Unitary Executive

Posted on 8 September 2018 by eehines

Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that held hearings last week on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, had an op-ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that opened with this.

Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of hating women, hating children, hating clean air, wanting dirty water. He’s been declared an existential threat to the nation.

He’s also accused of favoring a unitary Executive and thereby ceding dangerously broad power to the President.

This is a preview of Unitary Executive. Read the full post (216 words, estimated 52 secs reading time)

Connections

Posted on 6 September 2018 by eehines

One in particular stands out for me: that between Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) and the truth. Charles Hurt, in the Washington Times, has the sordid story.

[Klobuchar] claims to have read 148,000 documents that reveal Judge Kavanaugh to be so heinous as to be unfit for the high court.

OK, let’s say Ms. Klobuchar spent two minutes reading each document. That would be 296,000 minutes—or 205 days—reading these documents. Which is pretty remarkable considering Judge Kavanaugh was nominated 55 days ago.

This is a preview of Connections. Read the full post (285 words, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

Kavanaugh and Precedents

Posted on 5 September 2018 by eehines

Brent Kendall, in a piece in Monday’s The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the importance of judicial precedence and how willing Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh would be to overturn them.

Liberals warn that key rulings on abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights could be weakened or reversed by a court that leans further to the right. Many conservatives, on the other hand, hope those precedents will be limited by future rulings and eventually crumble, even if Judge Kavanaugh moves carefully rather than tearing through established doctrine.

This is a preview of Kavanaugh and Precedents. Read the full post (560 words, estimated 2:14 mins reading time)

Facts-s-s-s

Posted on 2 September 2018 by eehines

It burns-s-s-s….

Brown University has come under fire after censoring its own study on transgender youth, which found that social media and friends can influence teenagers to change their gender identity.

After all, the study’s findings might invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community. Can’t have the narrative contradicted.

Here are examples of what its study found, according to the study’s author, Lisa Littman, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown, physician, and author of the study:

This is a preview of Facts-s-s-s. Read the full post (423 words, estimated 1:42 mins reading time)

A “secretive, corrupt and troubling process”

Posted on 30 August 2018 by eehines

In a Letter to the Editor in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Kristine Lucius, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, decried the allegedly secretive, corrupt, and troubling process (Lucius’ phrase) with which the document release related to Judge Brett Kavanaugh is being handled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. She even went so far as to compare the document release of then-nominee Elena Kagan with that of Kavanaugh:

This is a preview of A “secretive, corrupt and troubling process”. Read the full post (307 words, estimated 1:14 mins reading time)

Flipping Witnesses

Posted on 28 August 2018 by eehines

President Donald Trump decries it. So have I in writing about the Manafort case and the credibility of Mueller’s prosecutors’ witnesses.

What’s interesting to me and saddening, and what’s dangerous to our system of justice—which includes justice for the accused as well as the victim—is prosecutors’ response to Trump’s decrial.

Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor, said that Mr Trump’s comments amount to “an absolutely outrageous statement and to any prosecutor would just be shocking to hear.”

“It’s hard to overstate how fundamental” to prosecutions cooperating witnesses are, Mr Zeidenberg said.

And Stephen Gillers, a New York University School of Law professor:

This is a preview of Flipping Witnesses. Read the full post (217 words, estimated 52 secs reading time)

The Will of the People

Posted on 16 August 2018 by eehines

The West Virginia House of Delegates has returned articles of impeachment against every one of the sitting Justices of the State’s Supreme Court. One Justice, Robin Davis, has resigned her post, doing so before any of the impeachment cases proceed to the West Virginia Senate for trial. In her resignation press conference, Davis complained

The majority members have ignored the will of the people who elected the justices of this court. They have erased the lines of separation between the branches of government.

This is a preview of The Will of the People. Read the full post (238 words, estimated 57 secs reading time)

Integrity Redux

Posted on 9 August 2018 by eehines

I wrote about the level of integrity in the Manafort trial a bit ago as it concerned an accountant who sold her testimony to Mueller’s prosecutors for immunity from her confessed crimes (or who was browbeaten into it with the potential charges as cudgel). Here’s another example of the level of integrity in Mueller’s case against Manafort, this time involving Mueller’s prosecutors’ star witness, Rick Gates.

This is a preview of Integrity Redux. Read the full post (263 words, estimated 1:03 mins reading time)

No Need to Waste the Time

Posted on 28 July 2018 by eehines

…arguing the matter. In an opinion piece, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called out “Tricky Dick Schumer” (their appellation) for his stalling effort centered on his demand for millions of pages of documents from Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s past pursuant to evaluating Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Schumer has said he’ll try to block any discussion of Kavanaugh’s fitness until he gets those millions of docs. The WSJ also noted that

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley [R, IA] is trying to work out a document deal with ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

This against the backdrop of

This is a preview of No Need to Waste the Time. Read the full post (256 words, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)

Reactionary Ideologue

Posted on 11 July 2018 by eehines

President Donald Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh, of the DC Circuit, to the Supreme Court, and “within seconds” Democracy for America called him a reactionary ideologue.

DfA, without correction from the Progressive-Democrats of Congress, or anyone else on the left, also has foretold Kavanaugh’s confirmation would

directly lead to the deaths of countless women with the dismantling of abortion rights.

Even taking the manufactured hysteria seriously, it’s instructive here as an aside (of no small size) to consider that the Left worries about the risks to grown, adult women who make the conscious choice to run a risk, but they care not a red sou for the deaths of countless babies who cannot speak for themselves and for whom the Left insists no one should so speak.

This is a preview of Reactionary Ideologue. Read the full post (359 words, estimated 1:26 mins reading time)

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Category Archives: Courts