Here is a headline I’ll bet you didn’t see this weekend: “Kavanaugh Confirmed with Bipartisan Vote in Senate.” You didn’t see it, but it’s true. It was not a party-line vote like Obamacare, which was passed without a single Republican vote.
The confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh not only received a Democratic vote, there was one Republican who voted no. It was barely bipartisan, but it was still bipartisan. Why didn’t the mainstream media report it that way? Because it doesn’t fit with the story they have been telling.
The Associated Press article about Kavanaugh’s confirmation got in some great but subtle digs. For instance, one of the lead paragraphs said Kavanaugh was “quickly sworn in at the court building, across the street from the Capitol…” You had to read much further down in the article to discover that the “court building” was the Supreme Court. Or that Kavanaugh wasn’t just sworn in by any old judge who happened to be in his office on Saturday. Kavanaugh was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, who Kavanaugh is replacing and for whom Kavanaugh clerked. In other words, this was not some kind of last minute, grab any judge you can kind of swearing in but a well planned swearing in where Kavanaugh was sworn in by the two people he chose.
The lead of the article gave a very different impression and that is from the completely unbiased Associated Press.
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The Democrats still have not figured out how to deal with President Donald Trump.
Here’s how the Kavanaugh nomination was supposed to work. The Democrats knew the Republicans had enough votes to get Kavanaugh confirmed if Republicans could get the nomination to a vote, so the key for the Democrats was to keep the nomination from ever coming up for a vote.
The Democrats delayed as long as possible, and then, when they had run out of the usual delaying tactics, Sen. Dianne Feinstein brought forward the accusation she had been sitting on since July.
The goal was to delay the confirmation as much as possible and to create so much controversy that Kavanaugh would ask that his name be withdrawn or that Trump would withdraw his nomination. This would have worked with President George W. Bush and most presidents. They are not usually willing to expend a great deal of political capital on a Supreme Court nominee. For one thing, they know that the other party has to allow them to appoint someone to the Supreme Court and the dissent usually falls off after the first round.
But Trump is not a politician and doesn’t play by the rules. Trump loves a fight, and, by delaying the Kavanaugh confirmation for so long, the Democrats had backed Trump into a corner where he wouldn’t be able to get anyone confirmed before the midterm election if he had dropped Kavanaugh. But even without that added incentive, Trump would have most likely fought rather than caved.
The Democrats fought the battle the way they do, with allegations of sexual impropriety followed by wave after wave of protestors. It probably would have worked against a president of either party who had come up through the political ranks. The level of controversy is not usually considered worth the effort. But as anyone who has been paying attention knows, Trump thrives on controversy. If there isn’t any, he creates some with a tweet or two.
So not only did Trump win, but he also sent a powerful message to the Democrats that this was not politics as usual and that he was going to fight every battle to the end.
It’s good news for Republicans, and maybe Trump’s message will wake up some Republicans who are far too willing to cave in to the Democrats rather than be labeled racist, misogynist, mean and someone who hates the poor.
Trump is attacked so virulently and frequently that he has to ignore the attacks. If he allowed them to stop him, then he would never get anything done.
After this win you can expect Trump to double down on getting his wall built.
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Why in the world would anyone vote for West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin after his ridiculous display on the Kavanaugh vote? Manchin voted for Kavanaugh, but only because Kavanaugh had the votes whether Manchin voted yes or no.
It was well known that if the Republicans had needed another vote that Manchin would have followed the Democratic Party line and voted no. Because the Republicans had the votes, Manchin was released by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and allowed to vote yes.
So what does Manchin stand for? He stands for making the most politically expedient vote possible. Voting yes is supposed to help him get elected in a state where 68 percent of the votes cast in 2016 were for Trump, and if Manchin had been a man about it and said, “I think Kavanaugh will make a fine justice and I’m voting for him,” that would be admirable. Even if Manchin had said, “I believe this will cost me my seat in the Senate but I cannot in good conscience vote for this man for Supreme Court justice,” that would have shown some courage.
But Manchin didn’t do either of those things. He stayed right on the fence to see how the vote was going to go. It would even have been better if Manchin had been honest about his vote and said, “If the Republicans don’t need my vote to confirm I’ll vote for Kavanaugh because that’s better for me politically, and if they do need my vote I won’t vote to confirm him because I am first and foremost a good Democrat.”
If I lived in West Virginia, I’d vote for a full-blown communist over Manchin, who evidently has no backbone at all.
