA grant polluters a two-year extension to meet the weakened limits. He only ruled in favor of the environmental groups on a procedural question.

"[T]he claim is revealing because my case was one of his own leading examples of pro-environmental rulings: that it is a very poor example ends up reinforcing the relative paucity of his 'rulings in favor of environmentalists' interests," Walke tweeted.

How Supreme Court Pick Brett Kavanaugh Could Return US Policy to the Era of Robber Barons

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/09/05/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-lochner-era-non-delegation-doctrine

As Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearings get under way, understanding his appointment’s potential impacts for corporate regulation and the climate means looking back all the way to 1890.

That was when a nearly 50-year stretch known to legal historians as the “Lochner era” kicked off — a time better known in U.S. history as the age of the robber barons.

The Lochner era gets its name from a 1905 Supreme Court case, Lochner v. New York, which threw out state limits on the number of hours bakers could work in a week. This case's reasoning was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1937 case that rejected a half-century of judicial thinking — doctrines that had led the court to toss out laws governing working conditions, creating food safety standards, and barring child labor.

In 1937, as the Great Depression raged, the Supreme Court faced pressure from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, frustrated after the Court rejected 11 of 13 early New Deal programs as unconstitutional. The Constitution doesn’t say how many justices are allowed to sit on the Supreme Court — and FDR threatened to add enough justices to change the court’s leanings.

Not long after FDR’s threat, Justices Owen Roberts and Charles Evans Hughes joined majorities that rejected Lochner and found the new National Labor Relations Board constitutional — a move that’s gone down in legal history as the “switch in time that saved nine.” (Nine being the number of justices sitting on the Court.)

During the Lochner era, the Supreme Court followed a “non-delegation doctrine” that required Congress to play an active role in the most minute details of decision-making and policy-setting.

Bringing it back could have huge significance for how the U.S. regulates the environment, food safety, the Internet — and global climate change.

Bringing Lochner Back?

After the Lochner era ended, the Supreme Court allowed Congress, which writes the laws, to delegate the details of rules and regulations to government agencies in the executive branch, which enforces laws. So, for example, the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can decide just how much of a given chemical is safe in a city’s drinking water — and change those rules as new hazards are uncovered — without getting both houses of Congress to sign off on every detail.

Taken to the extreme, uprooting its ability to delegate could require Congress to write or approve every new federal rule and regulation, a herculean task in a country of over 300 million people. The House and Senate’s 535 members would also have to tackle jobs currently performed by dozens of federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Department of Agriculture (USDA).

But there are signs that the Supreme Court might allow the non-delegation doctrine to slip back into the law. In March, the Supreme Court agreed to review a case called Gundy v. United States, limiting its review to non-delegation issues.

And with Justice Kavanaugh shifting the court far to the right, that relatively obscure case might represent a major opportunity for corporations to chip away at the foundations of America’s regulations, including its environmental protections.

“This is a really important sleeper case,” Sean Hecht, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles told McClatchyin June, before Kavanaugh was nominated on July 9. If the Supreme Court handed down a broad ruling, “[p]arties would feel emboldened to say, you can’t make us do this under the Clean Air Act, or Clean Water Act, or the Endangered Species Act, because Congress wasn’t precise enough in the policy guidance it gave the agency.”

The Gundy case, which involves a dispute over the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, directly relates to criminal, not civil law — but legal observers warn that reviving non-delegation in any context could open the doors to hard right-wing judicial activism in much broader contexts.

“There are many on the right that want to upend nearly a century of law,” said Lisa Graves, co-director of the watchdog group Documented and a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, warning that Kavanaugh’s appointment could kick off a move back towards the Lochner era.

Kochs and Kavanaugh: The Laissez-Faire Link

The Lochner era’s laissez-faire philosophy — a hands-off, “let it be” approach that promotes slashing corporate regulation in the name of limiting government power — is one that many Koch-affiliated organizations and right-wing think tanks share today.

The Federalist Society, whose top donors include David Koch, Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, and Koch Industries, according to The Hill, has for years sponsored and hosted debates on reviving the non-delegation doctrine.

Kavanaugh, a long-time Federalist Society member who briefly resigned at the start of his tenure with the G.W. Bush White House Counsel, has remained active at Federalist Society events, though in 2001 he sought to distance himself from the conservative legal group in the press.

“The Federal Society role here is extraordinary,” said Graves. Leonard Leo, who has served for years as the society’s executive vice president, took a leave to advise President Trump on judicial nominees. He helped craft the list used by the Trump administration to decide who to appoint to Supreme Court vacancies.

By speaking at and attending many of the Federalist Society events, Kavanaugh maintained a close connection to the group after he became a judge in D.C.'s U.S. Court of Appeals.

“Judges are like jewels in the crown of the Federalist Society,” Graves said. “In essence, his involvement lends the prestige of his office to that organization.”

When it comes to climate change, Kavanaugh can see that there is a problem. “The earth is warming. Humans are contributing,” he said in 2016. “There is a huge policy imperative. The pope’s involved.”

But in 2016 during oral arguments for a lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan, Kavanaugh’s reasoning against Obama's signature climate change program took on a Lochner-esque tone as he argued that Congress hadn’t clearly delegated authority for Obama’s EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. “Global warming is not a blank check, either, for the President,” Kavanaugh said.

During hearings on his appointment to the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh called Lochner a “classic example of judges superimposing their personal views on the decision-making process in an improper manner.”

“Yet after ascending to the D.C. Circuit in 2006, Kavanaugh proceeded to follow the example of the Lochner justices,” Slate reported in July.

“Judge Kavanaugh isn't anti-environmental, but he tends to be anti-agency,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Inside Climate News. “He's often struck down regulation that he didn't think Congress had authorized explicitly enough.”

...

Affluenza and Endless Privilege: Kavanaugh's Social Capital Shielded Him from the Consequences of Bad Behavior — Will That Change?

By Chauncey DeVega, Salon

The saga of Brett Kavanaugh: Class, social capital and endless privilege. READ MORE»

https://www.alternet.org/evangelist-franklin-graham-says-its-not-relevant-brett-kavanaugh-allegedly-assaulted-someone

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-anti-catholic-playbook/ no lnx

CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS

CORRUPTIONPODCASTS OPP-ART: DISPATCHES FROM THE RESISTANCE

The Nation

SUPREME COURT The ‘Anti-Catholic’ Playbook

SUPREME COURTRELIGIONBRETT KAVANAUGH

The ‘Anti-Catholic’ Playbook

Does Brett Kavanaugh think abortion should be illegal? A secret network of right-wing activists has spent millions attacking such questions as anti-religious bigotry.

By Sarah PosnerTwitter SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, began yesterday with a sustained uproar from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who protested Republican efforts to barrel through the process. From the opening moments, Democrats prevailed on committee chair Charles Grassley to postpone the hearings—or entertain their motion to adjourn—because so many of Kavanaugh’s records as associate White House counsel, and all of his records as staff secretary to President George W. Bush, have yet to be released.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, where Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow. Additional research by Eli Clifton, Richard Salame and Maia Hibbett.

Committee Republicans, undaunted by this breach of transparency, turned to laying the groundwork for the questioning of Kavanaugh, set to begin this morning, by sowing fear in the Republican base about what Democrats would do if he were not confirmed and they gained more control of the confirmation process after the midterms. Senator Ted Cruz reminded the public of litigation brought by religious groups, including Catholic nuns, against the Obama administration, claiming that employer-provided contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act violated their religious freedom. Democrats, Cruz charged, “want justices who will further that assault on religious liberty.”

The hearings were fast-tracked by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who is pressing the Senate to confirm Kavanaugh by October 1. The rushed timeline is just the latest maneuver in an aggressive Republican campaign to make sweeping, long-lasting changes to the federal judiciary by packing it with judges hostile to civil rights, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ equality, and church-state separation—while at the same time taking extreme measures to block Democratic nominees. If he is confirmed, the 53-year-old Kavanaugh could tip the balance of the high court for decades, potentially overturning the right to an abortion and dramatically expanding religious exemptions to civil-rights laws and reproductive-health services. He could play a pivotal role in matters that could decide the future of the Trump presidency, from the scope of executive power, which Kavanaugh has argued is vast, to whether or not a sitting president may be subpoenaed or charged with a crime. On a wide range of issues with a profound impact on the daily lives of Americans, a Justice Kavanaugh could prove the decisive vote that cements conservative gains, while wiping out past civil-rights advances.

In the coming days, the 21 senators on the judiciary committee will have an opportunity to ask Kavanaugh tough questions about his legal philosophy on abortion, LGBTQ rights, executive power, and, as the point person on government faith-based initiatives while in the White House counsel’s office of George W. Bush, the proper role of government in the face of faith-based discrimination. Civil-rights advocates say these are precisely the questions that must be posed, given the stakes in choosing a successor to Anthony Kennedy, long the Court’s crucial swing vote on many of these issues. But if a tight-knit network of conservative activists has its way, these senators will instead pull their punches, fearing ferocious, well-funded attacks that deliberately misrepresent such scrutiny as signs of anti-religious bias.

Conservatives, including Kavanaugh himself, have long awaited and carefully prepared for this moment. In the wake of the crushing defeat of conservative legal hero Robert Bork, nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, and deep disappointment that subsequent, more-moderate Republican appointees Kennedy and David Souter failed to adjudicate as conservative ideologues, right-wing political operatives began building a new strategy for the courts. The Federalist Society continued to build a pipeline of conservative nominees, but strategists bruised from the Bork fight knew they also would need a hard-hitting public-relations campaign to press for their confirmation. They would have to successfully portray rigid ideologues as mainstream, while intimidating lawmakers from grilling them on their more extreme views.

A key tactic would be to shut down questioning on how the nominee would approach cases on abortion or LGBTQ rights by accusing Democratic senators probing these issues of being anti-religious—even anti-Catholic—bigots.

That campaign, honed over more than a decade, has been fueled by tens of millions of dollars in dark-money donations, designed by conservative political consultants and PR firms, disseminated byadvocacy groups such as the Catholic League and the Judicial Crisis Network, and validated by GOP senators such as Orrin Hatch,who in past confirmation battles has accused “the left” of “trying to enforce an anti-religious litmus test.” The network also includes Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo, who famously delivered a list of judicial nominees to then-candidate Trump, and has continued to closely advise him on his picks as president.

In his East Room speech accepting Trump’s nomination in July, Kavanaugh spoke often about his faith. He recalled his Jesuit education at Georgetown Preparatory School, in the suburbs of Washington, DC, which taught him the motto “men for others,” a creed Kavanaugh said had inspired a lifelong dedication to public service. He highlighted his standing in “the vibrant Catholic community” in Washington, noting that “the members of that community disagree about many things, but we are united by a commitment to serve.” He hit the same notes yesterday in his opening remarks, referencing his Jesuit education and his volunteer work with Catholic Charities.

