The Senate Judiciary Committee has announced the identity of the lawyer who will conduct the primary questions of both Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Rachel Mitchell, the sex crimes bureau chief for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, is someone with considerable experience in not such sex crimes but delayed sex crime prosecutions. It is an unusual step for the Committee but not unprecedented. Congress will hire outside counsel or allow counsel to question witnesses on some occasions, particularly at fact-finding stages. I was hired a lead counsel to represent the United States House of Representatives in the successful challenge of the unilateral funding decisions of the Affordable Care Act by President Barack Obama.
Mitchell is without question highly credentialed in the field. She has done this work for 26 years.
It is also obvious that this move has a political purpose. As I have previously discussed, the Republicans were looking at the worst possible optics in having an all-male majority bench question a woman claiming to be the victim of an attempted rape. This gives the senators a political cushion in having a woman with a long history of supporting victims conduct the questioning.
For Kavanaugh, the timing is particularly bad with the sentencing of Bill Cosby based on long dormant allegations. The difference is that Cosby implicated himself in the drugging allegations and the number of women coming forward were both numerous and consistent in their accounts. Kavanaugh is facing accounts with little direct corroboration and Democratic senators who have announced in advance that they believe the accuser or even equivocating on whether he has a presumption of innocence. There are similar views of bias of some Republican senators who seemed to dismiss the allegations before any testimony is heard. One Republican Senate candidate even said that Kavanaugh should be confirmed even if the alleged attempted rape is true.
Most people I have spoken to simply want a fair and impartial hearing. They are less interested in who asks the questions as much as how those questions are answered. In the meantime, the second accuser, Deborah Rameriz, says that she would be willing to testify but there is no indication that she has been asked. The Committee has scheduled the final committee vote for the very next day, Friday, which would allow the matter to then go to the floor of the Senate.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/36360/former-hilary-clinton-operative-reveals-plan-emily-zanotti
Their plan will only work with the complicit cooperation of Republicans. That has been the long-standing complaint about establishment Republicans. They run on campaign promises that they don’t keep. They don’t have the backbone to stand up to Democratic bullying. They are not effective.
Unless there is some sort of valid evidence for these wild claims, Republicans should find their spine and stand up to this weaponization of sexual assault charges. If they bow to unsubstantiated allegations, contradicted by eyewitnesses, then they will encourage Democrats to do this again and again.
There will be no reason for voters to bother voting for Republicans. They are too timid, and they play right into the hands of the DNC over and over again. They couldn’t even get their act together and repeal and replace Obamacare. This is a watershed moment for the party. I hope they find their courage. This is clearly war. The Democrats have come out with their strategy – scuttle Kavanaugh’s nomination by any means necessary, take back the House, and then block all of Trump’s picks for the rest of his term.
Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, are you going to help Democrats do this? If so, then what good are you to us voters?
Good questions. but i think there are probably honcho Republicans who realize they lose this fight and their heads will eventually sneeze into the basket as well.
Maybe if they fail, it won’t just be hateful Democrats they have to worry about. Hateful former Republicans could easily just stay home and I would certainly just stay home if the Chief DJT said so. The Republicans stand with Trump or they are quisling traitors.
If DJT pulls Kav, then ok, no problem. For any reason, if DJT says so, then Kav’s gotta go
See the more they attack DJT the firmer our support. Kav’s support is derivative of Donald’s at this point. I am sure Amy Comey would make a good SCOTUS too. Heck Merrick Garland would have been ok really, not preferable but competent enough to the job; but it was the Senate’s prerogative to withhold its vote.
DJT is not an arch conservative whatsoever; neither is Kav. that is just nonsense. This has become a battle of flags here. This is feminism versus the supposedly horrible men, that’s how the Dems have framed it. IN that battle I know which side I’m on. And it only is called off if DJT says so. He’s the man!
Yes, I’m, a man! woohoo! Listen in now to the great 80s band BERLIN! We used to party to this one folks, oh yeah!
My advice to Republicans: “Don’t show up for the midterms!”
Seriously. If your party can’t stand behind Kavanaugh, then it’s totally useless. By staying home on Election Day you’ll be sending a message to McConnel and Grassey. They need to know they can’t take your vote for granted.
you know, these Democrats pose as Leftists, full of fluff about equality and so forth, and all the feminist tripe. But i found something interesting, here are the words of Lenin.
He called for equality and emancipation for women and then firmly placed it into a subordinate category under establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, and revising the basic economic superstructure of society
https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm
he also said that too many young communists were libertines, essentially exploiting the bursting of bonds of bourgeois norms to make themselves busy with sexual self indulgence
he also said that men who get too caught up in women’s things make bad revolutionaries…..
he also said women in the party have equal rights and “equal duties”
imagine that!
you know, the Chinese communists outlawed many retrograde aspects of feudalism in respect of the sexes– such as footbinding and concubinage.
but they also implemented a system that all along the past 70 years and to this dad did not fundamentally change the the particular characteristic of Chinese society that it is still as it was in ancient times :”patriarchal” or so i have read sociologists write of it.
Trust me there is no disruption of politics with nonsense like this allowed in the Chinese communist party nor was there in Soviet Russia. Find me an example of anybody attacking a political leader for being a cad or a philanderer. Just let me know, i Know of none.
so let the would be reds of today chew on that and ask themselves why
i would advance a theory: it would have lead to total chaos! in place of the dialectical struggle of class conflict, they would have had a useless and counterproductive conflict between the sexes which, based in biology, which instead of leading to class solidarity would have lead to greater and greater levels of social atomization and vain conflict distracting everyone from more gainful activity. that’s why.
they were crazy but they weren’t as crazy as our political leadership is today!
it today’s version of capitalism, such as it is, we have an endless quarrel being instigated between men and women which has increasingly annihalated the old institution of family and the home and replaced it with individualism and markets. Democrats, far from being “concerned with the people” or economic factors, have every bit along the past five decades advanced endless vain conflict between men and women with no end in site except exploding households and ginning up more sales for the smaller households that result from this molecular fission; and thronging the labor forces with women which pushes down the wages of all workers in the process.
Now of course Democrats are not communists; they just play with the theoretical forms of social conflict analagous to class conflict endlessly– black versus white, immigrant versus native, worker versus management, gays versus straights, men versus women! And to what end: only to the end of their vain struggle for perpetual power.
At least Republicans in their vaguely nationalistic conservatism elevate a positive social idea of general material improvement in the economy and through national defense. They are not constantly dividing the nation, not at the theoretical level.
It’s funny because the minority and special interest group sh#$t stirring that characterizes the Democrat approach to everything, is hardly democratic at all, in the sense that it rarely if ever serves the people as a whole.
Good comment, Mr. Kurtz.
#7 on the list of what great fictional stories have in common. The allegations against BK fail this test miserably:
7. Strong internal story logic
One of the most common features of ‘bad’ writing is that the story makes no overarching sense. Maybe the heroine’s actions completely contradict her psychological description and backstory. Or else there are sequences of scenes that don’t seem to contribute cohesively to the whole.
To ensure your novel has strong inner logic:
Make sure that the bulk of your story answers the central questions you set up: The narrative purpose of a scene (why the author is sharing this event) should make sense when examined alongside the whole arc of the story
Make sure your characters’ actions make sense: In the greatest novels, characters’ actions are a mix of inevitable (according to their motivations and personal histories) and surprising. If characters act completely against the personalities and backstories you create, they may seem inconsistent and confusing
https://www.nownovel.com/blog/writing-a-good-book-10-ingredients/