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This is a headline from The Washington Post: “Here’s a list of people the FBI did NOT interview. Okay with this, Flake and Collins?”
I am outraged at this fake news. Under this headline it printed a list of people who were not interviewed by the FBI in the Kavanaugh investigation. And the list is so incomplete it is embarrassing. In minutes I came up with 20 people who were not interviewed who were not on the list.
I was not interviewed and will testify under oath that I was never interviewed about Judge Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford.
The fact that I have never met Kavanaugh or Ford, or should I say don’t recall meeting Kavanaugh or Ford, should not be held against me. I did live in Montgomery County for a year in the 1980s and I once walked past a country club, which could have been the country club where Ford hung out. Not only that, I went to parties in houses in Montgomery County where men and women were drinking beer and the houses had bedrooms and some of the houses had teenagers in them. So who knows? Unless the FBI questions me, how do they know that I don’t have relevant information?
Then there is Scott D. Yost, who never lived in Montgomery County but he was a student at Duke University in the 1980s and Ford was a student at Carolina in Chapel Hill. It is an established fact that Duke students often go to Chapel Hill for parties. So there is no reason to think that Scott was not at a party in Chapel Hill at the same time as Ford, and no reason at all to surmise that Ford did not pour her soul out to Scott about the trials and tribulations of her life, whatever they might or might not have been. Certainly the FBI should have hauled Scott in and grilled him.
The list of those not questioned goes on and on. In fact, I can’t find anyone who was questioned and that makes me extremely suspicious. What kind of investigation did the FBI do when there are people who were alive in this country at the time of the alleged incident and could very well have knowledge of something that may or may not have happened?
It is a travesty and I think anyone who was not interviewed should immediately write to Schumer and let him know about the shoddy behavior of the FBI. No doubt Trump is behind it.
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One way to look at the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh is that our representative democracy system of government – where the majority rules – worked.
The people of the United States elected a Republican majority to the Senate and elected a Republican president. In the end, after all the protests and investigations, the elected president’s nominee was confirmed by the Republican majority in the Senate and is now a sitting member of the US Supreme Court.
The Democrats, the minority party, tried every trick in the book to keep Kavanaugh from being confirmed. They delayed the confirmation, demanded a second FBI investigation and tried to sway the vote with violent protests. But it didn’t work; our system of government did.
One thing it proves is that the founding fathers who invented this form of government knew what they were doing. The whole idea is that the majority rules but the minority is given an opportunity to make its case. In the nomination of Kavanaugh, the Republicans allowed the Democrats to make their case and, when allegations of past sexual misconduct were brought forward, the Senate Judiciary Committee gave Ford time to testify and gave Kavanaugh the opportunity to respond. Then a second investigation was called for to further investigate that allegation.
The FBI report has not been released to the public, but senators who read it said that they found no additional corroboration for Ford’s story.
In this country, an allegation is still not enough to convict someone of a crime and Kavanaugh was being accused of a crime. If there had been corroboration, the outcome most likely would have been different. But one person’s questionable memory of an event she said happened about 36 years was not deemed sufficient, and it should not have been. If it had been then no one who was opposed would ever be confirmed.
The closely divided Senate, with the Republicans having a majority of one vote, reflects the division in this country. Trump was elected with a large majority in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, once again indicating how divided the country is.
But even in a country that is sharply divided along political lines, the majority ruled as it should.
At this point, nobody knows what the makeup of the Senate will be after the midterm elections. The Republicans have a good chance of picking up a couple of seats and, if they do, the next Supreme Court nomination might not be quite so raucous because in this case the Republicans could only afford to lose the support of two senators and they lost one.
It’s about as close as it can get, and if parties could expel members the Republican Party should certainly expel Sen. Lisa Murkowski. But that is what elections are for. Murkowski is, as are we all, entitled to her own opinions, but you have to question why she wants to be a Republican if her politics align more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.
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Al Gore says we’re running out of time on global warming. Wow, you would think that after 30 years he would have to change his tune a little bit. Gore didn’t invent global warming, like he invented the internet, but he did popularize it and helped make it into a religion.
Gore and his disciples have been preaching that it is almost too late for decades. They have also been making predictions about the dire consequences of not doing anything for long enough that we now know that he was wrong 30 years ago, 20 years ago and 10 years ago. So is there any reason to think that this time he’s getting it right?
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No doubt more information will be coming out about Ford for at least the next few weeks. If you believe her story then she called her congresswoman and The Washington Post tip line because of advice from “friends on the beach,” and none of them knew how to get in touch with her senator.
