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US Supreme Court Tag

Like a drowning person, the opponents of Brett Kavanaugh are desperately trying to grab onto anything. Having failed to rattle Kavanaugh, either through questioning by Democrat Senators or shouting by alt-left protesters in the hearing room, Democrats have taken to bold-faced lies, like that peddled by Kamala Harris about contraceptives. And bizarre presidential campaign posturing, like Cory Booker

Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) is the latest Democrat to jump on the deception shuttle to, she hopes, the White House in 2020.  She tweeted an 11-second video of soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in which he says, "Filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objected to."

To Understand the behavior of Democrats during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, you need only look to the people who are making demands of them. The Democratic base does not want Kavanaugh confirmed, and even though Democrats know there is nothing they can do to stop it, they are trying to appear as though they are making an effort.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh faces the Senate Judiciary Committee for the third day on Thursday. The hearing starts at 9:30AM ET. Wednesday lasted 12 hours, but today should be a little shorter since senators only get 20 minutes to ask questions. Yet I expect many interruptions from protesters.

Today at 9:30 AM, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will face day 2 of his confirmation hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee. Maybe today we will actually hear Kavanaugh speak! The Democrats spent almost the first two hours trying to convince Chairman Chuck Grassley to adjourn the hearings over the lack of documents. Then the Senators had their opening statements, which took all day, and protesters interrupted a lot of the proceedings. Today each senator will have 30 minutes to question Kavanaugh.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanugh's hearings begin today at 9:15AM in front of the Senate Judiciary committee. More than likely Kavanaugh will face a lot of questions about abortion and executive power. We will cover the hearings live every day.

When it comes to judges, the President has a lot in common with North Carolina. While the White House finds itself thwarted on an almost hourly basis by federal district judges, the Tar Heel State languishes under the iron heel of the Fourth Circuit, a federal appellate court based in Richmond, Virginia.  Once deeply conservative, the Fourth Circuit is now almost as liberal as the Ninth, and for a very simple reason: President Obama got to fill vacancies Senate Democrats kept from Bush in 2007 and 2008. (The vacancy jockeying began long before Trump.)  The transformed Fourth Circuit quickly got to work striking down North Carolina's laws on voter IDs, transgender bathroom accommodations, public prayer, and, of course, election districting, from races for lowly school boards to those for Congress.

I googled "Kavanaugh Poll" this morning and came across articles declaring that polls show Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh has low support from women & the public overall and is one of the most unpopular picks in a decade. These articles came out about 19 hours ago yet a Quinnipiac University Poll from August 15 showed Kavanaugh gaining public support, mainly with independents and women almost evenly split.

When Masterpiece Cakeshop won its case on June 4, 2018, in the U.S. Supreme Court over refusal to bake a cake celebrating a gay wedding, many people assumed it was a win for religious freedom and free speech (the right not to have government compel your speech). The cake shop did not refuse to sell cakes to gays, it simply didn't want to prepare a custom cake with a specific message on it which it believed was contrary to the owner's religious beliefs. But as we covered at the time, the Supreme Court decision was tailored to bias against the cake shop in the Colorado administrative process. Justice Kennedy authored the 7-2 opinion:

Unfortunately for the press, there's not enough dirt on Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, which means journalists have to scrape at the bottom of the barrel. That's where we enter the creepy level and ProPublica has embraced it because the publication wants to know exactly who went to Washington Nationals baseball games with the judge and pictures of him at the games. Yes, the publication is still probing this disturbing development from July even though Kavanaugh bought those tickets with his personal credit card and his friends paid him back.

Just a few weeks ago, Democrats were vowing to do whatever it takes to keep Judge Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. They played to their base by dialing the rhetoric up to ten, as usual. Now it looks like that effort is beginning to fade.

Last year, we covered Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court, including their misguided insistence on using the filibuster in an attempt to stop the nomination.  At that point, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had eliminated the filibuster on lower court nominations but since there was no Supreme Court vacancy during his tenure as majority leader, Reid preserved the filibuster for the Supreme Court.