Brett Kavanaugh, The Justice Without a Past
Only 3%, 4%, or 7% of Kavanaugh’s record is known or public. This is because, as in all things, Trump and McConnell gain leverage by rushing all negotiations and approvals. The most important three years that he worked in the Bush White House are totally blocked from his past record.
Trump blocked 100,000 documents due to “executive privilege”, without giving any details. Bush released 42,000 documents the weekend before the hearings. The review of a million documents from the National Archives are far from completed because of the early start of the hearings.
Since we write about climate change and voter rights, we now know that Kavanaugh ruled against both of these as a Judge on the D.C. Circuit of the Court of Appeals. Nobel Laureates F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario J. Molina at UC Irvine along with Laureate Paul J. Crutzen of the Max-Planck-Institute discovered that fridge coolant and aerosol spray can filler chlorofluorocarbons were eating away at the Ozone layer which protects us from frying in ultraviolet radiation. The chlorine was responsible for this. A worldwide Montreal protocol halted production and use of this chemical. This was replaced in coolants by hydro-fluorocarbons without the Chlorine. But this is still a powerful greenhouse gas. Just as the Supreme Court said the EPA could regulate greenhouse gas CO2, it should be able to regulate these as well. But in 2017, Kavanaugh ruled against this.
In 2012, Kavanaugh also ruled to uphold a South Carolina voter ID law that disenfranchised more than 80,000 minority registered voters,
“What’s past is prologue”, is recognized by William Shakespeare’s character Antonio in “The Tempest”. In this play, the act being prologued is murder. We are worried about what rights of Americans will be “murdered” by Kavanaugh. We are also worried what superpowers he will grant to Trump to limit his responsibilities under the law and the Constitution. The quote “What is past is prologue” is inscribed on the statue “Future”, appropriately located in front of the National Archives Building.
Judge Kavanaugh was chosen by the Federalist Society (funded by the Koch Brothers), because he prosecuted Clinton’s impeachment, worked in the Bush White House, and is an “Originalist”. (Kavanaugh gave 50 talks to the Federalist Society.) Along with the other Originalists, they base their interpretations of the Constitution on ancient documents about the considerations of the Constitution’s drafters, and those who approved the Constitution. None of which is secret, or unavailable to be considered in the time for the case to be decided. So we have a hyper-hypocrisy here. A Justice who relies on the historical record, being confirmed without allowing his record to be reviewed.
So we have a Supreme Court nominee without a record, being nominated by a President without a record in business, hidden by non-disclosure agreements, without a tax record, and with suppression of his embarrassing affairs and assaults on women.
What we do know from Kavanaugh’s record on Clinton’s impeachment, is that in this most serious Constitutional crises, he promoted embarrassing Clinton as much as possible for purely political purposes.
Why is the deadline on October 1st? So that the new Supreme Court term would start with a full nine Justices. Yet, as pointed out in the hearings, McConnell blocked Obama’s Supreme Court nominee for nine months, requiring the Supreme Court to operate for a year with only eight members. That year was probably one of the most unbiased periods of the Court’s rulings.
The Democrat’s solution to this is suspend the hearings until all of Kavanaugh’s record can be examined. The Democrats are already challenging Kavanaugh’s almost perfect pro-business and Republican records on rulings.
I have just been one-upped by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas who ended his praiseworthy introduction of Kavanaugh with Cruz’s opinion of the opposition, quoting Shakespeare, “full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” from Macbeth. It is apparent why Cruz did not include the full sentence quote: “It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
