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Comment by thecleaner | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this. Kavanaugh hasnt been proven to be guilty. There are credible allegations which demand a further investigation as is being conducted by the FBI. Beyond that apart from his clumsiness at the testimony there isnt much going on against him. If these people are so data driven how come they choose to believe things for which we have no evidence. You may mock him for losing his cool but thats just about it. Anything beyond that is questionable and shouldnt be taken as the truth.

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Kavanaugh didn’t just deny that he committed the assault, he denied drinking, obvious jokes, and pretended to be a church going, sober, virgin. Well, we have loads of evidence that the latter is false throughout high school, college, and law school. If instead of admitting what he did do as in the past, but choosing to lie, not once but repeatedly, baldly, and swearing to god, makes him far, far less credible in denying the assault claims.

> Well, we have loads of evidence that the latter is false throughout high school, college, and law school

Where is the evidence ? For him to be a virgin, there literally can't be any evidence unless somebody actually watched him (which would be very terrible).

As far as swearing to God goes and being non-drinking and church going, these are things you argue while selecting the class president not a supreme court judge. Why isn't there any talk of his past judgements ?

The disrespect he showed to numerous Senators, and the numver of questions he refused to answer, should alone be enough to disqualify him.

Are the senators expected to show any respect to the nominee?

Ford's testimony appeared credible. However, there is no contemporaneous corroboration, even from her long-time friend who not only didn't corroborate it, she refuted that she had even met Kavanaugh.

Ramirez, Swetnik allegations are not credible. They too have no corroboration.

While I've seen plenty of people decry Rachel Mitchell's letter to the Republican Senators as "political", I have yet to see anyone refute the content of that letter. (https://www.axios.com/brett-kavanaugh-rachel-mitchell-prosec...)

There isn't an honest prosecutor who could get an indictment, let alone a conviction.

>Ford's testimony appeared credible

Did you even watch it?

I did, and I think she made up the entire thing.

For a while I thought maybe she was assaulted in some way and was completely confused about when it happened and who was involved, but after the polygraph comments were refuted by her ex-boyfriend that sealed the deal for me -- it's almost axiomatic that because of her field of study she would be well informed on the subject, her denials to Ms. Mitchell seemed odd, but it appears clear now that she in fact did lie about it. That's not a minor detail, it's a very big deal.

yes. the entire thing.

https://rewire.news/ablc/2018/10/04/contrary-to-conservative...

contemporaneous corroboration. Again, nobody has addressed all the holes as addressed by Rachel Mitchell.

Sure, let's make stuff up, like her memo.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/10/02/rachel-mitche...

> I don't understand this. Kavanaugh hasnt been proven to be guilty.

Has he been proven guilty of Ford’s allegations? No, he will very likely never be.

Has he done something that should bar him from being a judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice? Very much so and can conclusively be proven. Lying on the stand[0] is something not allowed for anyone, but most assuredly shouldn’t be allowed to slide for Supreme Court justices, IMHO.

[0] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/09/how-we-know-kavanaugh...

There are a whole lot of words in that article that don't prove the assertion in the headline.

You literally cannot in any way prove anything he said was a lie.

Did you read the article? At the very minimum you can prove the “four denials” or “refutal” as being a lie. While it might seem minor to a lay person, a judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice should understand there’s a stark legal difference between “denying/refuting something happened” vs “I don’t recall that happening”. And that’s just one thing you can prove, the article goes at length with good sourcing to prove more.

I read it all. You can't prove any of that as false. The article is a biased hit piece making allegations that are not provable. In fact, it makes assertions that have been refuted already by other people who were in K's circle of friends and some who were not (devil's triangle).

BTW, I'm not asserting that it is impossible that reasonable people might listen to his testimony and think he was lying. Calling something "proof" is a very different thing.

It's not a criminal trial, he doesn't have to be proven guilty of anything.

There are two things in my (and many others' minds) about why his confirmation is an egregious "ramming through" by the Republicans that have many people outraged.

1) He is not entitled to this seat. If you were interviewing a candidate who had allegations of any kind (sexual assault, stealing, unethical behavior in general), wouldn't you prefer to interview and hire someone else? Kavanaugh isn't some brilliant legal scholar that we should be so lucky as to have on the bench. This isn't supposed to be a criminal investigation. We shouldn't be arguing the semantics of whether what he's done is perjury. It's not supposed to be close. Nominees to the Supreme Court are supposed to aspire to a higher level of ethics, candor, and rationality (and not emotional exposition). The charges level against him, and the nonpartisanship that is supposed to be the foundation of the Supreme Court, should have made whichever party nominated him immediately withdraw his name and submit as an alternative any of the dozen or more judges with unassailable careers and personal records.

2) He made bare his partisanship with his railing against the Democrats' agenda and his conspiracy theory about how Democrats were out to get him because of some ill-conceived idea of our loyalty to the Clintons. Regardless of charges leveled against him, and regardless of their actual partisan beliefs, nominees to the Supreme Court are supposed to do their best in their confirmation hearings and for the entirety of their time on the bench, to convey a nonpartisan commitment to the interpretation of the Constitution and the American legal framework. He abandoned all this with his attacks on the left and his aggressive, disrespectful responses to the Senators who were interviewing him.

Yes, Republicans hold all the cards and can do what they will. They could ram him through now, after the midterms, or even let Trump do it in a recess appointment. But, the SCOTUS to this point has had an air of nonpartisanship and civility about it that has all but evaporated from every other part of public discourse, and Republicans are trying now to throw away the last bit of integrity left on the Supreme Court.

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