The Supreme Court Tuesday refused to take up an appeal from a Connecticut state court, allowing a case, brought by the parents of victims and survivors of the Sandy Hook mass shooting, to move forward with their lawsuit against Remington Arms Co., the manufacturer of the Bushmaster rifle used by the Sandy Hook killer to murder a classroom full of first graders and their teacher.
<a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/12/778487920/supreme-court-allows-sandy-hook-families-case-against-remington-to-proceed">NPR reports</a> that the Supreme Court denied Remington&#8217;s appeal, which focused on a 2005 law prohibiting the victims of gun violence from suing gun manufacturers for wrongful death and disfigurement. The Sandy Hook parents are using one of the law&#8217;s exemptions, which allows victims to sue gun manufacturers for their alleged unfair and illegal marketing practices, not over the weapons themselves.
The Sandy Hook parents have been trying to sue Remington for years, and several other lawsuits were tossed by lower courts, citing the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which grants gun manufacturers like Remington &#8220;broad immunity&#8221; from civil suits.
This time around, though, attorneys brought claims under a small exemption in the law that concerns weapons marketing under the theory that the Bushmaster rifle &#8220;never should have been sold to the public because it is a military-style weapon. They accuse Remington of violating Connecticut&#8217;s unfair trade practices law when it &#8216;knowingly marketed and promoted the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle for use in assaults against human beings,'&#8221; according to NPR.
<blockquote>In filings with the U.S. Supreme Court, the Sandy Hook families say Remington &#8220;published promotional materials that promised &#8216;military-proven performance&#8217; for a &#8216;mission-adaptable&#8217; shooter in need of the &#8216;ultimate combat weapons system.'&#8221; They also accuse the company of fostering a &#8220;lone gunman&#8221; narrative as it promoted the Bushmaster, citing an ad that proclaimed, &#8220;Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.&#8221;</blockquote>
&#8220;This is a weapon that&#8217;s been designed to inflict mass casualties and, &#8216;you&#8217;re not a man if you don&#8217;t have it.&#8217; That&#8217;s morally reprehensible and, from a marketing perspective, that&#8217;s just wrong and needs to stop,&#8221; one of the plaintiffs told CBS News.
The families also say that Remington marketed the rifle to odd demographics, including marginalized white males, by advertising within video games and in magazines and publications not geared toward hunters, which Remington says are the core consumers of the Bushmaster rifle series.
&#8220;Lawyers for the victims sued Remington contending that the company marketed rifles by extolling the militaristic qualities of the rifle and reinforcing the image of a combat weapon,&#8221; <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/12/business/remington-sandy-hook-supreme-court/index.html">CNN reported Tuesday morning</a>.
Gun rights advocates contend that the lawsuit, if successful (it&#8217;s still in its very early stages), could provide a backdoor way for gun control advocates to restrict the sale of weapons they deem &#8220;unacceptable&#8221; to own or use, including the Bushmaster and the much-maligned AR-15.
Remington did not have comment on the Supreme Court denial Tuesday morning, but it is probably preparing to handle the case head-on in Connecticut courts. The case now moves to a discovery period, where the Sandy Hook victims&#8217; families will likely information on how Remington made its marketing decisions for the Bushmaster rifle.

US-POLITICS-COURT

Supreme Court Won&#8217;t Take Sandy Hook Case, Will Allow Victims Of Mass Shooting To Sue Gun Makers

Gun Control

Guns

Supreme Court

On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump signaled a deal with congressional Democrats if the U.S. Supreme Court were to rule in his favor concerning the controversial Obama-era DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) immigration program.
&#8220;If Supreme Court remedies with overturn, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!” the president said via Twitter regarding DACA.
The Supreme Court will consider the Trump administration&#8217;s decision to end the DACA program, which has been argued to have been <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/federal-judge-rules-trump-must-reinstate-daca-ben-shapiro">unconstitutionally</a> enacted by the Obama administration via executive action.
The program defers deportations of immigrants brought over by their parents at a young age.
In the same tweet where Trump signaled a forthcoming deal, he ripped DACA. &#8220;Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from &#8216;angels,'&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;Some are very tough, hardened criminals.&#8221;
According to <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/news/new-data-shows-criminal-arrest-histories-daca-requestors">U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services</a>, about 8% of DACA recipients have criminal records:
<blockquote>8-percent of total DACA requestors (59,786 individuals) had arrest records as of the date the systems were queried, which included offenses such as assault and battery, rape, murder, and drunk driving, among others. &#8220;Requestors&#8221; includes individuals approved and denied DACA.</blockquote>
Trump added in the tweet: &#8220;President Obama said he had no legal right to sign order, but would anyway.&#8221;
This is also basically true. As noted by <a href="https://www.heritage.org/immigration/commentary/daca-unconstitutional-obama-admitted">Heritage</a>, Obama repeatedly acknowledged that he could not take such action alone, but did so anyway:
<blockquote>Responding in October 2010 to demands that he implement immigration reforms unilaterally, Obama declared, &#8220;I am not king. I can&#8217;t do these things just by myself.&#8221; In March 2011, he said that with &#8220;respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that&#8217;s just not the case.&#8221; In May 2011, he acknowledged that he couldn&#8217;t &#8220;just bypass Congress and change the (immigration) law myself. &#8230; That&#8217;s not how a democracy works.&#8221;</blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from “angels.” Some are very tough, hardened criminals. President Obama said he had no legal right to sign order, but would anyway. If Supreme Court remedies with overturn, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!
&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1194219655717642240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;The Trump administration announced its plan to phase out the program in 2017, only for the federal courts to rule that it could not apply retroactively and that DACA should be restarted in full,&#8221; <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-daca-supreme-court">Fox News</a> reported.
In April 2018, U.S. District Judge John Bates <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/2018/04/24/cfb41578-4816-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.a5adf4fd5206">ruled</a> that Trump could not legally end DACA, calling the decision to end the program &#8220;arbitrary and capricious because the [Trump administration] failed adequately to explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful.&#8221;
&#8220;So, in other words, if a president takes an executive action, then the subsequent president cannot undo that executive action — even if that original executive action has been declared unconstitutional, at least in part,&#8221; Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/federal-judge-rules-trump-must-reinstate-daca-ben-shapiro">Ben Shapiro</a> explained at the time.
&#8220;This is insanity,&#8221; Shapiro continued, adding, &#8220;Here’s how leftist courts have now ruled: an action that is obviously unconstitutional is no longer unconstitutional when performed by President Obama; undoing that unconstitutional action is unconstitutional if performed by President Trump.&#8221;
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said of the decision at the time: &#8220;Today’s order doesn’t change the Department of Justice’s position on the facts: DACA was implemented unilaterally after Congress declined to extend benefits to this same group of illegal aliens.&#8221;

Michelle Obama, Melania Trump, Donald Trump, Barack Obama

Trump Signals DACA &#8216;Deal&#8217; With Democrats

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

Illegal Immigration

Immigration

Judicial Branch

Judiciary

Lawsuit

Obama Administration

Trump Administration

In 1973’s landmark abortion case, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/#tab-opinion-1950137">Roe v. Wade</a>, the United States Supreme Court suggested that fetuses do not have constitutional rights because there was no consensus on when a human&#8217;s life begins and fetuses were not recognized as persons under the law. In 2019, neither proposition is true.
According to a recent <a href="https://www.kofc.org/un/en/resources/communications/abortion-limits-favored.pdf">Marist Poll</a>, only 46% of Americans believe &#8220;life begins at conception&#8221; is a biological and scientific fact, and less than one-third of Democrats reported that they believe life begins at conception. If you read Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer’s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-world-renowned-university-suppressed-josh-hammer">piece</a> this past summer on my academic research, then you might be aware of <a href="https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1883">the recent international survey</a> that found 96% of 5,577 biologists affirmed the view that a huma&#8217;s life begins at fertilization. The biologists represented over one thousand academic institutions from around the world, and most identified as liberal (89%), pro-choice (85%), non-religious (63%) Democrats (92%).
The Supreme Court considered the question of when life begins because the motivations behind abortion laws can hinge upon it.
If a human&#8217;s life begins at birth, a fetus is not a human that is presumptively legally protectable; an abortion restriction would be a bald-faced attempt to control women&#8217;s bodies. However, if a human&#8217;s life begins at fertilization, a fetus is a human who might be a legally protectable person; such an abortion restriction is then an attempt to protect the life of a human person.
Since we know that fetuses are humans, the question is whether they are legally protectable persons.
Ninety-three percent of Americans <a href="https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1883">believe</a> a human is worthy of legal protection once its life begins. <a href="https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/">Article 6</a> of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all humans deserve &#8220;the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.&#8221; After the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, U.S. Senators <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24596/24596.txt">Lyman Trumbull</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NU9hwULq9BUC&amp;pg=PA1794">Allen Thurman</a> stated that the amendment protected every human in the nation. These legislators&#8217; understanding of the amendment has been repeatedly echoed by the judiciary.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/303/77/">held</a> that all weak and helpless human beings are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Roe v. Wade itself, the Court noted that there could be no opposition to abortion restrictions if the &#8220;suggestion of [fetal] personhood is established.&#8221; In 1986, Justice John Paul Stevens went a step further and <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/476/747/">ruled</a> that, if recognized as humans, fetuses&#8217; protection from abortion would be guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Justices Blackmun, Brennan, and Marshall, who were all part of the Roe Court, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/492/490/#tab-opinion-1958093">repeated</a> Justice Stevens’ argument in 1989.
However, back in 1973, the Court felt it could not recognize the rights of fetuses based on two facts that are demonstrably false in 2019:
<ol>
<li>The Court could not &#8220;resolve the difficult question of when life begins&#8221; because they could not find a consensus of experts that agreed on a certain view. Today, a consensus of biologists affirm the view that a human’s life begins at fertilization, which is consistent with testimony given by experts at the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/97th-congress/senate-bill/158">1981 U.S. Senate Committee on a Human Life Amendment</a> and the <a href="https://www.dakotavoice.com/Docs/South%20Dakota%20Abortion%20Task%20Force%20Report.pdf">2005 South Dakota Abortion Task Force</a>.</li>
<li>The Court found fetuses had &#8220;never been recognized in the law as persons.&#8221; Today, most states <a href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/fetal-homicide-state-laws.aspx">recognize</a> fetuses as human persons and human victims under the law; 38 states have fetal homicide laws and 29 states protect humans beginning at fertilization.</li>
</ol>
Put plainly, the Roe Court could not establish fetal rights because it could not be certain that fetuses were humans and states did not recognize fetuses as persons outside of the abortion context. Today, the Court can be certain that life begins at fertilization and that most states treat the non-abortive killing of a fetus as homicide or murder. Indeed, these changes to the factual underpinnings of Roe were precisely what the Court contemplated as possible grounds for re-examining Roe in 1992&#8217;s <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/833/">Planned Parenthood v. Casey</a>.
The Casey Court established that a change in Roe&#8216;s underlying facts could support an argument for overruling it. While legal precedent is important, there is nothing more important than progressing the law to reflect the development of legal concepts and scientific knowledge to ensure that all humans are equally protected.
As it stands today, a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/05/29/728118503/saybie-born-at-8-6-ounces-in-san-diego-is-now-the-worlds-tiniest-surviving-baby">nine-ounce premature infant</a> has constitutional rights, but a nine-pound fetus does not; a fetus is recognized as a human and a homicide victim when its <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/doctor-slipped-abortion-drug-girlfriends-tea-sentenced-years/story?id=55280357">father drugs its mother</a>, yet <a href="https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1883">my research found</a> that only 12% of pro-choice Americans recognize an abortion as a homicide. These Americans are inclined to recognize deaths of fetuses as unjustifiable homicides in various non-abortive contexts: A physical attack of a pregnant person (86%), drugging of a pregnant person (87%), and medical malpractice (80%). However, when it comes to abortion, most opponents to fetal rights refuse to recognize fetuses&#8217; humanity.
When the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/10/04/763863712/supreme-court-revisits-abortion-with-louisiana-case">next challenge</a> to Roe, the Court should re-examine that precedent in light of these changes to the ruling&#8217;s underlying facts. The Court should recognize fetuses as human persons whose rights are guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of the impact it could have on abortion rights.
&nbsp;
RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-world-renowned-university-suppressed-josh-hammer">A World-Renowned University Suppressed Important Abortion Research. Here&#8217;s the Full Story.</a>