In emphasizing his Catholic faith, Kavanaugh had perfectly teed up conservative activists to launch a preemptive attack on anyone who might question his views on abortion, LGBTQ issues, and religious liberty.Within hours of his nomination, one conservative Catholic advocacy organization, Catholic Vote, which claims nearly half a million lay Catholics as members, declared Catholic voters to be “thrilled” with the pick, but warned that they would be vigilant for “any whiff of anti-Catholic bigotry” in the confirmation process. “The experience of past judicial confirmation battles suggest attacks on a nominee’s personal religious views are inevitable,” the group’s president, Brian Burch, said. Op-eds warned of “another explosion of public anti-Catholicism” and predicted the “ugly insinuation” of “the same ‘dual loyalties’ chestnut that bigots have smeared Catholic candidates for public office for going on 200 years in this country.”

Kavanaugh’s nomination was not even a day old, yet Burch was already issuing a warning: “CatholicVote.org is prepared to defend Judge Kavanaugh from any such personal smear campaign by anti-Catholic zealots. We intend to hold every Senator, of both parties, accountable. Any whiff of anti-Catholic bigotry must be met with universal condemnation by every senator. This is especially true for those senators seeking re-election in states won by President Trump.” These senators include North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin—all Democrats in close races. All three are Catholic, and all three have been targeted with ads over the Kavanaugh nomination by Catholic Vote and the Judicial Crisis Network.

It’s unlikely that anyone on the Senate Judiciary Committee missed Burch’s meaning. The network had bludgeoned Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, for a year over a single sentence she uttered during confirmation hearings last September for Amy Coney Barrett,a Notre Dame Law School professor and conservative Catholic whom Trump had nominated to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After Barrett insisted that as a judge she would follow Supreme Court precedent, Feinstein asked how Barrett would resolve conflicts between her religious beliefs and the law as a judge. “Dogma and law are two different things,” Feinstein told Barrett. “I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.”

The clip caused an immediate uproar among conservatives. Catholic Vote published a piece on its website, “Dear Anti-Catholic Left: Bigotry Lives Loudly Within You.” The Judicial Crisis Network, the dark-money group at the center of the conservative march to stack the courts, leapt to Barrett’s defense with an inflammatory, six-figure ad campaign, titled “Catholics Need Not Apply.” It accused Feinstein and fellow Judiciary Committee Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois, himself a Catholic, of having “mocked” Barrett’s faith. “Their hypocrisy knows no limits,” the ad charged. “They attack a woman for her Catholic faith, make it a religious test, while they are afraid to call radical Islam, radical Islam.”

The Senate confirmed Barrett, who became an instant celebrity to Trump’s Christian-right base, a standing that soon landed her on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court. Meanwhile a variation on Feinstein’s phrase—“the dogma lives loudly within me”—became a right-wing meme, appearing on T-shirts and coffee mugs sold on conservative websites, and her quote continues to provide fodder for right-wing pundits.

But while conservative Catholic activists have succeeded in claiming loudly that they have been oppressed, many liberal Catholic leaders argue that their views don’t represent all Catholics. “The religious right, including ultraconservative Catholic special-interest groups, are the squeaky wheel in American politics,” said Jon O’Brien, President of Catholics for Choice. “They get heard and privileged above the majority of Americans of faith or no faith. We are incredibly concerned that Kavanaugh and the special interests he is backed by will radically redefine religious freedom in America to mean religious privilege for a few at the expense of everyone else, including women and LGBT individuals.”

Indeed, yesterday, as Kavanaugh’s hearings got underway, 1,550 Catholic nuns, priests, deacons, and other leaders wrote to the Senate raising concerns about Kavanaugh’s views on health care, immigration, workers’ rights, voting rights, and the death penalty. “As Catholics,” they wrote, “we believe that any government official—including a Supreme Court Justice—must be concerned with the needs of people who are marginalized, not just the rich and powerful or a member of one’s own political party.”

Kavanaugh, it turns out, is deeply familiar with this playbook built around allegations of bias, as it dates back to his days as a top adviser in the George W. Bush White House during the religion wars over Bush’s judicial nominees, some of whom had out-of-the-mainstream views on abortion, gender, and LGBTQ rights.

From 2001 through the middle of 2003, Kavanaugh served as associate White House counsel, helping Bush shepherd his judicial nominations through the Senate. In mid-2003, Bush named Kavanaugh his special adviser and staff secretary; shortly afterward, he nominated Kavanaugh to be a judge on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Throughout this period, Bush’s judicial nominees—many of whom, like Trump’s nominees, had been cultivated and vetted by the Federalist Society—provoked pitched confrontations in a narrowly divided Senate.

In 2003, while Kavanaugh was still in the White House counsel’s office, conservatives accused Democrats of anti-Catholic bias during confirmation hearings for James Leon Holmes, whom Bush had nominated to be a federal trial judge in Arkansas. Holmes had a history of misogynist writing in which he had argued, with his wife, that “the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man” and insisted that an abortion ban would not violate the rights of women who had been sexually assaulted. “Concern for rape victims is a red herring,” he wrote in a letter to a local newspaper, “because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.”

The “controversy around Leon Holmes,” according to an account by conservative Catholic political operative Deal Hudson, provided a “perfect opening” for Republicans to accuse Democrats of being anti-Catholic. According to documents related to Kavanaugh’s White House tenure released by the George W. Bush Presidential Library, Manuel Miranda, at the time counsel to Senate majority leader Bill Frist, circulated an e-mail blast to White House staff, including Kavanaugh, from the arch-conservative Catholic League. “catholicism on trial: religious test applied to judicial nominee,” it read, going on to describe Holmes as “a man of deep religious conviction” and accuse Democrats of having “unfairly tagged him a misogynist, misunderstanding what the pope, the U.S. bishops and Holmes have said regarding this matter.”

“It does not get better than this,” Miranda enthused in his cover note. Miranda later left his post over a scandal in which he was implicated in secretly accessing and leaking Democratic computer files about judicial nominations. Holmes was confirmed.

The religion wars only intensified when Bush nominated William Pryor to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.Because he was up for an appellate seat, Pryor generated more adamant Democratic opposition than had Holmes. Senators probed his hard-line beliefs on abortion, church-state separation, and LGBTQ rights, including questioning him about his rescheduling of a family vacation to Disney World because it coincided with “Gay Day,”and an amicus brief he authored as Alabama attorney general in the landmark Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, in which he argued that gay sex should remain criminalized because the Court had “never recognized a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy.” Pryor supporters, again, portrayed legitimate questions about a nominee’s position on abortion—a constitutional right that enjoys majority support among not only Americans as a whole but also among Catholics—as a de facto litmus test against Catholics.

“Their intention is smearing senators as anti-religious for asking questions,” said Peter Montgomery, senior fellow at People for the American Way, which has been in the thick of judicial nominations for decades. “In doing that they’re hoping to intimidate the senator somehow. They raise these questions when senators are asking the nominees about important issues like Roe v. Wade.”

Throughout this entire period, Kavanaugh was specifically enlisted by the Bush White House to engage the Catholic community, including about judges. He was asked, along with Karl Rove, to address supporters of the Catholic magazine Crisis. He also spoke about judicial nominations to a Pro-Life Pilgrimage from Legatus, a conservative Catholic network created by Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, for Catholic business leaders who have “committed themselves to study, live and spread the Catholic faith in their business and personal lives.” And he volunteered to be the office’s specialist on faith-based initiatives, “given my general interest and my previous religious liberty work in my pre-WH days.” Kavanaugh had served on the Religious Liberty Practice Group at the Federalist Society; in private practice he authored an amicus brief in a school-prayer case, arguing that student-delivered prayers at football games were constitutional (the Supreme Court held that they were not).

It was during the Pryor nomination fight that conservative advocacy groups first aggressively advanced the claim that Catholics were being excluded from the bench by the left. The Committee for Justice, led by former George H.W. Bush White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, and the Ave Maria List, a political-action committee funded by Monaghan, ran newspaper ads in support of Pryor that targeted moderate and swing-state Democratic senators. The ads featured a picture of a closed courtroom door with a sign over it reading, “Catholics Need Not Apply”—the first of the phrase’s many appearances in confirmation campaigns.

Senate Republicans helped press the charge that Democrats were anti-religion. Hatch, then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters, “It appears that nominees who openly adhere to Catholic and Baptist doctrines, as a matter of personal faith, are unqualified for the federal bench in the eyes of the liberal Washington interest groups. Period.”

But the Committee for Justice ads drew condemnation from other quarters, including from the Anti-Defamation League, which protested that they were “misleading and inflammatory.” A Washington Post editorial described them as “beyond the pale.” Senate Democrats mounted a filibuster, consigning Pryor to a recess appointment, but he was eventually confirmed in 2005 in a bipartisan deal.

The political battle, however, turned out to be far more damaging to the senators who had opposed Pryor’s confirmation.As the 2004 election season got underway, it became clear that an attack machine sounding the alarm about anti-Catholic bias was perfectly comfortable with harsh assaults on Catholic Democrats. Then–Senate minority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, both Catholics themselves, had denounced the Committee for Justice ads on the Senate floor. Daschle, declaring himself “proud of my Catholic faith,” said, “I know about the bias against immigrants and against Catholics. That was real discrimination. What is being spread this week is a falsehood uttered for partisan political purposes.”

Despite his public declaration of pride in his Catholic faith, Daschle would become a target of conservatives—including conservative Catholics—who sought to oust him from the Senate in order to pave a clear path for confirmation of Bush’s judicial picks. The 2004 elections, with John Kerry, another liberal Catholic at the top of the presidential ticket, featured brutal attacks on both men’s faith.

The Republican National Committee attacked Kerry’s Catholicism, launching a website, KerryWrongforCatholics.com, critical of his positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, and judicial nominations, noting that as senator he had pledged to “filibuster any Supreme Court nominee who would turn back the clock on the right to choose, on civil rights and individual liberties, on the laws protecting workers and the environment.” Kerry was also being Swift Boated, a campaign conceived in part by a PR firm, Creative Response Concepts, that would go on to become a player in the Catholic judicial-nominations network. The Committee for Justice launched a website and ad campaign called “Kerry’s Scary” to attack his views on abortion, same-sex marriage and the pope, as well as his judicial philosophy, calling the latter issue urgent because “Court watchers believe as many as four Justices might retire in the next four years.”

