Broken_Erika
Play with me.
I wonder if they'll nominate Roy Moore when the next vacancy comes along just for the hell of it....
SCOTUS Nomination II: I Like Beer
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bernie14
Filter Manipulator
I apologize if i may have misinterpreted your post....this was my thought process... in your earlier post, you refer to a letter (which imo, may or may not be credible) from some old boyfriend of swetnick, claiming she liked gbs and she did so all the way back to hs..... in that same post, you stated that "but it's quite possible having undergone such an ordeal would lead one to try to recreate it on their own terms, to take control of it. Isn't that what often leads abusers to become abusers themselves?"... which is literally the defense mechanism of identifying with the aggressor... so, i interpreted that you were associating her trauma to the alleged kavanaugh gb (although she cannot even name one person who participated)... AND, in her interview, she claims she was in college, attending a hs party when she may or may not have been gbed by kavenaugh and his crew, so both her and your allegations seemed sketchy to me.
Heitkamp (D) has already pledged to vote no, but if Kavanaugh is going to be confirmed anyway, I'm betting that Manchin will just go along to get along. I don't expect Collins or Murkowski to vote no unless they both agree to do it. Flake was always going to toe the line... he just needed a tiny fig-leaf that wasn't too small, which he now has apparently.
TBH all the Republicans at least have the "I need to hold my nose and vote for this guy to save the Republic from going to liberal hell in a handbasket." They can at least claim that they are sacrificing their conscience for their conservative ideological greater good. But the Democrats on the other hand, have no reason other than cynical political self interest to vote to confirm... and I'm wondering if one or two of them don't do just that.
Timsup2nothin
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I'm wondering whether that self interest isn't in my interest. If the Republicans vote as a block Kavanaugh gets confirmed and there's nothing to be done to stop it. Given that, who would you rather have in the next senate, Manchin or Morrisey?
Lexicus
Deity
The question now is how long it takes for the Court to have more sitting justices than there are members of Congress. Any takers for sixteen years?
hobbsyoyo
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The Senators are not allowed to discuss the report.
Meanwhile the White House and other GOP press offices are tweating out how this report completely, totally, unequestionably clears Kavanaugh and there was not a single whiff of bad behavior.
But they are not supposed to talk about it...
The Democrats have come back and said these characterizations of the report are untrue but none of them have the stones to tell us what's in it or otherwise attempt to release it.
Meanwhile the White House and other GOP press offices are tweating out how this report completely, totally, unequestionably clears Kavanaugh and there was not a single whiff of bad behavior.
But they are not supposed to talk about it...
The Democrats have come back and said these characterizations of the report are untrue but none of them have the stones to tell us what's in it or otherwise attempt to release it.
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I'm holding out for Corey Booker to do it. He's running for President anyway and his seat is safe for the Democrats so he has nothing to fear from expulsion.
hobbsyoyo
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It all just comes back to this:
The Democrats stick to the rules. Republicans make new rules as they go and break them as they wish
The Democrats stick to the rules. Republicans make new rules as they go and break them as they wish
This is kinda the same dilemma we had with the filibuster on Gorsuch. If you're not going to use it, what is the point of trying to "save" it?
If Manchin is going to vote with the Republicans in key situations like this, then what is the point of protecting his seat (from a party standpoint)? May as well have a Republican in there and be done with it.
I mean I get what you're saying, but again, what's the point if he's always gonna cave anyway?
sophie
Break My Heart
Apparently Flake is still on the fence and needs "to be walked through the process"
hobbsyoyo
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You mean he needs to be shown the money.
I hope the press is keeping an eye on upcoming appropriations bills.
FTFY. Never in his career has he had the party at his complete and utter mercy like this. Basically, sexual favors are on the table. He can ask for literally anything he wants.
They have zero leverage on him because he is retiring. I'm guessing a cushy multi-million dollar no-show "consulting" position is being discussed.
We're probably going to need a Constitutional Amendment setting the number of SCOTUS justices at some point... or a war...
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Lexicus
Deity
Is a 50-50 vote on a nomination tie-broken by the Vice President?
Correct.