JACOBS: Why The U.S. Supreme Court Needs To Recognize Fetal Rights

Abortion

Constitution

U.S. Attorney General William &#8220;Bill&#8221; Barr has been making quite a name for himself over the past couple of months.
Last month, the attorney general, following the lead of Vice President <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/mike-pence-announces-trump-administration-will-fight-back-lower-court-nationwide-injunctions/">Mike Pence</a>, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/u-s-attorney-general-william-barr-end-nationwide-injunctions/">tore into</a> the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-pence-promises-challenge-nationwide-josh-hammer">erroneous notion</a> that so-called &#8220;nationwide injunctions&#8221; are an appropriate judicial remedy in our constitutional order. The practice of Article III federal judges issuing so-called &#8220;nationwide injunctions,&#8221; Barr averred, &#8220;flouts constitutional principles and stultifies sound judicial administration, all at the cost of public confidence in our institutions.&#8221; In so doing, the attorney general thus took the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-nationwide-injunctions-11567723072">same position</a> on the constitutional unsoundness of &#8220;nationwide injunctions&#8221; that Justice Clarence Thomas took in his <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf">lone Trump v. Hawaii concurrence</a> from June 2018. Justice Thomas may have gone solo in Trump — it is worth emphasizing that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-the-supreme-court-term-begins-today-here-is-what-conservatives-should-look-for">not a single other</a> purportedly conservative justice joined Thomas&#8217;s concurrence that doubted the constitutionality of &#8220;nationwide injunctions&#8221; — but the attorney general of the United States is now on record as wholly agreeing with him.
Earlier this month, the attorney general one-upped himself, delivering a <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/bill-barr-religious-liberty-warrior/">thunderous disquisition</a> at the University of Notre Dame that functioned as a débutante ball for Barr&#8217;s grand emergence into the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-culture-war-conservatives-congress-should-josh-hammer">culture war</a>. The speech excoriated the pernicious influence of the militant secularists who seek to chase religion wholly <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-social-conservatives-must-defend-the-intrinsic-good-of-religion">out of the public square</a>. The speech was nothing short of extraordinary. As legendary jurisprudential theorist Hadley Arkes <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/bill-barr-gives-a-speech/">put it</a>, Barr &#8220;dr[ew] deeply on some of the best things said and done in the [Western] tradition running back to Athens as well as Jerusalem.&#8221; Barr directly channeled President John Adams&#8217; admonition that &#8220;[o]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious [p]eople&#8221; and that it is &#8220;wholly inadequate&#8221; for anyone else. To be sure, the Left shrieked and howled at Barr&#8217;s channeling the <a href="http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Alexis.de.Tocqueville.Quote.8AF2">very best of our distinctly American political tradition</a> — an all-too easily foreseen reaction that, as Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn <a href="http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Alexis.de.Tocqueville.Quote.8AF2">wrote</a>, nonetheless &#8220;is highly revealing of the absolutism of secularist opponents determined to marginalize and destroy anyone who dares dissent from their own uncompromising orthodoxy.&#8221;
To synthesize, the attorney general has spent the last two months both lambasting the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-pence-promises-challenge-nationwide-josh-hammer">preeminent</a> malignant tumor afflicting our constitutional fabric — that of separation of powers-distorting &#8220;nationwide injunctions&#8221; — and unabashedly siding with oppressed religious Americans in their defensive cultural struggle against revanchist secularists who refuse to countenance religion as anything other than vestigial bigotry wholly unfit for inclusion in polite society. Nothing else in our self-governing republic matters unless and until the scourge of rogue &#8220;nationwide injunctions&#8221; is curtailed and, ultimately, eliminated. The attorney general has now expressly telegraphed to the other nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court not named Clarence Thomas that he agrees with Clarence Thomas on these injunctions&#8217; lawlessness. The attorney general, furthermore, has signaled his clear sympathizing with the group of Americans today who are most consistently under cultural and legal siege from the ascendant, institutionally supported forces of overt secularism run amok: Religious Americans.
America is better off for having an attorney general, much like Ed Meese during the Reagan administration, who is so willing to expressly put his thumb on the scale of constitutional order, truth, and justice alike. America is better off for having Bill Barr.

Attorney General William Barr

HAMMER: America Is Better Off For Having Bill Barr

Department of Justice

Religion

William Barr

Violent crime in America, despite experiencing an overall <a href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/1tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_1_crime_in_the_united_states_by_volume_and_rate_per_100000_inhabitants_1993-2012.xls">dramatic decline</a> since the 1990s, has started to <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/25-years-crime-wave-back-republicans-refuse-talk/">surge back</a> over the past few years. Amidst this distressing social trend, alas, America&#8217;s <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/rnc-blasts-kamala-harris-not-pro-criminal-enough/">erstwhile</a> &#8220;law-and-order&#8221;/tough-on-crime political party has been ideologically and financially captured by pro-criminal libertarians who ally with the Left to spout hackneyed, outmoded orthodoxies like the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-dont-let-kim-kardashian-fool-you-america-josh-hammer">alleged (non-)issue</a> of &#8220;mass incarceration.&#8221; The most tangible result of this unholy alliance was the bipartisan 2018 passage of the harrowing First Step Act jailbreak law — a law enactment which President Donald Trump, viewing the <a href="https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20191004/he-was-released-early-from-prison-in-february-now-hes-wanted-for-murder-on-federal-hill">murderous early results</a>, apparently already <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/trump-reportedly-regrets-passage-jailbreak-first-step-act-gullible-conservatives-supported/">regrets</a>.
Alas, the leftist/libertarian alliance on &#8220;criminal justice&#8221; issues, just highlighted during last night&#8217;s Democratic Party presidential primary debate when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) touted her work with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on the crime-abetting issue of &#8220;<a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/jailbreak-epidemic-gang-member-released-6k-bail-now-accused-raping-12-year-old-girl/">bail reform</a>,&#8221;continues unabated. Which brings us to prominent libertarian lawyer/legal commentator <a href="https://www.cato.org/people/clark-neily">Clark Neily</a>, who has been on a roll, of late. Neily, who spent years with the rabidly <a href="https://ij.org/center-for-judicial-engagement/">pro-judicial power</a> libertarian legal group <a href="https://ij.org">Institute for Justice,</a> now works for the equally <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/proper-judging-means-principled-engagement-not-judicial-deference">pro-judicial power</a> libertarian Cato Institute. Neily&#8217;s title at Cato is &#8220;Vice President for Criminal Justice&#8221; and, based on his recent musings, he appears to embody the zealous leftist/libertarian jailbreak alliance.
The precise target of Neily&#8217;s recent ire is the prosecutor. More specifically, Neily is convinced that far too many prosecutors become federal judges — and that not nearly enough criminal defense attorneys become federal judges. In a highly revealing but nonetheless sober-minded recognition of his core readership for such anti-prosecutorial musings, Neily has published on the subject at both <a href="https://www.cato.org/publications/studies/are-disproportionate-number-federal-judges-former-government-advocates">Cato</a> and, just this week, at left-wing <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/too-many-prosecutors-federal-judiciary.html">Slate</a>. The latter piece goes so far as to call for an outright &#8220;moratorium&#8221; on the nomination of former prosecutors to the federal bench.
I am not a former prosecutor. But I do have the benefit of education at a top law school and the experience of serving as a law clerk for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And I believe Neily is severely misguided in his anti-prosecutor crusade.
Crucially, Neily&#8217;s Cato <a href="https://www.cato.org/publications/studies/are-disproportionate-number-federal-judges-former-government-advocates#summary-previous-studies">study</a> makes no attempt whatsoever to control for education, intellect, or legal credentials. To many lay observers, this may seem anodyne — after all, can&#8217;t former prosecutors and defense attorneys/public defenders, as classes of attorneys, be presumed to have roughly equivalent legal acumens and credentials? Well, no. For generations, gifted law students of all political stripes have seen the prosecutorial career path — be it via the Department of Justice (DOJ), local U.S. attorney&#8217;s offices, state attorneys general offices, or even local district attorneys — as a prominent avenue for vocational success. The DOJ <a href="https://www.justice.gov/legal-careers/entry-level-attorneys">Honors Program</a> has long been viewed as one of the most prestigious entry-level attorney tracks in the nation, and scores of lawyers hoping to one day be considered for a federal judgeship have routinely sought U.S. attorney&#8217;s office experience as a means of padding their resumes and evincing a demonstrable commitment to public service. Again, this holds true for lawyers and judges of all political persuasions and partisan affiliations: As but two prominent examples for those on the Left, 2016 failed Barack Obama U.S. Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is a former federal prosecutor and current presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is a former California attorney general.
This is simply not nearly as broadly true for those who pursue careers in the criminal defense bar — be they in private practice or working as public defenders. Leftists and libertarians can gnash their teeth and wail all they&#8217;d like, but the reality, as I <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1176324820771819520">tweeted</a> last month, is that in no sane world is the median defense lawyer of the same acumen and credentials as the median prosecutor. Representing drug traffickers, gangbangers, and felons in possession of firearms is not a dream job. Again, my claim is that this holds true for prosecutors and the defense bar, viewed as a class — obviously, there will be innumerable individual dispensations to such a broad rule, when comparing class sizes of this magnitude. But anecdotally, based on (1) my own personal experience knowing many individuals who have become prosecutors and defense lawyers, (2) my own law clerk experience and thinking back to a comparison of the median prosecutor&#8217;s brief and oral argument versus the median defense attorney&#8217;s brief and oral argument, and (3) discussing the issue with other former federal appellate law clerk friends, I feel eminently comfortable making such a claim. We should feel comfortable establishing a rebuttable presumption that prosecutors, considered as a class, have superior legal credentials to defense attorneys. Based purely on my own experience, I cannot even begin to count the volume of public defender&#8217;s office legal briefs I read that were of an immensely shoddy quality.
At a bare minimum, libertarians and leftists who would seek to place a moratorium on nominating prosecutors to federal judgeships ought to be asked how they can be so sure that they are not sacrificing legal acumen or credentials. I understand that such logic is arguably circular — anti-prosecutor libertarians and leftists could respond that such a moratorium may prophylactically disincentivize smart law school graduates who may aspire for judgeships from pursuing prosecutorial careers. But the salient point is that the general prestige of many prosecutorial career paths is so deeply ingrained in our legal culture. That is not something that can be easily reversed, and I highly suspect the criminal defense bar and its apologists have no particularly compelling argument to offer for how they might be able to do so.
Prosecutors do not write our nation&#8217;s criminal statutes — they merely enforce them. To the extent leftists and libertarians — hooked as they are on the anachronistic talking points of &#8220;mass incarceration&#8221; and &#8220;low-level non-violent offenders&#8221; — have substantive issues with our criminal statutes, they ought to lobby policymakers. By all accounts, considering both <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/needs-leftists-gop-texas-gov-greg-abbott-endorses-radical-ban-box-pro-criminal-mandate-employers/">state-level initiatives</a> and the aforementioned First Step Act, the pro-jailbreak cabal is quite successful in its lobbying efforts. Pro-jailbreak forces are wrong, on the policy merits, but that is an issue that can be debated in the political space. But it would be dangerous for justice and the rule of law, absent pro-jailbreak forces&#8217; ability to overcome the rebuttable presumption about the credentials of disparate vocational classes, for such forces to also take out their frustrations as part of the judicial nominations process.

Judge gavel with Justice lawyers, Businesswoman in suit or lawyer, Advice and Legal services Concept.

