Scrambled Eggs

Faberge Egg:  Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took to the podium yesterday for one of those increasingly rare “daily” White House news conferences.  She defended Trump’s Mississippi mocking of Dr. Blasey Ford and her Senate testimony by saying that he was just “stating the facts” or at least the facts as he saw them.  She then went on to attack Democrats for exploiting Blasey, ignoring that several Republicans were also offended by Trump’s comments.  She further slammed Democrats for tarnishing Judge Kavanaugh’s pristine record acting as if that “little” problem with alcohol and his lying to the Judiciary Committee were just figments of the Democrats’ imaginations.  Of course she didn’t mention the letter that Kavanaugh sent to his high school friends years ago, the letter in which he detailed  plans for their group rental of a beach house and where he noted their intentions to get really drunk and puke a lot.  He signed that letter using his high school nickname “Bart,” relevant because during his Senate testimony he denied knowing if the character called Bart in his friend Mark Judge’s semi-autobiographical book was based on him.  Kellyanne Conway, also stuck with the “it’s okay for Trump attack to the victim” theme by claiming that the White House has done nothing but treat Dr. Blasey like of all things a Faberge Egg.  How ironic that she chose artwork produced for Russian Tsars and Tsarinas to defend Trump, why does everything always go back to Russia?  Republican Senators Flake, Collins, and Murkowski also weighed in on Trump’s comments.  Collins called them “just plain wrong,” Murkowski said they were “wholly inappropriate” and “unacceptable” and Flake said he thought they were “obviously insensitive and appalling, frankly. There's no time or place, but particularly, to discuss something so sensitive at a political rally is just wrong.” Trump’s crass statements aside, each of the so called Republicans of conscience went on to say that their votes were still up in the air pending the release of the FBI’s updated Kavanaugh report.  Early this morning the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House has already seen and reviewed the FBI report and that at least according to them, nothing in it corroborates the accusations against Kavanaugh.  That said the WSJ also reported that the FBI only interviewed the very few people that White House counsel Don McGahn authorized them to interview so the report is at best incomplete.  We may have to wait a day or so to hear from the remaining 40 or more people who weren’t interviewed, if it takes that long for some of them to start showing up on one or more news shows.  At 8 AM today, one copy of the FBI report will be made available to members of the Senate for their review, not one copy for each Senator but one copy for all of them.  In an effort to insure that the contents of the report remain confidential, each Senator will have to go to the Senate SKIFF to review the report where they will have to read fast as their time will be limited. Yesterday, more than 650 law professors, including 13 affiliated with Yale Law School and 21 with Harvard Law School, sent a signed a letter to the Senate arguing that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed because of his “lack of judicial temperament.” It’s worth noting that if he wasn’t a subject of that letter, Kavanaugh might have signed it. During one of his speeches, one that took place before he was nominated to serve on the Supreme Court and well before he demonstrated partisan outrage during his own hearing, he said “To be a good umpire and a good judge, don’t be a jerk. In your opinions, to demonstrate civility—to show, to help display, that you’re trying to make the decision impartially, dispassionately, based on the law and not based on your emotions.” Majority Leader McConnell doesn’t care what’s in the FBI report or what Kavanaugh’s legal peers have to say about his suitability or even about Kavanaugh’s emotional instability, he plans to push Kavanaugh’s confirmation through as soon as possible and has already scheduled a procedural vote for tomorrow.  All eyes are on Republican Senators Flake, Collins and Murkowski with a few also focused on Democrats Manchin and Heitkamp.  North Dakota’s Heitkamp is so far down in the polls right now that a vote for Kavanaugh probably wouldn’t do much to help her and might even cause a few of her Democratic supporters to stay home in disgust. West Virginia’s Manchin has a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent so he can afford to vote against Kavanaugh but will probably wait to make his decision until he sees which way the Flake, Collins, Murkowski wind is blowing.  As to Trump, his despicable mocking of Dr. Blasey appears to be energizing Republican voters, which is all he really cares about anyway.  Recent polls, to the extent that polls are to be believed, show that the Kavanaugh effect may cause more Republicans to show up and vote turning that much talked about Democratic wave into a mere ripple.

Judges Matter:  Yesterday, a federal judge in California temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s plans to terminate the legal status of about 300,000 immigrants who fled violence and disaster in Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua and El Salvador.  Justice Chen, an Obama appointee, found substantial evidence that the administration lacked “any explanation or justification” to end the “temporary protected status” designations for immigrants from those countries.  Citing statements by Trump denigrating Mexicans, Muslims, Haitians and Africans, including his January remark about “people from shithole countries” and his June 2017 comments stating that 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS,” the judge concluded that bias may well have been the motivating factor for the Trump administration’s policy change.  This is likely to be another one of those decisions that will ultimately reach the Supreme Court, one that may or may not include a Justice Kavanaugh but absent a Democratic wave will most likely include a new justice who shares most of his views.