I guess I should look into this then. My understanding of the drama, however flawed it may be, is as follows (and please, correct me if I'm wrong):
Ford accuses Kavanaugh of sexual assault. No-one can corroborate this story. There are witnesses (her husband, psychiatrist) who testified under oath that Ford had told them she was assaulted by Kavanaugh. These testimonies cannot corroborate the event itself (other than that Ford truly believes she was assaulted) but these testimonies do prove that she believed this long before Kavanaugh was nominated. And, as far as the evidence goes, Kavanaugh's calendar seems to put him on the scene, but nothing else. Is there anything else I should know? Has Ford changed her testimony in any way that would be damning? Has Kavanaugh? What about the other witnesses? Ford named a number of other people, none of whom corroborated her story? Her friend believes that Ford was assaulted, but did her friend corroborate any of the events of that party? All the other witnesses named by Ford essentially said that they can't remember?
What about Ford's fear of flying? Is it true that her hearing had to be postponed due to a fear of flying? And what about the lie detector thing? Is a lie detector a piece of evidence that anyone would take seriously? When taking it, did Ford lie about being familiar with lie detectors?
Then there's the hearing itself. So a number of posters believe that Kavanaugh perjured himself? What claims exactly? Can I have a list of Kavanaugh's lies? Or was it the "lack of candor" that really did him in? What's our key takeaway from this hearing?
Is there anything else I should take into account? Any number of things that need to be corrected? And what were the names of the other accusers?
hobbsyoyo
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And for background, the threshold used to be I think 60 senators. The Dems lowered it to 51 to get lower court nominees through during Obama's tenure due to rampant, unexcusable obstruction from the right. The GOP paid them back by lowering it to 51 for all nominees, including SCOTUS.
sophie
Break My Heart
Perjury:
The general lack of candor was part of it yes. There were the deflections, such as when he declared that parties *only* happened on weekends, and the calendar showed him as being away/busy/out of town every weekend of the summer, hoping to misdirect from the July 1 date (a Thursday) in which he is noted as having a get-together with 3 of the very people named in Ford's account. When asked about this date by the Republicans' chosen prosecutor, he waffled and played for time until the Republicans could call a Recess, at which point the prosecutor was no longer permitted to ask questions.
There are the rehearsed non-answers to certain particular questions. For example any time a question was asked about drinking, his response is the now infamous "I liked beer, I drank beer, I still like beer", any question about partying or drunkenness was met with the nonanswer of "I went to Yale" or "I worked my butt off" or "I was top of my class". Any question asking him whether he thought an FBI investigation would be appropriate was met with the nonanswer of "I will follow through with whatever the committee deems necessary" or "I wanted a hearing from DAY ONE". The most telling moment of the hearing was when Sen. Blumenthal pushed him into a corner about this line of questioning, such that Kavanaugh at one point fell silent for 20 seconds, refusing to say ANYTHING, until Blumenthal noted this, at which point he went back to his "I will follow through with whatever the committee deems necessary".
The big ones, though are the obvious and outright lies. The first being whether he ever got excessively drunk or blackout drunk, which he has adamantly denied, although a) we have him admitting *in email* that he got blackout drunk as recently as 2001, and b) his friends from Yale and high school are now coming forward in droves to dispute his self-characterization as a non-drunkard.
The second major one is his answers to epithets given to him in his high school yearbook, and definitions of "what they mean". For example, "King of the Beach Week Ralph Club" was, according to him, a reference to the fact that he has a weak stomach, and not that he drank to such excess that he vomited. Or that he was listed as a "Renate alumnus", referencing a girl from a neighboring high school, which Kavanaugh claims was a sign of friendship and a token of Kavanaugh's and his friend's admiration for her, despite a) Renate not knowing about this excerpt from the yearbook until a week ago, and b) being horrified and disgusted upon hearing about it and fervently denying anything the appellation might imply.
