WASHINGTON — Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court on Saturday by one of the slimmest margins in American history, locking in a solid conservative majority on the court and capping a rancorous battle that began as a debate over judicial ideology and concluded with a national reckoning over sexual misconduct. As a chorus of women in the Senate’s public galleries repeatedly interrupted the proceedings with cries of “Shame!,” somber-looking senators voted 50 to 48 — almost entirely along party lines — to elevate Judge Kavanaugh. He was promptly sworn in by both Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the retired Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — the court’s longtime swing vote, whom he will replace — in a private ceremony. For President Trump and Senate Republican leaders, who have made stocking the federal judiciary with conservative judges a signature issue, the Senate vote was a validation of a hard-edge strategy to stick with Judge Kavanaugh, even after his nomination was gravely imperiled by allegations by Christine Blasey Ford that he had tried to rape her when they were teenagers. The president was exultant. “He’s going to go down as a totally brilliant Supreme Court justice for many years,” he told reporters, whom he had invited to join him in watching the vote on television aboard Air Force One.<doc-sep>This image was removed due to legal reasons. Joe Manchin tried to play it safe this weekend, breaking party lines and voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in the hopes of courting the Trump-loving majority of his home state, but he may have just shot himself in the foot. Turns out, Manchin’s Democratic base might have had enough — and the Republicans don’t like him either. Advertisement Manchin went to an IHOP in Charleston, WV today to try to touch base with his constituents about his vote. Manchin’s re-election depends on courting enough of West Virginia’s Trump voters, but also energizing the strong Democratic minority to turn out and vote for him, which doesn’t look so good, according to the Associated Press. Here’s what some of the Democrats think, per AP: Walker, a first-time Democratic candidate for the state legislature, said she may not vote at all in the state’s high-stakes Senate election. Julia Hamilton, a 30-year-old educator who serves on the executive committee of the Monongalia County Democratic Party, vowed to sit out the Senate race as well. “At some point you have to draw a line,” Hamilton said. “I have heard from many, many people — especially women. They won’t be voting for Manchin either.”﻿ Across the parking lot, 63-year-old John Vdovjac said he was deeply disappointed by Manchin’s vote. Still, the Democrat said he’d probably vote for Manchin this fall. “I recognize the position he’s in because the state’s heavily Republican now,” said Vdovjac, a retired educator from Wheeling, as he helped grill hotdogs and hamburgers. “But he’s lost my loyalty.”﻿ Perhaps even more damaging is the fact that the Trump-supporting voters Manchin was trying to win over know his vote was a cowardly stunt to try to save his seat. Per AP: One West Virginia Trump supporter, 74-year-old Linda Ferguson, explained the politics bluntly as she watched the parade at Saturday’s Mountain State Forest Festival in Elkins. “If he didn’t vote for Kavanaugh he could have kissed his seat goodbye,” Ferguson said.﻿ But from some of these quotes, it looks like Manchin might as well kiss his seat goodbye anyway (emphasis mine): That wasn’t good enough for Tammy Means, a 57-year-old florist from Charleston, who was among thousands tailgating outside West Virginia University’s football stadium in Morgantown on Saturday. Means, a registered Democrat who voted for Trump, said she also voted for Manchin in the past. “I’m not going to anymore. Nope,” she said with a laugh as she sipped a Smirnoff Ice. She’s glad Manchin voted for Kavanaugh, but said, “He’s just doing it so he can get elected.”﻿ Advertisement Part of the deciding factor seems to be that Manchin waited to announce his vote until it effectively didn’t mean anything, trying to play both sides of the field. Manchin didn’t come out for Kavanaugh until after Susan Collins’ self-serving marathon of a speech made his vote irrelevant. Fuck Susan Collins In a single, horrific speech in front of the Senate this afternoon, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who… Read more Advertisement Manchin, for his part, tried to lean hard into the “innocent until proven guilty” angle. Per Vice News: “I make my votes based on the facts I have,” he said, speaking outside of a scheduled event at a senior center in Huntington, West Virginia. “I’ve made some tough votes over my career. Once I have the facts and I can come home and explain, I’m voting for it. So my vote was the same no matter what.” He explained that while some saw Kavanaugh’s hearing as a job interview, he saw it more like a trial and that he made his decision “based on the evidence the FBI put before me.” “I asked for that investigation and I made my decision based on that and also checking with people who’ve worked with him. Who know him professionally and, both, socially, “he said.” Advertisement Vice News also put together a focus group of West Virginia voters, who don’t seem particularly impressed with Manchin’s decision. Check out a clip here: Advertisement And of course, voting for Kavanaugh isn’t going to make the GOP leave him alone. Earlier today on Face the Nation, Mitch McConnell said that the Republicans still planned to fully back Manchin’s opponent, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who Manchin leads in the polls. Per CNN: “We appreciate his vote for Judge Kavanaugh,” the Kentucky senator said Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “I think it was the right thing to do. But we’re trying to win seats.” While McConnell said he appreciates Manchin’s support, he also pointed out that he is “still a Democrat.”