President Trump on Monday named “judge’s judge” Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The president sought a nominee of “impeccable credentials” who would “do what the law requires” and “apply the Constitution as written.” He found such a person in Kavanaugh, 53, who has served on the D.C. Circuit court of appeals since 2006. The conservative Yale Law alum clerked for the associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who stepped down just 12 days ago.
Democrats see the Supreme Court as a robed politburo that will give them what they can’t win through the electoral process. Democrats appear to believe they own the court and even before President Trump’s announcement they were gearing up for the fight.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who doesn’t have a vote on the nominee, said she is “determined to avenge President Obama if it’s the last thing I do.” Other Democrats, led by Charles Schumer, said they would oppose any Trump pick for the high court. The battle to confirm Kavanaugh is certain to be fierce, so all age groups might review the Democrats’ grand inquisitors of the past.
Ohio Democrat Howard Metzenbaum, a veteran of the Communist Party fronts such as the National Lawyers Guild, took the lead against black conservative Clarence Thomas in 1991. Metzenbaum thought he was intellectually superior to the Bush nominee, but Thomas, a Yale man like Kavanaugh, made him look a fool. It was likely Metzenbaum who leaked Anita Hill’s fake story, and the leftist Democrat pushed hard on the sexual harassment allegations.
When black businessman John Doggett testified in favor of Thomas, Metzenbaum charged that Doggett was also guilty of sexual harassment. White liberal Joe Biden also attacked on that front.
“From my standpoint as a black American,” Thomas said, “as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
Thomas’ “high-tech lynching” charge enraged West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klucker who also voted against Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice. Byrd voted against Thomas and so did Sen. Ted Kennedy who in 1969 left Mary Jo Kopechne to die at Chappaquiddick. In 1984, Kennedy colluded with KGB boss Yuri Andropov to prevent the reelection of Ronald Reagan, who in 1987 nominated Robert Bork to the high court.
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions,” Sen. Ted Kennedy famously charged. “Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy. America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks. Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.”
And so on, with high-volume accompaniment from Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, which was anything but.
Metzenbaum and Kennedy are tough acts to follow but Democrats are up to the task. Their lead inquisitor will be Dianne Feinstein, 85, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Long before Donny Deutsch charged that even Trump voters are Nazis the San Francisco Democrat, now 85, was the loudest voice for the leftist boilerplate that America is overflowing Nazis and that religious conservatives are Nazis.
In 1992 in rural Idaho, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Vicki Weaver through the head as she held her 10-month-old daughter. As husband Randy told the Senate in 1995, “She was not wanted for any crime. There were no warrants for her arrest.”
Democrats Herb Kohl and Patrick Leahy showed sympathy but as the San Francisco Examiner reported, “Feinstein dealt sternly with Weaver, asking whether his children wore Nazi arm bands and shouted Nazi slogans at neighbors.” Feinstein sought to show that the family was a pack of Nazis, implying that the killing of Vicki Weaver might have been justified.
Last September, in a confirmation hearing involving Amy Coney Barrett and Joan Larsen, both on President Trump’s original list, Feinstein said the backdrop for the hearing was the “neo-Nazis and white supremacists” in Charlottesville. “These are ideologies that people across the world died in a war fighting to defeat Nazism,” and just in case anybody wondered, “there isn’t any good in Nazism.”
Feinstein recently compared immigration policies under President Trump to “Nazi Germany.” Under her lead, Democrats will doubtless deploy the Nazi smear in the confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, along with the usual fake accusations and sub-infantile non-arguments. In 2018, as in 1991 and 1987, bigotry, fakery and slander live loudly within them.
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