Stupid Brett Kavanaugh tricks

Think Progress - In a telling moment during Wednesday’s confirmation hearings, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh appeared dumbfounded when he was asked by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) whether he knows of any laws that give the government the power to control male bodies.

“Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Harris asked.

After a long pause and a bizarre back-and-forth in which Kavanaugh asked for a more specific question and then claimed he thought Harris was “asking about medical procedures that are unique to men,” the judge eventually admitted that he could not think of any laws governing the male body.

NY Times -    As a White House lawyer in the Bush administration, Judge Brett Kavanaugh challenged the accuracy of deeming the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to be “settled law of the land,” according to a secret email obtained by The New York Times.

The email, written in March 2003, is one of thousands of documents that a lawyer for President George W. Bush turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Supreme Court nominee but deemed “committee confidential,” meaning it could not be made public or discussed by Democrats in questioning him in hearings this week. It was among several an unknown person provided to The New York Times late Wednesday.

Judge Kavanaugh was considering a draft opinion piece that supporters of one of Mr. Bush’s conservative appeals court nominees hoped they could persuade anti-abortion women to submit under their names. It stated that “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land.”

Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

The Hill -   Kavanaugh declines to answer question on whether he's talked about Mueller probe with people at Trump's attorney's firm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh late Wednesday declined to say whether he had discussed special counsel Robert Mueller Robert Swan Mueller Sasse: US should applaud choice of Mueller to lead Russia probe MORE ’s investigation with an attorney at President Trump’s attorney’s law firm.

Reuters - Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee, embraced judicial independence on Wednesday but sidestepped Senate Democrats’ questions on whether a president can pardon himself or fire a prosecutor investigating him.

Washington Times -Mr. Booker’s questioning of Judge Kavanaugh focused on racial diversity and voter ID laws, calling them the “crown jewel” of the civil rights movement. Judge Kavanaugh relied on Supreme Court precedent when answering the senator’s questions, not revealing his personal opinions on the race-based issues.

“You refused to answer a lot of my questions over the race and the law,” Mr. Booker said. “Your answers don’t provide me comfort.”

Judge Kavanaugh, though, did detail his own efforts to boost minorities in the legal profession, saying he has helped diversify the racial makeup of law clerks on federal courts and worked with his alma mater of Yale University to create a pipeline for them

Democracy Now - Public Citizen... analysis of Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions in split-decision cases, ... found that during his 12 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh decided or wrote an opinion against the public interest 87 percent of the time in split-decision cases dealing with consumer, environmental and worker rights.

Salon -In answering questions from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Kavanaugh appealed to his upbringing in Washington, D.C. At the time, the city was, in Brett Kavanaugh’s words “the murder capital of the world.”

... But Kavanaugh is not from Washington, D.C. He’s from in Bethesda, where he attended Mater Dei, a Bethesda-based Catholic prep school before going to Georgetown Preparatory School. Bethesda is part of Montgomery County, the eighth most-wealthy county in the United States.

Kavanaugh now lives in Chevy Chase, a suburb known for its long history of racism. It’s known as one of the richest and whitest cities in the country.