Tag: Brett Kavanaugh

Slam into SCOTUS

The Portly Politico1 Comment

With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday, the political world was thrown into hysterics.  Democrats are threatening to set the Supreme Court building and the White House ablaze if President Trump attempts to nominate a replacement for the Notorious RBG before the November election.

Even if they were serious about their histrionic, treasonous threat, President Trump should do it, and Senate Republicans should act speedily to confirm his nominee.  For that matter, President Trump should appoint the most stridently right-wing, pro-life, socially conservative, religious justice possible.

If the Kavanaugh hearings taught us anything, the Left will pillory any mildly conservative nominee to the Court.  Kavanaugh is a Beltway Dudley Do-Right, and he was treated as a de facto stand-in for every unpleasant interaction a woman has ever had with a man.  If the Left treated him so shabbily, why not go for broke and get the second coming of Antonin Scalia, or a young Clarence Thomas clone?

When I first heard the news, I remembered President Obama’s Merrick Garland appointment, and how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings.  That was entirely constitutional, both for the president to nominate, and for the Senate to decline to confirm.  McConnell’s rationale was that the Senate should not confirm a nominee during a presidential election year, so as to give the people a chance to vote for new leadership first.

My initial reaction was, “Well, screw it—just slam in a nominee and control SCOTUS for generations.”  The Senate isn’t bound by an unwritten rule or custom, and the Left has broken so many rules (including threatening to impeach Trump for performing his constitutional duty to make an appointment), it’s time for us to do so to win.

But then my younger brother informed me that a confirmation at this time would not be a breach of senatorial custom.  The rule that McConnell invoked in 2016 only applies when the President is one party, and the Senate is controlled by the opposing party.  Presidents who have attempted nominations in those conditions during election years have failed.  Ted Cruz covers it beautifully in a short YouTube video:

Of course, McConnell warned then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2009 when the Senate got rid of its requirement that sixty Senators were necessary to confirm Supreme Court nominees that it would one day come back to haunt the Democrats.  The price of their political expediency could very well be—let us pray!—a conservative-controlled Court.

Sadly, it seems that the Democrats will keep moving the goal posts, as usual.  The cry now is that if Trump gets his nominee before the election, the Democrats will engage in court-packing should they win the presidency and Congress; in other words, they’ll add Supreme Court seats to dilute the conservative majority.

Congress has the authority to alter the number of Supreme Court seats (when the Constitution was first ratified, the Court only had six justices, rather than the present-day nine).  However, the last infamous example of court-packing—Franklin Roosevelt’s ham-fisted attempt to inflate the Court to fifteen justices from nine—was met with severe push-back from even his own party, which saw it for the transparently naked power-grab it was.  Democrats nearly ninety years later are all too eager to engage in that power grab.

Therefore, even if President Trump gets his nominee confirmed before the 3 November election, it could all be undone with a Biden win and a “blue wave” seizing control of the Senate.  That’s why it’s all the more imperative—especially in swing States—to get out and vote for Trump.  The Supreme Court pick will be meaningless if Democrats take control of the levers of power again.

Nevertheless, Senate Republicans need to confirm—speedily—whoever President Trump puts forward as his nominee (hopefully Amy Coney Barrett).  That decisive action could rally millions of conservatives to get out to vote for Trump (and vulnerable Republican Senators) in November.

More importantly, it will—barring progressive court-packing—secure the Court for conservatives for at least a generation, and possibly beyond.  If President Trump is reelected and Republicans maintain the Senate, it may then be advisable—as much as I hate to suggest it—for Justice Thomas to step down, thereby allowing Trump to appoint a younger conservative who can maintain the conservative majority for another thirty or forty years.

Big things are afoot.  The Republicans and Trump may just have one last shot to save the Republic.

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Lazy Sunday LXXIX: SCOTUS

The Portly Politico9 Comments

Perhaps one of President Trump’s most enduring achievements has been his Supreme Court nominations.  He’s managed to tip the Court, however slightly, towards the conservatives.  With the death of Justice Ginsburg, Trump has the opportunity to secure a solid conservative majority on the highest court in the land for at least a generation.

With that, it looks like a good opportunity to review some posts about the Supreme Court:

  • “Breaking: Trump Nominates Judge Brett Kavanaugh to Supreme Court” – The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh was a major shift in American politics.  His confirmation hearings saw the entire fury of the Left unleashed, and it was during those hearings that I believe many of us realized that the old playbook of compromise among competing parties was no long valid or useful.
  • “SCOTUS D&D” – This post was a fun one—looking at the Supreme Court justices (from 2018) in terms of the Dungeons and Dragons alignments.
  • “Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings” – As noted above, the Kavanaugh hearings were a turning point.  I was blown away with the number of arguments people were making on social media that boiled down to “I was raped/sexually assaulted/abused, therefore Brett Kavanaugh assaulted Dr. Blasey Ford.”  The complete embrace of emotionalism and illogical thinking braced me to this stark reality.
  • “Screwed by SCOTUS” – One of my more recent posts on the Court, this piece explored the tendency of conservative justices to make surprisingly bad decisions in league with progressive cause du jours.

