The only way that any more than a couple Republicans vote to remove Thomas or Gorsuch is if they see an opportunity to replace an older conservative justice with a younger conservative justice.
Just the unhinged rants about beer and clinton alone were shocking.
And I can't "prove" this, but he straight up lied about those definitions like "devil's triangle", "boofing", etc. Those terms are extremely common, have well defined definitions and seemed like they were used in those contexts (parties). No doubt in my mind he lied about that. If he lies about simple stuff like that then God knows how much worse it can get.
"Well if anyone asks what the hell I'm doing on the ethics committee we'll just tell them I like chasing women and drinking whisky and the Speaker felt we were underrepresented."
In other words, even people who like to party deserve representation in government.
And as for lying about "devil's triangle", apparently several classmates from both Georgetown Prep and Boston College have confirmed his definition:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/04/politics/georgetown-prep-devi...
I am not going to debate this. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that anything can be debated, and with so many moving parts here, it's very easy to muddy the waters.
As an example, you linked an article where you chose to highlight friends of kavanaugh, impartial members, backing his claims and ignoring that others such as his roomate disagreed with those claims.
Of course you're free to believe whatever you want, but if you aren't willing to discuss it, why did you even bring it up here?
Leverage, pure and simple. He is absolutely beholden to them because they can ruin his career and life by turning on him at any wrong move by...just...telling the truth.
Anyone who knows anything about sexual assault would dismiss this as a serious threat to the credibility of the accusation. There was no reason for her to publicly make the accusation earlier. There is documentation of her privately making the accusation years before Kavanaugh's nomination.
>Veteran watchers of the court know that those sort of accusations aren't a serious impediment to confirmation however. Who can forget Clarence Thomas's Coke cans?
The hope was that society progressed in those nearly 30 years between the two nominations.
Society yes, Congress no. Many of the same people are still in there.
- There were no corroborating witnesses
- Kavanaugh's own personal calendar from the year in question has no entries for the party at which the assault allegedly happened
No one's memory is perfect after nearly 40 years.
>- There were no corroborating witnesses
What witnesses do you expect? The direct witnesses would have been implicating themselves. There were witnesses and evidence that showed she talked about these accusations years before Kavanaugh's nomination.
>- Kavanaugh's own personal calendar from the year in question has no entries for the party at which the assault allegedly happened
A teenage not documenting their illicit behavior is a rather weak argument that they never participated in said illicit behavior.
Indeed! Which is one of the reasons why we should question her accusation! How can we be sure she even accurately remembers who committed the assault? It might very well have been that she was assaulted, but by someone else. It could also be that it was Kavanaugh, but the interaction played out differently that she remembers.
> What witnesses do you expect? The direct witnesses would have been implicating themselves. There were witnesses and evidence that showed she talked about these accusations years before Kavanaugh's nomination.
She named witnesses to the actual event (or at least the party at which it took place) and none of them corroborated her story. They wouldn't have even been implicating themselves in the assault.
As I recall, she did talk about the incident years after it happened (long enough for details to have become muddled) but as I recall she didn't name Kavanaugh until after his nomination.
> A teenage not documenting their illicit behavior is a rather weak argument that they never participated in said illicit behavior.
Kavanaugh kept a fairly detailed social calendar. In conjunction with the fact that none of the other supposed attendees to this party remembers it happening, significantly undermines credibility of the accusation.
The US system of governance at this point is such a failure for real democratic rule. It's devolved into a two-party system, and for some reason we grant whichever party happens to be in power the ability to appoint party apparatchiks to vacancies on the Supreme Court. These people then rule until death, when they are replaced in the same manner.
This being the framework, there is never any structural incentive to do anything but convince voters that your opponent is a monster, so you can retain power. Good governance is not rewarded, bad behavior is not punished - we may only rely on the questionable morality of the elected officials to "do the right thing," since they cannot be held accountable.