Conservatives also raised questions about Daschle’s Catholicism during his 2004 reelection bid, attacking him in ads over his stance on the judiciary, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. The stakes were high for those who dreamed of a conservative takeover of the courts: If Democrats reversed Republicans’ razor-thin margin in the Senate, they would control the chamber, giving them the ability to block Bush’s nominees, including for anticipated Supreme Court vacancies, or push through those nominated by a potential president Kerry.

Even before the campaign got underway, conservative magazines spread stories that Daschle’s bishop was denying him communion because he was divorced. Then the ads started. The Ave Maria List PAC spent $100,000 running ads accusing Daschle of misinforming South Dakota voters that he was against abortion. One ad said Daschle had once called abortion “an abhorrent practice,” but had later supported pro-choice groups as senator. “Tom Daschle tries to claim he’s pro-life even though his voting record and actions in Washington prove he’s not,” the ad charged. “Tom Daschle has changed and it’s time for South Dakota voters to make a change of their own.”

Another anti-Daschle ad campaign, titled “You’re Fired”—modeled on Trump’s reality-television show The Apprentice—was produced by the You’re Fired PAC and funded by Robin P.Arkley II, a California real-estate magnate. Arkley donated over half a million dollars to the effort.

“The people of South Dakota want to protect traditional marriage,” an affiliated website declared. “You’re Fired Inc. believes the Federal Marriage Amendment is the only way to prevent liberal, activist judges from imposing same sex marriage as they have in Massachusetts—on the rest of American society.” The site depicted a boardroom meeting, during which an executive concluded, “We have one too many Democrats around here and that’s not a good thing,” punctuating his statement with the trademark “You’re fired.” Another Arkley ad charged that Daschle “refused to protect marriage” and “would let liberal, activist judges redefine it.”

Daschle lost his reelection bid, the Republicans retained control of the Senate, and Bush beat Kerry, winning reelection to a second term during which he put John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court.

With the White House and Senate in Republican hands, and with the GOP riding high on passing same-sex marriage bans at the ballot box in 11 states, conservative activists set to work on getting Bush’s conservative judicial nominees confirmed. After the 2004 election, one of Arkley’s top aides, Ann Corkery, who had directed philanthropy at his loan-servicing firm, founded the Judicial Confirmation Network. The group blandly described itself as “an organization of citizens joined together to support the confirmation of highly qualified individuals to the Supreme Court of the United States.” Yet Corkery and her husband Neil would soon become pivotal figures in a broadening coalition of conservatives as they prepared for the confirmation battles ahead.

That coalition, according to a 2006 account in Crisis magazine, was directed by a “war room” of activists “acquainted with each other through Catholic and conservative public causes.” Among them were major players from the Bush reelection campaign, including Gary Marx, who had led the campaign’s outreach to social conservatives, and Greg Mueller, described by Crisis as “the group’s public-relations maestro,” whose public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, had advised Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Today, CRC represents the Judicial Crisis Network as well as the Catholic Association, another advocacy group the Corkerys helped launch in 2007, to influence policy-makers on issues concerning “the family, Catholic institutions, religious liberty, and cultural values.” CRC did not respond to repeated requests to interview representatives of JCN and the Catholic Association.

According to Crisis, “Mueller, Leo, and their colleagues would provide the main talking points, media training, rapid response to any attacks on the nominees, assistance with ad buys, and ongoing legal analysis.”

“Our most important goals were to support the idea of judicial restraint, to define the character of the nominee within the first 24 hours, and to continue to provide support as the process wended its way,” Leo told Crisis, reflecting on the war room’s role in the successful confirmation of both Roberts and Alito. “To accomplish this, we engaged in a variety of approaches—an aggressive paid media effort, rapid response activity, and positive messages.”

Mueller described the war room in far more political terms. “We tried to take the approach of corporate crisis management, along with the daily political communications that go on in a political campaign.” It fell to Marx, fresh off the Bush-Cheney campaign and newly appointed as JCN’s first executive director, as Crisis wrote, to develop “a state-based strategy that would target the political pressure points—an organization that would make Democratic senators in Republican states feel the political heat.”

During Bush’s second term—as Kavanaugh’s nomination to the DC Circuit was held up over a period of years, with Democrats arguing that his role in drafting the Starr Report and in the investigation of the suicide of Clinton aide Vince Foster had marked him as too partisan to warrant his confirmation as a judge—the war room kicked in. JCN openly threatened Democratic senators with the Daschle treatment. If lawmakers filibuster Kavanaugh, JCN warned in 2006, a midterm-election year, “Americans in key states will react just as they did when former Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle did the same thing. Americans care about judges and the role of the courts in our society.” The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh two weeks later, by a vote of 57-36.

Today, thepresident of JCN is not a public figure like Marx but a player so behind-the-scenes as to barely leave a public trace. But Daniel Casey, a public-relations, political, and “crisis” consultant, is a veteran of the Bork confirmation battle—a fight that conservatives painfully lost, triggering the scorched-earth organizing JCN spearheads today.

Then the executive director of the American Conservative Union, Casey was “a crucial player” in the Bork fight, said Patrick McGuigan, who worked then for the Free Congress Foundation, a political advocacy group founded by religious-right architect Paul Weyrich that helped push the GOP to the right. The dust jacket of Ninth Justice, a book McGuigan wrote with Weyrich’s daughter Dawn, detailing each move and countermove in the Bork fight, describes McGuigan and Casey as “intensely Republican, devout Catholics, ardent admirers of the nominee—who understood from the first moment of the battle that they were involved in the most significant political confrontation of their lives.”

McGuigan, who now works as a journalist in Oklahoma, described his relationship with Casey as “co-captains” in the Bork battle, in which conservatives were heavily outspent and outmaneuvered by the liberal opposition. He said that at the time, there was “insufficient organization of ideas and messaging on the conservative side of things compared to the left side.” Casey’s forte, said McGuigan, was “neighborhood by neighborhood, precinct by precinct, household by household organization patterned after the labor unions, but on the conservative end of the spectrum instead. I think that’s what Dan was good at.” (Casey declined to be interviewed for this article, referring interview requests to Peter Robbio at CRC, who did not respond.) In the years after the failure of the Bork nomination, conservatives saw the appointment of Kennedy, and then of Bill Clinton’s nominees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Although Kennedy was nominated by a Republican, he proved a bitter disappointment to conservatives, particularly for his majority opinion in Lawrence in 2003, ruling anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional—a ruling that led, 12 years later, to the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide.

During the Bork hearings, Casey argued that “the American people should be outraged that the liberals are spending millions of dollars to try to buy a Supreme Court seat.” Three decades later, Casey is the president of the moneyed advocacy organizations JCN and the related Judicial Education Project, as well as of Catholic Voices. He is also treasurer and director of the Catholic Association Foundation and the Catholic Association. Together, they are part of a multimillion-dollar dark-money campaign backing a relentless drive by Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate to reshape the federal judiciary for generations, from federal trial courts all the way to the Supreme Court, and to shape public opinion about Catholicism and religious liberty.

JCN does not disclose the identity of its donors. But the group has said it anticipates spending at least $10 million advocating for Kavanaugh’s nomination. While many of the early ads focused on promoting Kavanaugh as a mainstream, impartial jurist admired by former clerks of all political stripes, the most recent ads touted him a “grand slam for conservatives” and warned Democrats against succumbing to “pressure from East Coast liberals.”

After 2008, the Judicial Confirmation Network changed tacks, from battering the opponents of Bush’s court nominees to blocking President Barack Obama’s. JCN, now renamed theJudicial Crisis Network, was the first conservative organization to blast Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor—a Catholic—as “a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.” Although JCN had repeatedly claimed that liberal Democrats had unfairly attacked conservative Catholics, it again did not hesitate to attack a liberal Catholic.

John Gehring, Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal group that advocates for progressive expressions of faith in politics, said that for conservative Catholics, Obama’s presidency “was very formative to the idea that Catholic identity was under siege by an administration that had elitist contempt for what the church believes.” The University of Notre Dame’s invitation to the pro-choice Obama to deliver a commencement speech in 2009, said Gehring, triggered “a huge divide” and “an earthquake in Catholic political conversation.” The Obama administration’s policies, particularly the contraception benefit written into the Affordable Care Act, which became the core target of conservatives’ legal strategy on religious freedom, further inflamed the world of conservative Catholicism.

But Gehring argues that this “well-funded, deep network” has “had disproportionate influence on what Catholic identity is in the public square and in politics.” He said the network has helped to create the distorted impression that Catholic priorities are limited to opposing abortion and LGBTQ rights, when traditional Catholic social-justice teaching includes a range of issues such as immigration, poverty, and the environment. Gehring pointed out, as an example, that conservative Catholics ignore the 1891 papal encyclical, “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor,” written in support of workers rights, including the right to unionize.

What’s more, the conservative network’s position on abortion doesn’t represent the majority of Catholics. According to the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. O’Brien, of Catholics for Choice, also points out that “Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as women of other faiths or no faith.” Kavanaugh’s decisions as an appellate judge on reproductive rights and the role of religion in politics, O’Brien added, “underscore just how out of touch he is with the majority of Catholics who are pro-choice and who support a healthy separation between church and state.”

During the Obama era, the dark money ramped up. The Wellspring Committee, a nonprofit formed in 2008 where both Corkerys have served as president, became the chief funder of JCN, bankrolling its campaigns to block Merrick Garland’s confirmation, and, under Trump, to support the nomination of Neil Gorsuch and other nominees to federal courts. According to an investigation last year by the Center for Responsive Politics, “most of Wellspring’s funds, in turn, came from a single mysterious donor who gave the organization almost $28.5 million—nearly 90 percent of its $32.2 million in revenues” in 2016. According to this report, Wellspring gave more than $23 million to JCN in 2016, quadrupling its 2015 donation to the group of $5.8 million.

Wellspringalso donated money to the Catholic Association, another nonprofit the Corkerys helped found, this one to advocate on behalf of “religious liberty,” and to the Federalist Society. In yet another sign of the intimacy of this network, the association paid Leo, known as Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer, $120,000 for “management consulting.” (Leo also earned $435,000 from the Federalist Society that year, according to its tax return.) Neither Leo nor the Corkerys responded to requests for comment.

Another mysterious Corkery-linked company, BH Group LLC, created in 2016, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Not much is known about what BH Group does, or who its principals are, but in 2016, the Corkerys’ Wellspring Committee paid BH Group $750,000 for “public relations,” according to its tax return, and JCN paid the firm $947,000 for “consulting services.” And Leo later identified BH Group as his employer in an FEC filing.