HAMMER: In Defense Of Prosecutors

Crime

Drugs

Federal Government

Homicide

Kamala Harris

On Friday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer — a Federalist Society <a href="https://fedsoc.org/contributors/josh-hammer">speaker</a>, frequent <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-draw-right-lessons-kavanaughs-bad-start-no-josh-hammer">commentator</a> on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-kavanaugh-and-gorsuch-have-issues-john-josh-hammer">legal</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservatives-how-much-longer-are-you-josh-hammer">issues</a>, and a <a href="https://firstliberty.org/team/josh-hammer/">constitutional attorney</a> by training — <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHhrDLqyWpY">joined</a> &#8220;The Conservative Review with <a href="https://twitter.com/rmconservative">Daniel Horowitz</a>&#8221; podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about a whole host of legal and judicial issues. The duo discussed the current <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-the-supreme-court-term-begins-today-here-is-what-conservatives-should-look-for">U.S. Supreme Court term</a>, the merits and flaws of the Court&#8217;s current &#8220;conservative&#8221; members, what to expect from the Court&#8217;s attention-grabbing cases this term, the strategic and visionary short-sightedness of many on the legal Right, the lay of the land of the modern &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-judicial-crisis-networks-open-attack-sen-josh-hammer">conservative legal movement</a>,&#8221; and the ultimate problem of reclaiming the Constitution from our culture of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">judicial supremacy</a>. The lattermost, judicial supremacy, is a topic on which Hammer has <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1151536557079375877">announced</a> he will have a piece of legal scholarship published this spring.
After Horowitz initially set the table for discussion, Hammer began the extensive chat by discussing why, on a first-principles level, the American people and the legal profession alike have lost a proper conception of what &#8220;the judicial power&#8221; in <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii">Article III</a> of the U.S. Constitution actually means — including the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-pence-promises-challenge-nationwide-josh-hammer">extent and scope of the judicial branch&#8217;s binding</a> (or lack thereof) authority:
<blockquote>What we&#8217;re lacking on the broader 35,000-foot altitude level &#8230; is that we don&#8217;t understand what &#8220;the judicial power&#8221; and the Vesting Clause of Article III actually means. And contrary to to the judicial supremacists — contrary to the people who will elevate the 1958 judicial atrocity of <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/the-one-court-precedent-that-matters-in-the-scotus-debate/">Cooper v. Aaron</a>, which established judicial supremacy to the highest paean of the judicial totem pole — [what they say about judicial power] is actually a direct contravention of the expressed text of Chief Justice Marshall&#8217;s famous decree in <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/5/137">Marbury v. Madison</a> itself. &#8230;
In Marbury, Chief Justice Marshall famously says: &#8220;[I]t is emphatically the province of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.&#8221; That&#8217;s what everyone always quotes, but what they never quote, Daniel, is literally the very next sentence after that, where Marshall also says: [&#8220;Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret the rule.&#8221;] &#8230;
[T]he crux of &#8220;the judicial power&#8221; &#8230; applies obviously to the parties in the suit [but] it goes no further whatsoever. &#8230; This ultimately gets you to Abraham Lincoln, who obviously <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/02/lincoln-on-judicial-despotism">defied the Court</a> in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/20/lincoln-versus-judicial-supremacy/">Dred Scott</a> and all of that. So on a broader level, we as a society are &#8230; completely missing the scope of judicial power in this country and the legal academy, the legal profession — as someone who went to a top law school, I can tell you it is generally inculcated in the rising generation of law students this erroneous belief that is the basic nature of the binding authority of the courts. It&#8217;s very tragic.</blockquote>
Later in the dialogue, Horowitz and Hammer discussed and previewed the current Supreme Court term, discussed the problems in the juridical approaches of each of Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Neil Gorsuch, and explained why Justice Clarence Thomas — the purest originalist on the Court — is a unique and irreplaceable figure. They explained why the federal judiciary will always be a losing &#8220;one-way ratchet&#8221; for conservatives unless and until the &#8220;legal conservative movement&#8221; awakens, en masse, to the danger of subscribing to the judicial supremacist paradigm.
WATCH:
<iframe title="Why Conservatives Will Be Disappointed with the &#039;Conservative&#039; Supreme Court | Ep 509" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LHhrDLqyWpY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

CR podcast screenshot 10.11.19

WATCH: Hammer On &#8216;The Conservative Review&#8217; Podcast: Everything You Need To Know For The Supreme Court Term

Brett Kavanaugh

Clarence Thomas

John Roberts

Neil Gorsuch

While the justices heard arguments in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/10/argument-analysis-justices-divided-on-federal-protections-for-lgbt-employees/">three cases</a> inside the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, Americans waited anxiously outside to learn the fate of the republic.
Exaggeration? Perhaps. But if so, it is only because it has become so routine to expect the high court to “decide” consequential issues for us. But that is not actually the justices’ job. Theirs is to say what the law is — “emphatically,” says Marbury v. Madison — and not to make it themselves.
In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court’s job is to “call balls and strikes” like a baseball umpire — and not to be “pitcher or catcher.”
But advocates for three individuals terminated from their jobs think otherwise. In their mind, federal employment law governing non-discrimination in employment — specifically, Title VII — needs to be updated. But the plaintiffs think the courts, and not the legislatures, should do the updating.
Interestingly, their argument suggests that nothing actually needs to be updated. When, in 1964, Title VII was enacted, they argue that the word “sex” would linguistically evolve to encompass its myriad meanings today. That is, they argue, “sex” clearly includes both gender identity and sexual orientation. All that is necessary, they say, is for the high court to recognize that “sex” and the accompanying concept of “sex stereotypes” includes all the many iterations of gender identity and sexual orientation.
That is strange because, since at least 1974, there have been repeated — and failed — efforts to add gender identity or sexual orientation protections in federal non-discrimination law, including Title VII. In fact, someone has introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in Congress every year since 1994. And every year it has failed. Every single year.
States, for their part, have a more mixed record. Some have expanded the definition of “sex” in their state employment code provisions. Some have not. In some cases, municipalities within a state conflict with one another. Some cities, trying to be more “progressive,” have adopted expanded non-discrimination ordinances — sometimes even in opposition with state law.
Even earlier this year, the so-called <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-house-democrats-equality-act-both-josh-hammer">Equality Act</a> — an aggressive non-discrimination proposal — passed the House of Representatives but has thus far not been acted upon in the U.S. Senate.
Perhaps to some, the word “sex” in Title VII means something more than it meant in 1964. But if, after 45 years since the first legislative effort in 1974, no Congress has agreed, why should the nine lawyers on the high Court do what Congress has not done itself?
So it is no surprise that Justice Samuel Alito said to advocates before the Court, “Congress has been asked repeatedly in the years since 1964 to address this question.” And, if Congress has so declined to address the question — or simply failed to act upon it — why should the Court? After all, he says, “[If] the Court takes this up and interprets this 1964 statute to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, we will be acting exactly like a legislature.”
Courts should not act like legislatures. Theirs is a different article in the Constitution altogether. Justice Neil Gorsuch seems to agree, noting that the role of expanding the law is the domain of the legislature. Thus, he said on Tuesday that this is “a question of judicial modesty.”
Beyond judicial modesty, if litigation since Obergefell v. Hodges has taught us anything, it is that short-circuiting the democratic process, as Justice Clarence Thomas warned us in his Obergefell dissent, has “potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty” (among other deleterious effects).
Justice Alito agreed, explaining at the time that Obergefell would “be used to vilify” those who disagree and that Obergefell may even be “exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”
Even since Obergefell wound its way to the Court, Jack Phillips, Aaron and Melissa Klein, Baronelle Stutzman, and others have emerged from the “recesses of their homes” — where Justice Alito said they might “whisper their thoughts” — and assumed the risk of acting upon their faith in public. Sadly, they were “labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”
Now, like Jack Phillips, they face years of litigation simply to clear their name. No American should face that fate. Respecting the democratic process that allows for give and take — for concession and compromise — gains for us an overall better result for freedom. Allowing Americans to use the First Amendment to question the speech of others in order to sharpen our societal understanding of freedom is a blessing rarely afforded to human history.
Judges should say what the law is. If the law is inadequate, they should not fill in the blanks left by Congress. To do so would give, as U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said at oral argument on Tuesday, “a complete victory to one side of the fight and nothing to the other side.”
&nbsp;
Jeremy Dys (<a href="https://twitter.com/jeremydys">@JeremyDys</a>) is Special Counsel for Litigation and Communications for First Liberty Institute, a non-profit law firm dedicated to defending religious freedom for all Americans. Read more at <a href="https://firstliberty.org">FirstLiberty.org</a>.

police officer outside SCOTUS

DYS: The Role Of The Judiciary Is To Say What The Law Is, Not What It Should Be

On Friday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a <a href="https://firstliberty.org/team/josh-hammer/">constitutional attorney</a> by training, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F7eZpkqdBE">joined</a> &#8220;Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler&#8221; on One America News Network to discuss the news that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take an important abortion case out of Louisiana: <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/june-medical-services-llc-v-gee-3/">June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee</a>. Last February, Hammer <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-john-roberts-latest-cowardice-reveals-pro-josh-hammer">castigated Chief Justice Roberts</a> for joining the Court&#8217;s liberal bloc to temporarily enjoin enforcement of the underlying Louisiana pro-life statute, which requires abortionists to maintain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinic. Hammer has also previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/legal-argument-louisiana-could-have-huge-josh-hammer">reported on</a> the potentially huge ramifications of a &#8220;third-party standing&#8221; legal challenge that Louisiana has made about abortion litigation more broadly. In Gee, the Court will hear arguments on both the merits of the underlying law and Louisiana&#8217;s &#8220;third-party standing&#8221; challenge.
Wheeler began by noting that, while she was happy to see the Supreme Court take the case, she was skeptical that pro-lifers could expect any kind of doctrinally or constitutionally meaningful outcome. She specifically expressed skepticism about both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — each of whom Hammer has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-kavanaugh-and-gorsuch-have-issues-john-josh-hammer">also been skeptical</a> of in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-draw-right-lessons-kavanaughs-bad-start-no-josh-hammer">Daily Wire op-eds</a>.
Hammer responded by agreeing with Wheeler&#8217;s concerns and ultimately predicting that the likeliest outcome in Gee is a narrow ruling that affirms the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit&#8217;s ruling to uphold Louisiana&#8217;s pro-life statute but perhaps only narrowly pares back the &#8220;undue burden&#8221; constitutional law standard for abortion regulation that was adopted by the Court in the infamous 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey:
<blockquote>You&#8217;re right to point out how Roberts seemed to flip from [his dissenting vote in the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court case of <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_new_e18f.pdf">Whole Women&#8217;s Health v. Hellerstedt</a>] to his siding with the liberals to grant the stay [in Gee] back in February. &#8230; I wrote a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-john-roberts-latest-cowardice-reveals-pro-josh-hammer">column</a> for The Daily Wire just ripping John Roberts for this &#8230; [and] to be honest with you, &#8230; he frankly deserved it.
Kavanaugh, now, he wrote separately. When you just dissent from this sort of decree, you don&#8217;t have to write anything, you can just dissent. Kavanaugh wrote separately [at the time] — he wrote like a three-and-a-half to four page dissent. It was very weird — you&#8217;re right to flag it, it was kind of wishy-washy. A lot of conservatives were like, what&#8217;s going on here — he seems to be trying to find a cute way out. So that was a red flag in and of itself.
My best guess here is that they probably will find a way to uphold the Fifth Circuit ruling &#8230; but they&#8217;re going to [do so] on very, very narrow ground. I wouldn&#8217;t expect this to be like a landmark decision or anything like that. Roberts and Kavanaugh will find a way to preserve what they view as the &#8220;institutional integrity&#8221; of the Court, but they&#8217;ll uphold the Fifth Circuit.</blockquote>
Hammer reiterated that prediction — while additionally predicting that Louisiana&#8217;s challenge to &#8220;third-party standing&#8221; for abortionists would unfortunately fail — in his Monday Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-the-supreme-court-term-begins-today-here-is-what-conservatives-should-look-for">column</a> previewing the 2019-2010 Supreme Court term: &#8220;Kavanaugh and Chief Justice Roberts write a plurality opinion that upholds Louisiana’s law while very narrowly paring back Casey‘s &#8216;undue burden&#8217; standard. But the chief justice joins liberals to secure continued <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-pence-promises-challenge-nationwide-josh-hammer">liberal standing</a> requirements for abortionists.&#8221;
WATCH:
<iframe title="SCOTUS Agrees To Hear Challenge To Louisiana Abortion Law" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2F7eZpkqdBE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Josh Hammer OANN screen grab 10.04.19

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: SCOTUS Is Set To Hear A Potentially Huge Abortion Case

