NOMINEE DOCS DON’T SAY MUCH | One Email Rises To The Top | 25 Years Of RBG
August 10, 2018
TODAY IN HISTORY
|On this day in 1993, RUTH BADER GINSBURG was sworn in as the second female justice in history on the U.S. Supreme Court.
SO WHAT'S FOR LUNCH
|AP’s Lisa Mascaro and Mark Sherman report that the first documents from BRETT KAVANAUGH’S time in the GEORGE W. BUSH White House counsel’s office were released yesterday. There were 5,700 pages posted online as part of Republicans’ expedited review, but critics of the document dump say the GOP is cherry-picking from the 125,000 pages of documents available on the nominee. AP notes, “The first download of thousands of papers Thursday is being pored over by activists and media organizations for insight into Kavanaugh’s legal thinking. But it’s unclear how revealing the papers will be. One of the initial pages was a discussion of lunch plans.”
A SLIVER NOT A SLICE
|The small portion of Kavanaugh documents made available yesterday were largely inconclusive about what role the SCOTUS nominee played in legal questions that stemmed from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Robert Barnes with The Washington Post writes, “Mostly, the documents detailed minutiae from the daily life of a White House lawyer, such as ethics questions about accepting baseball tickets or plane rides.”
THE GOLDEN TICKET
|However, it seems there was one nugget of information in yesterday’s slew of documents that could play an important role in JUDGE KAVANAUGH’S confirmation consideration. Charlie Savage and Michael D. Shear with The New York Times report that an email reveals Kavanaugh volunteered to prepare a senior Bush administration official to testify about the government’s monitoring of conversations between certain terrorism suspects and their lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks. That email is important because the nominee previously side-stepped questions about his involvement in the handling of terrorism suspects and said publicly that he “was not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants.”
ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING AT IT
|“Democrats are likely to seize on the communication to argue that he misled them during his 2006 confirmation to the D.C. Circuit when, pressed about whether he had helped to make the legal case for torture, he denied any involvement in discussions about the treatment of enemy combatants. The White House, however, argues that the email — in which Kavanaugh delegates to a colleague briefing of the attorney general on the use of military tribunals — strengthens the judge’s case. The White House says the email demonstrates that a limited number of White House aides, siloed from their colleagues, helped navigate uncharted legal territory on the interrogation of terrorist suspects and that Kavanaugh was not among them.” That’s Eliana Johnson with POLITICO reporting on how the White House is spinning the one email that rose to the top of yesterday’s pile.
OTHER NEWS
Law Professor Said Sotomayor Nominated To SCOTUS For "Latinaness." Then Deleted Twitter.
The Washington Post“It all started with a Slate piece that expressed annoyance over people who brand President Trump’s recent Supreme Court nominee a ‘nice guy.’ University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson was annoyed, too, but for a different reason. He said he believed liberals held a double standard for their annoyance with conservative fondness of Brett Kavanaugh’s backstory. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s backstory — her race and ethnicity — also played a role in her nomination and confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, he said.”
Tennessee Executes Inmate With Controversial Drugs Despite Sotomayor's Powerful Dissent
HuffPost“Sotomayor accused the U.S. of no longer being a civilized nation and ‘accepting barbarism’ in a blistering dissent after the high court refused Thursday to stop the execution using drugs that had resulted in painful, botched executions in the past. Irick and several other death row inmates sued early this year to halt the execution, arguing that the state’s new death cocktail, including the controversial sedative midazolam, would be tantamount to torture and a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against ‘cruel and unusual punishment.'”