Brett Kavanaugh is Trump’s newest Supreme Court nominee

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t too concerned about a new sexual misconduct allegation that’s been levied against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In fact, he’s dismissed it out of hand as a “reenactment” of a “sad and embarrassing chapter Senate Democrats ... wrote last September.”

It’s not a particularly surprising position — given how quickly McConnell questioned other misconduct allegations Kavanaugh faced last year — but it further underscores just how committed Republicans are to rallying behind President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court justice.

On October 6, 2018, the Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court.

The vote happened just weeks after women came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct: Christine Blasey Ford, who said Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school, and Deborah Ramirez, who said Kavanaugh thrust his naked penis in her face when the two were undergraduates at Yale.

Now that two New York Times reporters have extensively corroborated a key sexual assault accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and surfaced another previously unreported accusation of sexual assault against him, a big question looms: Can a Supreme Court justice be impeached?

The answer is yes.

Brett Kavanaugh may be confirmed to the Supreme Court, but Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley isn’t done with Michael Avenatti.

Grassley referred Avanatti and a woman he represented during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings to the Justice Department on three separate criminal charges related to impeding the confirmation process. Grassley’s office insists the referral is simply for an investigation and is not intended as an allegation of a crime.

With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Republicans have succeeded in a decades-long effort to capture total control of the judicial branch. While they will surely celebrate this victory, the real loser in this partisan battle is not the other side — it’s the Supreme Court. And without radical reforms to save its legitimacy, the Court may never recover from its transformation into a nakedly partisan institution.

After more than 200 years, the Supreme Court still plays a crucial role in our constitutional democracy. It offers a check on the political process, and it holds Americans to our deepest commitments by upholding society’s laws. Indeed, with the Court as the highest arbiter of legal disputes in our country, the public’s trust that it isn’t just playing out partisan politics is inextricable from public confidence in the rule of law itself.

President Donald Trump is embracing the conspiracy theories around the opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and the sexual assault allegations brought against him by Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford.

Kavanaugh was sworn in to the Supreme Court on Sunday and took part in another ceremonial swearing-in event at the White House on Monday after weeks of a bruising battle over his confirmation. Republicans, including Trump, have been taking a victory lap over the judge’s confirmation since the Senate narrowly voted to approve his nomination on Saturday.

Forty-nine Senate Republicans and one Democrat just confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the United State Supreme Court. No allegations, no protesters, no public opinion poll showing Brett Kavanaugh is the most unpopular person to be elevated to the nation’s highest court in recent history was going to stop them.

To the senators who confirmed him, it did not matter that Christine Blasey Ford testified for four hours under oath and told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she was “100 percent” certain Brett Kavanaugh was the boy who pulled her into a room at a high school party 36 years ago and tried to force himself on her. It did not matter that Kavanaugh appeared to, at best, mislead senators in his own testimony. It did not matter that, unlike Clarence Thomas who also faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the public thought Kavanaugh’s accuser was more credible than he was.

Now that Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh has the votes to be confirmed by the US Senate, there is likely a 5-4 majority on the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade (depending on how Chief Justice John Roberts votes — more on him here and below).

Kavanaugh has, for the duration of his confirmation fight, pretended this isn’t the case. “As a general proposition, I understand the importance of the precedent set forth in Roe v. Wade,” he told senators during his confirmation hearing. He reportedly told Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in private that he agrees with Chief Justice John Roberts, who called Roe settled law in his 2005 confirmation hearings. Both Collins, who supports Kavanaugh, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who opposes him, have said they think he won’t vote to overturn Roe.

With Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) announcing her support for him, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court is now all but assured.

He will be replacing Anthony Kennedy, who was, since at least 2005, the swing vote on many of the Court’s most ideologically charged decisions, responsible for 5-4 rulings that legalized same-sex marriage, preserved Roe v. Wade, upheld warrantless wiretapping, blew up campaign finance restrictions, overturned DC’s handgun ban, and weakened the Voting Rights Act. That position made him one of the most powerful people in America for well over a decade, not even counting the 18 years he shared his position as the Court’s swing voter with Sandra Day O’Connor.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) has announced he plans to vote to confirm embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, barring any major last-minute changes.

Flake said he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh this weekend unless “something big changes,” according to NBC News reporter Alex Moe.

Three senators will likely decide whether Brett Kavanaugh becomes a Supreme Court justice in a matter of hours: Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Joe Manchin (D-WV).

All three voted to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination in Friday’s key procedural vote. But they have yet to announce their position on the final vote, to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court for life.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who last week accused Democrats of plotting a political hit job against him on behalf of Bill and Hillary Clinton to smear his good name as he faces sexual assault allegations, wants America to know he is an impartial judge.