In early May 2017, about a month after Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Leo was awarded the prestigious Canterbury Medal from the Becket Fundfor Religious Liberty, billed by the organization as “religious liberty’s highest honor.” A major Christian-right legal firm, the Becket Fund is best known for its victory in 2014’s landmark Hobby Lobby case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act’s requirement of contraceptive coverage violated the company’s religious freedom. In his acceptance speech at a gala held at The Pierre, a New York luxury hotel overlooking Central Park, Leo, in white tie, could barely conceal his elation that Trump had beaten the odds to win the White House. Looking back on the campaign, Leo recalled the “fear that permeated every day in that countdown to November 8” and rejoiced at the “amazing turn of events, thanks to our 45th president.”

With Trump as president, Leo is, for all practical purposes, on the inside, as a handsomely compensated guide to judicial nominees who will satisfy religious conservatives. JCN runs the outside game,spending its mounds of dark money to promote the president’s—or rather, Leo’s—judicial nominees.

But even as the Trump administration was already well on its way to stacking the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with judges inclined to expand the reach of Hobby Lobby, Leo had not quite let go of the urgency of the Obama years—or what he’d seen as the threat of a potential Hillary Clinton presidency suppressing religious freedom. “As government policy becomes more grudging toward religious freedom, that attitude spreads in the broader culture. A hostile stance in Washington creates space for groups with kindred ideological designs,” Leo said, going on to warn of even more dire consequences. “A government that suffocates something so elemental as freedom of religion is not likely to be respectful of any other right.”

At one point, he released the tension with a joke at Clinton’s expense. “Of course everyone thought they knew how the election was going to go,” Leo said. “The Democratic nominee looked so confident, so relaxed, so content. With just days remaining, what could possibly go wrong?” And then, “Well, not everyone had access to Rebekah Mercer’s crystal ball.”

At the time Leo spoke, Mercer’s family’s data-analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, was not yet under federal investigation for harvesting private Facebook data and potentially violating US election laws. But even so, it was striking that he referenced the Mercer family—whose political giving is led by Rebekah and her father Robert, the reclusive, Trump-supporting, Republican financier—at a celebration of religious freedom, given that one of the family’s pet projects, Breitbart News, has long been a hotbed of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. It turns out that Mercer had also long been a generous funder of an array of organizations in Leo’s orbit—the conservative legal and Christian organizations that claim to represent ordinary citizens fed up with Democrat-appointed “judicial activists” and Democratic “gridlock” in holding up Republican nominees.

Charity filings show that between 2013 and 2016, the Mercer Family Foundation gave a million dollars to the Becket Fund, on whose board Leo has served since 2014. Between 2013 and 2015, the foundation donated nearly $6 million to the Federalist Society. In fact, Rebekah Mercer’s ties with Leo go even deeper.

In 2014, Leo joined the board of a new group called Reclaim New York, led by Mercer and Steve Bannon, then ensconced at Breitbart. The group claims to provide citizen trainings to “empower citizens to engage their state and local government,” but critics call it an astroturf organization dedicated instead to sowing distrust in state and local government and laying the groundwork for far-right Republican candidates to win elections. In 2015, Reclaim New York shared office space with Cambridge Analytica in midtown Manhattan and paid the firm for data-analytic services. (Reclaim New York did not respond to a request for comment about Leo’s role.) In 2016, Leo, along with Mercer and Kellyanne Conway, now a top adviser to President Trump, incorporated a related lobbying organization, the Reclaim New York Initiative.

A core element of Leo’s strategy, throughout the Bush and Obama years, was to portray religious freedom, a treasured American virtue, as under siege by supposed government overreach and disdainful, elite liberal culture. In another May 2017 speech, this one before the ActonInstitute, a conservative think tank, Leo placed the blame on the left for making confirmation battles “so intense.” Liberals, he said, want to invest the Supreme Court with “something close to absolute power,” including the “creation of rights found nowhere in the text or structure of the Constitution,” citing Griswold v. Connecticut, from 1965, which struck down laws criminalizing the sale of contraception; Roe v. Wade, from 1973, which legalized abortion; and Obergefell v. Hodges, from 2015, which legalized same-sex marriage.

But now, he said, thanks to Trump, liberals were finally losing control of the courts. “For constitutionalists,” Leo told the Acton Institute, “our improbable 45th president has turned out to be, to borrow a phrase from his predecessor, the change we’ve been waiting for.”

Sarah PosnerTWITTERSarah Posner is a Reporting Fellow with the Investigative Fund and expert on the intersection of religion and politics.

trms lied in previous confirmation on torture?

zelig of rw lawyering

news broke that Christine Blasey Ford—a 51-year-old professor of psychology at Palo Alto University in Northern California—had accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her at a party back in 1982, many of the responses were fair-minded and even-handed. A long list of people have stressed that while Kavanaugh hasn’t been convicted of anything, they definitely want to hear, in detail, all that Ford has to say—especially in light of the fact that Kavanaugh is up for a lifetime appointment on the highest judicial body in the United States.

But on the far right, some wingnuts have been quick to either demonize Ford or turn her accusation into a Republicans-versus-Democrats argument. Kavanaugh is their guy, the GOP is their party—and Ford’s accusation, they immediately assume, is nothing more than a Democratic conspiracy.

Here are five of the most appalling reactions to Ford’s accusation that have come from the far right.

1. Sen. Mitch McConnell Turns Ford’s Accusation into an Attack on Dianne Feinstein

As Senate majority leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell has been a ruthless, vindictive partisan whose top priority is sticking it to Democrats—not the wellbeing of the country. And he made that abundantly clear when, after learning that Ford had accused Kavanaugh of attempted rape, his knee-jerk response was to attack Sen. Dianne Feinstein (the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee) rather than wanting to hear what Ford has to say. McConnell views Ford’s allegation in strictly partisan terms, faulting Feinstein for not coming forward with the information she had on Ford and Kavanaugh sooner. But Ford, at first, had requested anonymity. And McConnell, always a Republican first and an American second, fumed, “Now, now, at the 11th hour, with committee votes on schedule—after Democrats have spent weeks and weeks searching for any possible reason that the nomination should be delayed—now, now, they choose to reveal this allegation.”

2. Donald Trump Jr. Mocks, Belittles Christine Blasey Ford

After Ford decided to reveal her identity, it didn’t take Donald Trump, Jr.—vice president of the Trump Organization—long to begin ridiculing and belittling her. In an Instagram post, the president’s 40-year-old son posted a mock “letter” that was written in crayon and labeled “Judge Kavanaugh’s sexual assault letter found by Dems.” The mock “letter” read, “Hi, Cindy, will you be my girlfriend? Love, Brett,” with boxes for checking either “yes” or “no.” And in a mocking tone, Trump, Jr. said of Kavanaugh, “Oh, boy, the Dems and their usual nonsense games really have him on the ropes now.”

3. Matt Drudge, Grabien News Attack Kavanaugh Accuser by Confusing Her With Someone Else

Matt Drudge’s The Drudge Report attempted to smear Ford on Twitter by linking to a hit piece on her that had originally been published by Grabien News. In the article, Grabien tried to paint Ford as a bad professor who had received a lot of negative online reviews from her students. One of the reviews, posted on RateMyProfessor.com on September 25, 2014, said, “Christine Ford is the worst educator I have experienced. Avoid taking her class and avoid any interaction with this person.” But the Christine Ford in that review is Christine A. Ford, a licensed social worker who taught at California State University, Fullerton—not Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford, who is employed by Palo Alto University. In fact, Fullerton is in Orange County south of Los Angeles, and is well over 300 miles from Palo Alto. Grabien has since retracted the inaccurate story that the Drudge Report was so quick to promote.

4. Women for Trump’s Amy Kremer: Democrats Want to ‘Gin Up the Hysteria Machine’

Republicans had no problem with Sen. Feinstein when, in late 2017, she demanded Democratic Sen. Al Franken’s resignation in response to sexual harassment allegations. Franken didn’t get a pass from Feinstein simply because he was a Democrat: Feinstein wanted him to step down, party affiliation be damned—and the Minnesota senator resigned. But the minute Feinstein has legal concerns about a Republican Supreme Court nominee, Republicans view her as a one-woman hit squad.

During a September 17 interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Amy Kremer (co-founder of Women for Trump) had the same knee-jerk reaction to Ford’s accusation as McConnell: she viewed it in strictly partisan terms, insisting that Democrats are trying to “gin up the hysteria machine” with a “dog and pony show.” Kremer also asserted that there should be no public testimony from Ford, only closed-door hearings—which is ludicrous. Considering that Ford is making a very serious accusation and that Kavanaugh, if confirmed, could still be on the Supreme Court 30 years from now, anything the Palo Alto University professor has to say on the matter should be heard publicly.

5. Joe Walsh Attacks Democrats for Waiting to ‘Drop This Dirt’

Even former Rep. Joe Walsh (a Tea Party wingnut) called Donald Trump, Jr. out for mocking Christine Blasey Ford, correctly denouncing him as an “uncaring, narrow-minded idiot” on Twitter. But Walsh, like McConnell and Kremer, has turned Ford’s accusation into an opportunity to play partisan politics, posting on Twitter, “So Dems waited until the very last minute to drop this dirt, and now they want to wait again to hear from her? You don’t think they’re trying to drag this thing out, do you?”

Walsh likes to see himself as a law-and-order man, but when a Republican Supreme Court nominee is accused of attempted rape, it’s all the Democrats’ fault, in Walsh’s mind.

AN cory f

From the moment the world learned that there were serious accusations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, countless conservatives have done their best to mock, downplay, and disregard the very serious allegations.

Now that the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has come forward, they haven't slowed their attempt to discredit, demean and dismiss her at all. If anything, their attacks have only ramped up as the allegations became more serious and credible.

Fox News commentator Stephen Miller (no relation to the White House staffer) offered up some of the worst takes in the aftermath of Ford's revelations. Ford said that Kavanaugh and a friend of his, Mark Judge,held her down in a bedroom at a party in high school while Kavanaugh groped her and tried to remove her clothes. She says they covered her mouth, turned up music to muffle her screams, and says she feared they'd inadvertently kill her.

Miller's response? "It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven."

In this way, he doesn't even accept Kavanaugh's denial that the incident ever took place. He seems to believe that it happened, but he dismisses any claim that it was wrong — despite the fact that Ford says she feared for her life, says it was against her will, and experienced decades of trauma as a result.

David French, a columnist for National Review, conversely, agrees that the charges against Kavanaugh are serious. But from the beginning, he's been clear that there's little reason to believe a woman who brings charges against a well-respected conservative judge.

