Judge Kavanagh on the Issues
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/09/politics/kavanaugh-on-the-issues/index.html
Judge Kavanagh has some fairly retrograde views on the sorts of issues that are going to be coming before the US Supreme Court.
On the Second Amendment, he believes in citizen’s rights to carry semi-automatic rifles and may vote to over-rule California and other state’s efforts to restrict the spread of semi-automatic weapons capable of wreaking mass killings in schools and churches and other public spaces.
On abortion, he wrote a dissent expressing the view that the federal government could deny an undocumented immigrant teen in their custody the right to seek and secure and access an abortion.
On executive powers, he apparently believes that the nuclear option of presidential impeachment is the only possible remedy for a President’s dastardly personal actions.
On administrative rule making authority, he believes that Chevron case was wrongly decided and that judges should not defer to a federal agency’s rule-making expertise.
On the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage for individuals, he believed it may infringe corporate religious liberties. In other words, your employer’s religious beliefs trump your own right to choose and use family planning services.
He concluded the Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure do not prohibit federal government collection and monitoring of all the phone numbers you call and how long you talk to each number.
He is not a fan of net neutrality and opined that efforts to assure that internet providers preserve individual rights of net neutrality by treating them all equally would violate the First Amendment.
He declined to much more than acknowledge the precedential value of the landmark Obergefell decision on marriage equality.
Separate and apart from his drunken behavior as a youth, his lurid obsessions while collaborating with Judge Starr in investigating President Clinton’s sex life, and his difficulties in being straight with the Senate during the confirmation process, this is not the type of justice who warrants a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. It’s not that he is conservative; it’s not that he is a highly partisan Republican operative; it’s that when he is cornered he seems to lie. The hearings were transparent to most Americans; Professor Ford was telling the truth to the best of her recall; Judge Kavanagh was screaming and blustering and bullying and interrupting, filled with rage that his carefully orchestrated nomination was in danger. How hypocritical after his own obsession with Monica Lewinsky to rant and rave incoherently about left wing conspiracies when asked about his own less than pristine past. How much simpler to have simply said from the start “I was a drunken teenager at a party and behaved badly, my memory is not great about that incident, but I made a mistake, and I deeply apologize for my actions”. That would have been the end of this whole sordid spectacle before it even began.
While I understand politically why President Trump, Senators McConnell and Grassley have wanted to ram this nomination through without pausing to take a look at what appears to be serious misconduct in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the far better course is to consider the nomination after the facts whatever they may be have actually been determined, weighed and assessed and after electoral partisanship has cooled. Take a deep breath.
Thank you Senators Flake and Murkowski.
Elections have consequences. In this case, it will be consequences for the next thirty years. So if you do value our democracy and our way of life, do get registered and do get out and vote this November and bring all your friends and family to the polls.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: September 28, 2018