﻿ Advertisement In other words, Mitch says thanks for the vote, sucker.<doc-sep>Ensuring Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court, Sen. Susan Collins’s lengthy, partisan speech on Friday defending her decision to provide the decisive vote to give him that lifetime appointment had a conclusion that, to anyone who knows anything about American politics, was more of a punchline. “My fervent hope,” she asserted, “is that Brett Kavanaugh will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court.” As the political scientist Seth Masket observed, this is tantamount to fervently hoping that dumping a barrel of kerosene on a fire will extinguish it. Not only will the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh make party polarization greater, it is likely to hasten the end of the Supreme Court as we know it. The idea that Kavanaugh will work as a consensus-restoring wound healer is absolutely ludicrous to anyone who knows anything about his history. He’s a long-time Republican operative who spent millions of dollars investigating discredited conspiracy theories while serving under Ken Starr’s investigation of the Clintons. His record on the D.C. Circuit, contrary to Collins’s disingenuous attempts to portray him as a moderate, is extremely and consistently conservative. And at his final appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, he delivered an angry partisan rant (complete with imaginary conspiracy theories about the Clintons) while treating the Democratic senators on the committee with open contempt. Placing an open Republican partisan who was also credibly accused of attempted sexual assault on the Supreme Court may well be the beginning of the end of a political dynamic that has been very favorable to the Republican Party. On one hand, the Supreme Court has become increasingly conservative, issuing decisions that have eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, largely eliminated the ability of state and federal governments to regulate campaigns’ finance, limited civil rights and consumer protections and attacked the rights of workers — among many other policy results desired by Republicans. Despite this, Democratic voters historically place less of a priority on the Supreme Court and have a much more favorable view of the court than Republicans. Republicans have been able to have their cake and eat it too, and it’s a major reason Donald Trump is sitting in the White House. It seems likely that this will not continue. Democrats are now much more likely to mobilize against an even more conservative court. Four members of this court have been nominated by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote; Kavanaugh will become the ultimate symbol of a Republican takeover of a court that fewer and fewer Democrats will recognize as legitimate. But how might Democratic leaders respond? The most natural place to start is with the possibility of impeachment. A focus on removing Kavanaugh is probably unwise, though not because the idea is bad on the merits. Even leaving aside Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s credible accusations of attempted sexual assault — which we shouldn’t — his repeated lying under oath during his confirmation hearings would in itself be reason to remove him from the federal bench. And, any congressional investigation run by a Democratic House committee into his shady personal and financial history might well reveal more concerns. The problem is that while impeachment would require only a simple House majority, it would take a two-thirds supermajority of the Senate to convict and remove him from office. The idea that a dozen or more Republican senators would vote to remove Kavanaugh when only one voted against him is fantastical. The next Democratic House or Senate could conduct the investigation into him that Republicans refused to do, but they are not going to be able to remove him regardless of what they find. A more likely scenario — especially if a Trumpified Supreme Court not only effectively overrules Roe v. Wade but then keeps striking down legislation passed by the next unified Democratic government — is expanding the size of the Supreme Court. The constitution does not fix the size of any federal appellate court, and the number of justices can be changed with simple majorities of both houses of Congress. Doing so isn’t hypothetical: After the Civil War, congressional Republicans manipulated the size of the court to ensure that it wouldn’t interfere with Reconstruction. It is true that the most recent serious attempt to expand the size of the Supreme Court — by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 — failed. But this failure was contingent, not inevitable. As Jeff Shesol observed in his comprehensive history of the conflict, had then-Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson not suddenly died, the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 might have passed. And Roosevelt’s proposal became unnecessary after that because the court’s then-swing justice, Owen Roberts, suddenly began to provide the fifth votes to uphold progressive legislation rather than striking it down. Had the Supreme Court continued to attack the New Deal after Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide victory, it is