The 2019-2020 U.S. Supreme Court term officially kicked off today with oral argument in the case of <a href="https://twitter.com/SCOTUSblog/status/1181192452331511810">Kahler v. Kansas</a>. This is the first full term with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and many conservatives — especially those of a perhaps more sanguine judicial disposition than <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservatives-how-much-longer-are-you-josh-hammer">yours truly</a> — eagerly anticipate what they hope will be important rulings in disparate hot-button legal areas such as abortion, gun rights, transgenderism and homosexuality, and immigration. Here are some key cases (with predictions!) and key broader themes to watch for, from a conservative perspective.
Cases
<ol>
<li><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gee-v-june-medical-services-llc/">June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee</a>: This is the most important abortion case since 2016&#8217;s disappointing result in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_new_e18f.pdf">Whole Women&#8217;s Health v. Hellerstedt</a>, which nullified the underlying Texas pro-life statute at issue. In Gee, the justices will grapple with two important questions: (1) Whether Louisiana&#8217;s hospital admitting privileges law for abortionists complies with the &#8220;undue burden&#8221; constitutional standard first promulgated in 1992&#8217;s infamous Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and (2) whether so-called <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/legal-argument-louisiana-could-have-huge-josh-hammer">&#8220;third-party standing&#8221; doctrine for abortionists</a> should be doctrinally revisited. PREDICTION: Kavanaugh and Chief Justice Roberts write a plurality opinion that upholds Louisiana&#8217;s law while very narrowly paring back Casey&#8216;s &#8220;undue burden&#8221; standard. But the chief justice joins liberals to secure continued <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-pence-promises-challenge-nationwide-josh-hammer">liberal standing</a> requirements for abortionists.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/new-york-state-rifle-pistol-association-inc-v-city-of-new-york-new-york/">New York State Rifle &amp; Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York</a>: This is the first Second Amendment case that the justices have taken since 2010&#8217;s landmark City of Chicago v. McDonald, which incorporated the individual right to keep and bear arms — as articulated by the Court two years prior in District of Columbia v. Heller — against state governments. In the comparably minor case of City of New York, the nine robed oracles will assess whether New York City&#8217;s <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/new-york-state-rifle-pistol-association-inc-v-city-of-new-york-new-york/">&#8220;ban on transporting a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun to a home or shooting range outside city limits&#8221;</a> is reconcilable with the Second Amendment&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservatives-must-not-go-soft-assault-josh-hammer">individual right</a> established in Heller and McDonald. PREDICTION: New York City&#8217;s ban will be overturned on a standard 5-4 ideological judicial split.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/altitude-express-inc-v-zarda/">Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda </a>(consolidated with <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/bostock-v-clayton-county-georgia/">Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia</a>): In what is perhaps my personally most anticipated consolidated case of the term, the justices will adjudicate whether Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination because of &#8220;sex,&#8221; necessarily also bans employment discrimination because of sexual orientation. The obvious and common sensical answer, using standard tools of statutory interpretation, is a resounding <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/judge-hos-excellent-opinion-on-title-vii-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-part-1/">&#8220;no.&#8221;</a> But the Court oftentimes does not supply the correct answer in these seemingly straightforward legal questions, especially where cultural currents strongly point in the sexual liberationist direction. PREDICTION: Kavanaugh defects to join the liberals in a 5-4 judicial re-writing of Title VII to accommodate sexual orientation. Thomas and Alito write scathing dissents, as Kavanaugh&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-draw-right-lessons-kavanaughs-bad-start-no-josh-hammer">reputation as moderate</a> is solidified early in his tenure.</li>
<li> <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/trump-v-naacp/">Trump v. NAACP</a> (consolidated with two other cases): At long last, the black-robed oracles of the Court will finally deign to decide for us flyover state plebeians whether then-President Barack Obama&#8217;s unconstitutional DACA executive amnesty may be rescinded by President Trump. The very fact that this is a viable legal issue — let alone a high-profile one — is, of course, dispiriting. But much like the so-called &#8220;travel ban&#8221; case of <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf">Trump v. Hawaii</a>, the presence of the &#8220;orange man&#8221; as a named party to a lawsuit tends to enflame the passions of the judicial <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/judicial-resistance">#resistance</a>. PREDICTION: Trump&#8217;s executive rescinding of Obama&#8217;s unconstitutional amnesty is upheld, but only after the chief justice and Kavanaugh first both side with the liberals in erroneously finding that Trump&#8217;s rescinding of the policy is judicially reviewable, in the first instance.</li>
</ol>
Themes
<ol>
<li>Will Kavanaugh move to the right or solidify his centrist bona fides as the chief justice&#8217;s <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/07/supreme-court-bromance-john-roberts-brett-kavanaugh-tie-up-court/3342377002/">wingman</a>? Kavanaugh had a complicated initial partial term on the Court. He found himself in the majority more than any other justice, and emerged as the closest ally on the Court to new, post-Anthony Kennedy &#8220;swing vote&#8221; Chief Justice Roberts. Kavanaugh generally finished the term in strong fashion, although there were a number of hiccups along the way on issues as wide-ranging as the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-roberts-and-kavanaughs-death-penalty-josh-hammer">death penalty</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-blown-opportunity-justice-kavanaugh-quickly-josh-hammer">antitrust</a>. I tend toward pessimism when it comes to Kavanaugh — he is, at his core, a Beltway Republican establishmentarian and not a man of Thomas/Scalia-esque originalist juridical convictions. I unfortunately predict more disappointment from Kavanaugh this term, with the consolidated Title VII cases being my best guess for a high-profile case where Kavanaugh will disappoint conservatives.</li>
<li>Will Justice Neil Gorsuch&#8217;s libertarianism — especially on criminal law — continue unabated? While of a decidedly stronger originalist hue than Kavanaugh, Gorsuch&#8217;s second full term on the Court solidified jurisprudential traces that we first saw emerge in his <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/gorsuch-dead-wrong-immigration/">disastrous</a> 2018 concurrence in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/15-1498_1b8e.pdf">Sessions v. Dimaya</a> — namely, that of pro-criminal libertarianism. Toward the end of last term, Gorsuch ruled in disappointing fashion in the &#8220;unconstitutionally void for vagueness&#8221; case of <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-431_7758.pdf">U.S. v. Davis</a> and the mens rea requirement case of <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-9560_e2p3.pdf">U.S. v. Rehaif</a>. In Rehaif, Gorsuch was joined in the majority by Roberts and Kavanaugh, but in Davis — likely the more pernicious of the two, from the perspective of opening the litigation floodgates to habeas corpus challenges — he joined the liberal bloc alone. Criminal law comprises a plurality of the Supreme Court docket, and it is deeply dispiriting for law-and-order conservatives to see Gorsuch emerge as an ally of the Left in judicially imposing de facto jailbreak initiatives. It is easy for a conservative to be tough on Kavanaugh, but Gorsuch&#8217;s mishaps also demand scrutinizing eyes.</li>
<li>How, if at all, will the chief justice respond to bipartisan attacks on the Court? The chief justice, ever concerned with non-legal, extraneous concerns such as the Court&#8217;s &#8220;institutional integrity,&#8221; is <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2019/10/07/because-they-work-get-ready-for-more-attacks-on-john-roberts/">uniquely susceptible</a> to well-orchestrated P.R./media campaigns against him. The chief should expect much more of that this term, as it seems that the current Court pleases no one in particular — be they on the Left or the Right. Roberts has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-kavanaugh-and-gorsuch-have-issues-john-josh-hammer">long been a disappointment</a> to conservatives, and there is little reason to expect him to change course at this stage of his career on the Court. But it will nonetheless be interesting to monitor whether Roberts will feel compelled to speak up in similar fashion to how he did last term, when he <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/21/john-roberts-trump-statement/2080266002/">condemned Trump&#8217;s comments</a> about overtly partisan federal judges.</li>
<li>Will conservatives finally resign themselves to ending this <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservatives-how-much-longer-are-you-josh-hammer">judicial supremacist charade</a>, once and for all? This is, of course, the most important question of all. In a judicial supremacist world — that is, the anti-constitutional legal hellscape wrought by 1958&#8217;s power grab case of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">Cooper v. Aaron</a> — the so-called <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed78.asp">&#8220;least dangerous&#8221;</a> branch has transmogrified into something much more insidious. Under this faux-legal framework, arguably nothing is more important in the world of federal politics than judicial nominations. But playing the judicial supremacist game is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservatives-how-much-longer-are-you-josh-hammer">systemically rigged</a> against conservatives and, ultimately, is un-winnable. Will conservatives ever wake up?</li>
</ol>

U.S. Supreme Court

HAMMER: The Supreme Court Term Begins Today. Here Is What Conservatives Should Look For.

First Amendment

LGBT

Second Amendment

I&#8217;m grateful to Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer for <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51845/hammer-culture-war-conservatives-congress-should-josh-hammer">bringing attention to</a> the need for conservatives to get re-engaged in the fight for traditional marriage. The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) has been helping lead the movement to protect marriage for over 12 years now, and we remain fully engaged in the fight.
Over 50 million Americans voted for traditional marriage in 30 states only to see their votes stolen by the illegitimate, anti-constitutional U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. The Obergefell decision is one of the most unprincipled U.S. Supreme Court rulings ever, legally on par with the infamous Dred Scott ruling. Written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, Obergefell was entirely political — devoid of any application of the history and tradition of American jurisprudence, and of any meaningful reliance on legal precedent.
Sadly, the response by many conservatives to this outrageous ruling has been a retreat to the sidelines, egged on by forces claiming that the issue is &#8220;settled.&#8221;
But it&#8217;s not settled. Marriage is the most important institution that society has to bring men and women together and to provide the ideal environment for children. It&#8217;s not a political institution — something that can be changed by politicians or courts. It was created by God, has existed in every known civilization, and is essential to societal and human flourishing.
Americans are beginning to see the consequences of Obergefell. Despite the assurances of the justices in the Court&#8217;s majority, supporters of traditional marriage have not been left alone to live out their beliefs. There are dozens of cases where marriage supporters have been targeted by LGBT activists and their political allies who have sought to force not merely acceptance, but celebration, of gay &#8220;marriage.&#8221;
The concept of gender itself is now under attack by the same activists who demanded that marriage be redefined in Obergefell. A dangerous gender ideology is being force-fed to children as young as kindergartners. Unsurprisingly, there&#8217;s been a rampant increase in teens identifying as &#8220;transgender.&#8221; Many parents report that their children exhibit sudden and rapid onset of gender dysphoria because of social media.
Democracy itself has been weakened by Obergefell. When over 50 million Americans go to the polls to support traditional marriage, only to see their votes discarded by five unelected judges, citizen confidence in government is eroded.
Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, there remains a vibrant and growing movement to protect the right of Americans to support true marriage — and to restore marriage to our national laws. It&#8217;s time for conservatives to get off the sidelines and back in the fight.
NOM is working on a number of fronts that are producing results. Extensive efforts through the Trump administration and the courts are underway to protect the religious liberty rights of Americans to live out their beliefs about marriage. Last year&#8217;s Supreme Court victory in the case of Christian baker Jack Phillips in the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling was hugely important. NOM participated in the case as amicus curiae.
We&#8217;re vigorously contesting the notion that a person&#8217;s sex is not a biological reality and that it is instead based on feelings and emotions. And we&#8217;re fighting hard to prevent further advances of the LGBT agenda, including the grossly misnamed <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47176/hammer-house-democrats-equality-act-both-josh-hammer">Equality Act</a> (H.R. 5/S.788) which would enact much of the LGBT agenda in federal statute at the expense of people of faith.
Through all of this, however, we&#8217;ve never lost sight of the need to repeal Obergefell. And by the grace of God, we now have a path forward using the same avenue that imposed it — the U.S. Supreme Court. Obergefell was a 5-4 decision. Thanks to the appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Court, we believe there&#8217;s a current majority on the Court to overturn Obergefell. If President Trump is able to appoint yet another justice, we&#8217;d be in an even stronger position.
We call on all conservatives to join with us. We want to organize a coalition of the willing, including officials in key states, to challenge Obergefell and then bring the right case forward to the Supreme Court to overturn it. This will take time and resources, but it&#8217;s time to begin.
I encourage anyone who wants to be part of this exciting new chapter in the marriage battle to contact NOM. We&#8217;re eager to be on offense to restore marriage to our nation&#8217;s laws.
Brian Brown is president of the <a href="https://nationformarriage.org">National Organization for Marriage (NOM)</a>. He may be reached at bbrown@nationformarriage.org.