The whole argument is ridiculous on its face. This is a woman with a doctorate. Well educated, well traveled, she grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. How could she not know how to get in touch with her senator?
But there is more. One of those friends on the beach used to work for Senate Majority Leader Schumer’s attorney. It’s not possible that she didn’t know how to get in touch with a senator. She probably could have had Sen. Feinstein’s cell phone number with one phone call, maybe two.
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I know the mainstream media are still predicting a blue wave this November, but I think the whole Kavanaugh opposition may have broken up that wave more than the leftists in the media suspect.
It’s worth noting that the mainstream media operate in a leftist bubble. All their fellow journalists are leftists, their editors and pretty much everyone in the industry is liberal, so all they hear is opposition to Trump and the evil Republicans who support him. There are no discussions around the water cooler about whether or not Kavanaugh will turn out to be a good Supreme Court justice because they all know that he will be a disaster.
Out in the real world things are different. People have varying opinions, but even some Democrats were appalled at the way Kavanaugh was attacked by the left. The idea that a Supreme Court nominee had to go on national television in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and defend his high school yearbook is, in the real world, as absurd as the idea that a nominee to the Supreme Court would be denied confirmation because he drank too much in high school and college.
A lot of us drank too much in high school and college and believe that we turned out to be responsible adults. It’s hard to imagine going to a job interview for which you are well qualified and having to defend jokes about flatulence in your high school yearbook. Who would even sit through such an interview?
The leftists in the mainstream media and the radicals who were protesting in and around the Capitol clearly believed that anything that would defeat Kavanaugh was fair game, but to many Americans they went too far. The far left of the Democratic Party is without a doubt energized, but what about moderate Democrats and the independents?
The question boils down to whether we want the country to be controlled by angry mobs roaming the halls of the Capitol accosting elected officials or if we want those elected officials to make reasoned decisions.
The question in midterms is always, who is going to get out and vote. Certainly the far left is going to go to the polls, but the far left is not enough to win elections and neither is the far right. The folks that decide elections are the ones in the middle: Democrats who sometimes vote for Republicans, Republicans who sometimes vote for Democrats, along with independents. The hate and animosity displayed by the far left turned off some of those folks. The question is, how many.
Then there is the question of individual candidates. Each congressional race boils down to two candidates. The huge national issues are one aspect of congressional races; but the individuals are another.
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The question about the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, that everyone is asking is, why did her announcement come seemingly out of the blue this week? Maybe it wasn’t as out of the blue as it appeared.
Trump said that Haley talked to him six months ago about leaving. It’s possible that Haley planned to make her announcement that she was leaving at the end of the year this summer and Trump asked her to wait until after the Kavanaugh nomination was approved.
It turned into a long wait. Haley, having been in the Trump administration for a year and a half, knows full well that a week without some kind of huge controversy is rare. Kavanaugh had been sworn in and another hurricane was on the way. If Haley had been patiently waiting to make her official announcement, she may have decided that there was no time like the present.
Imagine trying to work an announcement in at a time when there wasn’t some crisis. It’s not easy. The protests from the left have died down for the moment, the hurricane was still off the coast, she may have seen the window of opportunity closing and jumped to get through before it did.
She gave Trump plenty of time to make an appointment before she actually leaves and, with her resume, she can call the shots for her own future. Haley can work in the private sector for a couple of years and make a whale of a lot of money. She’s in a great position to run for the Senate from South Carolina if Sen. Lindsey Graham decides he wants to be attorney general, as is rumored, or she can bide her time for the 2024 presidential election.
Haley said that she definitely is not going to run against Trump in 2020. What about running with Trump in 2020? Maybe Trump is thinking he’s going to need some help in 2020 and he would get more from a young Indian-American woman than from another old white male. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence seem to be getting along, but it’s possible that Pence is already tired of having a title but no job.
Here’s an interesting side note: The office of the vice president is such an inconsequential job that the vice president didn’t have an official residence in Washington until 1974, when the Naval Observatory was made the vice presidential house; and it is still the “official temporary residence of the Vice President of the United States.”
Vice President Walter Mondale was the first vice president to live in the house.
Vice President Joe Biden in 2009 told the media that there was a 9/11 underground bunker built under the house. Neighbors had reported a lot of construction noise in 2002 but no signs of construction. Biden’s comment was later explained as Biden confusing an attic workroom with an underground bunker.
