Carrie Severino: Latest Kavanaugh allegations a shameful attempt to reignite baseless smears
Author of 'Justice on Trial' Carrie Severino weighs in on the controversy over the New York Times story.
The blowup over the New York Times' latest smear of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is even bigger than the continued character assassination against a good man who's been a faithful public servant for a quarter-century. It's part of an unprecedented attack by liberal politicians, media and others on the independent judiciary.
Over the weekend, New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, breathlessly revealed a new allegation in the paper’s Opinion section based on their book on Kavanaugh.
The justice had, they claimed, engaged in an act of sexual misconduct at a party when he was an undergraduate at Yale.
They neglected to mention in their article that the purported victim denied any knowledge of the incident to her friends and that their only direct source for the story was a former lawyer for the Clintons who himself would not confirm the story.
It is rare for a newspaper to issue a major substantive correction. It is practically unheard of for a newspaper to do what the New York Times was forced to do by Monday afternoon: admit that an article’s authors had omitted facts that were not only pertinent to the article’s subject but almost flatly contradicted the thrust of the article itself.
Unfortunately, this incident is only the latest of a litany of Kavanaugh accusations that have been roundly debunked.
Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of similar misconduct at a college party, admitted that she only discovered her memory of the incident after “assessing her memories” for almost a week alongside an attorney provided by Kavanaugh’s Democrat opponents.
Julie Swetnick’s accusations—that Kavanaugh and his friends had engaged in unreported serial gang rape—were so roundly discredited that even Swetnick appeared to back off of them in a television appearance.
And Christine Blasey Ford, whose testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was watched by millions of Americans, told a story that has been rebutted by every single person she herself named as witnesses to it. Even her longtime friend and Kavanaugh opponent Leland Keyser, who endured months of pressure and intimidation by Ford’s friends and allies, told the FBI that she did not believe Ford’s story.
What is it about Brett Kavanaugh that leaves the left and its press allies so willing to play fast and loose with the truth? The answer lies in how the left views the role of the judiciary and the Supreme Court.
Conservatives and most Americans view the role of judges as calling balls and strikes—saying what the law is, and not what they think the law should be. This, incidentally, was the system that the Framers of our Constitution intended.
The left, though, sees things differently. For the better part of a century, the left has used the courts to enact radical policy changes that could never make it through the democratically accountable branches of government.
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From the growth of the administrative state, to individual “rights” found nowhere in the Constitution, to heightened protections for criminals, the left has used the federal judiciary to achieve, through the raw exertion of judicial power, what it could never achieve through democratic politics.
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Now, with the Trump administration’s historic successes in appointing conservative judges to every level of the federal judiciary—the sorts of judges who will interpret the Constitution as written—the left fears losing its most powerful weapon, and entering a new era where they will have to, for once, fairly compete on the merit of their ideas
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In this light, judges like Kavanaugh are not mere nominees, to be assessed on their merits and the facts and either confirmed or rejected. They are existential threats to political order the left is trying to bring about. Judges like Kavanaugh are to be engaged and destroyed.
Until that attitude changes, we can, unfortunately, expect more of the same fake news for each and every new judge and justice nominated by this administration.