That’s it for now.  Here’s hoping President Trump and Senate Republicans can get it done and slam in a super conservative appointee ahead of the election.  We’ll see.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

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TBT: Flight 93 Election Follow-Up

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It’s been a big election week for yours portly; even though I lost to a surprise write-in candidate, I feel pretty good about it.  It’s also, of course, a huge (yuge?) election year, with the fate of the United States dangling in the balance.

Right now, President Trump is down in the polls, and there’s a lot of black-pilled commentary on our side (I’m certainly guilty of it).  Z Man wrote a scatching post yesterday—entitled “Flight 93 Crashed“—that argues that Jeff Sessions’s defeat in the Alabama US Senate Republican primary to former football coach Tommy Tuberville marks the end of any significant, mainstream nationalist and immigration patriot influence in national politics.  Sessions was, indeed, a John the Baptist in the Senate, crying out in the wilderness of the cheap labor lobby, a lone voice for immigration restriction.

I do think President Trump has treated Sessions shabbily at times, but when Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, he allowed hostile forces to take the reins, resulting in two years and millions of wasted dollars on a politically-motivated investigation that nearly put Roger Stone in jail for a meaningless process “crime.”  More importantly, it stymied the Trump presidency, putting a stop to the energy and excitement of those early days of his administration.

Sessions was, I believe, doing what he thought was right, but his fatal error was he assumed we were still playing by the old playbook of political decorum and fair play.  By taking that path—however honorable in the particular—he unleashed incredibly dishonorable forces, albeit unintentionally.  To add insult to injury, Democrat Doug Jones won his Senate seat away from Judge Roy Moore, a huge hero for social and religious conservatives.

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Screwed by SCOTUS

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My brother sent me a meme the other day:  a picture of nine Clarence Thomases under the heading “The Ideal Supreme Court“:

Memes are often pithy statements of the Truth, and, boy, this one nails it.  Given the treacherous and boneheaded rulings from the Supreme Court this week—particularly from perennial traitor Chief Justice John Roberts, joined in one ruling with milquetoast toady Neil Gorsuch—we could do for a Court full of Clarence Thomases.  Such a Court would understand the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court in relation to it better than any Court we’ve had since the 1920s.

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Lazy Sunday VI: Progressivism, Part II

The Portly Politico68 Comments

Last week’s Lazy Sunday shared four of my pieces about the excesses and abuses of Leftist progressivism.  This week, I’m reheating three TPP classics for your Sunday morning consumption.  Enjoy!

1.) “Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings” – the meltdown of the Left was on full display during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.  Here you had a straight-as-an-arrow judge who had been through multiple confirmations without incident.  What most frustrated me about the Kavanaugh hearings was how women began reasoning this way:  “because something bad happened to me, Kavanaugh must have done something to Dr. Blasey-Ford.”  How can we have the presumption of innocence—and rational, impartial weighing of evidence—if people make such absurd, illogical leaps in their “reasoning”?

2.) “Sanctimonious Leftism” – this piece was about a smarmy letter from Rich Harwood of the Harwood Institute about how disgraced Virginia Governor Ralph Northam can redeem himself.  It basically boils down to a lot of “feel-good crap,” as my mom would say.  Who cares what Northam did at a party thirty-plus years ago?  His heinous views on post-birth infanticide should be ring way more alarm bells.  The black-face/Klan hood incident is a distraction, but it’s one that makes the Left feel virtuous and smug about its own perceived righteousness.  Remember, for the Left, killing babies is good, but wearing a costume is bad.

3.) “Academic Leftism’s Sour Grapes” – this piece detailed a disturbing, outright pro-socialist piece from a college professor, in which the prof urged his fellow academic socialists to abandon the academy and to get into the government—as if they don’t already dominate both.  The Left must have total domination of every aspect of society, as well as the levers of power in the government.  If they lose the government, they lose control, even if they still dominate in the media, academia, the culture, etc.

So there’s your weekly dose of warmed over Leftist insanity.  More to come (assuming my Internet gets fixed in a timely fashion).

Happy Sunday!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Posts

Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings

The Portly Politico26 Comments

The Internet has been all atwitter with talk of the Kavanaugh hearings, particularly Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s vocal-fry inflected testimony, as well as Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s, and Senator Lindsey Graham’s fiery, righteous outburst.

My general policy with such hot-button current events is to withhold comment until the facts are known.  That’s not a savvy move for a blogger, but it gives me time to make an informed judgment on what the Truth is likely to be.

Below are comments I posted on the Portly Politico Facebook page (which I encourage you to “like,” “follow,” and whatever else one has to do to get notifications these days) about the hearings.  What troubles me the most about the (it seems baseless) accusations against Judge Kavanaugh is the utter breakdown of logical thinking—and the utter willingness of his critics to throw due process and the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” under the bus.

But, we all know it’s political theatre.  The Democrats are attempting to delay or derail the confirmation process until after the 2018 midterm elections.  They could care less about Dr. Ford’s alleged sexual assault.  I also wrote that Judge Kavanaugh would be in for a thorough Borking, so we all knew this was coming; still, I naively did not fathom the depths to which the Left would descend.

As for Dr. Ford, she could very well have suffered some trauma—or some imagined, “recovered” memory.  The old “what-does-she-have-to-gain” defense is as baseless as her claims:  $100,000 (and counting) in GoFundMe money, the kudos of the “Resistance,” probably a book deal, a political career if she wants it—she will be richly rewarded for her role in the potential takedown of an eminently qualified, eminently respectable constitutional originalist.

Submitted for your edification—and the good of the Republic and logical thinking—my reflections:

Some logic re: the Kavanaugh hearings.

1.) Women (and men) are sometimes the victims of sexual assault, rape, etc. That’s bad–evil!

2.) Brett Kavanaugh can be innocent and can still be true.

Just because evil things happen to some people doesn’t mean that Brett Kavanaugh did anything evil, or what he has been accused of doing.

Further:  I keep reading and hearing that Dr. Ford’s testimony is “credible.” Based on what evidence? As far as I can tell, there is NO evidence to support her claim, and a great deal to refute or challenge it. Being emotionally compelling is not the same thing as having substantial evidence.

Maybe something happened to her, maybe not. It’s hard to imagine someone subjecting themselves to this scrutiny for light and transient reasons. That said, the “Resistance” is real. So are recovered memories, or flawed ones.

The Democrats in the Senate don’t care (in general) about Dr. Ford’s allegations or about what’s allegedly happened to other women. They care about delaying the vote on confirmation until after the election so they can scuttle the deal. They’re using women to further their own political agenda, and as much as they’ll protest to the contrary, they know all-too-well the dangerous game they’re playing.

They’ve been running this playbook for decades. Senator Lindsey Graham’s righteous outburst demonstrates that the scales have fallen away from Establishment Republicans’ eyes–the old Marquis of Queensbury rules don’t work when the other side will destroy you when it’s politically expedient to do so.

Baseless, misdirected, and/or politically-motivated accusations don’t help anyone. They harm real victims of sexual assault and rape, as well as men who may be entirely innocent. Further, in the Kavanaugh case, they undermine the legitimacy of our already-ossified institutions.

SCOTUS D&D

The Portly Politico11 Comments

This past Monday night, President Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, predictably sending progressives into apoplectic (and apocalyptic) fits of self-righteous virtue-signaling and white-knighting.  Naturally, Leftists realize their decades-long project of circumventing representative government through the courts might backfire—when you create an excessively powerful institution and lose control of it, you start to worry that weapon will be turned back on you.

There’s been a great deal of analysis since then of Kavanaugh and how his nomination might shift the direction of the Court.  I’m not steeped enough in the details to make a judgment call myself, though it seems that Kavanaugh is remarkably experienced, and interprets the Constitution fairly narrowly (in the sense that he’s not one to create “emanations of penumbras” of rights or legislate from the bench).

I’m a bit concerned that he’ll be too restrained, a la Chief Justice John Roberts, who disastrously upheld the Affordable Care Act twice, the second time largely on the grounds that the Court should avoid overturning what legislatures enact.  That’s a good impulse generally, but not when the plain language of the act states something contrary to what the Court rules, and the Court deciding that Congress “meant to write it another way” is a funny way of exercising judicial “restraint.”

Regardless, my sense is that Kavanaugh is a solid and safe pick.  I’d much rather have seen, say, Utah Senator Mike Lee get the nomination—there’s no ambiguity about his commitment to constitutionalism—but Kavanaugh might stand a better chance of surviving his confirmation vote (after a predictably theatrical bout of boisterous dissent from doomsday-speaking Democratic Senators).

But I digress.  In attempting to analyze the Supreme Court, Conservative Review‘s Joseph Koss has applied a nifty little model to try to make sense of where the Court has been, and where it might be headed with the addition of Kavanaugh.

Koss is quick to point out that he’s not completely satisfied with this model—he applies the classic Dungeons and Dragons alignment system (the nerd in me is rejoicing)—and that some justices don’t quite fit into one of the nine slots, but he explains his placements thoroughly and carefully.

Check out his analysis here:  https://mailchi.mp/ab9d22079504/supreme-court-alignment?e=0d04a04a52

He also invites readers to tell him how wrong he is here.

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What do you think, TPP readers?  Is Kavanaugh a slam-dunk pick?  A Washington-insider swamp creature sell-out?  A rock-ribbed conservative?  Leave your thoughts and comments below!

Breaking: Trump Nominates Judge Brett Kavanaugh to Supreme Court

The Portly Politico10 Comments

President Trump has nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.  This appointment will mark Trump’s second nomination, and will cement the Court’s conservative majority by a narrow 5-4 margin.

Kavanaugh is a devout Catholic and father of three living in Washington, D.C.  He is also a champion for religious liberty, and even the feisty Ann Coulter supports him.  For some readers, that may be cause for concern, but I trust Coulter’s instincts on this one—after all, she predicted Trump would be POTUS, right?

Expect Kavanaugh to face a thorough Borking from Senate Democrats, who will unload on him mercilessly.