After a farcical background check of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh, should it surprise anyone that new allegations of misconduct have come out? Not to Jennifer Rubin:
In September 2018, I warned about the abbreviated FBI investigation into allegations that Brett M. Kavanaugh engaged in sexually aggressive behavior: “If Democrats retake one or both houses in November, they will be able to investigate, subpoena witnesses and conduct their own inquiry. The result will be a cloud over the Supreme Court and possible impeachment hearings … Kavanaugh has not cleared himself but rather undermined faith in the judicial system that presumes that facts matter.”
And sure enough, two New York Times reporters have found multiple witnesses to the allegations from Deborah Ramirez that Kavanaugh exposed himself during a dorm party at Yale. One newly discovered witness had information concerning yet another, similar event. That witness, Max Stier, is the chief executive of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that, among other things, tracks nominations and confirmations. According to the Times report, he brought the information to the Senate Judiciary Committee (Who? Who knew about this?) and to the FBI.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)...will once more receive the lion’s share of the criticism and anger. Not only did she cast the last holdout vote on the premise that Kavanaugh would uphold the right to an abortion (!), but she accepted an obviously fraudulent investigation. Had she demanded a real inquiry, including witnesses we now know about, the truth might have come out before Kavanaugh was elevated to the court.
And, of course, barring a Constitutional amendment or impeachment, he's there for life. That diminishes the entire Court, says Greg Sargent:
But beyond the ugly tactics that produced this particular majority lies a looming question: What will the long-term consequences of this takeover be?
A new study offers an alarming answer to that question. It concludes that even if Democrats win the White House and Congress, the high court will likely strike down much of what they do to address the climate change crisis, even as the window for action is closing, perhaps exacerbating the threat of civilizational catastrophe.
“Climate change legislation,” the report starkly concludes, is “unlikely to survive judicial review,” at a time when “leading scientists have concluded that only twelve years remain to avoid planetary climate change catastrophe.”
What makes the study interesting is that it uses the justices’ past rulings, as well as other conservative legal scholarship, to elaborate a picture of the specific legal doctrines they might employ to strike down efforts to legislate against global warming. The study concludes that their records clearly demonstrate they will have many such doctrines to weaponize in this fashion.
In other words, the right-wing majority on the Court seems likely to use established (but controversial) right-wing jurisprudence to limit the Federal Government's attempts to stop the planet from boiling.
Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell may have doomed half the planet to drowning and the other half to war. Thanks, Obama!