Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Highlights and ("Low" Lights) from Day 1 of Kavanaugh Hearing

Today was the first day of the confirmation hearings for the nomination to the Supreme Court of current D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  The hearing started inauspiciously, as both Democratic senators and protesters in the room interrupted Chairman Chuck Grassley as he convened the hearing. To their credit, Senators Leahy and Feinstein did not join in the breach of order but rather looked uncomfortable at their colleagues' indecorous behavior.


Chairman Grassley was very patient with the repeated interruptions and responded to them, before finally beginning his actual opening statement over an hour after the hearing started:


 After the Chairman and Ranking Member finally gave their opening statements, the other committee members gave their "10-minute" statements.  Chairman Grassley graciously allowed senators to go significantly over their allotted time, and the Democratic members of the committee greatly abused this courtesy with lengthy speeches.




 Sen. Sasse gave an excellent civics and history lesson about how the distortion of the separation of powers under the Constitution has led us to the point where Supreme Court nominations are so contentious:

After joking that he had a 12-minute preamble followed by an 18-minute opening statement (as Sen. Booker did immediately preceding him), Sen. Tillis pointed out that the Democratic senators could use the hearing as a valuable opportunity to engage in a legitimate debate:

 Both Senators Booker and Harris were clearly on the presidential campaign trail, giving stump speeches meant to appeal to the liberal Democratic base, with Sen. Harris going so far as to claim that Judge Kavanaugh's entire career has been driven by partisanship:

Sen. Graham concluded with a strong statement calling out the Democrats for their hypocrisy:


Then the hearing moved to introducing Judge Kavanaugh and his opening statement:




The hearing will resume tomorrow at 9:30 and can be watched live here.  It is scheduled to last through Friday.  The RNLA will live tweet the hearing each day.  
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Friday, August 31, 2018

Weintraub's Enforcement Votes Exhibit Bias Against Trump and Republicans

(This is the third in a series of five posts on the demonstrated bias of Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub.  The first installment is here, the second installment is here, and the last installments will be posted in the next few days.)

 Commissioner Weintraub's Enforcement Votes Exhibit Bias Against President Trump

Commissioner Weintraub's votes in recent enforcement matters also have raised eyebrows because she has rejected FEC General Counsel recommendations to dismiss matters and treated President Trump differently than she treated President Obama.

 In a case, Matter Under Review 7244, where a complaint alleged that President Trump's Inaugural Committee incorrectly reported the addresses of a handful of donors out of many thousands of donors, errors had been corrected in amended reports.  In 2009 and 2013, the Obama Inaugural Committee filed amended reports to clear up errors, and the Commission took no enforcement action.  The Obama campaign also had taken in upwards of millions of dollars from foreign addresses, but claimed that it refunded those contributions.  In Obama cases, Weintraub voted to dismiss complaints and not even investigate.  Accordingly, the FEC General Counsel recommended dismissal of the Trump Inaugural Committee.  But Weintraub voted against dismissal.  She rejected her own General Counsel's recommendation, apparently because President Trump will face more severe enforcement than President Obama received. 

In another case, Matter Under Review 7100, a complaint alleged that Donald Trump made personal use of his campaign's funds by promoting Trump Organization products and properties by using them for campaign events.  The law allows candidates to use corporate resources so long as they pay a fair market price for use of the resources.  Accordingly, Trump paid for all uses of corporate resources. And most of the money in Trump's campaign fund was contributed by Donald Trump himself -- so improper personal use was hardly a risk.  Accordingly, the FEC General Counsel recommended dismissal of the complaint.  Weintraub voted against the FEC General Counsel's recommendation to dismiss.  Weintraub then issued a gratuitous statement chastising President Trump:  "Trump hotels, Trump steaks, Trump water, Trump golf courses, Trump wine," she complained, calling the campaign's use of Trump properties one big "infomercial" for Trump's corporate properties and products, which amounted to personal use of campaign funds.  Never mind that Trump funded his own campaign and never mind that the FEC General Counsel recommended dismissal.  The FEC needed to investigate and punish.

 And in yet another case, Matter Under Review 6961, a complaint alleged that the Trump campaign failed to pay an event-service company for services in setting up Trump's presidential candidacy announcement event, but it turned out that the Trump campaign indeed had paid a contractor event-service company who in turn paid the subcontractor event-service company in question, and the payment showed up on a subsequent public report filed with the FEC.  The FEC General Counsel recommended dismissal of the complaint.  Here, even though she voted to dismiss the complaint, Weintraub voted to send a "caution letter" to the Trump campaign, apparently to stigmatize Trump in a case that even Weintraub conceded had little merit. 