Husband and Wife

BROWN: The Fight For Marriage Continues

Conservatism

National Organization for Marriage

Same-Sex Marriage

Traditional Marriage

Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, the New York Times journalists who co-authored a new book on Brett Kavanaugh and have come under fire for apparent anti-Kavanaugh bias, are receiving yet more blowback over an adapted passage of their book, this time published by The Atlantic.
In the piece — which, like their much-maligned New York Times piece, is based on an excerpt from their new book — Pogrebin and Kelly claim that potential witnesses to an alleged incident at a party at Yale involving Kavanaugh and accuser Deborah Ramirez remained &#8220;mum&#8221; on the allegation. But as pointed out by The Federalist&#8217;s <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/17/witnesses-defended-kavanaugh-nyt-authors-falsely-claimed-they-were-silent/">Molly Hemingway</a> who co-authored her own Kavanaugh book, that&#8217;s simply not true. Some of the named witnesses have gone on the record to address the allegation — and defended Kavanaugh. The &#8220;major error,&#8221; notes Hemingway, is now the second such error in an excerpt from the Times reporters that has ended up burying exculpatory evidence.
In the new excerpt for The Atlantic titled, &#8220;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/pogrebin-kelly-kavanaugh/598159/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">We Spent 10 Months Investigating Kavanaugh. Here’s What We Found</a>,&#8221; Pogrebin and Kelly write (emphasis added):
<blockquote>Using Martha’s common-sense test, the claims of Deborah Ramirez, while not proven by witnesses, also ring true to us. Ramirez, who was a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s, said he drunkenly thrust his penis at her during a party in their freshman-year dormitory, Lawrance Hall. The people who allegedly witnessed the event—Kavanaugh’s friends Kevin Genda, David Todd, and David White—have kept mum about it. Kavanaugh has denied it. If such an incident had occurred, Kavanaugh said, it would have been the &#8220;talk of campus.&#8221;</blockquote>
&#8220;It is not true that the alleged witnesses kept mum,&#8221; counters Hemingway. &#8220;This is another major error by The New York Times reporters.&#8221;
Hemingway points to the clear evidence that Pogrebin and Kelly appear to be attempting to bury evidence which was provided from the very beginning, in the first report on Ramirez&#8217;s claim. Ronan Farrow and Jane Meyer broke the story in a report for <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/senate-democrats-investigate-a-new-allegation-of-sexual-misconduct-from-the-supreme-court-nominee-brett-kavanaughs-college-years-deborah-ramirez">The New Yorker</a> that makes quite clear that potential witnesses were willing to go on the record about the claim and that they sided with Kavanaugh:
<blockquote>One of the male classmates who Ramirez said egged on Kavanaugh denied any memory of the party. &#8220;I don’t think Brett would flash himself to Debbie, or anyone, for that matter,’&#8221; he said. Asked why he thought Ramirez was making the allegation, he responded, &#8220;I have no idea.&#8221; The other male classmate who Ramirez said was involved in the incident commented, &#8220;I have zero recollection.&#8221;
In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and one other classmate, Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events: &#8220;We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not. The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending. Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.&#8221;</blockquote>
Hemingway notes that the book contains the same &#8220;major error&#8221; as the adapted passage published by The Atlantic.
This new decision to bury exculpatory evidence follows the controversy stirred up by the first excerpt of the book published by the Times over the weekend, which glaringly left out a key piece of information that was included in the book and which the authors blame Times editors for removing.
In a piece published in the Times&#8217; Sunday Review, Pogrebin and Kelly wrote: &#8220;We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.&#8221;
But after being called out by other journalists, including Hemingway and co-author Carrie Severino, for leaving out a key piece of information, the Times issued a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51805/breaking-new-york-times-adds-correction-kavanaugh-ryan-saavedra">correction</a> revealing that the alleged victim declined to be interviewed and her friends &#8220;say that she does not recall the incident&#8221;:
<blockquote>An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book&#8217;s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.</blockquote>
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51883/cbs-real-bombshell-kavanaugh-fords-allies-james-barrett">CBS: ‘Real Bombshell’ On Kavanaugh Is Ford’s Allies Pressuring, Threatening Key Witness</a>

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NYT Reporters Slammed For Another ‘Major Error’: Witnesses DID Defend Kavanaugh

New York Times

It seems that the business of governing is always testy — fractious, even. When a legislative body of any sort acts with unanimity, it is notable.
As reported by the <a href="https://www.unionleader.com/news/education/prayer-will-stay-at-nashua-school-board-meetings/article_30673c73-aa8a-55fc-ab27-eaec67df867a.html">New Hampshire Union Leader</a>, the Nashua, New Hampshire Board of Education (“Nashua BOE”) recently voted 7-0 to retain the practice of offering a prayer prior to its publicly meetings. The unanimous vote is remarkable for an age in which division rules the day.
More remarkable, the Nashua BOE faced stiff opposition from an out-of-state group that routinely complains about the presence of any sort of religion in public. This time, according to the Union Leader, the group sent not one, not two, but multiple letters — “once every six months for the past two years” — in an attempt to bully the Nashua BOE into ending the tradition of praying before a public meeting.
In all likelihood, the members of the Nashua BOE spent not a little time debating the topic. Whether in an open meeting or in the cloakroom, it is quite common to debate a topic — especially a topic as potentially divisive as prayer before public meetings. Regardless, the board members emerged unanimous. They are in good company.
This a common, almost daily practice across the country, and the U.S. Supreme Court has twice legally examined the practice of prayer before public meetings. In 1983, the justices explained in Marsh v. Chambers that the practice of the Nebraska Legislature of paying a chaplain to open its meetings with prayer presented no constitutional issues. Indeed, the Court explained that “the men who wrote the First Amendment Religion Clauses did not view paid legislative chaplains and opening prayers as a violation of that Amendment” and, therefore, neither should any of us.
Several decades later, in Town of Greece v. Galloway, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the Court’s majority, explained that the practice of having volunteers open public meetings in prayer also comports with the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, Justice Kennedy showed an understandable concern for the tone of such prayers. “Prayer that is solemn and respectful in tone, that invites lawmakers to reflect upon shared ideals and common ends before they embark on the fractious business of governing,” he explained, befits the function of such prayers: “[T]o lend gravity to the occasion and reflect values long part of the Nation’s heritage.”
And quite the tradition it is. One would be hard-pressed to find a more longstanding and treasured tradition of our republic. Indeed, Judge Jeffrey Sutton, concurring with a 2017 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that upheld the practice of the Jackson County (MI) Commission’s commissioners themselves offering prayer, noted that such prayers are no recent phenomena:
<blockquote>“For all of American history, such prayers have been allowed, whether invoking Jesus, God, or something else, whether by government-paid chaplains or by the elected officials themselves. And for all of American history, the United States Supreme Court has authorized such prayers. No one doubted the practice for most of our history.”</blockquote>
And no one should doubt it now. Indeed, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in last month’s Fields v. Speaker of the Pa. House of Representatives decision, “the longstanding practice of theistic prayer in the United States” is entitled to a “presumption of constitutionality.”
In other words, the U.S. Supreme Court and its lower courts have repeatedly affirmed the constitutionality of prayer before public meetings — and have even gone so far as to establish a presumption that such practices are constitutional. While some may suggest that a fabled “wall separating church and state” forbids such a practice, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court think otherwise. Not only is the practice of legislative prayer constitutional, but those who would challenge the practice of prayer before public meetings bear the nearly insurmountable burden of disproving the presumptive constitutionality of such a longstanding practice.
Hopefully, the letter-writing gadflies will now leave the Nashua BOE alone. But should those letters turn into a lawsuit, we at <a href="https://firstliberty.org">First Liberty Institute</a> would happily defend the Nashua BOE.
There is a time and place for us to be divided. Matters of policy, questions of bond rates, and decisions over curricula will find vocal division throughout a community and even among the members of the Nashua BOE. Pausing to offer a prayer prior to such discussions need not be one of them.
The Nashua BOE is, therefore, deserving of commendation. They join a long line of legislative bodies, both large and small, that have sought to set a solemn tone before turning to the public’s business.
Well done, Nashua. May others follow your example of civility.
Jeremy Dys (<a href="https://twitter.com/jeremydys">@JeremyDys</a>) is Special Counsel for Litigation and Communication to First Liberty Institute, a non-profit law firm dedicated to defending religious freedom for all. Read more at <a href="https://firstliberty.org">FirstLiberty.org</a>.

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DYS: Yes, Local School Boards Can Pray Before Meetings

Bible

Education

Prayer

On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan breaks down the most recent Kavanaugh accusation published by The New York Times and talks about how quickly it fell apart. Video and partial transcript below: 
This [New York] Times story is an amazing piece of self-destruction. It&#8217;s in keeping with what they&#8217;re doing now, everything is get Trump, everything is destroy conservatives, everything is lump conservatives with Trump and just page after page about how Trump is evil, what a terrible thing he&#8217;s done to us, how we’ll never recover. Never mind the economy, never mind the fact that we&#8217;re not at war, never mind the fact that everything is actually going pretty well.
At The New York Times, Donald Trump is the devil and they cannot stop attacking him, and part of him is, of course, the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. You know, not wishing anything bad on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but very possibly another Supreme Court pick [is] coming up, so they&#8217;re getting all the more hysterical about it.
So a book is going to come out [“The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation”] written by two New York Times reporters. So they run this thing &#8230; and you all remember how they tried to get him with Christine Blasey Ford, [saying] he&#8217;d done this horrible thing when he was 18- or 17- or 16-years old, whatever it was. Now, [the Times] say they&#8217;ve got a shocking new sexual allegation.
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When [Kavanaugh] was at Yale in the &#8217;80s, he was at a party, and I guess the idea is he was naked and some of his pals shoved him into a girl so that his penis touched her hand. This is written by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, and we&#8217;ll get back to them in a minute. …
Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino wrote this wonderful, wonderful book called “Justice On Trial.” I read it, I recommend it highly. It is deeply, deeply researched. All about this attack on Brett Kavanaugh, and where it came from, and the strategies they were using, all this stuff. Here&#8217;s Mollie talking about the way the Times reported this allegation:
<blockquote>HEMINGWAY: So there is this book coming out on Tuesday, it&#8217;s written by two reporters who were actually kind of involved in anti-Kavanaugh efforts, probably the best way to put it. They were reporting on it for The New York Times, they were pulled off of their beats to help, because they both had privileged backgrounds where they had intersected with people who were in the story, and Robin Pogrebin went to Yale with Kavanaugh, she actually roomed with one of the central figures who coordinated anti- Kavanaugh efforts. She lightly discloses that in her book, and now they’re out with a book — and Carrie [Severino] and I have been reading it, I just finished it. They also have an essay where they claim that there was another allegation. Left out of the essay is &#8230; that the claim that was made is actually denied by the alleged victim. They put that in their book, but they didn&#8217;t put that in their essay, which is causing some people to question their journalistic ethics.</blockquote>
This is amazing stuff. They did put an editorial note after 24 hours of enduring the wrath of all humankind. They put in an editorial note mentioning that the woman who is supposed to be at the center of this doesn&#8217;t remember this. She doesn&#8217;t say it happened, she&#8217;s not denying it, she just says she doesn’t remember something like that ever happened, which is pretty amazing [to leave that out].
I mean, that is an amazing piece, and you have to remember the big thing, the big take on this, is why didn&#8217;t the FBI research this? You have to go back and remember that the whole thing was about delaying the Kavanaugh acceptance, delaying putting him on the Court, so that hopefully something magical would happen — they would find that Trump was actually Vladimir Putin in disguise, you know, they would actually get to an election and vote him out of office — something, anything to delay.
So they kept pouring things on, kept masking more and more things, kept moving the goalpost, and finally, the Republicans agreed to let the FBI investigate the two most believable allegations: The Blasey Ford allegation and one other allegation. They investigated those [and] found no proof that they had taken place. It’s obvious nonsense.
Now here&#8217;s Carrie Severino, the other author of the book “Justice On Trial,” talking about the chain, how this piece of intelligence actually becomes a story, [and] how the sources pass it along.
<blockquote>SEVERINO: What&#8217;s so funny about this allegation is the incredibly attenuated nature of it. So what they really have is two Senate staffers who say that Stier told them that he heard from a woman at a party — when &#8230; everyone was maybe drunk — Kavanaugh’s friends pushed him and his genitalia into her. Now what&#8217;s crazy is that this story itself is, I mean if you even followed that, that&#8217;s impressive, it&#8217;s so many links in the chain. And the part that they leave out is that this woman apparently had told her friend that she doesn’t even remember it [and] Stier himself — and the woman are not speaking to Pogrebin and Kelly. So this is a, you know, it&#8217;s not even like third-hand, fourth-hand, account of an incident that, even if it happened as it is described, sounds like it was Kavanaugh&#8217;s friends who were the wrongdoers here. So it is a very bizarre thing to try to hang your hat on, as a new allegation.</blockquote>
On top of which, Stier, who they refer to as this kind of &#8230; well-respected guy — he runs a nonprofit and &#8230; oh, he was a well-respected man — he was also on Bill Clinton&#8217;s legal team when they were defending him against charges of sexual malfeasance with Monica Lewinsky. Stier is on that legal team, and on the other team against him: Brett Kavanaugh.
So they&#8217;ve got these two reporters, one of whom was involved with trying to take down Kavanaugh. They&#8217;ve got a source who isn&#8217;t talking to them, who was on the Bill Clinton team against Brett Kavanaugh. Plus, it wasn&#8217;t even from the source. It was two people, two aides, telling them that the source said that this happened at a party to a woman who doesn&#8217;t remember it. I mean, this is something you scrawl on a bathroom wall — this is not a news story that should make it into some place supposedly as terrific a journalistic venue as The New York Times.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. </a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch “The Andrew Klavan Show” on-demand!</a>

