If the Republican Senators she reportedly told what they wanted to hear aren't lying, we now know Rachel Mitchell is a Republican hack who was prepared to tell them what they wanted to hear from the start.
If I had been a Democrat on that Committee I'd have demanded that she say whether or not she would have tried to proceed without a police agency doing the kind of investigation that Brett Kavanaugh refused to ask for even as he kept demanding a "fair process" and which Grassley and the rest of the Republicans made certain that they would never allow even as Kavanaugh's excuse for refusing to ask for the FBI to investigate was that he was willing to do what the committee the Republicans control did.
If I were a Democrat who was up against Rachel Mitchell in any way or if I were in Arizona in a position to do it, I'd demand to know how her partisan bias influenced her professional work. If the Republicans are misrepresenting what she said she could clear that up but her chance is about to disappear. If she doesn't do that she deserves to have it damage her professional reputation.
She damaged her reputation by appearing in the hearing, something that no lawyer should ever have agreed to (the lack of control of your part in the hearing, the obvious use of you as a puppet, etc., were red flags enough). I had little respect for her simply because she agreed to be there.
ReplyDeleteNow, she says she wouldn't prosecute Kavanaugh? What, is that a universal standard any prosecutor would agree with? It's merely her opinion, and her professional acuity is already damaged by her participation yesterday. Her expertise is undermined, her authority to opine is ruined.
She's been used like an old rag and tossed aside by the people who hired her. That was entirely foreseeable. That's why she should have stayed out of it. OTOH, she is another object lesson in what the GOP Senators on the Committee (all men) think of women; any woman.
Well said.
DeleteI was inclined to feel sorry for her but not all that sorry. Once I heard her at work that declined with every question. It was revived by Lindsay tossing her aside but with that report last night she's a partisan hack for me.
I would certainly insist that Kavanaugh recuse himself from any issue relevant to his tantrum yesterday. He should have that haunt him for the rest of his days.
Reading Jennifer Rubin's fears about the fall out from him being put on the court are, I think, inevitable due to how the Republicans have acted for the past few decades. I think that as well as the demonstrated incompetence of most if not all of the Supreme Court members in mathematics, science, etc. prove the Court is an 18th century institution that has steered the legal profession into a dangerous spiral. And it's not just the Republicans, Justice Stephen Breyer doesn't seem to understand that you can't analyze statistical issues with legal dogma. I think it's inevitable that the court be expanded and fundamentally restructured. I also think that Louis Boudin's idea that 5-4 overturnings of laws should be considered illegitimate. Sometimes that would work against the effort to reign in congressional excess but it would more often reign in conservative-fascist judicial excess. At least the Congress is answerable to the voters, in some sense of the word.
The problem with recusal on the S. Ct. is that there is no power to enforce it. That Court can enforce it against lower courts, but no one can make a Justice recuse. Scalia refused to more than once.
ReplyDeleteThat's one of a number of problems with it. I don't think it can stay the way it is now. I think the people predicting a disaster of credibility for the court and the liklihood of politicians starting to ignore it are probably too optimistic.
DeleteI know a lot of people are skeptical of my theory but I really think it all starts with the Warren Court's free speech and, especially, free press rulings that enabled those with the most power and control of the media. I think it's no accident that those were made right at the height of liberalism in the early Johnson years and things have been going steadily to hell since then.
If I hadn't been reading and listening to Brueggemann I don't think I'd have any idea what was going on. One of the things he's been saying more and more is that we're headed for fascism because Americans have been gulled and duped out of morality, equal justice, economic justice. Literally nothing I've encountered that the secular left says about this gets to the bottom of what's wrong. I listen to Majority Report and think they're generally pointed in the right direction but they constantly miss it because they are so reflexively anti-religious, scientistic, ideological.
I think it started with the Warren Court, but I've always understood it as a raw exercise in power, a struggle between the revanchist/Goldwater (now Tea Party) crowd, and, basically, the rest of America.
DeleteHeard an analysis of Texas politics this morning, from a local guy who said there was always an agreement in Texas politics that the business of government was business (there was a briefly "liberal" period in the '70's, but that's been buried long before the "change" occurred here). He said it started changing in the 21st century, but the radical change, the pursuit of ideology for the sake of ideology, started with the election of Obama and the reaction (the racist reaction) of the creation of the Tea Party. At that point the Texas Lege went from "moderate" to "insane," and it has stayed that way since, fighting on "social" issues (like who can pee where in public schools) because those are inflammatory, while trade and even education policy are too complicated for most people to care about (except for school taxes and what they say about the Alamo in Texas history).
Raw power, IOW. The election of Obama is a consequence, ultimately, of Brown v. Board (it set in motion the Civil Rights Act of '57, '64, Voting Rights Act of '65, Fair Housing Act, etc., as well as the Civil Rights Movement). The resistance to that decision has never ended (school desegregation has, effectively); and it got new fuel with our first black President.
Which still brings us back to Brueggemann and the accuracy of his analysis, or rather how accurate his analysis is.
I should clarify that last line, now that I read it again: Brueggemann is dead on. The problem is morality, equal justice, and most importantly, economic justice. That's the one that gets everyone's attention, because talking about the money takes you from preachin' to meddlin', as the old story has it. Where your treasure is, that's where your heart is, and money is our treasure. It's never about economic anxiety, it's always about economic claim, and economic justice goes after that claim. Economic claim is where the problem is; but it's also where the heart is, so while it gets to the heart of the matter, it also goes to what is truly held most dear, and you threaten that at your peril.
DeleteWhich is pretty much what the prophets were on about....
It's as I once said, blog comments aren't the product of a major university publishing house back in the days when they had rigorous copy editing. Quick and dirty. I've had to do some major clarifications, I should have kept a list of my 10 worst comment bloopers, it would have made an embarrassingly fun post.
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