Kavanaugh wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal published on Thursday night with the headline: “I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge.”

“A man’s life is in tatters,” President Trump said at a rally on Tuesday night. “A man’s life is shattered.”

He was talking about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault or other misconduct by Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

A historically influential Christian umbrella group has come out against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

The National Council of Churches (NCC), an umbrella organization that represents dozens of Christian churches, published a statement Wednesday demanding that Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of several instances of sexual assault occurring while he was in high school and college, be removed from consideration for a position on the Supreme Court.

The sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have brought out something in conservatives. Even elite Never Trump writers have started lining up to defend the nominee and the president behind him.

“Ever since the rise of Donald Trump, the conservative movement has oriented itself as a circular firing squad. The attacks on Kavanaugh broke that formation,” conservative pundit Seth Mandel writes in the Atlantic. “Mild-mannered anti-Trump conservatives would, in private conversations, fume at Kavanaugh’s treatment and insist Democrats had crossed a line and could not be appeased — the judge had to become a justice.”

The FBI’s investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh did not come up with any new information, according to accounts from several senators who were briefed on the report Thursday.

That means Republicans are claiming they’ve done more than enough to clear Kavanaugh of these allegations — while Democrats are left in the same place they were before they even surfaced: calling for more time and information about Kavanaugh’s record and past.

Everybody wants to know if the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation drama will help Republicans or Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections. The truth is, based on the polls we have, it’s really hard to tell.

The narrative goes something like this: Republican voters have been energized by the partisan fight over Kavanaugh’s nomination and the sexual assault allegations against him. They view it as an unfair Democratic smear campaign against a good man. So those voters — particularly the Trump skeptics who might otherwise not have felt a compulsion to vote in November — will now turn out to support Republicans. Small-dollar fundraising is booming for the GOP, we learned Thursday, which only strengthens that interpretation.

It looks like Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has enough support from the senate to be confirmed to the bench.

This was long expected. Most Republicans senators quickly lined up behind Kavanaugh, who would surely swing the Court’s ideology to the right. They either endorsed him outright or heaped praise on Trump’s nominee, while noting that they take their judicial confirmation responsibility seriously.

As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prepared for a difficult Senate vote on repealing Obamacare last July, he had something else on his mind.

“I’d really like to get that Kennedy slot,” McConnell told his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, while they were walking in Washington. (Joe Perticone, a reporter for Business Insider, overheard the comment and tweeted it.) He made the comment nearly a year before Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement.

President Donald Trump mocked a woman in front of an audience of thousands for coming forward to report sexual assault.

At a rally in Southaven, Mississippi, on Tuesday night, Trump made fun of Christine Blasey Ford, who testified at a hearing last week that Brett Kavanaugh, now a nominee to the Supreme Court, sexually assaulted her when they were in high school in the 1980s.

The FBI investigation into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the sexual assault and misconduct allegations against him is marching along, and results could come as early as Wednesday.

But in the past 24 hours alone, a lot has happened: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate will vote on Kavanaugh on this week, whatever the FBI probe says and whenever it arrives. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said if the judge’s nomination fails, he thinks President Donald Trump should try to nominate him again.

A new poll is the latest evidence of a dramatic partisan breakdown over what to do about sexual assault allegations: A majority of Republicans are willing to support political candidates who face multiple accusations of sexual assault, while a vast majority of Democrats are not.

The poll, released on Wednesday morning by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, asked a representative sample of Americans this question: “If a political candidate has been accused of sexual assault by multiple people, would you still consider voting for them if you agreed with them on the issues, or would you definitely not vote for them?”

All human memory is flawed. That’s true for you, me, and Christine Blasey Ford — the woman who has upended the Supreme Court nomination process with her accusations of sexual assault against nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Ford doesn’t remember everything about that night. But she remembers the central trauma, and has not wavered in her assertion of who perpetuated it. And for those hoping for Kavanaugh’s speedy confirmation, it’s all too easy to accuse her of memory lapses.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) didn’t appear to mince words when he described Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s ferocious attacks on Democrats, the signature piece of his defense against the sexual assault allegations endangering his nomination at last week’s hearing. Kavanaugh’s counterattacks were “sharp and partisan,” Flake said.

“We can’t have that on the Court,” the retiring Arizona senator continued, according to the Atlantic’s Elaina Plott.

The fate of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court may be in the hands of Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

As the nation anxiously awaits the results of an FBI investigation into multiple sexual assault and misconduct allegations against the nominee, there seems to be a general consensus that the outcome of the probe only matters to these two female Republican senators. As if only moderate Republican women would care about sexual assault.