For everything that’s happened in this process, in many ways what stuns me most is what Sen. Grassley is doing right now. He is again going back to this claim that the Democrats held the sexual misconduct accusations against Kavanaugh “in reserve” for the last moment to spring on the helpless judge.
We now know quite a bit about the chain of events that brought these accusations to light. Blasey Ford wrote a letter to Dianne Feinstein and asked her not to share it with anyone else. It seems clear that it was Feinstein’s intention to allow the confirmation to go to a vote without these allegations ever being made public. Late in the process some of her colleagues were reportedly getting upset with her because she wasn’t revealing an allegation she knew about. Read More
Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation is now basically a certainty. It will be finalized tomorrow. But this won’t be entirely the end of the story. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has made clear that if the Democrats take over the House of Representatives next year his committee will set about doing the investigation Senate Republicans and the White House refused to do. But now there’s this: FOIA lawsuits by Senate Democrats and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that have unearthed information “about potentially thousands of Brett Kavanaugh’s White House emails and other records related to the Senate hacking scandal from early in the George W. Bush administration and other controversial subjects that have not been disclosed to the Senate.” Read More
Barring some almost unimaginable development, Brett Kavanaugh will be elevated to the Supreme Court tomorrow. In all likelihood he will serve there for decades into the future. I know many of you are disappointed, angry, resolved. I have nothing wise to add to those sentiments. But I do have an observation I would like to share, one which I think helps put in perspective what we’ve witnessed and experienced over the last two to three weeks. Read More
This is notable. I mentioned Thursday that the Trump White House is now trying to hold up China as the ‘real’ meddler in US elections, attempting to delegitimize the investigation into members of the Trump entourage conspiring with Russia. As I wrote then, we should be able to recognize this manipulation without needing to make any excuses for China’s documented and assumed behavior. Like all great powers, China has active and robust espionage and cyber-espionage operations. But Politico talked to various leaders in the private sector cyber-security industry and they say they’re not seeing any of what the Trump White House is claiming. So the White House line on this seems to be even more bogus than I’d imagined. Read More
From TPM Reader MR …
One of the most remarkable features of the Kavanaugh vote hasn’t been remarked upon enough in my opinion: the red state Democratic senators dared to come out against Kavanaugh. Heitkamp, Donnelly, McCaskill, Tester, and throw in Nelson as well: all extremely vulnerable, all past the primaries and facing red-state general election voters, and all stood firm against Kavanaugh. (One can quibble about Manchin. My take is that he will always be there when the Democrats really need him (except on coal).)
It’s a mere formality at this point, but the Senate is about to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The voting is set to begin shortly. TPM’s Tierney Sneed is at the Capitol.
This is a portion of a report from something called The Ben Carson News, a political newsletter from Ben Carson, now Secretary of HUD.
The Democrats are like a pack of vicious dogs with this whole Kavanaugh “crisis”, sinking their teeth in and tearing at the flesh until rivers of blood flow through the street.
They’re crazed lunatics on a seek and destroy mission to annihilate Trump and anyone associated with him.
And the driving force behind them—the reason the left has gone so full-on radical extreme left?
The Deep State.
Presumably Ben isn’t actively managing the publication while in government. And the way these things work in the right wing newsletter world, there’s a decent chance he barely had much involvement with it before he entered the Trump administration. But it’s worth seeing the kinds of things people are reading.
The Senate’s 50-48 confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh sets into motion a series of legal battles that will unfold for years to come over abortion rights, executive power, the administrative state, and other issues yet to be foreseen. These are not the battles progressive activists expected or wanted to fight. It feels like a generational setback. You don’t usually get to pick your battles. They are thrust on you. But it is the fight at hand, and it is only just beginning.
The Supreme Court announces that Brett Kavanaugh will be sworn in immediately.
I just randomly happened upon this. It’s a 1969 episode of The Dick Cavett Show with Groucho Marx. There’s a brief intro from Cavett, recorded relatively recently. In the intro Cavett explains two things about the interview. The first was that it was planned as a 30 minute segment. But Groucho was so on that they just decided to keep rolling and went a full hour. The second thing was that Cavett thought this was maybe groucho’s last interview when he really still had his edge. Cavett says he was “there, young and funny.” Everything’s relative: Marx would have been 78 or 79 at the time. His health declined fairly dramatically over the remaining eight years of his life. But he’s not only lucid. He has the impeccable comedic timing and imagination. Watch the full video after the jump … Read More