September 4, 2018
If we had any doubt that the lazy days of summer end the Tuesday after Labor Day, regardless of what the calendar says, today snapped us out of that torpor with a vengeance. The Republicans were “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” in their determination to push pedigreed toady, Brett Kavanaugh, onto the Supreme Court, despite the fact that only 4% of his records had been made available to the Senate, as of the start of hearings this morning (Source: “The fight over the release of Kavanaugh documents as hearing gets underway, explained,” by Li Zhou, Kay Steiger and Andrew Prokop, Vox.com, 9/4/18). That is a level of secrecy unprecedented in the history of Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
It is even more alarming, because what we do know about Kavanaugh suggests that he is an affable extremist. In a 2009 law review article, Kavanaugh opined that sitting presidents should be provided with “a temporary deferral of civil suits and of criminal prosecutions and investigations,”(emphasis added), (Source: “Separation of Powers During the Forty-Fourth Presidency and Beyond,” by Brett M. Kavanaugh, Minnesota Law Review.org, 2009). There is little doubt that this expansive view of executive power was the most salient part of Kavanaugh’s record, as far as Trump was concerned. Make no mistake, Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court will profoundly endanger the bedrock principle that no person, including the President of the United States, is above the law.
In addition, despite Kavanaugh’s meaningless recitation of the truism that Roe v. Wade is settled law, his antipathy to a woman’s right to choose is evident in his recent opinions in Garza v. Hargan, 875 F.3d 735 (D.C. Circuit, 2017). When Kavanaugh wrote the decision for the three judge panel, he had no problem delaying the ability of a 17 year old refugee to get an abortion, despite the fact that she had complied with the already onerous waiting period required under Texas state law. When that decision was overturned by the full Circuit, sitting en banc, Kavanaugh penned a vehement dissent,accusing the majority of creating a “new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.” He went on to contemptuously denigrate the majority’s opinion as being “in line with dissents…by Justices, Brennan, Marshall and Blackmun,” (Garza v. Hargan, 875 F.3d at 753).
Those two sentences reveal a tremendous amount about Kavanaugh’s point of view. His emphasis on J.D.’s status as an “unlawful immigrant,” whose “home country does not allow elective abortions,” is evidence that Kavanaugh has greater fealty to patriarchy than to the Constitution, since it is settled law that undocumented immigrants are entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment (Plyler v. Doe, 457 U. S. 202 (S.Ct. 1982)). Secondly, it is telling that the most damning criticism that Kavanaugh can conceive is to liken the majority’s opinion on an abortion issue to opinions written by Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the opinion in Roe v. Wade, or liberal lions of the Court such as Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall.
The truth is, what we do know about Kavanaugh’s views is repugnant enough. How much worse is what he’s hiding?
#KavaNAH
#VOTE