Before Ford had come forward, he said, "So far, the claims against Kavanaugh are _still_ a dreadful dirty trick."

After she went on the record with the compelling details of her allegations, his mind didn't change. He said it's more likely that he claims are false than that they're true, based on little more than minor (and easily explained) discrepancies between her account now and notes taken by her therapist about the incident in 2012. And, perhaps, the fact that she's a Democrat.

Ed Whelan, a conservative legal writer, has been a vociferous defender of Kavanaugh from the beginning of his nomination. Without providing any justification aside from his faith in Kavanaugh, he has declared that Ford is not telling the truth about her accusations. He's openly speculated that she might have had false memories about the event, without acknowledging that it's at least as likely, if not more, that Kavanaugh could have blacked out himself during a drunken assault. He also fails to acknowledge one of the major lessons of the #MeToo movement — that many men who seem to be upstanding citizens are also guilty of terrible offenses.

Erick Erickson, a conservative writer at The Resurgent, has been one of the most prolific disseminators of vicious talking points against Ford. He has denied that there should even be hearings about the accusation and has baselessly said that Ford is not credible.

He writes: "While I suspect the accuser will bring forward some friends who claim she told them at the time, because that is just how convenient this story is, thus far none have come forward."

Ford has presented a therapist's notes from 2012 about the assault and her husband's corroborating testimony, but this is not enough for Erickson. But, apparently, based on this quote, nothingcould be enough for him. If her friend's come out to confirm the report, that's just a little too "convenient." If they don't, well then how come? Isn't that just a little too suspicious?

He also repeatedly calls her a "Bernie Sanders supporter," as if that damages her credibility.

Another favorite line of attack from many of these conservatives: Going after Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who kept Ford's letter quiet when she wanted to remain anonymous. They call the late-game revelation of the accusations a dirty trick, rather than taking seriously the fact that coming forward with these accusations is incredibly risky and emotionally and socially costly. This put both Feinstein and Ford in a very fraught position.

Why is it so difficult to come forward? Because accusers know they will be attacked — and these conservatives have proven that to be true.

Kavanaugh’s Perjury Avalanche — 50 Years in the Making

kpfa rollback of nuclear options over time; tecnically in effect for gorsuch but not

used by agreement bipartisan? (gop punted on 3-3 worst, rest got pass incl BK; gang of 8 incl diane f; fillibuster wd have obviated cory etc rear guard tactics

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/judge-brett-kavanaugh-should-be-impeached-for-lying-during-his-confirmation-hearings.html

graves

Much of Washington has spent the week focusing on whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. After the revelations of his confirmation hearings, the better question is whether he should be impeached from the federal judiciary.

I do not raise that question lightly, but I am certain it must be raised.

Newly released emails show that while he was working to move through President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees in the early 2000s, Kavanaugh received confidential memos, letters, and talking points of Democratic staffers stolen by GOP Senate aide Manuel Miranda. That includes research and talking points Miranda stole from the Senate server after I had written them for the Senate Judiciary Committee as the chief counsel for nominations for the minority.

Receiving those memos and letters alone is not an impeachable offense.

No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it.

For example, in 2004, Sen. Orrin Hatch asked him directly if he received “any documents that appeared to you to have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Kavanaugh responded, unequivocally, “No.”

In 2006, Sen. Ted Kennedy asked him if he had any regrets about how he treated documents he had received from Miranda that he later learned were stolen. Kavanaugh rejected the premise of the question, restating that he never even saw one of those documents.

...

MMA

enate hearings were held for Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.As the hearings got underway, the press found itself getting very easily distracted by the chaos coming out of the White House. Word of a new book by Bob Woodward detailing the hectic state of the Trump White House quickly grabbed headlines. Then, when an anonymous administration official penned an op-ed critical of Trump’s behavior and calling into question his fitness for office, the media went into a frenzy discussing the piece and speculating about who the author may be.

You would think that an unpopular president distrusted by his own staff making a lifetime appointment of a historically unpopular pick to the Supreme Court would be a national scandal.

It isn't.

The media is focused on the chaos of Trump's White House, but it's being covered as a human interest story instead of how the most powerful office in the history of the world is making decisions that affect the rest of us. And that has largely kept negative scrutiny off of Brett Kavanaugh.

If this were any other administration in recent history, Kavanaugh's nomination would be in serious trouble, perhaps already sunk. But the media simply hasn't really bothered to engage with that story.

With the media often focused elsewhere (and convinced that the hearings would be boring), here are some of the critical moments that you might have missed:

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) repeatedly questioned Kavanaugh on his use of documents stolen from Democratic staffers when Kavanaugh worked on judicial nominations for the George W. Bush White House.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) questioned Kavanaugh on reproductive rights and pressed him to name any laws that allow the government to regulate male bodies. He could not.
Harris also explained to Kavanaugh that a phrase he used in an op-ed, “racial spoils system,” is “commonly used by white supremacists.”
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) exposed that Kavanaugh “disparaged the Native Hawaiian community” in an op-ed he wrote.
Hirono also brought attention to Kavanaugh’s attempt to erect an unnecessary barrier to a minor immigrant obtaining an abortion.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said he hoped Kavanaugh would ask for his own hearing to be suspended in light of Republicans withholding a massive amount of documents related to Kavanaugh’s history
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) highlighted the role of right-wing and corporate dark money behind Kavanaugh’s nomination.
During one of the few interesting exchanges involving a Republican senator, Kavanaugh indicated his belief that birth control medications are “abortion-inducing drugs” while being questioned by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

And the hearings are not even the biggest story: Republicans are engaging in a widespread effort to obscure Kavanaugh’s record by rushing the hearings in the first place and refusing to release tens of thousands of documents. Heck, Republicans even put a former Kavanaugh deputy and current lawyer for Trump's White House counsel in charge of the document release process, with barely a mention from the media.

The entire nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, from beginning to end, is a monumental scandal.

It would be great if the media treated it for the sham it is instead of playing along with Trump.

http://www.theherald-news.com/2018/09/02/gop-lawyer-caught-in-crossfire-on-kavanaugh-russia-probe/aukw7hj/

WASHINGTON – Bill Burck is a Republican insider being pushed into the limelight by two of the biggest political dramas in Washington: the Russia investigation of Robert Mueller and the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

He's a lawyer for current and former Trump White House officials who have been touched by the Russia probe. As George W. Bush's longtime public records lawyer, he's in charge of culling documents for the Senate from Kavanaugh's White House years. He's also Kavanaugh's friend and former deputy at the Bush White House.

That makes Burck, 47, "triply-conflicted," say some Democrats, They have denounced the lawyer's role in the unusual and potentially precedent-setting arrangement to expedite the gathering of Kavanaugh's government records before Senate confirmation hearings that start Tuesday.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told reporters that Republicans are "cherry-picking" what Kavanaugh records are available. He called it "a disservice to the American people."

Burck's friends and allies see in the Yale-educated lawyer a straight-shooting, skilled professional who cares less about partisan battles than providing the best legal representation possible. For several years in a row a legal publication named him a "White CollarMVP."

Burck scoffs at critics who see partisan politics at play in his client roster. He says his work for Bush reviewing Kavanaugh's records has little to do with representing Donald Trump-world clients in Mueller's investigation.

"I think partisanship may be getting in the way of rational thought," Burck told The Associated Press.

The weeks ahead are not the type of public spotlight Burck necessarily seeks. While he gravitates to high-profile cases, Burck appears to prefer a behind-the-scenes role as the lawyer people call when they are in a tough spot.

Those who know the New England native from his days as a clerk to retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedyrecall a bright but laid-back colleague.

"He's a pretty rare combination of book smarts and good people skills and good judgment," said attorney Jim Bennett, who was a fellow Kennedy clerk in the late 1990s and has remained friends with Burck. "People gravitate to him as a lawyer because he inspires confidence."

The son of a corporate lawyer, Burck showed ambition, working as a federal prosecutor in New York and at the Bush White House as Kavanaugh's deputy staff secretary. His private practice caseload has come to read like a legal-thriller index.

Burck was lead counsel to FIFA in the international football association bribery scandal and for insurance giant AIG over claims it misled the federal government during the 2008 finance crisis. He was counsel to the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity in its challenge to a California campaign finance law that required nonprofit groups to disclose their membership. That fight played out while Kamala Harris, now a senator, was the state's attorney general.

These days Burck represents White House counsel Don McGahn, former White House adviser Steve Bannon and former chief of staff Reince Priebus in the Mueller probe.

McGahn, who has been shepherding Kavanaugh's nomination through the Senate, has become an important witness in Mueller's investigation. Not long after the extent of McGahn's meetings with investigators were disclosed in news reports, Trump tweeted that McGahn would be leaving the White House after Kavanaugh was confirmed. Senate votes are expected at the end of September, in time for the start of the new Supreme Court session Oct. 1.

Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law school professor who played basketball and shared happy hour beers with Burck when they were both clerks, doesn't consider Burck to be an "extreme conservative." Roosevelt expects the role Burck is playing now representing the Trump officials is "a little ideologically to the right of where I'd expect him to be."

Burck in some ways may be more of a White House outsider than ally because all three of his Trump-related clients were essentially fired by the president.

But that doesn't satisfy Democrats who see in Burck a too-intricate circle of connections. They're particularly upset that Senate Republicans only requested Kavanaugh's documents from his work in the White House counsel's office, rather than his three years as Bush's staff secretary. They say the decision has hidden from view potentially millions of pages that could shed light on Kavanaugh's thoughts on Bush-era policies, including the use of harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding.

"The process reeks," said Brian Fallon, a former aide to Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Fallon, now executive director of Demand Justice, a group that opposes Kavanaugh's confirmation, added: "Burck has his thumb in every pie."

Before the Senate hearing Tuesday, Burck's team announced it had largely concluded its document production, with more than 267,000 pages from Kavanaugh cleared for public release. That's more than any other court nominees, Republicans say, but far fewer than the 900,000 that National Archives initially estimated for the job.

In a letter to GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Burck's team said that duplicate documents cut that number to some 600,000. An additional 174,000 pages were made available to the committee on a confidential basis and about 100,000 were personal.

While the letter says Bush sought to err on the side of openness and transparency, the Trump White House – separate from Bush – is withholding 100,000 pages on the basis of presidential privilege. Schumer called the White House's move "a Friday night document massacre."

Even before Trump chose a replacement for Kennedy this summer, Republicans knew they had a paper trail problem if Kavanaugh became the nominee. He would be the first public-sector pick from the email age with an unprecedented amount of public documents. Republicans are eager to confirm the new justice before the November election, when their slim majority is being challenged. They began crafting a workaround.

