This is brutal: Why @benjaminwittes would vote against Kavanaugh.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

ShoutyJobSeekingHat Retweeted:

This is brutal:
Why @benjaminwittes would vote against Kavanaugh.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/why-i-wouldnt-confirm-brett-kavanaugh/571936/ …

If only Republican senators would have 1/100th the class that Ben Wittes has about such things.

Link to tweet

IDEAS

I Know Brett Kavanaugh, but I Wouldn’t Confirm Him

This is an article I never imagined myself writing, that I never wanted to write, that I wish I could not write.

2:21 PM ET

Benjamin Wittes
Editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

If I were a senator, I would not vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.

These are words I write with no pleasure, but with deep sadness. Unlike many people who will read them with glee—as validating preexisting political, philosophical, or jurisprudential opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination—I have no hostility to or particular fear of conservative jurisprudence. I have a long relationship with Kavanaugh, and I have always liked him. I have admired his career on the D.C. Circuit. I have spoken warmly of him. I have published him. I have vouched publicly for his character—more than once—and taken a fair bit of heat for doing so. I have also spent a substantial portion of my adult life defending the proposition that judicial nominees are entitled to a measure of decency from the Senate and that there should be norms of civility within a process that showed Kavanaugh none even before the current allegations arose.

{Read Caitlin Flanagan on why she believes Christine Blasey Ford}

This is an article I never imagined myself writing, that I never wanted to write, that I wish I could not write.

I am also keenly aware that rejecting Kavanaugh on the record currently before the Senate will set a dangerous precedent. The allegations against him remain unproven. They arose publicly late in the process and, by their nature, are not amenable to decisive factual rebuttal. It is a real possibility that Kavanaugh is telling the truth and that he has had his life turned upside down over a falsehood. Even assuming that Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations are entirely accurate, rejecting him on the current record could incentivize not merely other sexual-assault victims to come forward—which would be a salutary thing—but also other late-stage allegations of a non-falsifiable nature by people who are not acting in good faith. We are on a dangerous road, and the judicial confirmation wars are going to get a lot worse for our traveling down it.

Despite all of that, if I were a senator, I would vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. I would do it both because of Ford’s testimony and because of Kavanaugh’s. For reasons I will describe, I find her account more believable than his. I would also do it because whatever the truth of what happened in the summer of 1982, Thursday’s hearing left Kavanaugh nonviable as a justice.

{Read Deborah Copaken on facing her rapist}

A few days before the hearing, I detailed on this site the advice I would give to Kavanaugh if he asked me. He should, I argued, withdraw from consideration for elevation unless able to defend himself to a high degree of factual certainty without attacking Ford. He should remain a nominee, I argued, only if his defense would be sufficiently convincing that it would meet what we might term the “no asterisks” standard—that is, that it would plausibly convince even people who vociferously disagree with his jurisprudential views that he could serve credibly as a justice. His defense needed to make it possible for a reasonable pro-choice woman to find it a legitimate and acceptable prospect, if not an attractive or appealing one, that he might sit on a case reconsidering Roe v. Wade.
....

[CincyDem]

1. It's only brutal if you're a rational thinker who values...

...an independent judiciary that doesn't filter knowable facts through a partisan lens.

[DeminPennswoods]

2. Kavanaugh has always been a partisan hack

David Brock details it all in his biography "Blinded by the Right". Kavanaugh among others was groomed from an early age to be a true rightwing believer and eventually to be planted in the judiciary and federal government. The only difference between him and Hannity is a law degree and apparently an ability to fool the Ben Wittes' of the world.















9-

[Jarqui]

3. I didn't find it brutal. For Kavanaugh maybe. But for the rest of the country,

I don't think he's too far off the mark.