All the Ways a Justice Kavanaugh Would Have to Recuse Himself

Given his blatant partisanship and personal animosity toward liberals, how could he be an effective member of the Supreme Court?

ed note–if the name ‘Lawrence Tribe’ rings a bell in terms of Judea, Inc’s war against Trump, it should.

Besides what his last name obviously more than slightly ‘intimates,’ he has also used his own position within the establishment in not only pushing for, but indeed, being one of the first ‘respectable’ establishment powerbrokers to publicly call for Trump’s removal over his firing of James Comey.

Now, as pertains Kavanaugh’s ascension to the highest bench in the land, again, it all goes back to two words, both of which begin with the letter ‘I’.–

Israel, 

and

Impeachment.

And while tribemember Tribe is careful in his verbal black magic to avoid discussing either of the two aforelisted ‘I’ words, he does allude to the latter in his use of the word ‘indict’, which is the Constitutional process otherwise known as ‘Impeachment’ and all can rest assured that in some discussion (s) somewhere, these two issues occupied positions of primary importance when Tribe and his fellow tribesmen gathered as a minyan in the ‘tent of meeting’ to collaborate, collude and conspire as to how they might add more fuel to the fires being lit underneath the Trump White House.

We should also note Tribe’s obvious tribal calling card, which is his typical Judaic hypocrisy in stating that Kavanaugh could not be an effective SCJ due to his ‘blatant partisanship’ and ‘personal animosity’ towards liberals, when it is an established fact that liberals have an open, no-holds-barred season to vomit and defecate their invective against conservatives at any old moment they suddenly get ‘the urge’, but which never comes into question when said liberals are being vetted for some high post such as a SCJ since, after all, they are merely exercising their ‘rights to free speech’, dontchaknow.

For the record, we don’t give a rat’s fuzzy rear end about Kavanaugh in any capacity other than the fact that he stands as the possible lynchpin in deciding whether or not a war-reluctant Trump is replaced with a died-in-the wool/marinated-to the-bone-marrow Christian Zionist VP Mike Pence who obviously has the backing and support of those running the entire circus surrounding Kavanaugh in the interests of seeing Trump removed.

By Laurence H. Tribe, NY Times

Much might be said about Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s possible confirmation to the Supreme Court: in terms of his still only partly disclosed professional record, the allegations of sexual assault and his candor, or lack of it, in testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But apart from all that — and apart from whatever the reopened F.B.I. investigation might reveal — the judge himself has unwittingly provided the most compelling argument against his elevation to that court.

His intemperate personal attacks on members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and his partisan tirades against what he derided as a conspiracy of liberal political enemies guilty of a “calculated and orchestrated political hit” do more than simply display a strikingly injudicious temperament. They disqualify him from participating in a wide range of the cases that may come before the Supreme Court: cases involving individuals or groups that Judge Kavanaugh has now singled out, under oath and in front of the entire nation, as implacable adversaries.

Well before last week’s hearing, public officials and scholars of legal ethics were already debating whether a Justice Kavanaugh, with his unusually expansive views of presidential power, would be required to recuse himself from cases involving the legal fate of the president who nominated him.

This is not an abstract concern: I was a co-author of a Brookings Institution report concluding that conflicts of interest, and the appearance of such conflicts, would be pervasive in cases arising from the special counsel’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

The Supreme Court may have to consider questions about whether a sitting president can be indicted or subpoenaed, and what effect pardoning a federal offense would have on state charges for the same conduct — an issue bound up in Gamble v. United States, a double jeopardy case already on the court’s calendar. Many have argued that Judge Kavanaugh should not be confirmed unless he commits in advance to recusing himself from such cases. He has predictably refused to do so.

The accusations made by Christine Blasey Ford raise another order of concern. Some might argue that the unresolved cloud over his past would require a Justice Kavanaugh to recuse himself from any case involving sexual assault or harassment. That might well be, but I have in mind something more sweeping and fundamental.

To be sure, the rules of recusal that bind lower federal court judges do not technically apply to Supreme Court justices — at least according to the self-interested interpretation of the justices themselves. But those rules are not the only source of legal principles requiring all judges, of whatever court, to step aside when the institutional integrity of the judicial process is incompatible with their participation.

Apart from formally promulgated codes of judicial conduct, the Supreme Court has recognized that those whom our legal system entrusts to resolve controversies among litigants have a constitutional duty to step aside whenever a conflict of interest — or the public appearance of such a conflict — is so powerful as to erode public trust in the fair and impartial administration of justice.

In Caperton v. Massey Coal, the court held that a judge politically beholden to one of the litigants must recuse himself, and in Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar, it held that the need to preserve judicial impartiality trumps the rights of judicial candidates to solicit campaign contributions.

Judge Kavanaugh’s attacks on identifiable groups — Democrats, liberals, “outside left-wing opposition groups” and those angry “about President Trump and the 2016 election” or seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” — render it inconceivable that he could “administer justice without respect to persons,” as a Supreme Court justice must swear to do, when groups like Planned Parenthood, the NRDC Action Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Naral Pro-Choice America or the American Civil Liberties Union appear as parties or file briefs on behalf of plaintiffs and defendants.

For a Justice Kavanaugh to participate in internal court discussion or oral argument of such cases, much less vote on their resolution, would involve not just an undeniable appearance of conflict but an actual conflict, given his stated animosities and observation that “what goes around comes around.”

My decades of observing the court’s work and arguing cases there convince me that his required recusal would extend to a very broad slice of the Supreme Court’s docket during his lifetime tenure as a justice. That would leave the court evenly split in far too many cases, for years on end, if he were to recuse himself as required — or deeply damaged in the public’s trust if he were not.

It is up to the president and the Senate to decide whether this situation makes him unacceptable as a nominee. But should he be confirmed, it is impossible to see how Judge Kavanaugh could discharge his responsibilities as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.