Friday, September 21, 2018

The Kavanaugh situation: the encapsulation of all that makes 2018 post-America such a train wreck

The whole thing makes one embarrassed to be a human being.

Ford's getting death threats. Kavanaugh's wife's getting death threats.

Senators like Hirono and Gillibrand are behaving like jackboots.

Ford's legal team is insisting that the fundamental American legal principle that accusers state their case before the accused, who are presumed innocent, be turned on its head. 

And now this:

On Friday morning, to the dismay of Republicans defending Judge Brett Kavanaugh from evidence-free allegations of sexual assault, President Trump took to Twitter to finally sound off on the case. And he promptly stepped on two land mines.
First, he made the claim that the accuser was probably lying about the assault because she didn’t file a police report.
This is stupid. She was 15 years old at the time of the alleged events, and many women don’t come forward with assault cases because they are embarrassed or blame themselves. Just because she didn’t file a police report doesn’t mean the attack didn’t happen.

What’s more, this sort of claim is wildly counterproductive, given that Democrats are chomping at the bit to claim that Republicans are callous about charges against women — so callous that they don’t care whether Kavanaugh attempted to rape a girl decades ago or not.
Then it got worse. Trump tweeted: 

The radical left lawyers want the FBI to get involved NOW. Why didn’t someone call the FBI 36 years ago?
Again, this is idiotic. The FBI has no jurisdiction to investigate the Blasey Ford allegations in the first place. They investigated the Clarence Thomas allegations (and exonerated him, which people tend to forget) because Thomas was an employee of the federal government on federal property when he allegedly sexually harassed Anita Hill. But the FBI can’t just investigate state crimes in a private home 36 years ago. That’s not their job, and it’s not their purview. But instead of repeating that eminently true claim, Trump is now saying that the FBI should have been involved originally. Which they shouldn’t have. Because even if the events occurred, they would have been a state crime.

Throne-sniffers, this is the kind of situation in which the Very Stable Genius's temperament affects policy.

The kind of day when wants another planet available to go to for a while.
 
 

4 comments:

  1. If you lie to the FBI, you go to jail as a felon. Dr Ford wants to tell her story to the FBI. Kavanaugh and Mark Judge...not so much. Kinda says it all.

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  2. Statutes of limitations, law enforcement jurisdictions, rules of evidence, all be damned, I guess, so peeps think they can keep exterminating fetuses which is their foremost fear of loss. The rule of lawyers and the kangaroo court of public opinion are on full display here in this former government of laws. If K gets confirmed there will be an immediate threat to remove him from the bench. Isn't it horrific?

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  3. And that's cute too, referring a situation that happened 30 plus years ago to the FBI to set someone to get caught in a lie. Reread Kafka's The Trial for a clearer picture of this mud. It presaged Nazi Germany.

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  4. :This is about whether a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. If we reverse — or even dilute — that principle, it could cast us into the dystopian realms of Kafka and Orwell. It would upend our Constitution’s guarantee of due process of law. For that, our Supreme Court has found, is bound up with the idea of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The court articulated that in 1881. It held that evidence “upon which a jury is justified in returning a verdict of guilty must be sufficient to produce a conviction of guilt, to the exclusion of all reasonable doubt.” In 1970, the supremes again marked the point, in a case involving a juvenile. There, too, it said, “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” was required for “every fact necessary to constitute the crime charged.”

    https://nypost.com/2018/09/21/kavanaugh-his-accuser-and-innocent-until-proven-guilty/

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