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KLAVAN: The NYT Implodes After Declaring War On Kavanaugh

Media Bias

A new book written by two New York Times journalists, an excerpt of which has sparked a media firestorm and much <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51857/nyt-tries-answer-questions-kavanaugh-report-james-barrett">criticism</a> directed at the paper, contains details that CBS describes as the &#8220;real bombshell&#8221; the Times&#8217; initial report missed. The long-time &#8220;close friend&#8221; of Christine Blasey Ford, who Ford named as a potential witness to the alleged sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh back in high school, not only says she does not believe Ford&#8217;s accusation, but told the FBI that allies of Ford threatened her with a smear campaign to change her story.
Leland Keyser, a long-time &#8220;close friend&#8221; of Ford, is one of four people Ford named as supposedly being at the alleged party where she said Kavanaugh tried to force himself on her. In its report Monday, CBS Evening News notes that with Keyser&#8217;s first public statements on her friend&#8217;s allegations, which she gave in an interview with Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, all four of the people Ford claims were at the party now flatly deny that it ever happened.
As The Daily Wire reported Monday, Keyser also says that Ford&#8217;s allies attempted to pressure her to change the story, telling the FBI that those allies even threatened to mount a smear campaign against her if she didn&#8217;t — a claim previously revealed by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino in their book, &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Trial-Kavanaugh-Confirmation-Supreme/dp/1621579832/ref=asc_df_1621579832/?tag=hyprod-20&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=366299517591&amp;hvpos=1o1&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=12984476754283352462&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvqmt=&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvdvcmdl=&amp;hvlocint=&amp;hvlocphy=1022764&amp;hvtargid=pla-783566544414&amp;psc=1&amp;tag=&amp;ref=&amp;adgrpid=79033899791&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvadid=366299517591&amp;hvpos=1o1&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=12984476754283352462&amp;hvqmt=&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvdvcmdl=&amp;hvlocint=&amp;hvlocphy=1022764&amp;hvtargid=pla-783566544414">Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court</a>.&#8221;
In a tweet Monday promoting the CBS report, CBS&#8217;s Jan Crawford underscored the &#8220;real bombshell&#8221; highighted by the network (h/t <a href="https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2019/09/17/real-bombshell-cbs-news-hits-nyt-kavanaugh-story-focus-witness-tampering/">Ed Morrissey</a>): &#8220;We report tonight the real bombshell: Christine Ford’s close HS friend (who Ford says was at the party when Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her) said Ford’s story is not believable and told the FBI Ford’s allies pressured her, threatened her with a smear campaign to say otherwise.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">A new sexual misconduct allegation against SCOTUS Justice Brett Kavanaugh fueled impeachment calls from Democratic presidential candidates; former Yale classmates claim he exposed himself to a woman at a college party, <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@nytimes</a> reports.
Here&#8217;s <a href="https://twitter.com/JanCBS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JanCBS</a> <a href="https://t.co/HcfNV8jqzT">https://t.co/HcfNV8jqzT</a> <a href="https://t.co/999JwfsIMz">pic.twitter.com/999JwfsIMz</a>
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) <a href="https://twitter.com/CBSEveningNews/status/1173729651199549446?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">We report tonight the real bombshell: Christine Ford’s close HS friend (who Ford says was at the party when Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her) said Ford’s story is not believable and told the FBI Ford’s allies pressured her, threatened her with a smear campaign to say otherwise <a href="https://t.co/GQhBTXHcze">https://t.co/GQhBTXHcze</a>
— Jan Crawford (@JanCBS) <a href="https://twitter.com/JanCBS/status/1173781504767483905?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 17, 2019</a></blockquote>
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As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51819/son-witness-who-denied-blasey-fords-kavanaugh-amanda-prestigiacomo">The Daily Wire</a> reported Monday, Hemingway and Severino&#8217;s book, which was published in July but largely ignored by the media, unlike the new Times reporters&#8217; book, referenced the alleged attempt to pressure Keyser. In a report for The Federalist Monday, <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/15/new-book-christine-blasey-fords-friend-leland-keyser-doesnt-believe/">Hemingway</a> summarized the revelations in their book that the Times reporters confirmed and elaborated upon:
<blockquote>The authors also acknowledge what had previously been reported in &#8220;Justice on Trial,&#8221; about the efforts of mutual friends to get her to change her testimony to be more supportive of Blasey Ford. The reporters say that some of Blasey Ford’s friends “had grown frustrated with Keyser. Her comments about the alleged Kavanaugh incident had been too limited, some of them felt, and did not help their friend&#8217;s case. Surely, given what a close friend Keyser had been, she could say more to substantiate Ford’s testimony and general veracity, even if she could not corroborate Ford’s more specific memories.&#8221;
A group text was formed in which friends such as Cheryl Amitay and Lulu Gonella discussed how to get her to say something more helpful to the cause. An unnamed man on the text suggested that they defame her as an addict. Keyser has been in recovery for some time, as her friends know and as has previously been reported.
Amitay answered, &#8220;Leland is a major stumbling block.&#8221; While asserting she didn&#8217;t want her to make anything up out of whole cloth, she offered ideas for things that could sound supportive of Ford’s story, such as that she’d been in similar situations with Blasey Ford that summer.
&#8220;I was told behind the scenes that certain things could be spread about me if I didn&#8217;t comply,&#8221; Keyser told the reporters, a stunning admission of the pressure to which she was subjected to by Blasey Ford’s allies.</blockquote>
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51819/son-witness-who-denied-blasey-fords-kavanaugh-amanda-prestigiacomo">Son Of ‘Witness’ Who Denied Blasey Ford’s Kavanaugh Assault Claim Speaks Out: Pressured To Lie By Blasey Ford Allies</a>
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CBS: ‘Real Bombshell’ On Kavanaugh Is Ford’s Allies Pressuring, Threatening Key Witness

Christine Blasey Ford

On perhaps no cultural issue has the Right more clearly waved the white flag than it has on the issue of marriage. The National Organization for Marriage, which for years existed as the leading organization pushing back against the homosexual rights movement&#8217;s ahistorical revisionism and redefining of marriage, is now hard-pressed to galvanize a grassroots movement in favor of restoring conjugal marriage. Never mind that the ludicrous 2015 U.S. Supreme Court case that bastardized the Fourteenth Amendment in an astonishing black-robed power grab to constitutionalize same-sex nuptials and impose it upon a divided citizenry, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf">Obergefell v. Hodges</a>, had all the jurisprudential heft of the <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/06/15235/">infamous Dred Scott diktat</a>. Rare is the social conservative, these days, who seems enthused about trying to chip away at Obergefell&#8216;s (il)legal foundation; most pro-conjugal marriage social conservatives resist the temptation to go on the offensive and are instead content to defensively crouch and demand <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47964/hammer-conservatives-must-make-their-arguments-josh-hammer">values-neutral pluralistic religious liberty &#8220;tolerance.&#8221;</a>
But such a defensive posture is unwarranted and, indeed, ultimately unjustifiable. Much like our <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47249/hammer-yes-alabama-legislature-right-openly-defy-josh-hammer">efforts to protect the unborn</a> from Roe v. Wade&#8216;s legal regime of state-sanctioned genocide of an entire sub-class of human beings, marriage as a socially defined one-man/one-woman institution is worth fighting for in both the cultural and legal arena. America was quite conscientiously founded under the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript">natural law tradition</a>, and there is no more natural biological fact than the reality that every child born in this Earth is born to one (non-trans) mother and one (non-trans) father. And to the extent there is nascent social science data on the question of outcomes for the children of heterosexual and homosexual parents, that data is, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/13/there-is-no-harm-caused-by-same-sex-parenting-studies-suggesting-otherwise-are-skewed">at best for the Left</a>, a <a href="https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/the-regnerus-study-social-science-new-family-structures-met-intolerance">mixed bag</a>. We will know much more in future decades, as our grand and godless social experiment in marriage revisionism plays out in real-time, but there is already <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/04/16760/">no shortage of warning signs</a> for the revisionists.
The phenomenon of the broader Right&#8217;s capitulation on the marriage issue has been exacerbated by our debilitating <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49913/hammer-conservatives-how-much-longer-are-you-josh-hammer">crisis of judicial supremacy</a> — the erroneous and anti-constitutional notion that the idiosyncratic ukases of our unelected black-robed masters in what Alexander Hamilton called the <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed78.asp">&#8220;least dangerous&#8221; branch</a> ought to be treated not merely as ad hoc legal judgments, but as broader political rulings that &#8220;bind&#8221; the populace. The danger of judicial supremacy cannot be exaggerated: How are <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/preamble">We the People</a> to remain constantly vigilant against tyranny if that tyranny comes not in the form of legislators and executives who can be held accountable at the ballot box, but in the form of judicial usurpers who accomplish with the stroke of a pen what the cultural Left could not otherwise accomplish over decades?
The Right cannot unilaterally disarm in the culture war. The Left makes overt moral argumentation to advance a compelling narrative as to their (dystopian, pagan, and positively harrowing) vision of the good life. Why on Earth are <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47964/hammer-conservatives-must-make-their-arguments-josh-hammer">we on the Right not doing the same</a>, as New York Post Op-Ed Editor Sohrab Ahmari <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47839/hammer-limited-defense-sohrab-ahmaris-assault-josh-hammer">asked earlier this year</a> of National Review Senior Writer David French? In what world does retreating to pleas for Anglo-American common law procedural niceties suffice, given the gravity of the cultural task at hand and the totalitarian nature of the contemporary Left?
It seems that longtime Straussian jurisprudential luminary Hadley Arkes agrees, based on a recent <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/does-the-right-dare-fight/">disquisition</a> published at the indispensable <a href="https://americanmind.org">American Mind</a> online journal. Arkes urges conservatives to aggressively wage the culture war on at least four issues: Marriage, sexual orientation, transgenderism, and abortion. But it is Arkes&#8217; advice on marriage that is most provocative — and which deserves the most careful attention for congressional lawmakers due to its potential to publicly clarify the obvious <a href="https://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/the-wild-ideas-of-social-conservatives/">slippery slope</a> upon which the marriage revisionists have so <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/george-gay-marriage/index.html">unabashedly embarked</a> (emphasis added):
<blockquote>What I have in mind is the proposal for a Defense of Monogamous Marriage Act (DOMMA). That would simply enact another version of the Defense of Marriage Act, but with these components: That neither the federal government nor the states would be obliged to recognize as a &#8220;marriage&#8221; a union of more than two people. That proposal made its way to the staff of Paul Ryan when he was Speaker in the last Congress, and I was told that the Speaker would make a decision on bringing the matter to the floor if a sponsor could be found for the bill.
For the leadership the prospect was intriguing, for they couldn&#8217;t guess how Democrats would vote on such a bill. On the one hand, the Democrats don&#8217;t want to come out explicitly for polygamy, but on the other they are reflexively opposed to virtually any measure that would cast a moral judgment on the way that people act out their sexuality. As for the courts, the Supreme Court could not strike down this bill without virtually licensing polygamy. In the meantime, we would establish — in the face of Justice Kennedy&#8217;s dubiety — that Congress does indeed have the authority legislate on this subject of marriage.
There were two conservative congressmen who were willing to consider acting as sponsors of the bill, but both men had other troubles of their own and they didn&#8217;t survive their primaries. Still, the proposal is as sound and as provocative as it ever was in testing the constitutional argument. What remains is finding the conservative congressman with the nerve to introduce it.</blockquote>
I have discussed over the years the marriage debate with many, many people — likely more supporters than opponents of same-sex marriage. I have never once heard an intellectually defensible rationale articulated as to why, once the biological and conjugal element is eliminated from the marriage definition, the definition must be capped at solely two individuals. After all, the only reason we God arrived at two in the first place is because it takes precisely one man and one woman to procreate.
The Defense of Monogamous Marriage Act (DOMMA) is a brilliant piece of legislative mischief that would force Democrats to directly confront the societal hell that they have begun the process of unleashing. And it will force Democrats to ponder the reality that perhaps not all sexual desires and proclivities ought to be treated equally under the law. Perhaps love does not necessarily always &#8220;equal&#8221; love. The DOMMA would also nudge back against the judicial supremacist paradigm and represent a salutary attempt by Congress to check the judiciary. After all, as James Madison told us in <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp">The Federalist No. 51</a>, our constitutional structure revolves around the notion that &#8220;[a]mbition must be made to counteract ambition.&#8221;
All we need is a few culture-warring congressmen to take the legislative initiative. Any takers?

