Bush-era White House documents relating to Brett Kavanaugh leak - Polidicks

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/us/politics/kavanaugh-leaked-documents.html?utm_source=nytimes&utm_medium=tw&utm_campaign=actiontw&utm_content=scotus0906 WASHINGTON — As a White House lawyer in the Bush administration, Judge Brett Kavanaugh challenged the accuracy of deeming the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to be “settled law of the land,” according to a secret email obtained by The New York Times. The email, written in March 2003, is one of thousands of documents that a lawyer for President George W. Bush turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Supreme Court nominee but deemed “committee confidential,” meaning it could not be made public or discussed by Democrats in questioning him in hearings this week. It was among several an unknown person provided to The New York Times late Wednesday. Judge Kavanaugh was considering a draft opinion piece that supporters of one of Mr. Bush’s conservative appeals court nominees hoped they could persuade anti-abortion women to s ubmit under their names. It stated that “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land.” Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.” He was presumably referring to then-Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, conservatives who had dissented in a 1992 case that reaffirmed Roe, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The court now has four conservative justices who may be willing to overturn Roe — Justices Thomas and John C. Roberts Jr., Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — and if he is confirmed, Judge Kavanaugh could provide the decisive fifth vote. Still, his email stops short of saying whether he personally believed that the abortion rights precedent should be considered a settled legal issue. Democrats have complained about relying on Mr. Bush’s lawyer rather than the National Archives to decide what to provide to the Senate, as one part of a larger fight over how many documents from Judge Kavanaugh’s years in the Bush administration the Senate and public should be able to vet before his confirmation vote. In another document, Judge Kavanaugh expressed a critical view about some Department of Transportation affirmative action regulations, writing: “The fundamental problem in this case is that these DOT regulations use a lot of legalisms and disguises to mask what is a naked racial set-aside,” he wrote, adding that he thought the court’s four conservative justices at the time would probably “realize as much in short order and rule accordingly.” In another e-mail, analyzing a complex May 2003 ruling by a panel of three district court judges about a campaign-finance disclosure law, Judge Kavanaugh appeared to exhibit hostility to a rule that corporate and union funds could not be used to pay for issue ads that attacked or supported a specific candidate for federal office; instead funding for such ads would have to come from separate funds and disclosed to the Federal Elections Commission. Noting that that rule was arguably more expansive than another part of the regulations the panel had struck down, Judge Kavanaugh wrote that the decision by two of the judges to up hold that rule was “both strange and dangerous.” Fortunately, he added, the Supreme Court was likely to take a fresh look at the issue and would “not care” what the lower-court judges thought. And in yet another, he offered advice for an appeals court nominee who was scheduled to meet with two Democratic senators: “She should not talk about her views on specific policy or legal issues,” he wrote. “She should say that she has a commitment to follow Supreme Court precedent, that she understands and appreciates the role of a circuit judge, that she will adhere to statutory text, that she has no ideological agenda.” Fun fact, during the confirmation hearing of Robert Bork (who didn't believe the Constitution gives a right to privacy) the media got hold of his video rental habits to prove a point.

again, we're seeing a case where they're angry and promising he won't get borked up but bork was a truly awful person that shouldn't have been nominated, and this justice seems better only superficially, behind the facade he seems hell bent on unlimited corporate and executive power.

"I am going to release the email about racial profiling. And I understand that the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate. And if Sen. Cornyn believes that I violated Senate rules, I openly invite and accept the consequences...the emails being withheld from the public have nothing to do with national security." — Sen. Cory Booker Axios

https://twitter.com/CoryBooker/status/1037718107543011333?s=19

Well, he went and did it. Looking the files over, I wonder if it was worth risking his career for these 4 pages? The topic, discussing the possibility of using racial profiling to secure airlines following 9/11, is certainly troubling in hindsight, but I haven't noticed anything particularly damning against Kavanaugh. Of course, I am the opposite of any kind of expert, and my eyes kind of glazed over about half-way through, so we'll see if people who actually know stuff pick anything out.

This seems like the best chance that's gonna come to stop Kavanaugh

Booker, or some other senator should revise Ted Kennedy's Bork speech Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy ... President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

Oh Look. Another white old man who'd abuse the 14th to give white people more power. Even though the 14th was designed for minorities.

Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.” To be fair that's really not that absurd of a statement. There's an ingrained and trained hesitancy to language like "all" in the law. Attorneys and judges are (typically) highly risk-averse. That sounds like pretty typical editing to me, if somewhat political in nature due simply to the topic. And the Court can, and does, overturn precedent, and the makeup of the court is pretty damn important. That's why Kennedy's retirement is so significant. Department of Transportation affirmative action regulations, writing: “The fundamental problem in this case is that these DOT regulations use a lot of legalisms and disguises to mask what is a naked racial set-aside,” he wrote, adding that he thought the court’s four conservative justices at the time would probably “realize as much in short order and rule accordingly.” Without knowing the regulation it's hard to comment, but again, this isn't really that nuts of a statement. In equal protection doctrine, the standard of review is affected by what the statute looks like. Something can be facially racial or facially neutral. What he's saying is that the affirmative action regulation is clearly a racial classification, written in such a way as to appear facially neutral. Again, not really a whole big to-do. A lot of set-aside programs have this kind of issue, and Equal Protection goes both ways. There are ways to encourage, for instance, the state to hire minority owned businesses for construction contracts (which is probably what the DOT regulation is about) that doesn't involve a set-aside.