[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hatever your view of Brett Kavanaugh, let’s get one thing clear: While he’s hoping to become the ninth justice of the US Supreme Court, he is not on trial. He is facing a confirmation hearing by the Judicial Committee of the US Senate.
Republican backers of this clearly flawed and truth-challenged candidate are insisting indignantly, in the case of mounting charges from alleged victims, that he’s entitled to a “presumption of innocence” as several women claim he assaulted and harassed them as a teenager and perhaps when he was older, and amid evidence that he had a “runway model” standard for hiring female clerkship applicants as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC which led Yale Law professors to recommend that female student applicants to clerkships for Kavanaugh “dress accordingly.” (As one prominent professor is reported to have told such students, “There’s a reason all his female clerks look like models.”)
But that’s not how it works in a Senate confirmation hearing, any more than it’s how it works when you or I go to a job interview. Does an employer give an applicant a “presumption of innocence” when they contact prior employers to check on your work record?
Of course not. If I were applying for a job at a newspaper, the hiring editor would likely call prior papers I had worked at. If an editor there happened to be the one I told was simply caving in to pressure from big advertisers in killing a story I had done on corporate corruption in the appealing of tax assessments on major office building properties using two different sets of books for determining property value, and that person said I was “difficult to work with,” I would have no recourse.
I would be deemed guilty as charged, and moreover, I quite likely wouldn’t even have that Constitutionally guaranteed right to “confront my accuser,” because the hiring editor would have no obligation to even inform me of the evidence that was being used against me. That’s the way job applications work in the United States of America.
In that sense, unless a Senate Committee decides to hold a closed hearing, a confirmation hearing like this one for Judge Kavanaugh is considerably fairer than the situation most job applicants face. At least Kavanaugh, and other judicial candidates facing such hearings, gets to know what the charges are that are being made against him. That is at least if the majority party in control of the hearing doesn’t try to deep-six an accusation and pretend it doesn’t exist, as the GOP members controlling the Judiciary Committee tried to do with the second woman, Deborah Ramirez. She’s a fellow Yale alum who is accusing Kavanaugh of gross harassment with a penis in the face while they were both freshmen, whose complaint the Justice Committee Republicans hid for a week hoping to get past a planned but later postponed vote to approve the not-so-good judge’s nomination.
The committee standard in these hearings need not be that accusations against Kavanaugh get proven “beyond a reasonable doubt” (the standard for proof for jurors or judges in criminal trials) or even “by the preponderance of the evidence” (the standard of proof for civil trials). The standard is, and should be: Do we really want someone to get this job who has reputable people saying terrible things about hisor her fitness to serve in this lifetime position?
That’s how it works when a prospective employer looks at a job applicant. And Kavanaugh is a job applicant for one of this country’s most prestigious and important jobs there is: Supreme Court justice.
So far, Kavanaugh’s looking pretty shabby as a candidate for the post. He’s having to use his wife as his best witness, which, if we want to go to the inappropriate trial analogy being used by Kavanaugh’s Republican defenders is the typical last refuge of male scoundrels: Get the little lady to come and stand, or sit primly by you, however embarrassed and ashamed she may be at having to be there looking supportive, and giving a show of appearing like she, at least, believes you’re not a debauched cad.
I was just on a jury panel in an assault case last week where we on the jury panel concluded unanimously that the defendant was guilty of assault in a road rage case where he punched and badly broke the jaw of his victim. The fact that his wife was put on the stand and answered his attorney’s question as to whether the defendant, her husband, was a “peaceful and non-violent man” by responding “Yes” did not sway a single one of us in our view of guilt based on the evidence presented.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] doubt that Kavanaugh’s dragging out of his wife to accompany him on a puff-ball interview session on Fox TV in which he, in one cringe-worthy moment, told viewers that “I did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter,” swayed anyone who was undecided about his moral, psychological and behavioral fitness to be one of the final deciders on justice in the land.Since this hearing is, at bottom, a job interview, I would say we’ve heard enough already, and, by the time at the end of this week or next after the committee and the citizens of the nation have heard the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, Ramirez and perhaps a third alleged Kavanaugh sex abuse or harassment victim now being mentioned in the media as ready to come forward, they, and all of America — or at least that portion of us who want a fair, impartial and most of all honest jurist to be the ninth member of the Supreme Court, should know that Kavanaugh is not that man.