 These are three different cases with a common denominator: Commissioner Weintraub went against the FEC General Counsel's recommendation of dismissal because the complaints were all against Trump.  As we are detailing in this series, this is part of a pattern of a troubling appearance of bias by Commissioner Weintraub against Republicans in general and President Trump in particular.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Kavanaugh Hearing Witness List: Bipartisan Support and Irrelevant Opposition


The Senate Judiciary Committee has released its witness lists for the Kavanaugh hearing starting on Tuesday. On one side are a diverse group of people including leaders of the Supreme Court Bar and the other side is John Dean. Democrats seemingly have no interest in Kavanaugh but are trying to score some sort of larger political point. As the Hill puts it:
Dean is among more than a dozen witnesses selected by Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. The former White House counsel "will speak about the abuse of executive power" during his appearance, according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the panel.
Contrast this with the Majority witness list which includes some of the greats of the Supreme Court Bar:
The Honorable Theodore B. Olson, Partner, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher; Former Solicitor General, United States Department of Justice, Washington, DC 
Ms. Maureen E. Mahoney, Former Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, Washington, DC
The Honorable Paul Clement, Partner, Kirkland & Ellis LLP; Former Solicitor General, United States Department of Justice, Washington, DC
But Kavanaugh does not just draw from the conservative or Republican side.  His witness include liberals such as Lisa Blatt who wrote in Politico: “I’m a Liberal Feminist Lawyer. Here’s Why Democrats Should Support Judge Kavanaugh:”
Sometimes a superstar is just a superstar. That is the case with Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who had long been considered the most qualified nominee for the Supreme Court if Republicans secured the White House. The Senate should confirm him. I have argued 35 cases before the Supreme Court, more than any other woman. I worked in the Solicitor General’s Office for 13 years during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. Because I am a liberal Democrat and feminist, I expect my friends on the left will criticize me for speaking up for Kavanaugh. But we all benefit from having smart, qualified and engaged judges on our highest court, regardless of the administration that nominates them.
It is really sad that the Democrats' star witness literally has nothing to with Judge Kavanaugh or the current Supreme Court. While those that know Judge Kavanaugh and practice in front of the Supreme Court on both sides of the aisle support him. 


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Weintraub's Personal Staff Exhibits Bias Against Trump and Republicans

(This is the second in a series of five posts on the demonstrated bias of Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub.  The first installment is here, the third is here, and the next installments will be posted in the next few days.)

Commissioner Weintraub's Personal Staff Routinely Trolls President Trump and Criticizes All Things Republican

Since President Trump took office, Weintraub's personal staff has been tweeting almost daily invective about President Trump and Republicans on the Twitter account altFEC, self-described as "The unofficial Resistance team of the U.S. Federal Election Commission." "Resistance" means resistance to the Trump Administration.  Consider a few examples of the kind of deep enmity and prejudice expressed toward President Trump:
  • Gleefully: "Mr. Art Of The Deal got his ass kicked by the D.C. City Government"
  • Mocking Trump:  "Where are Hillary Clinton's emails? Mr. Trump said.  Oh, here's one.  [faux email from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump]  Resign, you treasonous clown." 
  • Criticizing Trump:  "Oddly, as his behavior gets more erratic & overtly pro-Russian, it may actually be a sign that Trump is *not* a Russian agent. Because at a certain point – one already passed – you would think his handlers would say, 'Yo, dude, tone it down a little. You’re being too oobvious [sic].'” 
  • Exhorting cable carriers to drop Fox News -- a news channel Commissioner Weintraub concluded broke the law by hosting a Republican debate in 2016:  "Here's a question. The more people watch #FoxNews, the less well-informed they are about basic facts. Arguably, FOX is tearing at the fabric of our democracy. They have a 1st Amendment right to exist, but not to be carried by cable companies. So: Why do cable companies carry it? https://t.co/0Ttqvrl5EQ"   
The person responsible for this anti-Republican venom is none other than Weintraub's confidential counsel, Tom Moore, who was publicly identified as AltFEC by Rudy Takala of The Hill on his Twitter feed on February 26, 2017.  People close to the Commission confirm that Weintraub is aware of Moore's anti-Trump crusade and approves of his activities.  According to one source, Weintraub has been known to defend Moore's right to express his anti-Trump hostilities (anonymously!) toward the very people who are the subject of FEC enforcement authority by invoking the First Amendment -- a constitutional provision she rarely acknowledges when supporting enforcement against other citizens.

