Kavanaugh SCOTUS hearings

[GMDino]

(09-24-2018, 05:11 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Shouldn't your question be why did folks sit on this information to delay investigations?

No since that has been explained repeatedly.

(09-24-2018, 05:11 PM)bfine32 Wrote: But there should be no time limit on the investigations; however, there should be a time limit of time to vote.

Kavanaugh was nominated by Trump on 7/9/2018; that's 77 days and counting. In the past 115 years, the average time for Senate confirmation/rejection has been 37 days. More recently in the period from Richard Nixon's presidency to the present, the average has been 63. But folks want people to buy the narrative the GOP is rushing it.

Maybe because these same republicans thought six months was fine during the Obama administration?

From the link in the story I noted above:

Quote:Six. Seven. Nine. Ten. Seven. Nine.

These numbers reveal the absurdity of the argument that somehow the federal judiciary is debilitated without a ninth Supreme Court justice for a brief period of time. As the numbers make clear, the size of the court as Congress designed it over the years has frequently changed, and hasn’t left the court in disarray.

The Supreme Court was established with only six justices. No one would call members of the first Congress that passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, like James Madison, or George Washington, who signed it into law, un-American.

Yet, Register editorial April 4 [Grassley creates stalemate on Supreme Court] went so far as to call the current Senate’s check on the president’s power to nominate “un-American” because eight justices will perform the court’s work until a new president is sworn in.

The temporary impact of a split decision pales in comparison to the damage an election-year political brawl would cause the court and the country, as then-Sen. Joe Biden said in 1992. Biden, then-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, explained that the Senate shouldn’t move forward on a Supreme Court nomination during a hyper-partisan election year, predicting that a nominee, the president, the Senate, and the nation would endure a bitter fight no matter how good a person is nominated. I agree with Chairman Biden. A nomination considered during this heated campaign season would be all about politics, not the Constitution.

The court will continue to fulfill its constitutional role during this vacancy just as it has in the past. For instance, Justice Jackson spent a full court term prosecuting war criminals at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Justice Frankfurter wrote to Justice Jackson that his absence did not sacrifice “a single interest of importance.” Justices also regularly recuse themselves from cases to avoid conflicts of interest. Justice Kagan sat out of dozens of cases because of her prior work as solicitor general — including two that resulted in evenly divided four-to-four decisions. The sky didn’t fall.

As Justices Breyer and Alito have said recently, the court can deal with a vacancy and continue its work. It can order a case to be reargued after the vacancy is filled. It can reschedule a case for a later time. It can reach an evenly divided decision and resolve the issue another day.

So, despite hyperbolic rhetoric, the court will continue to function. And even cases that split evenly will likely be few and far between. On average, the court decides about one in five cases by a five-to-four split. Because Justice Scalia wasn’t always in the majority, you can expect even fewer cases to result in tie decisions because of his absence.

With this in mind, the American people have a unique opportunity to engage in a serious discussion about the meaning of our Constitution and the way justices read it. Supreme Court justices should decide cases based on the law and the facts instead of personal policy preferences, empathy, or what’s in the justice’s heart, as the president has suggested. Americans deserve the chance to debate these questions this election year before the court takes a dramatic turn for a generation.

The Senate’s power to withhold consent is as much a part of the Constitution as the president’s power to nominate. It’s also not unlike the president’s power to veto a bill Congress presents him, as the president has done nine times, or the many veto threats he’s made on measures that Congress hasn’t even passed. The Senate’s decision regarding the court vacancy is constitutional. It will help safeguard the integrity of the court. It’s common sense. And, it’s entirely American.

Seems like he was in no rush and didn't see a problem with it....then.

(09-24-2018, 05:11 PM)bfine32 Wrote: What's wrong with the legal answer. Seat him and if he is found to be unfit, impeach him.

Someone has more faith in the people who would make that decision than I do.