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HAMMER: CULTURE WAR: Conservatives In Congress Should Push A ‘Defense Of Monogamous Marriage Act’

Congress

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House Republicans

The latest <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nyt-reporters-uncover-new-sexual-misconduct-claim-kavanaugh_n_5d7d7ccde4b077dcbd5f6e7c?xf">allegation</a> against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was obviously bogus from the start. As you&#8217;ve probably heard by now — you couldn&#8217;t help but hear it, with the way the media have been trumpeting the story — a guy named Max Stier claimed he saw &#8220;Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.&#8221; That claim is contained in what the Left assures us is a &#8220;bombshell&#8221; report in The New York Times.
The bombshell report has, predictably, fallen apart. As it turns out, Stier is a Clinton operative with an obvious partisan agenda. The &#8220;victim&#8221; in the case has no memory of any such incident taking place. The Times omitted that last fact from its original report and has since had to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51805/breaking-new-york-times-adds-correction-kavanaugh-ryan-saavedra">issue</a> an embarrassing &#8220;correction.&#8221; It appears that &#8220;Believe Women&#8221; has morphed suddenly into &#8220;Believe Men Who Tell Stories About Things That Supposedly Happened To Women At College Parties 30 Years Ago.&#8221; That slogan just doesn&#8217;t have the same ring to it, in my opinion.
But — and here&#8217;s the craziest thing about the latest Kavanaugh-related hysteria — the fact that the story is almost certainly false is nearly irrelevant. The story itself was already so strange, ambiguous, and petty that it wouldn&#8217;t matter even if it were true. On the weird and ambiguous front, how exactly could Kavanaugh&#8217;s friends force his penis into the hand of a female student? I mean, logistically, how does this work? Did they drag the poor girl over to Kavanaugh&#8217;s naked member and force her to touch it while she screamed out in protest? Presumably not, especially if she doesn&#8217;t remember it. Or did the female student happen to have her hand in close proximity to Kavanaugh&#8217;s penis, enabling his friends to initiate this contact with a quick shove? If that was the case, it would seem that Kavanaugh is as much a victim of &#8220;sexual assault&#8221; as the girl. And, at any rate, why would she have her hand in that area to begin with?
What we&#8217;re left with is a bizarre (and, incidentally, false) story about some weird, utterly inconsequential incident at a drunken frat party three decades ago. The &#8220;bombshell&#8221; — which has prompted renewed calls for Kavanaugh&#8217;s impeachment and provoked performative outrage from millions of leftists — is a big, fat nothing, whether it&#8217;s true or not. And it isn&#8217;t true.
The media tell us with great concern and disappointment that Stier reported his story to the FBI but the FBI &#8220;didn&#8217;t investigate.&#8221; Of course they didn&#8217;t. How would they investigate a penis being pushed into someone&#8217;s hand in the 1980s? And why would the FBI investigate it? Is indecent exposure at a college party a federal crime? If so, the FBI has a lot of work to do. Literally every college party that has occurred in the last century has just become a federal crime scene.
If we&#8217;re being unreasonably generous, we might accept that the Democrats didn&#8217;t know about the crucial detail the Times left out when it ran with the story over the weekend — and that they called for Kavanaugh&#8217;s impeachment because of it. But they certainly did know that the story is dumb and irrelevant. Yet they amplified it anyway, and labeled it &#8220;sexual assault&#8221; anyway, because the ends always justify the means. From the Left&#8217;s point of view, Kavanaugh may not be a literal rapist, but he is guilty of thought crimes, which is even worse. He deserves to be destroyed by sexual assault claims — even false sexual assault claims — because he has committed the underlying sin of disagreeing with them on political and ideological issues. He &#8220;threatens their rights&#8221; — specifically, the right to murder their unborn — and so he must be annihilated. One way or another.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51819/son-witness-who-denied-blasey-fords-kavanaugh-amanda-prestigiacomo">Son Of ‘Witness’ Who Denied Blasey Ford’s Kavanaugh Assault Claim Speaks Out: Pressured To Lie By Blasey Ford Allies</a>

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WALSH: The Latest Allegation Against Brett Kavanaugh Is Obviously Bogus. But It Wouldn’t Matter Anyway.

The following is satirical.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has set off a bombshell with a new report of completely unsubstantiated rumors of yet another absurd sexual allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The report of the factually empty gossip was such a bombshell that it blew several Times reporters out of the newsroom and into a vast darkness of journalistic malfeasance where they floated desolate in a soul-destroying moral vacuum along with most of the Times&#8217; editorial staff.
According to the allegations, someone said someone said something &#8216;bout something else someone might have said about Justice Kavanaugh. No, wait, sorry, that&#8217;s a James Taylor song. No, wait, that&#8217;s actually also The New York Times piece, although the Times did not supply the lilting melody or soulful blues-slash-country vocal stylings of Mr. Taylor at his extraordinary artistic peak.
The Times story alleges &#8212; and I am not making this up &#8212; that some guy saw Kavanaugh&#8217;s friends push Kavanaugh&#8217;s penis into the hand of a woman at a party at Yale. The penis was later returned to Mr. Kavanaugh by his friends who said they had only borrowed it as a prank. The allegation was alleged in an alleged book by some alleged reporters for the Times, an alleged newspaper. But in the book, the woman in question says she has no memory of the incident &#8212; a fact that was left out of the original Times story, which is both an astounding act of corrupt journalistic malpractice and standard operating procedure at the Times.
Democrats immediately reacted to the fact-free third-hand rumors by demanding Kavanaugh&#8217;s impeachment. In a statement by a female make-believe Indian presidential candidate, who asked to remain anonymous while she was degrading herself by spreading baseless calumnies, &#8220;This unfounded slur is just one more unfounded slur to add to the pile of unfounded slurs which magically become founded once you pile them up high enough.&#8221;
Mobs of hysterical leftist females immediately gathered outside the Supreme Court shrieking &#8220;Believe all women,&#8221; while simultaneously making that utterly impossible.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51808/trump-check-out-what-nyt-just-had-do-after-james-barrett">Trump: Check Out What NYT Just Had To Do After &#8216;Assaulting&#8217; Kavanaugh With Smear Report</a>

Brent Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation

BOMBSHELL: No, Sorry, Just Another Baseless Slur Against Kavanaugh [Satire]

Satire

Brett Kavanaugh was accused of trying to rape Christine Blasey Ford at a party when she was 15 and he 17 sometime in the 1980s (she doesn&#8217;t remember what year). Ford said that the boozy party at a home near Columbia Country Club outside Washington, D.C., was attended by five people: herself, Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, Patrick Smyth, and Leland Keyser.
When the attempted rape accusation emerged during his Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination to join the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh &#8220;categorically and unequivocally&#8221; denied the allegation. Judge, a longtime friend of Kavanaugh&#8217;s, also denied the charge.
Smyth, meanwhile, said he never attended the party.
That left Keyser as the sole possible corroboration for Ford&#8217;s story. But through her attorneys, Keyser said at the time that she did not know Kavanaugh and had no memory of the party nor any attempted sexual assault, shattering Ford&#8217;s claim. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/lawyers-for-christine-blasey-ford-say-she-has-accepted-senate-judiciary-committees-request-to-testify-against-kavanaugh/2018/09/22/e8199c6a-be8f-11e8-8792-78719177250f_story.html?noredirect=on">The Washington Post</a>, though, wrote in September 2018 that &#8220;she believes Ford&#8217;s assertions.&#8221;
But a new book now says that Keyser doesn&#8217;t believe Ford&#8217;s story.
&#8220;Buried at the end of their new book &#8216;The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,&#8217; reporters Robin Pogebrin and Kate Kelly quietly admit that Christine Blasey Ford’s lifelong friend Leland Keyser did not believe her friend&#8217;s tale of a sexual assault at a party they both supposedly attended. Keyser was named by Ford as a witness, one of four who denied any knowledge of the event in question,&#8221; reports <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/15/new-book-christine-blasey-fords-friend-leland-keyser-doesnt-believe/#.XX7SCNWkVfg.twitter">The Federalist</a>, which got an advance copy of the book.
<blockquote>The book offers no evidence in support of the allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford, but, they write, their &#8220;gut reaction&#8221; was that her allegations &#8220;rang true.&#8221;
Their &#8220;gut&#8221; instinct was based on the fact that Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh grew up in the same rough area and she had dated one of his friends. Further, Leland Keyser had gone out on a date — maybe even two dates, they&#8217;re not sure — with a friend of Kavanaugh&#8217;s. &#8220;None of that means that Ford was, in fact, assaulted by Kavanaugh,&#8221; they write, &#8220;But it does mean that she has a baseline level of credibility as an accuser.&#8221; It is unclear what they mean.</blockquote>
The whole tale falls apart at the end of the book, Mollie Hemingway writes. There, the authors say: &#8220;We spoke multiple times to Keyser, who also said that she didn&#8217;t recall that get-together or any others like it. In fact, she challenged Ford&#8217;s accuracy. &#8216;I don&#8217;t have any confidence in the story.'&#8221;
In her own book, &#8220;Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court,&#8221; Hemingway details the pressure applied on Keyser to get her to back up Ford&#8217;s tale. The new book does so, too, saying Ford&#8217;s friends &#8220;had grown frustrated with Keyser. Her comments about the alleged Kavanaugh incident had been too limited, some of them felt, and did not help their friend&#8217;s case. Surely, given what a close friend Keyser had been, she could say more to substantiate Ford’s testimony and general veracity, even if she could not corroborate Ford&#8217;s more specific memories.&#8221;
The pressure grew intense. &#8220;I was told behind the scenes that certain things could be spread about me if I didn&#8217;t comply,&#8221; Keyser told the authors.
And the new book delves into one bizarre aspect of Ford&#8217;s claim: How she got home after she abruptly left the party, which was miles away from her house.
<blockquote>As previously reported in &#8220;Justice on Trial,&#8221; Keyser continues to think about the story in which she was supposed to have played a part. She has both &#8220;logistical and character-driven&#8221; problems with it. Focusing on one of the angles that many women had trouble believing, she says, &#8220;It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she&#8217;s going to get home.&#8221;
The authors previously note that Blasey Ford suggested that Keyser might have driven her home, which they do not note is a change from her claim that she does not know how she got home. Keyser also reflects that the get-togethers of their youth were not like the one Ford described. She adds, &#8220;I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.&#8221;</blockquote>
Ford, whose story was never corroborated, collected more than $1 million from a GoFundMe page. In a sad illustration of today&#8217;s world, Keyser has collected just $7,865, even though, as <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-leland-keyser">her page notes</a>, she &#8220;stood up and did what was right when she had everything to lose and nothing to gain.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51805/breaking-new-york-times-adds-correction-kavanaugh-ryan-saavedra">New York Times Adds Correction To Kavanaugh Smear Article</a>

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Christine Blasey Ford’s Friend Doesn’t Believe Her On Kavanaugh Accusation, Says New Book

