Ken Starr, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump and the eroding rule of law
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We don't know what motivated Donald Trump's decision to pick longtime conservative activist Brett Kavanaugh for a Supreme Court seat, but it's a pretty sure bet that Trump, currently facing allegations that his campaign eagerly attempted to conspire with RussKen Starr, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump and the eroding rule of law
We don't know what motivated Donald Trump's decision to pick longtime conservative activist Brett Kavanaugh for a Supreme Court seat, but it's a pretty sure bet that Trump, currently facing allegations that his campaign eagerly attempted to conspire with Russian government agents in a partnership to tip the scales of the American presidential election, picked Kavanaugh for Kavanaugh's unique (and nutty) premise that you cannot so much as investigate charges against a sitting president. It is, in fact, the distinguishing feature between Kavanaugh and the rest of them. Every one of the finalists selected from the Federalist Society's list of approved hard-right legal arsonists could each be assured of voting «correctly» on key conservative issues such as abortion, corporate rights, and limiting consumer and voter powers; Kavanaugh is alone, however, in stating such a blunt and convenient opinion on the single issue most dear to Donald Trump's own heart: Donald Trump's personal legal well-being. If it is up to a future Justice Brett Kavanaugh to rule whether a sitting president has to cooperate in a probe into Russian election hacking that has already implicated core members of his administration and campaign staff, and that is more likely to happen than not, Kavanaugh alone is on the record saying investigators can pound sand. And if you think that played no role in Donald's Trump choice to pick him as potential defender, you have not been paying attention to the man. Donald Trump is obsessed with shuttering this single probe; Donald Trump spends more of his time demanding the shuttering of the investigation than he does blustering on any other topic. According to his own staff, it consumes him. According to his Twitter feed, it is nearly always on his mind. So that is why Donald Trump has landed upon Brett Kavanaugh as his new pro-bono legal defender, but the story of just how Kavanaugh came to such an (ahem) unusual epiphany is both a wee bit bizarre and a wee bit unflattering to both the man and the movement. It is a microcosm of conservative «legal» thinking of the sort that the Federalist Society and other hard-right activist groups have so furiously pushed as the only «legitimate» judicial temperament, in that it appears to be entirely situational. Kavanaugh used to have one opinion, an opinion on which his then-current career was foundationally based. Then the presidency shifted hands, the persons under investigation switched places and—lo and behold—so did Kavanaugh's beliefs. It was most definitely not Kavanaugh’s opinion, though, back when he worked as one of the top lieutenants probing Republican conspiracy theories under Ken Starr. Read more