Is this shameless or extraordinary amnesia, or both? (Pick A.)
Washington PostRuth Marcus was deputy editor for editorial pages and wrote an article in Sunday’s paper. “Confirmation hearings? More like defamation hearings.”The headline online was “You can’t ignore consent or advice. It is just smear, degrade.“ It’s like nothing ever happened to Brett Kavanaugh.
Consent and advice have given way to degrade and smear. The goal is not to illuminate but to tarnish: If a nominee can’t be stopped, at least the other side can inflict some damage on her and the opposition party.
A sad trend culminated in the confirmation hearings that just ended for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji brown Jackson. The political element has always been present in nominations and hearings. After all, the Framers gave the power of confirmation to a political branch.
A confirmation hearing has never been more about law than it is about political point-scoring or presidential campaign-launching.
This is just as shameful as Jackson being “treated worse than Kavanaugh” by the Editorial Board of the Post.
As if Marcus wasn’t required to deal with the Fake News regarding teenage gang rape, “Brett Kavanaugh” was never mentioned in this instance. Kavanaugh was accused of teenage sexual assault in 2018. Marcus then took aim at Kavanaugh. The headline then was “Ford’s testimony was devastating. Kavanaugh’s was volcanic.” Kavanaugh’s was volcanic.
Oh no, “the fundamental wisdom of the Constitution’s approach was on display Thursday. Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was confronted with the witness against him — one of them, anyway — and it was devastating.” This paper is a Democrat rag!
Marcus’s latest piece focuses on Bork.
The 1987 confirmation hearings for Robert H. Bork kicked off the modern judicial wars, and Republicans still seethe over Bork as Democrats’ original sin. “We started down this road of character assassination in the 1980s with Judge Bork’s hearings and senators have been engaged in disgusting theatrics ever since,” said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.).
I was there, and what actually happened was, to borrow Bork’s famous description of why he wanted to be a justice, an “intellectual feast” — especially in comparison with this past week’s food fight. He lost by a vote of 42 to 58, with six Republican senators voting against him. Two Democrats voted for his confirmation.
That wasn’t because Democrats dragged him “into the gutter,” as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) complained. Bork was defeated by Bork entirely, thanks to both his incendiary writings, and his testimony before this committee. His expressed views were so extreme and so far outside the legal mainstream that his confirmation failed by the largest margin in history.
Marcus is shamelessly skipping important events, such as Ted Kennedy’s discredit speech on “Robert Bork’s America” going back in segregation and Gregory Peck’s mocking TV commercial for People for the American Way. It was something that had never been done in confirmation.
You can click on Marcus’s link to “actually occurred” and Edward Walsh, a reporter noted that “Like Biden (Senate Minority Leader Robert J. Dole) also saw Bork confirmation fight in a way to advance his campaign for the presidency.”
PS. Tucker Carlson was Marcus’s opponent earlier.
Washington Post columnist! Ruth Marcus showed a weird tendency to consider the Kavanaugh rape allegations unproven as fair game. Now she’s saying, “How low will they go?” pic.twitter.com/Pkgm5VP4Zf
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) March 28, 2022
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