Posted on 06/24/2019 2:34:47 AM PDT by SMGFan
NPR's Michel Martin speaks with journalist Carl Hulse about his book "Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, From Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh."
ns are expected this week. Many will likely be decided by the five-vote conservative majority that the public has come to expect. But long before any of the current term's cases were decided, achieving that majority was part of a long-term plan, a calculated political maneuver by Republicans after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
That battle and its aftermath are the subject of a new book by Carl Hulse, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times. It's called "Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over The Supreme Court From Scalia's Death To Justice Kavanaugh." And here to tell us more about it is Carl Hulse.
Welcome. Thank you for joining us.
CARL HULSE: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
MARTIN: "Confirmation Bias" is a strong - it's - I don't know. It's a strong...
HULSE: I think it...
MARTIN: ...Strong title. What do you mean by that?
HULSE: I think it was meant as sort of a nonpartisan way of talking about what's gone on in the confirmation process on Capitol Hill and how both sides have tried to put their thumbs on the scale and try and steer these judicial nominations in the direction they wanted. And so there is bias on it, and it's been bias on both sides, honestly. I know people don't like to talk about both sider-ism these days, but, you know, both parties have had a lot to do with how mucked up the process has gotten.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
“It’s a national disgrace,” Thomas said. “And from my standpoint as a black American, 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,” Thomas said.
'If I were a black liberal, I would be hailed, I guess. But I'm not. I mean, I think for myself. I want to make my own decisions.'
you can play the 7 minute interview.
:MARTIN: And finally, can I just ask - Carl, did you ever figure out why it is that Republicans that have been so much more successful than Democrats in making elections a referendum on the courts?
HULSE: Abortion. Abortion.
MARTIN: Really?
It started long before this.
Back when FDR packed the court.
Maybe before that even.
Let's see, when discussing who put whose thumb on the scale, let's consider on the one hand:
Dred Scott
Plessy vs. Ferguson
Court packing scheme
Japanese internment
The Borking of Bork
The Borking of Thomas
The borking of Cavanaugh
Against which we have:
Mitch McConnell refusing to take up a lame-duck confirmation.
Mitch McConnell abolishing the filibuster of Supreme Court nominees.
Well, it's a difficult weighing process but, I guess I'll go with Mitch on this one.
An appointment who remains conservative AFTER confirmation is a political partisan.
You’re right, but Scalia was confirmed nearly unanimously. Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh just barely.
SCOTUS is supposed to be Conservative. Anything that vies away from that is not only liberal, but radical.
SCOTUS Justices need to obey the constitution as written. Period.
The most effective conservative SC judge is found dead with a pillow over his head in a Rat mega donors house seemingly just in time for Obongo to shift the court had left for a decade. Partisanship doesn’t begin to describe it.
The REAL partisanship started with Robert Bork. With his “Borking”, the Democrats figured out that they could prevent solid conservatives from senate confirmation. They later found out that the wimpy Republicans were not nearly so organized and that they would avoid similar confrontations and allow Democrats to nominate radical liberals on the court. This meant that Democrats would gain radical liberals in the court, while republicans would only gain mushy moderates. It took Trump to stop that.
Now that the Left is near to losing their grip on the Supreme Court, they have decided that the confirmation process is too political. Boohoo! Turnabout is fair play. They made the Supreme Court into a sort of super legislature composed of elevated philosopher kings little subject to traditional judicial restraint and constitutional precedents. The Left deserves to suffer the consequences as the Court turns to the right and undoes decades worth of their handiwork.
It was not Thomas’ finest hour. Did he think Bork was black? Or any other pick who was considered conservative? He was not attacked because he was black.
It started in earnest with Teddy Kennedy’s decision to bork Robert Bork.
Not that I believe for a moment that this book deals honestly with that fact.
Actually, the fact that Thomas was black had a GREAT deal to do with the attacks--as Thomas became the highest ranking black man in office and a conservative to boot.
Yes he was attacked because he was black and he was attacked because he was conservative. As a blackman he threatened a core Democrat voting block. If we were socialist black would not be a problem. But the threat posed by the sum of black and conservative is greater than its parts.
It started with the Dems borking Bork.
And the fact that NO ONE is reporting is this: if the citizens had wanted Merrick Garland sitting on the SCOTUS, they would’ve voted Hillary in. Period.
Merrick Garland was NEVER going to sit on the Supreme Court.
Once Mitch grew a spine and dug in he was a dead letter.
Had Hillary won his nomination would have been withdrawn and she would have nominated somebody far more radical.
Yes, I still remember, decades later, that Ted Kennedy, came out and denounced “Robert Bork’s America” as a place where women will have back alley abortions, blacks to go the back of the bus, etc.
It’s easy to say both parties are responsible for politicization of the courts. But which party started it and wanted the courts to be a “super legislature”?
Yes, by definition the courts are in some way political because appointments are made by politicians. What got "political" for the worse is denying the opposing party their rightful appointments by prostituting the advice and consent process.
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