 How can Commissioner Weintraub's office be viewed as fair, neutral, impartial when such nasty ad hominem attacks at President Trump are being published by her personal staff?  It simply cannot. 
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

A Bipartisan Election Scandal for a Former Liberal Darling


Generally the first defense of any Secretary of State or chief election official caught in a scandal is to claim partisanship. And Kentucky’s Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes has quite a scandal on her hands. Secretary Grimes was a darling of MSNBC for her Senate run against Mitch McConnell a few year back. Yet, it is her day job as Secretary of State that is getting her in trouble with both sides of the aisle.

In a nine-page letter to the Kentucky State Board of Elections, State Board of Elections Executive Director Jared Dearing, wrote:
Dearing, a Democrat, said in his letter that since he took the position last year either Grimes or her assistants have asked him and Scutchfield to do things, "we have found to be inappropriate, unethical and potentially illegal."
Among those unethical things are to ignore a consent decree which required Grimes’ office to clean up Kentucky’s voter rolls:
Dearing said in his letter, which he provided to the Courier Journal on Monday, that after about 100,000 postcards were returned he was ordered to stop scanning them by Grimes' staff. He said they were told to "slow walk" the process after he and Scutchfield raised concerns about disobeying the federal court order.
She also may have improperly used the voter registration systems to view employees' voting history and affiliation.  In other words, she may have been trying to hire for career and merit-based positions only Democrats and not Green, Libertarian or Republican Party affiliated voters. 

And yet another frightening example: she picked poll watchers (which are almost always selected by parties to watch over election officials):
Dearing also said Grimes has given her office the ability to recruit and place poll workers across the state, a task previously handled by county-level political parties and boards of elections, and was given the names and addresses of all 15,000 poll workers in order to send them a thank you letter prior to a contentious election. Previous secretaries of state were not given that information. 
“The legislators who created the laws that govern our elections placed a system of checks and balances that would allow no one individual or one political party to have an unfair advantage within the system,” Dearing wrote. “During Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes’ term in office, many of these checks have been slowly chipped away.”
These allegations mirror those of the former Republican Executive Director last year:
Last October, the former assistant executive director of the State Board of Elections, Matt Selph, filed a whistleblower lawsuit accusing Grimes of many of the same issues raised by Dearing.
The complaint filed by Selph, a Republican, and the letter sent by Dearing are both rooted in allegations that Grimes has improper access to the state’s voter registration system. Dearing alleged that Grimes’s staff was using the database to look up the voting records of elections board staffers and job candidates.
How many Executive Directors of both parties have to accuse Grimes before people start believing the allegations?  All sides, Democrat or Republican, Green or Libertarian, should agree that Grimes needs to go.    