Aides to Grassley were on a conference call the day after the nomination was announced and looking for a solution. What could be called the "Burck process" would become a potentially precedent-setting approach. The National Archives said in a statement later that it's "something that has never happened before."

Republican advocates say the new system pushed the Senate more fully into the digital age, with computer software to more quickly search and sort hundreds and thousands of pages, much the way it is done at big law firms. They say the National Archives still has final review over the production, but the private lawyers – Burck hired a team of about 50 – can do the job much faster.

Grassley has welcomed the expedited review and criticized the Democratic push for additional documents as a costly paper chase.

Lisa Mascaro

JCN hired covington

Former Senator Jon Kyle Has Been Named McCain's Replacement — And He Was Kavanaugh's 'Sherpa' Through Confirmation Process

By Laura Clawson, Daily Kos

McCain's wife Cindy tweeted her support.

concern on CPP section 1.11? AEP v Conn?

Senate hearings regarding Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh begin on Tuesday September 4. That might come as a surprise to you considering that Kavanaugh has only been discussed for 84 seconds on nightly network news shows since July 10.

The media is frequently favoring voices who favor Kavanaugh's confirmation. The AP has quoted far more pro-Kavanaugh voices than people working to stop his nomination. Additionally, Sinclair stations are running must-runs urging his confirmation.

The fact of the matter is that Kavanaugh has an extreme record with a partisan history. Conservatives are being silent to reduce the risk of backlash, but they have openly admitted that any Trump nominee would overturn Roe v. Wade. Reproductive rights access is very much on the line with Kavanaugh's nomination. The NRA is thrilled with Kavanaugh's stance against an assault weapons ban. Extreme anti-LGBTQ groups are lining up behind Kavanaugh. Karl Rove admitted that Kavanaugh was involved with every policy decision that the Bush administration made.

Meanwhile, conservatives are praising Kavanaugh as a nice guy who has daughters.

Kavanaugh's approval ratings are at a record low, with numbers not seen since Robert Bork. And yet the media is generally just treating his nomination as inevitable. That is media malpractice.

They'll have no choice but to cover the opposition once hearings start this week. They won't be able to ignore the growing opposition anymore once Kavanaugh is in the spotlight.

Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace the retired Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court, has been receiving a lot of praise from the far right along with plenty of criticism from liberals and progressives. Social conservatives are hoping that Kavanaugh—a far-right social conservative and a “strict constructionist” or “originalist” comparable to the late Antonin Scalia—will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade if confirmed by the U.S. Senate. And Kavanaugh’s nomination has drawn praise from the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and other Christian Right groups. But not all right-wingers are happy with the nomination, including Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano and commentator Ben Shapiro.

In contrast to Sean Hannity and others at Fox News, libertarian Napolitano has never been a Republican party liner. Philosophically, Napolitano has a lot more in common with former Rep. Ron Paul or former New Mexico governor and 2012/2016 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson than he does with Sen. Orrin Hatch or Sen. Lindsey Graham. And Napolitano has made it clear that Kavanaugh isn’t someone he would have nominated.

Interviewed by the libertarian Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie in July, Napolitano declared, “I was very disappointed with the appointment of Kavanaugh because I believe he comes from the heart and soul of the Washington establishment.”

Napolitano told Gillespie that although Trump campaigned on “draining the swamp” in 2016—“the swamp” being Trump’s term for the Washington, DC establishment—Kavanaugh is as establishment as it gets.

The judge went on to explain why he considered Kavanaugh problematic from a 4th Amendment standpoint. Kavanaugh, Napolitano told Gillespie, “believes that the 4th Amendment does not apply to the NSA, that it only applies to law enforcement.”

Kavanaugh, Napolitano said, is much too quick to “find creative ways” to “justify police excess.”

Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash has expressed 4th Amendment concerns about Kavanaugh as well. On July 10, Amash tweeted, “Kavanaugh is not another Gorsuch—not even close. Disappointing pick, particularly with respect to his #4thAmendment record. Future decisions on the constitutionality of government surveillance of Americans will be huge. We can’t afford a rubber stamp for the executive branch.”

Although most of the right-wing criticism of Kavanaugh has come from libertarians, one theocratic social conservative who was initially critical of Trump’s pick was former Pennsylvania Sen. RickSantorum—who, ironically, has been a big Trump supporter despite allegations that Trump had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet. Santorum said of Kavanaugh, “He is from Washington. He is the establishment pick. He is the Bush pick. It just seems like Trump, in this case, just bowed to the elite in Washington. I think that’s going to rub a lot of people the wrong way.”

Shapiro, like Napolitano, considers Kavanaugh sympathetic to the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare—which he believes Kavanaugh upheld in the case Sissel v. Department of Health and Human Services. And Shapiro has joined Napolitano in criticizing Kavanaugh as an establishment nominee who is weak on the 4th Amendment.

Shapiro said of Kavanaugh, “He is more of a law-and-order, sort of William Rehnquist type of judge….(Kavanaugh) is not a big fan of a lot of these sort of civil libertarian decisions that some on the right are fond of.”

On Fox News, Shapiro told libertarian Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, “I’ve got problems with Kavanaugh in general. He’s being pushed very hard by a lot of folks from Team Bush, who knew him way back when and are very fond of him. He’s kind of the D.C. insider pick.”

https://www.alternet.org/brett-kavanaughs-salacious-clinton-memo-exposes-his-deeply-partisan-views-executive-privilege

For both the media and the Democrats, gathering sufficient information about Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's latest Supreme Court nominee, before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell crams him through the confirmation process has seemed nearly impossible. On Monday, however, the Washington Post managed to publish the full text of a much-discussed memo Kavanaugh wrote in 1998. At the time,Kavanaugh was part of special prosecutor Ken Starr's team, working on an open-ended investigation of President Bill Clinton that started with a right-wing conspiracy theory about real estate deals and wound up, years later, being about a sexual relationship Clinton had with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The full text of this memo is telling for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's a picture-perfect distillation of the way that disgust and titillation are completely intertwined in the conservative mind and lay the groundwork for the right's sadistic approach to sexual matters. The other is that it offers yet more evidence that Kavanaugh is far from the fair-minded jurist Republicans are portraying, and instead clearly seems to be a partisan hack of the worst sort. On that latter point, there is very ample reason to believe that Kavanaugh will allow Trump to get away with all sorts of grotesque efforts to escape consequences for any illegal dealings with Russian agents.

It's already been reported that Kavanaugh had pushed hard, during his time in the Starr investigation, to ask Clinton a bunch of explicit and repetitious questions about the sexual details of his relationship with Lewinsky. What this memo makes clear is that Kavanaugh's interest in granular detail was more "Penthouse Forum" than "deposition." And his reasoning is made clear when Kavanaugh writes that the goal is to pressure Clinton into resigning or admitting to perjury. The idea was clearly to make the questions so uncomfortable that Clinton would capitulate.

But whatever legal strategy Kavanaugh is advocating, it's hard to look away from how perfectly this memo captures the rat's nest of prurience and puritanical moralism that motivates the religious right — the same movement that hopes to use Kavanaugh to undo decades of legal rulings granting women and LGBT people sexual privacy and autonomy. On one hand, he decries Clinton for "disgusting behavior" that he says "disgraced his Office." On the other hand, he wants to know every single detail, rendered in maximally graphic terms.

Conservatives have long tried to leverage legitimate feminist concerns about power imbalances in relationships like the one between Clinton and Lewinsky in order to paint conservative interest in this case as high-minded instead of leering. We see Kavanaugh playing the same game in this memo, blaming Clinton for turning Lewinsky's life "into a shambles," while avoiding the fact that Starr and his investigative team worked with right-wing operatives to out Lewinsky and parade her around for months in the public square. In this memo, it's clear that Kavanaugh's plan was to draw out Lewinsky's public humiliation even further by rooting around for more explicit details.

Kavanaugh later tried to distance himself from this abusive attitude towards Lewinsky, saying, "I regret that the House of Representatives did not handle the report in a way that would have kept sensitive details in the report from public disclosure." But in the heat of the moment, Kavanaugh was a big advocates of using sexually explicit details as a tool of public humiliation for partisan gain, and didn't care how much it might damage the woman involved.

What's equally telling is how full-throated Kavanaugh was in his belief that the president deserved no special protections from legal inquiry or consequences, even though Kavanaugh's anger, as captured in this memo, is largely about a legal sexual relationship, and not about the president committing perjury in an attempt to conceal it. Kavanaugh denounces Clinton for "frivolous privilege claims" and says he is "strongly opposed to giving the President any 'break' in the questioning."

Kavanaugh's strong objections to the idea of executive privilege dried up the second the topic was something other than exposing the frequency of Oval Office ejaculations. As soon as 1999, Kavanaugh had switched to arguing that a court decision to release the Watergate tapes was "an erroneous decision" because it "took away the power of the president to control information in the executive branch."

He took that position even though the central scandal of the Watergate controversy — a burglary and the resulting cover-up — involved criminal activity. Which was not true of Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, however unethical or distasteful one may find it.

Kavanaugh's view that executive privilege is nearly ironclad -- unless there was oral sex involved -- was strengthened after his time working for George W. Bush, who probably didn't commit adultery while in office, but did get the United States into an unnecessary war based on blatantly false claimsand was accused of outing a CIA agent in order to punish her husbandfor saying so. After all that, Kavanaugh bafflingly concluded in 2009 that "the president [should] be able to focus on his never-ending tasks with as few distractions as possible" and so "should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship," such as dealing with subpoenas and other legal issues.

Kavanaugh and his allies would like to portray this history as an evolution in thought. The likelier explanation, especially based on the timing, is that Kavanaugh's views on executive privilege depend not on the severity of the legal morass any president is involved in — lying about an affair being far less important than lying to launch a war or cover up a political burglary — but on whether that president happens to be a Republican.

McConnell clearly wants to get Kavanaugh's butt into a seat on the Supreme Court before it begins reviewing the inevitable arguments over how much President Trump's executive privilege should shield him. Such cases might involve answering a subpoena by Robert Mueller, the consequences of campaign finance violations, foreign emoluments, or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States by working with Russian intelligence to hack Democratic email accounts during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The R next to Donald Trump's name on the ballot might even be enough to shield him from any prurient sexual questions related to potential laws broken when paying off porn stars for their silence about sexual activity. Even though such questions were deemed by Brett Kavanaugh to be among the country's most pressing problems 20 years ago.

https://www.alternet.org/brett-kavanaugh-may-have-committed-perjury-gop-suppressing-evidence

One of the top concerns of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding President Donald Trump's Supreme Court Nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, is whether he knew anything about, authorized, or advised the Bush administration on their torture program for detainees in the War on Terror while he served as White House staff secretary.