extremely unlikely that the Supreme Court would have only nine members today. It’s also critical to remember that Supreme Court decisions are not self-enforcing; they require the active compliance of various public officials. If elected officials simply refuse to implement the court’s decisions, there’s little the court can do about it. And this is, like expanding the size of the court, not merely hypothetical. For reasons both good (like Abraham Lincoln ignoring the Supreme Court’s holdings on the citizenship of African Americans, or the ability of Congress to enforce slavery in the territories in its infamous Dred Scott decision) and bad (like southern states refusing to implement the court’s order that segregation was unconstitutional for nearly a decade), decisions made by prior courts have been rendered dead-letters by noncompliance. An aggressively partisan Republican Supreme Court that undermines the ability of a Democratic Congress to implement the laws it passes with ad hoc constitutional arguments (while possibly undermining the basic rights of voters and already disadvantaged minorities) is going to find increasing resistance to its decisions. So, for now, the fate of the Supreme Court rests in the hands of Chief Justice John Roberts. If Roberts — as he did in refusing to vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act — remains the median (albeit not centrist or swing) vote and backs away from repeated conflicts with the next Democratic Congress and president, the nine-justice equilibrium might remain. But if he presides over a Republican super-legislature, or Trump is able to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg and/or Stephen Breyer with yet more hyper-conservatives, the question becomes how radically the federal courts will be transformed, not just if they have been. And Brett Kavanaugh’s legacy will stand as a symbol of the court’s partisan illegitimacy long after Trump has left the White House.<doc-sep>
President Trump on Monday ripped Democrats for talk of impeaching Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh over allegations he committed perjury during his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I’ve been hearing that they’re now thinking of impeaching a brilliant jurist — a man that did nothing wrong, a man that was caught up in a hoax that was set up by the Democrats,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn before departing for a police convention in Orlando. “And now they want to impeach him. I’ve heard this from many people. I think it’s an insult to the American public.” In an interview with Yahoo News on Sunday, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., left open the possibility of impeaching Kavanaugh if Democrats take back one of the houses of Congress in next month’s midterm elections. “The reality is, right now, Republicans control the House and the Senate, and there’s no way to do even an investigation unless we flip one of the houses. So I think even before you start focusing on questions about his truthfulness before a Senate committee, you’ve got to focus on the urgency of the work over the next 30 days, and that’s where my focus is,” Booker said. “I think that after the dust settles on the night of [Nov.] 6th, I think that’s where we start to evaluate.” The confirmation of Kavanaugh despite multiple sexual assault allegations enraged activists. Protesters, most of them women, flooded the U.S. Capitol on Saturday ahead of the Senate’s confirmation vote. Democratic lawmakers, like Booker, are hoping to channel that anger into votes. Trump, though, predicted a different outcome. President Trump talks to reporters as he departs the White House in Washington on Monday. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters) “I think you’re going to see a lot of things happen on Nov. 6 that would not have happened before,” he said. “The American public has seen this charade, has seen this dishonesty by the Democrats.” Trump said the mere mention of impeaching a Supreme Court justice who “is a top scholar, a top student, a top intellect, and who did nothing wrong” should galvanize support for Republican candidates on the ballot. Story continues “I think a lot of Democrats are going to vote Republican,” the president said, adding: “I have many friends that are Democrats. The main base of the Democrats has shifted so far left that we’ll end up being Venezuela. This country would end up being Venezuela.” “I thought the way they behaved was absolutely atrocious,” Trump fumed. “I thought the way they conducted themselves, the way they dealt with a high-level, brilliant, going to be a great justice of the Supreme Court — the way they really tortured him and his family — I thought it was a disgrace. I thought — I thought it was one of the most disgraceful performances I’ve ever seen.” Last week, Trump angered both Democrats and Republicans by mocking Christine Blasey Ford, who in testimony accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers. Previously, Trump had said he found Ford’s testimony “very compelling.” On Monday morning, he issued a blanket dismissal of the allegations against Kavanaugh brought by Ford and two other women. “It was all made up,” Trump said. “It was fabricated. And it is a disgrace.” Addressing the convention of International Association of Chiefs of Police in Orlando Monday afternoon, Trump again painted Kavanaugh as a victim. “It was very, very unfair what happened to him,” the president said. “It was a disgraceful situation brought about by people that are evil. And he toughed it out. We all toughed it out together.” ___ Read more from Yahoo News: