Free Republic

Abortion and the fate of Roe v. Wade are always near the center of the debate on any Supreme Court nomination. The controversy over nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh’s views on Roe offers a window into a system conservatives established a few decades ago to produce the kind of justices who would be fervent advocates for their cause, while also being just restrained enough in their beliefs to be confirmed. As a piece of political strategy, it’s absolutely brilliant, and it could hardly be working any better. Among other things, it allows Republicans to finesse issues such as abortion on which...

Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton implied that the potential confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would bring the United States back to the times of slavery during a speech on Friday. “I used to worry that they wanted to turn the clock back to the 1950s. Now, I worry they want to turn it back to the 1850s. These will be urgent fights. Stakes could not be higher,” she said during her speech at the American Federation of Teachers. “This nomination holds out the threat of devastating consequences for workers’ rights, civil rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights, including...

The fact that the media responded to the nomination of a Supreme Court justice by obsessively covering Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Russia and NATO proves that Trump has checkmated them with Brett Kavanaugh. Liberals know they can't stop Kavanaugh's confirmation, so they'd just as soon not hear any news about it at all. Please cheer us up with stories about Paul Manafort's solitary confinement! But there was one very peculiar reaction to the nomination. The nut wing of the Democratic Party instantly denounced Kavanaugh by claiming that his elevation to the high court would threaten all sorts of "rights." Sen....

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin says Brett Kavanaugh has "all the right qualities" to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Manchin's comments regarding President Donald Trump's nominee to the high court came during an interview on West Virginia's MetroNews' "Talkline" radio show on Wednesday. An excerpt of the interview is posted on the MetroNews Twitter account. "He has all the right qualities," Manchin said. "He's well-educated and, with that, we have to just look at making sure that the rule of law and the Constitution is going to be followed and that's going to basically preempt anything else he does."

(CNSNews.com) - House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) said in her weekly press briefing on Thursday that the Democratic Party is about “honoring the vows of our founders. “Our values are about supporting America’s working families, about honoring the vows of our Founders, about honoring the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, honoring the aspirations of our children,” she said. “That is why we vote so much alike because we have shared values,” she said...

Or did someone throw the Washington Post a curveball? The White House released Brett Kavanaugh’s financial records yesterday as part of their disclosures for his eventual confirmation hearing, and the Post may have thought they’d found a diamond in the rough. Kavanaugh ran up some substantial credit-card debt, a potential hanging slider over the partisan plate. That is, until they found out what the charges were.Can we call this a swing and a miss? Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh incurred tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt buying baseball tickets over the past decade and at...

I think it’s fair to read this passage from a speech delivered last year to AEI as, shall we say, “Roe-skeptical.” Although (a) naturally it’s much more circumspect than what you might hear from Mike Lee on the Senate floor, befitting the different roles of a federal appellate judge and a U.S. senator, and (b) it’s not so overtly “Roe-skeptical” as to give us a strong clue about whether Kavanaugh would overturn the decision. Is it enough for him that “the general tide of freewheeling judicial creation of unenumerated rights that were not rooted in the nation’s history and...

It’s not just the wrongly decided Roe V. Wade decision that liberals fear is in jeopardy with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. They also fear their crusade against “semi-automatic” weapons may be exposed as the semantic, visual, and judicial fraud that it is: "If you care about common sense gun violence protection, Judge Kavanaugh is your worst nightmare. If you want background checks, a ban on assault weapons, or any of the other common sense measures that we have in Connecticut, or California or New York, Judge Kavanaugh will strike them down." said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, who used to...

Here’s hoping the ‘unusual’ email he sent them blows right up in Rosenstein’s smug face. Donald Trump is not America’s president, at least according to the fully active treacherous Deep State. For all intents and purposes Robert Mueller III’s ‘Special’ Counsel is POTUS. Broken token Jeff Sessions is not the Attorney General, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein is. With not a single vote to his name, Robert Mueller inserted himself over 63 million Trump voters on May 17, 2017—the day his special counsel was impaneled.

Erich Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America (GOA), issued the following statement on Pres. Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court: "Kavanaugh will be a huge improvement over the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on many constitutional issues, including the Second Amendment. "Initial reports suggest that Judge Kavanaugh deeply respects the Second Amendment, even though he was not the strongest of the finalists. "Nevertheless, Judge Kavanaugh filed a pro-gun dissent in Heller II, arguing that Washington, DC's ban on semi-automatic firearms was arbitrary and unlawful. "In fact, his dissent was so well argued that GOA's...

A new poll shows that voters in battleground states represented by vulnerable Senate Democrats decisively want President Donald Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, to replace Anthony Kennedy in the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS)... The poll conducted by the Tarrance Group between July 5 and 8 revealed that voters agree by a decisive margin of at least 12 percent that their senators should confirm the SCOTUS appointment Trump announced Monday night. After explaining that the U.S. Senate will vote on the president’s appointment to replace Justice Kennedy, it asked voters, “Do you think Senator [Nelson, Donnelly, McCaskill, Heitkamp, or...

Shannon Watts gets a little unhinged when it comes to guns. We all know that. She sees an individual’s right to keep and bear arms as something that should pretty much be abolished, and anyone who disagrees with her is a target of her scorn…when they’re not being blocked on Twitter, at least. With the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she has yet another excuse to spew her bile all over social media. In the process, she may have made a bit of a slip-up.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is going to be a weeks-long torment for some on the Hill—and I’m talking about red state Democrats. Senate Republican moderates Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have been very receptive to Kavanaugh’s nomination, easing pressure from the right that they could sink this SCOTUS nominee if they defect. That could be the case, but for now, pressure has ramped up on Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), and maybe Bill Nelson (D-FL). Nelson needs help. Republican Gov. Rick Scott is outworking him on Hispanic outreach, and he’s beating Nelson...

President Donald Trump waited for primetime to unveil his pick to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Trump picked U.S. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Kennedy, 81, setting up a fight with a divided Senate. Kennedy was often a swing vote in the Supreme Court, joining liberal justices to legalize gay marriage and voting with conservatives to throw out campaign-finance restrictions. While Kavanaugh, 53, was framed as the more "establishment" conservative pick of the other candidates, various Republicans had phoned Trump last week to voice their objections over his potential nomination, including about a 2011 opinion where he...

Wednesday on Hugh Hewitt’s nationally syndicated radio show, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he anticipated that Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the vacancy left by the retiring Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, would be confirmed during September. Should Kavanaugh be confirmed by mid-September, which Tillis said it was a 100 percent chance probability, it would set Kavanaugh up for the beginning of the high court’s term in October.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh amassed tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt in part by purchasing baseball tickets to Washington Nationals games, according to a Washington Post review of Kavanaugh’s financial disclosures and information provided by the White House. Kavanaugh has reported having up to $200,000 in credit card debt during the past 10 years, according to the Post's report. In 2006 — the year he was confirmed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — he reported having between $60,000 to $200,000 in debt.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has asked the offices of all 93 U.S. attorneys to each provide up to three federal prosecutors to assist the Justice Department in reviewing government records of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the New York Times reports, citing a letter it obtained. Why it matters: The Times notes that this is an unusual move because department attorneys are not typically responsible for carrying out such a task. "The production of documents could slow down a confirmation hearing that has already shaped up as a sharp partisan battle. Democratic lawmakers say they want to...

The Fourth Amendment broadly guarantees that Americans should be free from government intrusion in their homes and private lives and that infringements on these rights must come with the justification of a warrant or probable cause. These guarantees and protections form the basis of property protections and a right to privacy both of which are fundamental to individual liberty. In 2015, Kavanaugh went out of his way to minimize these protections. During his tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he issued a separate concurrence in the denial of a rehearing en banc in Klayman v....

WASHINGTON — Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, has asked federal prosecutors to help review the government documents of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times on Wednesday. Mr. Rosenstein’s request was an unusual insertion of politics into federal law enforcement. While the Justice Department has helped work on previous Supreme Court nominations, department lawyers in Washington typically carry out that task, not prosecutors who pursue criminal investigations nationwide. But in an email sent this week to the nation’s 93 United States attorneys, Mr. Rosenstein asked each...

Fairfax, Va. -The National Rifle Association (NRA) applauds the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the United States Supreme Court. “President Trump has made another outstanding choice in nominating Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court. He has an impressive record that demonstrates his strong support for the Second Amendment,” said Chris W. Cox, Executive Director, NRA-ILA. “We urge the Senate to swiftly confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, just as it confirmed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.” During his tenure on the U.S....