Kavanaugh

unsung said:

Well that could be because on this forum 9/10 threads are telling me how great Dems are.

When is a pattern evidence of bias?

In court, pattern is evidence of bias all the time; evidence on which juries and trial judges rely, to show discriminatory intent, to show a common scheme, to show bias.

When does a pattern prove bias?

That's no idle question. It's relevant to the pattern of the Roberts Court when its Republican majority goes off on its partisan excursions through the civil law; when all five Republican appointees -- the Roberts Five, I'll call them -- go raiding off together, and no Democratic appointee joins them.

Does this happen often? Yes, indeed.

The Roberts Five has gone on 80 of these partisan excursions since Roberts became chief.

There is a feature to these eighty cases. They almost all implicate interests important to the big funders and influencers of the Republican Party. When the Republican Justices go off on these partisan excursions, there's a big Republican corporate or partisan interest involved 92 percent of the time.

A tiny handful of these cases don't implicate an interest of the big Republican influencers -- so flukishly few we can set them aside. That leaves 73 cases that all implicate a major Republican Party interest. Seventy-three is a lot of cases at the Supreme Court.

Is there a pattern to those 73 cases? Oh, yes there is.

Every time a big Republican corporate or partisan interest is involved, the big Republican interest wins. Every. Time.

Let me repeat: In seventy-three partisan decisions where there's a big Republican interest at stake, the big Republican interest wins. Every. Damned. Time.

Hence the mad scramble of big Republican interest groups to protect a "Roberts Five" that will reliably give them wins -- really big wins, sometimes.

When the Roberts Five saddles up, these so-called conservatives are anything but judicially conservative.

They readily overturn precedent, toss out statutes passed by wide bipartisan margins, and decide on broad constitutional issues they need not reach. Modesty, originalism, stare decisis, all these supposedly conservative judicial principles, all have the hoof prints of the Roberts Five all across their backs, wherever those principles got in the way of wins for the Big Republican interests.

The litany of Roberts Five decisions explains why big Republican interests want Kavanaugh on the Court so badly that Republicans trampled so much Senate precedent to shove him through; so let's review the litany.

What do big Republican interests want? Well, first, they want to win elections.

What has the Roberts Five delivered?

Add Heller and McDonald, which reanimated for the gun industry a theory a former Chief Justice once called a "fraud"; both decisions 5-4.

This year, Trump v. Hawaii, 5-4, rubber stamping President Trump's discriminatory Muslim travel ban.

And in case Wall Street was feeling left out, helping insulate investment bankers from fraud claims: Janus Capital Group, Inc., 5-4.

No wonder the American people feel the game is rigged.

Here's how the rigged game works: big business and partisan groups fund the Federalist Society, which picked Gorsuch and now Kavanaugh. As White House Counsel admitted, they "insourced" the Federalist Society for this selection. Exactly how the nominees were picked, and who was in the room where it happened, and who had a vote or a veto, and what was said or promised, is all a deep dark secret.

Then big business and partisan groups fund the Judicial Crisis Network, which runs dark-money political campaigns to influence Senators in confirmation votes, as they've done for Gorsuch and now Kavanaugh. Who pays millions of dollars for that, and what their expectations are, is a deep dark secret.

These groups also fund Republican election campaigns with dark money. The identity of the big donors? A deep dark secret.

Once the nominee is on, the same business front groups, with ties to the Koch Brothers and other funders of the Republican political machine, file "friend of the court," or amicus briefs, to signal their wishes to the Roberts Five. Who is really behind those "friends" is another deep dark secret.

It has gotten so weird that Republican justices now even send hints back to big business interests about how they'd like to help them next, and then big business lawyers rush out to lose cases, just to get them up before the friendly Court, pronto. That's what happened in Friedrichs and Janus.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the biggest corporate lobby of them all. It's the mouthpiece for Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Guns, you name it--and this year, with Justice Gorsuch riding with the Roberts Five, the Chamber won nine of the 10 cases it weighed in on.

The Roberts Five since 2006 has given the Chamber more than three-quarters of their total votes. This year in civil cases they voted for the Chamber's position nearly 90 percent of the time.

People are noticing. Veteran court-watchers like Jeffrey Toobin, Linda Greenhouse and Norm Orenstein describe the court as a delivery service for Republican interests:

Toobin has written that on the Supreme Court, "Roberts has served the interests . . . of the contemporary Republican Party."

Greenhouse has said, "the Republican-appointed majority is committed to harnessing the Supreme Court to an ideological agenda."

Orenstein described, "the new reality of today's Supreme Court: It is polarized along partisan lines in a way that parallels other political institutions and the rest of society, in a fashion we have never seen."

Gorsuch delivered the key fifth vote in the precedent-busting, but also union-busting, Janus decision. He too had pledged in his hearing to "follow the law of judicial precedent," assured us he was not a "philosopher king," and promised to give equal concern to "every person, poor or rich, mighty or meek."

How did that turn out? Great for the rich and mighty: Gorsuch is the single most corporate-friendly justice on a Court already full of them, ruling for big business interests in over 70 percent of cases, and in every single case where his vote was determinative.

The president early on assured evangelicals his Supreme Court picks would attack Roe v. Wade. Despite "confirmation etiquette" assurances about precedent, your own words make clear you don't really believe Roe v. Wade is settled law.

We have seen this movie before. We know how it ends.

The sad fact is that there is no consequence for telling the Committee fairy tales about stare decisis, and then riding off with the Roberts Five, trampling across whatever precedent gets in the way of letting those Big Republican interests keep winning 5-4 partisan decisions.

Every. Damned. Time.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/whitehouse-reveals-kavanaughs-pro-corporate-right-wing-record-in-scotus-hearing-opener

unsung said:

I’m somewhat changing my opinion of her as the more stories come out where she claimed to have wanted to remain anonymous but the Dems are now exploiting her and essentially doxxed her.  I’ll suspend full judgement.  That doesn’t mean I necessarily believe her, I mean she can’t supposedly name any real details other than it was allegedly Kavanaugh.  

If the timeline as alleged remains true it would make them both minors at the time, hardly grounds for ruining potentially two careers/lives.

CM189191 said: