Friday, September 7, 2018

Contempt of Court And Contempt For Law And The Legal Profession Is Richly Earned By All Of Those

If you thought the hypocrisy and testilying that came from Brett Kavanaugh (Yale) was disgusting, we're about to get to the really putrid part of it when his well-placed, Yale-Ivy credentialed colleagues who are allegedly liberal will come out and tell us how we shouldn't worry about having their buddy (and ticket to the ultimate legal insider set) Brett, on the Supreme Court.   We've already had some of that, so much of it that some at Yale felt it necessary to call bull-shit on their "liberal" colleagues.

Many conservative voices have spoken in support of President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. But so have some liberal lawyers, including some of our colleagues at Yale Law School. Why would left-leaning attorneys lend their authority to a judge who has an unmistakable record of hostility to core liberal causes, from abortion rights to voting rights, from environmental regulations to restraints on presidential power?

In celebrating Kavanaugh, liberals may be acting out nostalgia for a long-gone bipartisan appointment process. They may be failing to admit the importance of values to judging, or they may be misreading Kavanaugh’s record. Perhaps they think he is the best nominee they can hope for, or that his personal virtue recommends his confirmation. Then again, maybe they are simply seeking influence. None of these are creditable reasons: There is no liberal case for Kavanaugh.'

I can give you another reason, their "liberalism" was always more of a professional-ideological pose than it was anything to do with the lives of real people, the environment, equal justice under the laws, certainly not anything like economic justice.

The last Senate Judiciary hearings that I listened to gavel-to gavel were those to confirm Alito (Princeton-Yale) to the Supreme Court, the ones which had the memorable moment of staged tears with Alito's wife, cued by Lindsay Graham (U of South Carolina) fleeing the hearing room in tears.  Lindsay apparently is the guy in the Republican Caucus they count on to direct the pantomimes and skits.   A natural role to assign a right wing gay guy, I guess.

The thing about those hearings which was the last straw wasn't the old-white, mostly lawyer, many Ivied men and their emetic pious citations and calls for "comity" and the inevitable sports metaphors, it was hearing Alito's colleagues on the bench, in law schools and in the establishment of the legal profession, the "liberals" and even "feminists" among them calling for his confirmation.  That came after the part of the hearing which made me most outraged, something I can't stop thinking about or bringing up, Professor Ronald Sullivan of Yale pointed to two rulings by Alito dealing with the strip searches of a 10-year-old girl who was not under suspicion for a crime and the adult wife of a wealthy veterinarian who was under suspicion for a crime.  Alito considered the strip search of the little girl as quite proper and OK, but was outraged when the wealthy woman was strip searched.  I'll never get over how that failed to make an impression among Alito's "liberal" even "feminist" supporters that made the slightest differnce.

The legal profession is held in low regard, while a bit of that is unjustified, lots of it is richly earned by lawyers, by judges, by "Justices".  The antics of T. S. Ellis (Harvard-Oxford),  the judge in the first Manafort trial which may well have been from a partisan, political motive AND ANYONE WHO READ WHAT HE DID DURING THAT TRIAL WOULD BE WELL WITHIN REASON TO ASSERT THAT is only one recent example of that.  Republicans in the corrupt Senate have rigged the system to prevent an indisputably legitimately elected Democratic president the ability to appoint judges and a Justice to the Supreme Court - the rule obviously being that the white-supremacists of the Republican-fascist party can nullify the election of a Black Democratic President - and the legal profession, lawyers, judges, "Justices" are totally OK with that.  We are about to hear a raft of the lawyers, law professors, no doubt the judicial colleagues of Brett Kavanaugh give their more than merely tacit approval to the process.

Never take a "liberal", even a "feminist" in the legal profession's word without subjecting them to extreme skepticism and a critical look at WHAT THEY DO.  That's certainly a good rule for any who have or will support putting the likes of Alito or Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.  You can read it in the excerpt above, their professional interest is served by them giving that support, they, like Alito and Kavanaugh and the rest of the Republicans on the Supreme Court put personal self-interest above even the morality they give lip-service to.  They are disgusting, they deserve the contempt they earn, their colleagues who tolerate their behavior, the kind of thing I criticized Rod Rosenstein (University of Pennsylvania, the "minor Ivy" not a state school, - Harvard)  for yesterday, bring the contempt for their profession on it.

I'm going to occasionally give the provinance of the politicans, judges, lawyers, "journalists" because I think we all need to know what educational credentialing entities to attribute them to.  Almost all of them will turn out to be Ivy-Ivy Equivalent in every case, though a few will have gone to public schools, most went the prep-Ivy route.  The despotism we are under is a product of elite schools.   Federalist-fascism is largely a product of the Harvard Law faculty.

Update:  Oh, to be fair, Paul Manafort is a product of the Ivy-equivalent, Georgetown University, BS, JD.   Another piece of shit the elite Jesuits who run that place, the same ones who produced Gorsuch and Kavanaugh at the prep-preIvy level, need to answer for producing.

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