The New York Times was forced to issue a significant <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51805/breaking-new-york-times-adds-correction-kavanaugh-ryan-saavedra">correction</a> Sunday to its &#8220;bombshell&#8221; report on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after being called out by other journalists for excluding exculpatory evidence from their initial report. President Trump, who blasted the initial report, unloaded on the paper again early Monday, pointing to the forced correction and its &#8220;assault&#8221; on the conservative justice as another example of how the left-leaning mainstream is &#8220;working with their partner, the Dems,&#8221; to push a political agenda rather than reporting the facts.
On Saturday, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/sunday-review/brett-kavanaugh-deborah-ramirez-yale.html">The New York Times</a> published a report on Kavanaugh accuser Deborah Ramirez&#8217;s &#8220;Yale experience&#8221; which has inspired outrage from Democrats and calls from the Left for the impeachment of Kavanaugh. In the report, the Times cites former classmate, Max Stier, who told the Times&#8217; Kate Kelly and Robin Pogebrin, who are writing a book about Kavanaugh&#8217;s accusers, that Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and exposed himself at a college party while other classmates supposedly grabbed Kavanaugh&#8217;s penis and pushed it into the hand of a female victim.
&#8220;A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student,&#8221; the Times reports. &#8220;Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly.&#8221;
After being called out for leaving out key information from the story, the Times was forced to issue a correction on Sunday acknowledging that the alleged female victim, Tracy Harmon, declined to be interviewed and her friends &#8220;say that she does not recall the incident.&#8221;
&#8220;An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book&#8217;s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party,&#8221; the Times says in the correction. &#8220;The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.&#8221; The text of the report now notes that &#8220;the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.&#8221;
In response, Trump posted a series of tweets Monday slamming the Times and the rest of the &#8220;horrible&#8221; people in the &#8220;lamestream media&#8221; for letting their agenda trample their journalistic integrity.
&#8220;&#8216;The New York Times walks back report on Kavanaugh assault claim,&#8221;&#8216; Trump tweeted, citing &#8220;Fox and Friends.&#8221; &#8220;The one who is actually being assaulted is Justice Kavanaugh — Assaulted by lies and Fake News!&#8221; he added. &#8220;This is all about the LameStream Media working with their partner, the Dems.&#8221;
Trump then quoted Dan Bongino: &#8220;What’s happening to Justice Kavanaugh is a disgrace. This guy is not a good man, he is a great man. He has to go to his church with his family while these terrible reports are being written about him, a disgrace!&#8221;
The president then added a follow-up tweet slamming the &#8220;horrible people&#8221; in the media and, again, urging Kavanaugh to sue. &#8220;Just Out: &#8216;Kavanaugh accuser doesn&#8217;t recall incident.&#8217; @foxandfriends DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT THESE HORRIBLE PEOPLE WILL DO OR SAY. They are looking to destroy, and influence his opinions — but played the game badly,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;They should be sued!&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">“The New York Times walks back report on Kavanaugh assault claim.” <a href="https://twitter.com/foxandfriends?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@foxandfriends</a> The one who is actually being assaulted is Justice Kavanaugh &#8211; Assaulted by lies and Fake News! This is all about the LameStream Media working with their partner, the Dems.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1173568871481171974?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">“What’s happening to Justice Kavanaugh is a disgrace. This guy is not a good man, he is a great man. He has to go to his church with his family while these terrible reports are being written about him, a disgrace!” Dan Bongino <a href="https://twitter.com/foxandfriends?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@foxandfriends</a>
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1173571513418756098?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">Just Out: “Kavanaugh accuser doesn’t recall incident.” <a href="https://twitter.com/foxandfriends?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@foxandfriends</a> DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT THESE HORRIBLE PEOPLE WILL DO OR SAY. They are looking to destroy, and influence his opinions &#8211; but played the game badly. They should be sued!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1173576122811985920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
As more reports pointing out the Times&#8217; failure to disclose the denial of the alleged victim began to surface on Sunday, Trump encouraged Kavanaugh to sue the paper for defamation.
&#8220;Brett Kavanaugh should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue,&#8221; Trump tweeted Sunday. &#8220;The lies being told about him are unbelievable. False Accusations without recrimination. When does it stop? They are trying to influence his opinions. Can&#8217;t let that happen!&#8221;
&#8220;Can’t let Brett Kavanaugh give Radical Left Democrat (Liberal Plus) Opinions based on threats of Impeaching him over made up stories (sound familiar?), false allegations, and lies,&#8221; Trump added. &#8220;This is the game they play. Fake and Corrupt News is working overtime! #ProtectKavanaugh.&#8221;
Among those who called out the Times for neglecting to include key information is JCN&#8217;s Carrie Severino, who tweeted early Sunday, &#8220;This is the blockbuster &#8216;new allegation&#8217; against Kavanaugh. Except it&#8217;s not actually new. It was shopped to Senate Democrats at the time and they apparently found it impossible to nail down, so they ignored it — the same Senators who found the &#8216;rape boat&#8217; allegations plausible.&#8221;
&#8220;Neither do Kelly and Pogrebin nail it down. Not only does the alleged victim not confirm the story, she is reported to be denying it,&#8221; Severino added. &#8220;(Their description of Stier as a &#8216;respected thought leader&#8217; and BK classmate overlooks another time his paths crossed Kavanaugh&#8217;s: he was a member of Bill Clinton&#8217;s defense team back during the Lewinsky investigation.)&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">This is the blockbuster &#8220;new allegation&#8221; against Kavanaugh. Except it&#8217;s not actually new. It was shopped to Senate Democrats at the time and they apparently found it impossible to nail down, so they ignored it &#8211; the same Senators who found the &#8220;rape boat&#8221; allegations plausible. <a href="https://t.co/0183DKr0q2">pic.twitter.com/0183DKr0q2</a>
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) <a href="https://twitter.com/JCNSeverino/status/1173217732034273281?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">Neither do Kelly and Pogrebin nail it down. Not only does the alleged victim not confirm the story, she is reported to be denying it.
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) <a href="https://twitter.com/JCNSeverino/status/1173218085102333952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">(Their description of Stier as a &#8220;respected thought leader&#8221; and BK classmate overlooks another time his paths crossed Kavanaugh&#8217;s: he was a member of Bill Clinton&#8217;s defense team back during the Lewinsky investigation.)
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) <a href="https://twitter.com/JCNSeverino/status/1173220013639118848?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Related: 
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51801/new-york-times-deletes-tweet-about-brett-amanda-prestigiacomo">New York Times Deletes Tweet About Brett Kavanaugh’s ‘Penis’</a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50775/trump-nyt-just-admitted-what-ive-been-saying-all-james-barrett">Trump: NYT Just Admitted What I’ve Been Saying All Along About Their Anti-Trump Agenda</a>
This article has been revised for clarity.

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Trump: Check Out What NYT Just Had To Do After ‘Assaulting’ Kavanaugh With Smear Report

Donald Trump

Thomas Fahr Steyer, a California-based billionaire and leftist activist focusing on environmental issues, is a candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Steyer, a longtime leftist philanthropist and prolific donor to Democratic candidates and causes, is by far the wealthiest candidate in the 2020 Democratic field. Steyer&#8217;s political activism has focused disproportionately on environmentalism and global warming/climate change issues, although he has the political profile of an across-the-board, full-spectrum progressive/leftist. As the most recent entrant into the 2020 Democratic presidential field, he does not yet register in <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/democratic_nomination_polls/">current polling for the nomination</a>.
Steyer, who has a bachelor degree from Yale University and a MBA from Stanford University, is the founder of San Francisco-based hedge fund Farallon Capital and the co-founder of Oakland-based Beneficial State Bank. In 2012, Steyer stepped down from Farallon in order to focus more of his time on environmentalist/alternative energy advocacy. In addition to his involvement with Beneficial State Bank, which focuses on community development, Steyer has been involved with other leftist philanthropic causes — including his <a href="http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Tom-Steyer-says-effort-to-end-inequality-isn-t-6438690.php">2015 founding</a> of the Fair Shake Commission on Income Inequality and Middle Class Opportunity, which promotes reducing income inequality. But above all, Steyer has spent more time and resources on environmentalist activism. In 2013, for example, Steyer founded NextGen America, an environmentalist nonprofit and political action committee.
Steyer, who would become the first president with a Jewish parent if successfully elected, is married and has four children. He has an <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/thomas-steyer/">estimated net worth</a> of $1.6 billion, and has committed self-funding his 2020 presidential bid to the tune of <a href="https://time.com/5623149/tom-steyer-presidential-campaign/">$100 million</a>.
Electoral History: Steyer has never sought political office prior to his current campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. However, he has a lengthy history of involvement in partisan Democratic causes. Steyer has been a prolific fundraiser for many leading Democrats over the past few decades, including for Barack Obama in 2008. Steyer also spoke at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and reportedly considered a 2018 run for California governor.
On The Issues: Perhaps more so than any of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, Steyer&#8217;s candidacy revolves around one core issue: Environmentalism. He has made global warming prevention, opposition to the oil and natural gas industries, and a concomitant greater government role in investing in alternative energy sources the central tenets of his public activist profile. Steyer has a less prolific track record and history of commentary on other issues, but all available evidences points toward his being an across-the-board, full-spectrum progressive/leftist. For example, his 2020 campaign <a href="https://www.tomsteyer.com/about-tom/">website</a> also touts his work in &#8220;promot[ing] social justice and increas[ing] participation in our democracy through voter registration and grassroots organizing.&#8221;
Constitution: Steyer has a very thin public record of commenting on legal and judicial issues. He has, however, been a prominent advocate for impeaching President Donald Trump. Steyer has stated that he opposes Citizens United v. F.E.C., the U.S. Supreme Court&#8217;s landmark 2010 political speech-affirming case. He also <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/12/megadonor-steyer-abortion-rights-candidates-241563">supports</a> Roe v. Wade, thus indicating a belief in the so-called constitutional &#8220;right to privacy&#8221; and &#8220;right to abortion.&#8221; Steyer has suggested sympathy for gun control measures that would undermine Americans&#8217; Second Amendment rights, and he also supports a robust role for the federal government in economic regulation that is consistent with mainstream legal progressivism.
Economy: Steyer supports raising personal taxes and strongly opposed President Trump&#8217;s 2017 tax cut law. In his 2020 campaign announcement video, Steyer <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-does-tom-steyer-believe-where-the-candidate-stands-on-6-issues">lamented</a> how corporations have an &#8220;unlimited ability to participate in politics, [which] will skew everything because they only care about profits.&#8221; His anti-corporation message is also decidedly populist, as Steyer has also <a href="https://www.axios.com/tom-steyer-on-the-issues-in-under-500-words-2020-presidential-election-2e5a747a-b6bf-459d-a581-e7d1efcd75bd.html">said</a> that &#8220;the only way for us to solve the urgent problems facing our country is to loosen the stranglehold that corporations have over our politicians and return political power to the American people.&#8221; Like many of his 2020 Democratic rivals, Steyer also <a href="https://www.latimes.com/la-pol-sac-essential-poli-tom-steyer-praises-minimum-wage-hike-1459196428-htmlstory.html">supports</a> raising the federal minimum wage. Steyer, though a billionaire, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/12/this-billionaire-wants-trump-to-raise-his-taxes.html">vocally opposes</a> income inequality.
Health Care: Steyer <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/tom-steyer-2020-democrats/540357/">supports</a> &#8220;Medicare for All,&#8221; which would effectively amount to a single-payer health insurance system and a de facto governmental takeover of health insurance and imposition of socialized medicine in America. He <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-does-tom-steyer-believe-where-the-candidate-stands-on-6-issues">has been critical</a> of the perceived corporate greed of large pharmaceutical companies.
Immigration: Steyer has been harshly critical of the Trump administration&#8217;s attempts to secure our border amidst a hitherto unprecedented influx there of Central American migrants. Steyer <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/392482-billionaire-steyer-to-invest-1-million-to-help-immigrants-fight">donated</a> last year to leftist/open-borders legal groups at the southern border working to assist illegal aliens facing deportation. He <a href="https://twitter.com/TomSteyer/status/1146079566374457344">addresses</a> illegal immigration in starkly pro-illegal alien — and not rule-of-law — terminology. Steyer appears to <a href="https://nextgenamerica.org/issues/immigration/">support</a> a pathway to citizenship for much of America&#8217;s illegal alien populace.
Foreign Policy: Steyer has a thin track record on foreign policy, although he <a href="https://twitter.com/TomSteyer/status/1005947721361121281?s=20">has been critical</a> of President Trump&#8217;s foreign policy approach. He has also taken the standard leftist approach to Special Counsel Bob Mueller&#8217;s now-infamous report: <a href="https://www.needtoimpeach.com/obstruction-of-justice/">Accusing</a> President Trump of obstruction of justice.
Abortion: Steyer is <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Thomas_Steyer">emphatically pro-abortion</a>.
Guns: Steyer has founded organizations have <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Thomas_Steyer">worked closely</a>, at times, with anti-Second Amendment organizations. He is largely seen as sympathetic to gun control initiatives.

Where Does Tom Steyer Stand On The Issues? Here’s Everything You Need To Know.

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