Kavanaugh claimed that the "Devil's Triangle", a crass and obvious reference to a three-way involving two men and one woman (you know, what he and Judge allegedly attempted with Ford) was in fact a drinking game, although he couldn't actually explain the rules when asked to do so directly. He also claimed that "boofing", generally understood to refer to the act of ingesting alcohol through the anus, was a reference to flatulence. The lies in these instances were so patently obvious that someone from inside the Capitol building was scrambling to amend the respective wikipedia pages to include his erroneous definitions. There actually exists evidence of someone actively trying to cover Kavanaugh's ass as he blatantly and flippantly lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Of course these declarations are absurd on the face of it, but recently many of Kavanaugh's classmates from Yale, most particularly his freshman roommate, have come forward to note that Kavanaugh knew very well what all of these words actually meant, and his trying to pass them off as something they weren't represented outright lies on his part.
The general lack of candor was part of it yes. There were the deflections, such as when he declared that parties *only* happened on weekends, and the calendar showed him as being away/busy/out of town every weekend of the summer, hoping to misdirect from the July 1 date (a Thursday) in which he is noted as having a get-together with 3 of the very people named in Ford's account. When asked about this date by the Republicans' chosen prosecutor, he waffled and played for time until the Republicans could call a Recess, at which point the prosecutor was no longer permitted to ask questions.
There are the rehearsed non-answers to certain particular questions. For example any time a question was asked about drinking, his response is the now infamous "I liked beer, I drank beer, I still like beer", any question about partying or drunkenness was met with the nonanswer of "I went to Yale" or "I worked my butt off" or "I was top of my class". Any question asking him whether he thought an FBI investigation would be appropriate was met with the nonanswer of "I will follow through with whatever the committee deems necessary" or "I wanted a hearing from DAY ONE". The most telling moment of the hearing was when Sen. Blumenthal pushed him into a corner about this line of questioning, such that Kavanaugh at one point fell silent for 20 seconds, refusing to say ANYTHING, until Blumenthal noted this, at which point he went back to his "I will follow through with whatever the committee deems necessary".
The big ones, though are the obvious and outright lies. The first being whether he ever got excessively drunk or blackout drunk, which he has adamantly denied, although a) we have him admitting *in email* that he got blackout drunk as recently as 2001, and b) his friends from Yale and high school are now coming forward in droves to dispute his self-characterization as a non-drunkard.
The second major one is his answers to epithets given to him in his high school yearbook, and definitions of "what they mean". For example, "King of the Beach Week Ralph Club" was, according to him, a reference to the fact that he has a weak stomach, and not that he drank to such excess that he vomited. Or that he was listed as a "Renate alumnus", referencing a girl from a neighboring high school, which Kavanaugh claims was a sign of friendship and a token of Kavanaugh's and his friend's admiration for her, despite a) Renate not knowing about this excerpt from the yearbook until a week ago, and b) being horrified and disgusted upon hearing about it and fervently denying anything the appellation might imply.
Kavanaugh claimed that the "Devil's Triangle", a crass and obvious reference to a three-way involving two men and one woman (you know, what he and Judge allegedly attempted with Ford) was in fact a drinking game, although he couldn't actually explain the rules when asked to do so directly. He also claimed that "boofing", generally understood to refer to the act of ingesting alcohol through the anus, was a reference to flatulence. The lies in these instances were so patently obvious that someone from inside the Capitol building was scrambling to amend the respective wikipedia pages to include his erroneous definitions. There actually exists evidence of someone actively trying to cover Kavanaugh's ass as he blatantly and flippantly lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Of course these declarations are absurd on the face of it, but recently many of Kavanaugh's classmates from Yale, most particularly his freshman roommate, have come forward to note that Kavanaugh knew very well what all of these words actually meant, and his trying to pass them off as something they weren't represented outright lies on his part.
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metalhead
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One thing that is so far being overlooked - the House can, I believe, open a perjury investigation on Kavanaugh. If Democrats take the House, which is far more likely than them taking the Senate - they will have the power to do the investigation that the GOP has so far refused to do, subpoenas and all.
If the GOP is not considering this possibility, they are fools. Kavanaugh made many provably false statements just from what we know; imagine what they could do with subpoena power. He specifically denied assaulting Debbie Ramirez; the House has clear grounds to investigate her claim to the hilt. In public.
If the GOP is not considering this possibility, they are fools. Kavanaugh made many provably false statements just from what we know; imagine what they could do with subpoena power. He specifically denied assaulting Debbie Ramirez; the House has clear grounds to investigate her claim to the hilt. In public.