In 2006, during his confirmation to the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh told senators, under oath, that he was "not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants," and had no knowledge of issues about "the legal justifications or the policies relating to the treatment of detainees," according to NBC News. However,Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Dick Durbin (D-IL) assert that multiple documents and email chains show Kavanaugh was briefed on the issue, implying he was not honest with the Senate.

Some of the documents Judiciary Democrats say prove Kavanaugh's knowledge of the torture program, and potentially even suggest that he perjured himself in his earlier confirmation, have been marked "Committee Confidential" by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — meaning that even most senators are not allowed to review them.

Also of concern is whether the White House is playing any role in steering document requests. On Friday, Leahy submitted a letter to White House Counsel Don McGahn, demanding to know what was discussed at a meeting between him and Judiciary Republicans regarding Kavanaugh.

According to a press release from Leahy, prior to the meeting on July 24, Republicans were prepared to ask the National Archives to release documents produced during Kavanaugh's time as White House Staff Secretary for former President George W. Bush. But after the meeting, Republicans refused to do so, allowing a limited release of documents curated by "a lawyer representing the former president."

"In the 44 years I have served in the United States Senate, I have seen 19 nominations to the Supreme Court, including the nomination of every current member of the Court," said Leahy. "I have never before seen the White House, under either a Republican or Democratic president, usurp or direct the parameters of the Judiciary Committee’s document request regarding a Supreme Court nominee. I find it troubling that the White House and Judiciary Committee Republicans are stifling transparency rather than working together to provide the necessary documents for the Senate to do its work. The American people deserve the unvarnished truth about Judge Kavanaugh."

McGahn has played a critical role in getting Trump's parade of far-right judicial nominees waved through the Senate, and has expressed his avowal to put two Supreme Court justices on the bench before leaving his role in the White House.

In addition to pressuring Judiciary Republicans to release the full set of documents,Senate Democrats have also filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has threatened to sue the National Archives to make them public.

one author of tort memo made judge? brett k lied about his involvment in senate confirmation hearings (and they are pissed; trying to limit docs, senate had to FOIA?!)

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/donald-trump-just-sign-much-deeper-failings-united-states-and-world

tom e

...In a sense, it may hardly be more out of the ordinary to face a failing experiment in what, earlier in this century, top officials in Washington called “nation building” than in our individual lives. In this case, the nation I’m thinking about, the one that seems in the process of being unbuilt, is my own. You know, the one that its leaders -- until Donald Trump hit the Oval Office -- were in the habit of eternally praising as the most exceptional, the most indispensable country on the planet, theglobal policeman, the last or sole superpower. Essentially, it. Who could forget that extravagant drumbeat of seemingly obligatory self-praise for what, admittedly, is still a country with wealth and financial clout beyond compare and more firepower than the next significant set of competitors combined?

Still, tell me you can’t feel it? Tell me you couldn’t sense it when those election results started coming in that November night in 2016? Tell me you can’t sense it in the venomous version of gridlock that now grips Washington? Tell me it's not there in the feeling in this country that we are somehow besieged (no matter our specific politics), demobilized, and no longer have any real say in a political system of, by, and for the billionaires, in a Washington in which the fourth branch of government, the national security state, gets all the dough, all the tender loving care (except, at this moment, from our president), all the attention for keeping us “safe” from not much (and certainly not itself)? In the meantime, most Americans get ever less and have ever less say about what they’re not getting. No wonder in the last election the country’s despairing heartland gave a hearty orange finger to the Washington elite.

States of Failure

“Populist” is the term of the moment for the growing crew of Donald Trumps around the planet. It may mean “popular,” but it doesn’t mean “population”; it doesn’t mean “We, the People.” No matter what that band of Trumps might say, it’s increasingly not “we” but “them,” or in the case of Donald J. Trump in particular, “him.”

No, the United States is not yet a failed or failing state, not by a long shot, not in the sense of countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen that have been driven to near-collapse by America’s twenty-first-century wars and accompanying events. And yet, doesn’t it seem ever easier to think of this country as, in some sense at least, a failing (and flailing) experiment?

It’s hard to look back on the last decades and not think that democracy has been sinking under the imperial waves. I first noticed the term “the imperial presidency” in the long-gone age of Richard Nixon, when his White House began to fill with uniformed flunkies and started to look like something out of an American fantasy of royalty. The actual power of that presidency, no matter who was in office, has been growing ever since. Whatever the Constitution might say, war, for instance, is now a presidential, not a congressional, prerogative (as is, to take a recent example, the imposition of tariffs on the products of allies on “national security” grounds).And don’t just blame it on Donald Trump. That’s the easy path to an explanation. Something had to go terribly wrong to produce such a president and his tweet-stormed version of America. That should seem self-evident enough, even to -- though they would mean it in a different way -- The Donald’s much-discussed base. After all, if they hadn’t felt that, for them, the American experiment was failing, why would they have voted for an obvious all-American con man? Why would they have sent into the White House someone whose Apprentice-like urge is to fire us all?

As Chalmers Johnson used to point out, in the Cold War years the president gained his own private army. Johnson meant the CIA, but in this century you would have to add America’s ever vaster, still expanding Special Operations forces (SOF), now regularly sent on missions of every sort around the globe. He’s also gained his own private air force: the CIA’s Hellfire-missile armed drones that he can dispatch across much of the planet to kill those he’s personally deemed his country’s enemies. In that way, in this century -- despite a ban on presidential assassinations, now long ignored -- the president has become an actual judge, jury, and executioner. The term I’ve used in the past has been assassin-in-chief.

All of this preceded President Trump. In fact, if presidential wars hadn’t become the order of the day, I doubt his presidency would have been conceivable. Without the rise of the national security state to such a position of prominence; without much of government operations descending into a penumbra of secrecy on the grounds that “We, the People” needed to be “safe,” not knowledgeable; without the pouring of taxpayer dollars into America’s intelligence agencies and the U.S. military; without the creation of a war-time Washington engaged in conflicts without end; without the destabilizationof significant parts of the planet; without the war on terror -- it should really be called the war for terror -- spreading terrorism; without the displacement of vast populations (including something close to half of Syria’s by now) and the rise of the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic on the basis of the resulting anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiments, it’s hard to imagine him. In other words, before he ever descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in 2015, empire had, politically speaking, trumped democracy and a flawed but noble experiment that began in 1776 was failing.

Had that imperial power not been exercised in such a wholesale way in this century, Donald Trump would have been unimaginable. Had President George W. Bush and his cronies not decided to invade Iraq, The Donald probably would have been inconceivable as anything but the proprietor of a series of failed casinos in Atlantic City, the owner of what he loves to call “property” (adorned with those giant golden letters), and a reality-TV host. And the American people would not today be his apprentices.

In other words, in the twenty-first century, Donald Trump is proof indeed that the American experiment in democracy may be coming to an unseemly end in a president with all the urges of an autocrat (and so many other urges as well). Or think of it this way: the contest -- from early on an essential part of American life -- between democracy and empire seems to be ending with empire the victor. However -- and here may be Donald Trump’s particular significance -- empire, too, looks to be heading toward some kind of ultimate failure. He himself is visibly a force for imperial demolition. He seems intent -- as in the recent abusive NATO meeting and the chaotic get-together with Russian President Vladimir Putin -- on dismantling the very world that imperial America built for itself in the wake of World War II. You know, the one in which it was to be the ultimate and eternal victor in a rivalry between imperial powers that had begun in perhaps the fifteenth century, reached its peak when only two “super” rivals were left to face each other in the Cold War, and ended with a single power seemingly triumphant and alone on planet Earth.When that “very stable genius” (as he reminded us again recently) inherited such powers long in the making, he also inherited the power to use them in ways that would have been unavailable to the president of a country that had genuine “checks and balances,” one in which the people knew what was going on and in some sense directed it. Consider it a sign of the times that he’s the second president to lose the popular vote in this 18-year-old century -- the first, of course, being George W. "Hanging Chad" Bush. So perhaps it’s only proper that President Trump has now nominated to the Supreme Court a judge who was once a Republican operative for the very legal team focused on stopping the recount of those contested Florida ballots in 2000 -- a recount the Supreme Court did indeed halt, throwing the election to Bush. Note that Brett Kavanaugh is also the perfect justice for America’s new imperial age of decline, one whogenuinely believes that the law should read: the president, while in office, is above it. Think of him as Caligula’s future enabler.

How quickly those historically unique dreams of global dominion fell apart in the “infinite wars” of this century. Think of Donald Trump as the overly ripe fruit of that failure, that endless imperial moment that never quite was. Think of him as the daemon in the (malfunctioning) global machinery of a world that is itself -- as in Brexiting “Europe” -- evidently beginning to come apart at the seams amid war, a flood of global refugees, and one factor never experienced before (on which more below). Think of America as being caught up in some only half-recognized United Stexit moment, though what exactly we are withdrawing from may be less than clear.

Still, bad as any moment might be, you can always hope for, dream about, and work for so much better, as so many have over the centuries. After all, everything I’ve described remains the norm of history. What empire hasn’t had its Caligulas, its Trumps? What empire hasn’t, in the end, gone down? What democratic experiment hasn’t sooner or later faltered? Even the best of experiments come up short as autocrats take power and hand their rule on to their sons, only to be overthrown by some revolt, some new attempt to make better sense of this world, which itself falters sooner or later. And so it goes.

Again, that, as they say, is history, a series of failed experiments, but ones that always end, in their own fashion, with hope still alive for a better, fairer, juster world. Yes, a particular failure might be terrible for you, your community, even several generations of yous, but it, too, will pass and you can expect our better angels to reappear someday, even if not in your lifetime -- or at least until recently you could do so.

The Ultimate Experiment

There is, however, another experiment, a planet-wide one that seems to be failing as well. You could think of it as humanity’s experiment with industrial civilization, which is disastrously altering the environment of this previously welcoming world of ours. I’m referring, of course, to what the greenhouse gases from the fossil fuels we’ve been burning in such profusion since the eighteenth century are doing to our planet.

Whether you call it climate change or global warming, the one thing it isn’t -- despite the fact that we’ve done it -- is history. Not human history anyway. After all, its effects will exist on a time scale that dwarfs our own. If allowed to play out to its fullest, it could destroy civilization. And ironically enough, unlike so many of our experiments, this was one we didn’t even know we were conducting for something like a century and a half. So consider it an irony that it’s the one likely to endanger every other imaginable experiment. If not somehow halted in a reasonably decisive fashion, it could not only inundate coastal cities, turn verdant lands into parched landscapes, and create weather extremes presently hard to imagine, but produce heat that will be devastating.

