Trump Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh has been sworn in as the 114th Supreme Court Justice of the United States after being confirmed by the Senate on Saturday. Sputnik asked legal scholar Jak Allen to summarize some of the important details of his rancorous confirmation process.
The issue for the Democrats is that the FBI investigation [of Kavanaugh] has fallen far short of their expectations. The problem for them is that if we got to an impeachment proceeding, then you’d have the House Judiciary Committee conduct an investigation and recommend the charges; then it would approve it and put forward articles of impeachment for a vote; if the House votes for it, which is entirely possible given a Democratic majority after the midterms, then you’d have a trial in the Senate which requires a two-thirds majority vote to convict.
So in essence it’s near impossible, and even if the Democrats won the Senate, they’d still need to convince a good number of Republicans, which is just so unlikely in this age of partisanship.
So whether it’s true or not I’m not sure. But I think the broader thing to look at here is that when a [Democratic president] eventually nominates someone to the Court, there will be the same calls of opposition by Republicans, and the same types of money packs being injected. It’s just [a question of] whether it reaches as vicious [a state] as we’ve seen with regard to this nomination.
So it’s kind of like the notion of free speech, and there needs to be a discussion about how we go forward with such contentious problems. Surely we want to maintain the very foundations that keep a democracy healthy, including the presumption of innocence. If that right is corrupted, we’re going to blur the line between innocent and guilty people, and allow people in power to manipulate that system.