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Monday, August 27, 2018

Vice President Pence Calls RNLA Members to Action for Kavanaugh


On Friday Vice President Mike Pence addressed the RNLA and issued a call to action to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.  Vice President Pence stated:
We're going to fight to take his case all the way to confirmation. We need your help. We need your continued engagement. We need the RNLA, not just those of you who came to the lunch today, but your 6,000 members, who are leaders in your community, to get out and spread the word among your peers. Spread the word in every state in the nation. Get the word to every Senator from every state about what Judge Brett Kavanaugh brings.
He also spoke on the qualifications of Judge Kavanaugh:
Judge Kavanaugh graduated from Yale Law School, fellow in the United States Solicitor General’s office, clerked in the Third Circuit, and then he clerked for the man who he would be replacing on the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy. He also served as Associate Counsel at the White House. And since 2006 served on what many regard as the second highest court in the land, the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia. 
During his time on the bench, Judge Kavanaugh has been called a judges’ judge. A stunning 39 of his 48 clerks have gone on to clerk at the Supreme Court. His peers in the judiciary rightly see him as a thought leader. His opinions are cited by courts across the country on a regular basis. And the Supreme Court has endorsed Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions more than a dozen times. I think that’s worth a round of applause. 
And the truth is Judge Brett Kavanaugh has established a record of enormous weight and credibility on the bench. He’s written 307 opinions and they have proven not only the strength of his intellect but also you can see he has a crystal clear judicial philosophy and fidelity to the Constitution of the United States. Judge Kavanaugh has proven his support for our first freedom, religious liberty. He stood for the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms. He's always enforced the Constitution's clear and unambiguous limits on government power, upholding the separation of powers, checks and balances, the principle of federalism that’s essential to our freedom. The truth is, Judge Brett Kavanaugh supports the principles of limited government enshrined by our founders in the Constitution of the United States of America. He is a textualist and an originalist.
He thanked the RNLA for its help in the past and reminded us that President Trump's last Supreme Court nominee was a former RNLA Member, Neil Gorsuch:
The men and women in this room have been supporting judicial nominees across the board.  You and your peers across the county made our case in your states, with your peers and in the public debate. The President and I are truly grateful for everything you've done. 
In fact, I know you're particularly grateful that we've also nominated a number of RNLA members into positions on the courts around the country, including one who ended up serving with distinction on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, a former RNLA member by the name of Justice Neil Gorsuch.  What a great guy.   In nominating Justice Gorsuch, President Trump kept his word; kept his word to appoint a justice in the mold of the late and great Justice Antonin Scalia. And frankly seeing the early days of his tenure on the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Gorsuch has already proven, already proven himself for the trust the President has placed in him, in his commitment to the Constitution and the principles of limited government that are enshrined there. President Donald Trump and I could not be more proud of Justice Gorsuch.
We also cannot be more proud of the next Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
It is really important that as lawyers, RNLA members do their best to live up to the praise and fight for Judge Kavanaugh and “make the case.”  Please sign our letter supporting Judge Kavanaugh here.      

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Chairman Grassley Responds to Democrats' Latest Stall Tactic on Kavanaugh

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley spoke on the Senate floor (video here) to call out the Democrats' latest tactic today on Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court:
Over the past day, several of my colleagues issued statements calling for Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing to be delayed. They claim it’s because President Trump’s former lawyer recently pleaded guilty to criminal violations of campaign finance law, allegedly at President Trump’s direction. 
I’m not going to delay Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. There’s no precedent for delaying a hearing in these circumstances. In fact, there’s clear precedent pointing the other way. . . . President Clinton was under investigation for much of his presidency and was impeached for committing perjury. But the Senate didn’t stop confirming his lifetime appointments to the bench. President Trump is not even close to being in the same legal situation as President Clinton. My colleagues’ pleas to delay the hearing ring false. I’ll tell you why. . . . 
The goal has always been the same: delay the confirmation process as much as possible and hope Democrats take over the Senate in the midterm elections. The Ranking Member’s hometown newspaper reported on this strategy recently, calling it an attempt to stall. The strategies might change, but the goal to obstruct the confirmation process remains unchanged.
The Democrats have tried to use their unreasonable demands for huge numbers of largely irrelevant documents as an excuse to delay also: 
They tried pushing for an unprecedented disclosure of Judge Kavanaugh’s executive branch documents, even though we’ve already received more pages of such documents than any previous Supreme Court nominee. And this is on top of his twelve-year judicial track record and other more relevant publicly available materials. . . . 
On a related note, we are working to make as many of the documents we receive publicly available as soon as possible. It’s common practice to receive documents as “committee confidential” until we can assure ourselves that we won’t disclose sensitive, confidential information to the public. . . .  And, of course, all my Senate colleagues are welcome to review “committee confidential” documents at their convenience. Simply get in touch with my staff. They will make sure you have full access to the range of “committee confidential” documents.
And Chairman Grassley recently noted that, contrary to liberal and Democrat complaints about the hiding of records, the majority of the records related to Judge Kavanaugh's service in President George W. Bush's White House Counsel's office are restricted from public access under the Presidential Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act.  Both Presidents Bush and Trump are working to make as many documents available to the Judiciary Committee as possible, but instead of being praised for their transparency, they are being baselessly attacked.  As of yesterday, the Committee had received 430,700 pages of documents, dwarfing the previous record of 180,000 set by Justice Gorsuch.

 Chairman Grassley also confirmed that the confirmation hearing for Judge Kavanaugh will start on September 4, allowing enough time for him to be confirmed before the start of the Supreme Court term this fall.  Thanks to Chairman Grassley for standing against all the Democrats' attack and delay tactics by consistently pointing to the facts.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)