And yet don’t give us any kind of a free pass on this one. Despite those endless years of not knowing what we were doing, ignorance can’t be pled. Increasing numbers of us (including the giant oil companies who did everything humanly possible to keep the news from the rest of us) have known about this since at least the 1960s. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report that highlighted a human-caused warming of the planet from the carbon dioxide burned off by fossil fuels. It included remarkably accurate projections of the increased heat to come in the twenty-first century and of other effects of climate change, including sea level rise and the warming of sea waters. So don’t say that no one was warned. As time went on, we’ve been warned again and again.

And for this, too, Donald Trump can’t be blamed, but his presence in the White House is now a powerful symbol of a human failure to grasp the dangers involved. Talk about a symbolic act of self-destruction: the American people put a fierce climate denier in the White House. He, in turn, has brought his passionate 1950s-style fantasies of an even more oil-fueled global future with him. He has, among other things, appointed a remarkable set of Republican climate-change doubters and deniers to crucial positions throughout his administration. He’s moved to withdraw this country from the Paris climate accord, while powering up fossil-fuel and greenhouse-gas-producing projects of every sort and weakeningthe drive to develop alternative energy sources;he has, that is, done everything in his power to stoke global warming.

Along with the actions of the CEOs of the giant oil companies, this will surely prove to be the greatest criminal enterprise in history,since it takes the all-time largest greenhouse gas emitter out of the running (except at the state and local level) when it comes to impeding global warming. In other words, whatever else he may be, President Donald Trump seems singularly intent on being a one-man wrecking crew when it comes to human history.

Since Lucy walked upright by that African lake three million years ago, this has been a remarkably welcoming planet for the human experiment. If, in the coming century, climate change hits full force, it won’t just be a matter of refugees in the hundreds of millions or individual deaths in countless numbers, or some failing democracy that became an empire. It could mean the failure of the whole human experiment in ways that are still hard to grasp. It could mean no more chance for failure, The End.

That’s something worth working against. That’s a failure no one in any possible future can afford.

In the meantime, here I am, another year closer to my own moment of “failure,” living in a potentially failing country on a potentially failing planet. Happy birthday to me.

dn cdb

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Last week, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh submitted to the Senate his responses to a lengthy questionnaire as part of the confirmation process. Responding to a question about the 10 most significant cases over which he sat, Kavanaugh cited his dissenting opinion in White Stallion Energy Center v. EPA, in which he argued that the EPA must consider financial costs when deciding whether to regulate emissions from power plants. Kavanaugh wrote in the questionnaire, quote, “In my view, it was unreasonable—and therefore unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act—for EPA not to consider the costs imposed by regulations in determining whether such regulations were 'appropriate and necessary.'” I’m wondering your thoughts on, if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed for the Supreme Court, what the impact of this would be on environmental laws in the future.

KIERÁN SUCKLING: Well, it would be extraordinary. I mean, Trump has already had one appointee on the Supreme Court. If he gets the second, he will likely be able to control the whole judicial agenda for environmental protection in this country. And that’s incredibly important, because right now the strongest, most powerful force of resistance against Trump is our legal system. And that’s because virtually everything he wants to do is illegal. The people he’s put in place, like Zinke and Pruitt, to carry out his agenda have such disdain for governance. They don’t even know how to do governmental process properly, so they’re continually sued, they’re continually found guilty. And that’s keeping America on track, this independent judiciary. So, if Trump captures the Supreme Court, we’re going to find he’s got an open agenda to do whatever he wants. And so, it’s very, very dangerous and disheartening.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10072018/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-trump-nominee-climate-change-policy-environmental-law

https://www.ecowatch.com/kavanaugh-supreme-court-environment-epa-2585783500.html

Environmental Stakes of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court Nomination

When President Donald Trump announced Brett Kavanaugh as his pick to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on Monday, he picked the potential justice with the most environmental law experience of his final four frontrunners, E&E reported.

The announcement sent environmentalists and legal experts scouring through his more than 300 rulings on the D.C. Circuit Court to reveal a contradictory picture: Kavanaugh accepts the science behind climate change, but has ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) attempts to do anything about it.

"Judge Kavanaugh isn't anti-environmental, but he tends to be anti-agency," Michael Gerrard told Inside Climate News. Gerrard is the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. "He's often struck down regulation that he didn't think Congress had authorized explicitly enough."

In a 2012 case, for example, he dissented from a majority ruling upholding Obama-era attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, arguing Congress had not empowered the EPA to do so.

"The task of dealing with global warming is urgent and important," he wrote, according to The New York Times. But, despite that, he ruled the "EPA went well beyond what Congress authorized."

Kavanaugh's past rulings are particularly important because, if confirmed, he could have a major impact on the Supreme Court's environmental decisions. This is because Kennedy was a key swing vote on the issue.

In Massachusetts v. EPA, Kennedy broke a tie in ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, even though the act does not mention them explicitly, since it was written in the 1970s, before climate change was a major concern.

Kavanaugh's strict adherence to the letter of Congressional laws suggests to legal scholars he would have ruled differently.

"I think he would have decided against Massachusetts v. EPA," University of California Los Angeles environmental law professor Ann Carlson told The Atlantic. "Everything points to the direction of a very narrow construction of the Clean Air Act, and that will seriously limit the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases in a way that makes a meaningful difference."

Kavanaugh decided against the EPA in three major cases involving the Clean Air Act during the Obama years, The Atlantic reported.

In one, E.M.E. Homer City Generation v. Environmental Protection Agency, he struck down the EPA's ability to regulate air pollution that passed from one state to another. The Supreme Court later overturned that decision, in a ruling Kennedy supported, according to The New York Times.

Kavanaugh has ruled in favor of environmental actions in some instances, however. In 2013, he ruled that it was legal for the EPA to revoke a mountaintop-removing mining permit in West Virginia, though he ruled against the EPA in a different legal argument involving the same case, according to The Atlantic.

In 2014, he also decided in favor of the Natural Resources Defense Council in a case challenging pro-industry policies for emissions from cement kilns, The New York Times reported.

Harvard law professor Richard J. Lazarus told The New York Times that Kavanaugh was not hostile to environmental laws per se, but that his approach might harm the environment as long as the legislative branch declines to pass new ones.

"Congress stopped making clean air laws after 1990, so the EPA has to work with increasingly tenuous statutory language. In effect, his approach to environmental law would make it harder to address current problems so long as Congress remains out of the lawmaking business," Lazarus said.

However, Kavanaugh's approach could also stymie the Trump EPA's attempts to deregulate independent of Congress.

"If he faces some Scott Pruitt-era rule that was kind of done quick and dirty, I don't think the administration should expect him to rubber-stamp it," Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler told The Atlantic. "He doesn't grade federal agencies on a curve."

'Pure Conjecture'?

Roberts started off his dissent by stating that he would render "no judgment on whether global warming exists, what causes it, or the extent of the problem." But his framing of the question of standing—the threshold test of whether Massachusetts and other states even had the right to press their case in court—was out of step with the science.

On coastal damages from sea level rise, an eventuality that is not just a risk but a certainty, readily observed and directly caused by the warming of ocean waters and the melting of ice masses due to rising carbon dioxide, Roberts wrote: "It is pure conjecture."

As for strengthening controls on the greenhouse gas emissions from new cars, one of the main sources of carbon pollution and the focus of the litigation, their tailpipe fumes played only a "bit-part" in causing the problem, he said.

His point was that to even get their day in court, plaintiffs had to prove that a specific harm to them (coastal damage) had to be right around the corner (not decades away) and had to be knotted to a single act of regulatory neglect (lax auto standards).

Not even justice should be that blind.

It is well established that sea level rise is just one of the myriad dangers presented to public health and the environment by the unregulated use of fossil fuels. In the context of climate science, a century is the blink of an eye. And the moment EPA ruled that CO2 was a dangerous pollutant, not only the science but the law tells the federal government to control emissions from all significant sources, not just new cars.

Next, take a look at the other dissent, written by Scalia—a judge who conservatives consider the archetype for the next nominee to the high court.

Most of it is taken up by Scalia's brand of textualism, a contorted, dictionary-driven defense of the notion that man-made carbon dioxide is not even pollution.

"Regulating the buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, which is alleged to be causing global climate change, is not akin to regulating the concentration of some substance that is polluting the air," he wrote.

What This Could Mean for Future Rules

Five like-minded justices "could overturn Mass. v. EPA or, perhaps more likely, significantly curtail its reach," said one legal scholar, Ann Carlson at the UCLA law school.

"Justice Scalia had already begun to lay the groundwork for curtailing EPA's power to regulate greenhouse gases in a subsequent case, *Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA*," she wrote. (There, the court upheld EPA rules on some sources, but said the agency had overreached on others.)

"With a new Justice on the Court who opposes Mass. v. EPA, it isn't hard to imagine the Court imposing significant limitations on EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases," she went on. "If a Democrat were elected President in 2020 and attempted to reinstate something like the Clean Power Plan, for example, we could well see the Supreme Court strike such a rule down."

She found it "even more alarming" that Alito and Thomas wanted to undo Massachusetts at that point. "Add Justice Gorsuch and the new Justice, persuade Justice Roberts to join in, and Mass. v EPA is overturned."

Richard Lazarus of Harvard told The Atlantic that Kennedy's absence might affect environmental law across the board. "He's been on the court just over 30 years, and he's been in the majority in every single environmental case but one. You don't win without Kennedy," he said.

Without knowing the name of the next justice, it's hard to predict more, other than that the court that ultimately decides the fate of the Clean Power Plan will lean even more to the right than the one that, just before Scalia died, issued a stay of that regulation.

Ever since the stay was issued, the litigation has been in limbo, although it looks like judicial patience is running out at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which held oral arguments almost two years ago.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Climate Change

Among the judges on that appellate bench was Brett Kavanaugh, who is on everyone's short list, including Trump's, to replace Kennedy.

Here's one of his comments that day, as reported by The New York Times:

"The earth is warming," Kavanaugh said. "Humans are contributing. I understand the international impact and the problem of the commons. The pope's involved. And I understand the frustration with Congress."

But he echoed Chief Justice Roberts' thinking when he went on: "If Congress does this, they can account for the people who lose their jobs. If we do this, we can't."

If Kavanaugh becomes the nominee, those words would likely resonate with pro-coal senators like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, two of the nervous Democrats whose votes might be needed for his confirmation.

And knowing what a weak hand the greens hold in Congress, it's easy to see why climate activists are walking around with furrowed brows.