The GOP isn’t stupid. They know that if they kick out anyone who votes against the party their majority would disappear. They’d have to kick out Collins for voting against ACA repeal, they’d have to kick out Lindsay Graham for voting for all of Obama’s court picks, they’d have to kick out John McCain for voting for…

Why wouldn’t it? Assuming that everyone on the court voted the same as they did last time, you still have five votes in favor of the ACA (Roberts, Kagan, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer) and four votes against (Kavanaugh/Kennedy, Scalia/Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas). Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion upholding the…

He’s a Democrat because, it might be hard to remember after the past few years, but West Virginia is/was a heavily Democratic state. You pretty much had to be a Democrat to win there, to the point where their current Republican governor was a Democrat until after his election.

Kirsten = Christine. Makes sense to me.

I think he’ll probably end up voting party line like most Republicans, especially if they do well this year. A lot of Republican critics are unhappy with Trump but have conceded that they are out of step with the country since he did so well in the election.

There’s nothing good about a Kavanaugh confirmation. However, if it’s going to happen, we need to make sure that we get Congress back and get state legislatures and governors’ mansions back. That’s always been the winnable fight here. These SCOTUS were never winnable; we lost those battles in 2014 and 2016. IF we want…

We can’t forget about him, but we have to accept that he will likely be confirmed and that the only people who can stop him at this point are Republican Senators. That doesn’t mean that we forget about him, but it does mean that we shouldn’t immolate ourselves and ignore every other political and social issue for the…

Honestly, I think it will have to be a citizen led movement. If we hate conservatives, and they hate us, then our politicians will reflect that. No one is going to tone things down if they think that they will be primaried by someone who thinks that every vote needs to be party line. Politicians didn’t go crazy on…

There’s an article on the Washington Post showing how conformation battles started getting narrower and narrower and more partisan over time. Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Souter has an easier time, while John Roberts, Sam Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch etc. really didn’t.

If people stopped whining and started voting that will never be possible.

Yeah that’s why I cynically want this to be done this week no matter what. If Kavanaugh’s confirmation is a done deal — which it is if Flake and Collins are a “yes”, then dragging out the argument over whether or not he will be confirmed and reminding conservatives over and over that they need to vote is not really a…

Honestly, I kind of hope that people aren’t thinking too much about him in November. Most of the Senate seats up right now are in red states where Kavanaugh is very popular. I think Dems in those districts would be happier talking about anything else, like healthcare and social justice. 

To clarify, the main issue criminally is how the intern got the information. Trump presumably got Graham’s phone number from Graham, not from illegally accessing a restricted government computer system.

Agreed. I think the problem is that the Senate doesn’t have any expertise in investigating crimes or even performing background checks. The FBI does, but they were in a straitjacket. In theory, they should have taken all the time they needed for a thorough examination. But they didn’t, so the Senate couldn’t. It’s a…

I think it’s time to move on from Kavanaugh and start putting extra attention on the midterms starting next week.

The Constitution wasn’t written two years ago, and the people who wrote it did not imagine straight party line voting would be as common as it has become. How would they have? Hell, up until a few years ago it was effectively impossible to confirm a SCOTUS nominee on a straight party line vote unless you had a…

I think he’s saying, rather, that men of a certain age and status are likely to have a past history of sexual assault. Given what we’ve learned about society, it’s not exactly an unreasonable assumption. Amy Barrett might be even more conservative than Brett Kavanaugh, but she is probably less likely to have ever…

Yep. Conservatives aren’t stupid. They know that, when you have 60 million people on your side, the chances are that one of them will say something dumb at some point is 100%. If people gave up on their sincerely held beliefs every time someone who shared them acted silly in public, we would all be nihilists by now.

This is why I’m not so worried about Roe v. Wade. Pro lifers in government don’t need to overturn it. “Planned Parenthood vs Casey” already did for the most part.

They have to make her look crazy. If she was just a partisan liar, it would be hard to explain why she would be willing to potentially destroy her own career and safety for a story that is made up.