We don’t need proof of guilt. All we need to know is that there is significant evidence of an apparent pattern of misconduct towards women that make it clear that this guy should not be in a position to be deciding important cases that involve the rights of women, the credibility of women, or the alleged improper behavior of men. Remember, the women making the charges didn’t know each other, but the accusations are very similar in portraying a guy who is rough, callous, uncaring and basically a sexist and sometimes violent pig.
For example, consider this. Many young men in America, sadly mostly black young men, are languishing in jail today because they were found by a court to have sexually assaulted women as Kavanaugh has been accused of having sexually assaulted Flasey Ford. Those are young men who on the discression of a trial judge, were tried as adults though they, like Kavanaugh, were only 17 when the alleged offenses were said to have occurred and their alleged victims were perhaps 15 or 16, like Blasey Ford. What would Kavanaugh do if such a case were brought before him on the Supreme Court, particularly with the intent of claiming such a decision to try them as adults should be declared unconstitutional? Would he say, as he did on Fox, when asked that question by Fox reporter Marsha MacCallum about how he would judge young men accused of abusing a girl (after a long pause and an attempt to just look at the floor), “I think everyone is judged on their whole life.”
Seriously, judge? How do you judge the “whole life” of a 17-year-old? WTF kind of answer is that?
No, this is not a man fit to be a Supreme Court Justice.
In fact, he’s not fit to be an Appellate Court judge either.
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Things to ponder
While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
2 comments
We need to amplify the focus of this national debate—more at times like an irreconcilable brawl. To reduce everything—as the Democrats would like, and the Republians would agree—to a matter of identity politics, the threat presented by the Kavanaughs of this world to women, is to lose sight of the more serious disease underlying these disgusting developments: Kavanaugh, Trump, Hillary, Obama and their crimes and their invariably repugnantly amoral personalities.
In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter if Kavanaugh is chosen to be the next judge on the SCOTUS. The world may be the worse for that but that, in itself, will not kill it. Concemtratng our minds on this is a bit like sonambulists rearranging the seats on the Titanic’s deck. The hearings are staged, foks, an act performed by the political class to further distract the nation from what really matters. They look courteous—these world class ciminals, all—on both sides of the duopoly divide—falling all over to extend sympaties and comforting words to the protagonists in this insalubrious joke of a play. But all the noise made by the political whores and their equally prostituted media cannot drown the truth: that the world, the planet, is well past the point where the sexual offenses, to call it that, of oversexed, inebriated, privileged, and yes, oafish teenagers deserve more attention than the ever rising threat of global war, the immiseration of billions and the death and constant suffering of tens of milions at the hands of the very neoliberal system that both Kavanaugh and his chief accuser, Blasey Ford, belong to.
Forgive me for being less than impressed with Blasey Ford’s plight, but while we are talking about Kavanaugh’s assault, which, incidentally, ugly as all hell, did not amount to rape, we must also ask, why do we have a Trump in the White House, and a Republican party in the driver’s seat? Yea, because the Democrats, having a huge chance to nail the seat of power for generations, of reducing the GOP to a political ghost by enacting one or two pieces of desperately needed legislation, Medicare for All, for example, and a national infrastructural reconstruction program accompanied by visionary steps to arrest the unraveling of the environment (not to mention trimming and eventually eliminating the obscene Pentagon budgets and America’s addicition to war), did NONE of these obvious things, thereby betraying not only the working people of this nation, but the hostage population of the world itself, whose fate Washington’s politicians also hold in their hands.
Yes, Blasey Ford and her ilk belong to the same party, same duopoly fraud, that destroyed the Middle East long before Trump appeared on the horizon. Same party and its gallery of hypocrites in the media and Congress that did not raise a finger to stop the head choppers and mass rapists in Syria, Libya and other parts, (in fact cold-bloodely instigated them and supported them to this day) nor has ever demonstrated ANY concern for the equally murderous and hypocritical meddling of the US in Ukraine, nor the constant provocations against Russia, a field which is now almost wholly owned by this despicable party.
So, while women all over the place are being KILLED AND RAPED, and drown in poverty due to the scourge of a savage and cancerous neoliberalism–while affluent women like Blasey Ford sit back comfortably shrieking about the injustices done to Hillary, and master hypocrites like Diane Feinstein—who has pushed hard to spread the “fake news” label and the charge of “treason” on websites that denounce the imperial lies—shed crocodile tears for Kavanaugh’s victims, we are expected to lose all sense of proportion and JOIN this repugnant travesty?