It is incredible what Biden has gotten away with over the years. Evidently the bunker under the vice presidential mansion is supposed to be top secret, either that or Biden can’t tell an attic from a basement. And although Biden often appears confused by life, it’s hard to imagine that even Uncle Joe can’t tell up from down.
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If Guilford County is representative of the nation, the Democrats should be worried about the future because more black voters are registering Republican.
It used to be that Republican events were nearly all white because the number of black voters who were registered Republican was miniscule. However, the numbers I’ve seen show that, although the number of blacks registered Republican is still small, it’s growing, and Republican events are far more racially mixed than they were even a few years ago.
But Guilford County might be an outlier because the chairman of the Guilford County Republican Party, Troy Lawson, is black and has been making an effort to convince conservative blacks to go ahead and change their registration, and it appears that Lawson is having an effect.
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The mainstream media say the Republicans are crazy conspiracy theorists for claiming that some of the protestors during the Kavanaugh nomination battle were paid. But one of the woman who got on the elevator with Sen. Jeff Flake and convinced him to call for an investigation is a professional protestor who is paid over $178,000 a year. That’s a fact, not a conspiracy theory.
Ana Maria Archila is co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy. What makes it all even more interesting is that her fellow co-director, a male, is paid more than she is.
Maybe Hillary Clinton should work on equal pay for women for liberal protest organizations. But then again, even the Democrats don’t pay much attention to Hillary Clinton these days.
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Speaking of Hillary Clinton, it is incredible that she and former President Bill Clinton are going on a speaking tour. It’s hard to believe that the two have agreed to spend so much time together and astounding that, in this #MeToo era, Bill Clinton, who has a credible accusation of rape hanging out there along with multiple credible accusations of sexual assault and impropriety, has chosen to get out in public.
Evidently, it’s still acceptable for Bill Clinton to behave toward women the way he did because he is Bill Clinton. But then again, a lot of people thought that Bill Cosby would never be convicted of anything.
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The Democrats have lost their last bit of control of the federal government – the Supreme Court. For decades the Democrats have known that whoever was elected president and whichever party controlled Congress, they always had the final word because the liberals had a majority on the Supreme Court.
Now that liberal majority is gone and already the Democrats are talking about packing the court, which means adding Supreme Court justices so the five Republican appointees would be in the minority.
To do this, of course, the Democrats would have to control both Houses of Congress, which doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon, and the presidency, which won’t happen until at least 2020. And since Trump has proven to be a political force the Democrats can’t beat, that doesn’t seem likely.
Any talk of court packing in 2018 is a little silly, but it does indicate just how upset the liberals are about losing the Supreme Court. What is going to be even worse is when Trump gets another – and most likely two more – appointments.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg may be the darling of the left, but she didn’t do the left any favors by not retiring while Barack Obama was president. Of course, you can’t really blame Ginsburg; being a leftist, she most likely believed what she was hearing from the mainstream media that there was no way that Hillary Clinton could lose.
The Democrats make a huge deal out of the Republicans in the Senate not considering the Supreme Court nomination by Obama of Judge Merrick Garland, but at the time the conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president, so she could either reaffirm the nomination of Garland or choose someone farther left. It was seen at the time as unnecessary obstructionism by the Republicans, not as giving Trump a Supreme Court nomination as soon as he took office, because nobody on the left thought Trump would ever take office.
Now it appears to have been a dastardly plot by Republicans, but at the time it was considered just being unnecessarily mean spirited. If you doubt it, go back and watch the election night broadcasts of any of the networks. Even the folks on Fox were stunned that Trump was actually winning and couldn’t believe that he had won even after he crossed over the magic 270 threshold.
Hillary Clinton was so stunned that she couldn’t even come out on stage and concede. And in the Electoral College it wasn’t even close. Trump won with 306 Electoral College votes and still lost the popular vote.
Fairly early in the evening an unbiased observer would have predicted that Trump would win because he was winning states by considerable margins that were supposed to be toss-ups. But in presidential elections there are no unbiased observers, and there weren’t any on Nov. 8, 2016.
If you’re already handicapping the 2020 election, Trump has to be considered the favorite. First based on his success in 2016 and the fact that his base is, if anything, more supportive of him than they were in 2016. Also because the Democrats don’t have an heir apparent and the candidates who are starting to make moves are from the far left wing of the Democratic Party. Far left candidates may be able to win the Democratic primary, but they aren’t going to fair well in a general election, particularly when they are up against an incumbent.