PROPORTION, PEOPLE. PROPORTION. Let’s get our priorities straight, for once.
The nation should not be obsessively debating the minuscule points of truths and lies defining Kavanaugh and his accusers’ positions. It’s basically a dead end, a cul de sac as far as truth is concerned. She said, he said. Because, EVEN if the GOP stacked the court for the next 100 years with their judicial troglodytes, we face the same task: to tackle and overturn this criminal system driving himanity into its grave, directly responsible for all this ugliness swallowing us.
You all know I hardly exaggerate. With the planet literally dying, due to duopolist betrayals; with ghastly wars raging in all latitudes, and now with the rising specter of a nuclear war (pushed chiefly by the Democrats, by the way) but endorsed by the US-led capitalist bloc as a whole; with the pretense of democracy we still hang on to in this country in shreds and rapidly vanishing, product of a political homicide committed by those who profess to be their most loyal defenders, it’s time to look deeper and higher, and recognise that this geyser of ills sprouts precisely from the social arrangement all these worthies are deeply invested in, the capitalist/imperial system (aka “neoliberalism”), and that the fight confronting humanity is not so much one of sexism or even race as it is one of class. For Obama and Susan Rice and Colin Powell are all black and look what they did, whom they served. And Hillary, Samantha Power, Diane Feinstein, Racehl Maddow, and many others of their plumage are certainly all women, and look at what they did—and do. There’s obviously a broader, larger denominator explaining the sociopathic behaviour of these people, and I’ll let you guess what it is. How many examples do we need to decipher the obvious?
In this regard, let me close by quoting our esteemed Hiroyuki Hamada, who himself brings to our attention some words well worth pondering:
From Phil Rockstroh:
“Amnesty International has demanded the Kavanagh hearings go into recess until his role in Bush/Cheney era torture programs can be investigated. The types of prep schools Brett Kavanaugh attended were training grounds for sadism of every kind. And there exists a reason for the sons of the capitalist elite to revel in cruelty: Whether the cruel and callous acts involve transgressions committed against vulnerable women or the perpetual exploitation of lower economic orders — the mindset required is predatory in nature. A human being possessed of heart, soul, and attendant conscience would recoil at the heartlessness required to be a member of the capitalist ruling elite.”
Replying to P. Greanville –
I can’t begin to describe my delight at your comment as well as this article. You have articulated much more elegantly and thoroughly what I have been thinking – and telling my partner – all along. I agree with everything you’re saying. Seriously – is this the best the stupid do-nothing Democrats can come up with? As you wrote – this does not mean I am minimizing all the disgusting things men have done to women for the last few hundred years. I’ve been subjected to many of those “things” and – often – because I needed to keep my job to support my family – I put up with it. Much of the harassment came from men who were often my boss – or in positions that were higher than mine. So yes – this has to stop. But it has to encompass non-white, poor and working class women all over the world. And at its base is the capitalist system which fosters domination and abuse.
Yes – why are we ignoring the horror in the world that’s unfolding every single day? Why are we focusing on identity politics? Why is Kavanaugh’s past record on decisions, judgements and statements completely over-looked? Why is the press all a-twitter over this and 2 years of Trump’s every twitch as if Obama, Clintons one and two and the DNC in general has not worked hard to create the mess we’re in now? Why is there no attention paid to how we’re decimating our planet – and it’s already too late? It’s a distraction!
In the last couple of days I’ve seen headlines proclaiming Christine Blasey Ford to be the new heroine for “all” women. Bullshit. Let’s say white, upper-middle class women. In the United States. She’s an ultra-privileged woman who teaches at…..Palo Alto University, for god’s sake. I’ve had FB women friends telling me I should make my profile picture all black tomorrow from 8am to 9pm to give men a taste of what a world without women would be like – and, of course, protest Kavanaugh’s appointment. Ohhhhh…..SCARY! But wait – isn’t that more “becoming invisible”? Oh – pardon my disgust.
And then…….I read this article and your comments. Your statement “bourgeois feminism repels me. Affluent, often highly privileged women pushing their petty concerns and priorities on the public arena while forgetting and frequently burying important issues of benefit to their sisters living in less splendiferous surroundings is indeed repulsive…” expresses exactly how I’ve been feeling. It was such a relief and validation to read every word you wrote.
So – thank you – from the bottom of my heart.