[jerf]

Stand in his place for a week and tell me that.

To echo manfredo, if the only people we can nominate to the Supreme Court are people who can just calmly sit there while the absolute worst accusations possible are flung against them, we're not going to be nominating new justices any time soon (Democrat or Republican). Or, alternatively, we're going to get a very, very distorted set of justices who lack all emotional affect or something.

Or, looking at it from another view point, there is this idea floating around (you're not the first place I've heard it from) that simultaneously, poorly-founded [1] accusations of rape are really, really terrible, like, the worst thing ever, more than sufficient to scotch a nomination to any serious office of the land... but at the same time, a person who is so accused of literally the worst thing ever should also have no reaction to this and be completely impassive in the face of these nominally terrible accusations.

Look, either it's that serious and it should be treated that seriously across the board, or it's not that serious at all, and it should be treated unseriously across the board. But if you try to have it both ways, the conclusion people are eventually going to come to is that it must not be serious. That's what's going to win out; are you sure you want that? Do you really want to say that the standard for reacting to being accused of serious crimes is that the accused should just wave the accusations away and be completely unaffected by them? Are you really asking for that to be the standard? Because if you think about it, I bet that's not what you want.

[1]: You want to consider them true, you want to consider them false, that's your business, but I'm very comfortable characterizing the accusations as very poorly founded either way.

[yongjik]

> Stand in his place for a week and tell me that.

Imagine going to the less well-off part of America and start a conversation like that.

"Imagine you're accused of rape twenty years ago and you have to defend it in front of angry people."

"So, if I fail, I go to jail?"

"No, not really."

"...Are they gonna beat me up?"

"No."

"Do I lose my job? My house? Will they take my daughter away for me being a rapist?"

"No, none of this happens. But a lot of people will call you names."

"...A lot of people call me names for just walking around!"

[manfredo]

From my discussions, as well as from surveys conducted (remember, poorer less educated people were more likely to support his appointment), it actually resonated more with less well off demographics. True, for Kavanaugh the stigma of being seen as a rapist doesn't have much effect - his employment is guaranteed for life after all. But for a poor person it may greatly impede their ability to get employment, potentially even putting them on the streets. For the less well off, being seen as a rapist, is a lot more impactful than getting called names.

[perfmode]

That office is so important that I’m happy to wait until the right candidate shows up. And I don’t want republicans or Democrats.

I want scientists of law with integrity.

And there are plenty competent people with integrity. It is people who lack integrity that marginalize them.

[lifeformed]

Well there was one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland

A bipartisan moderate that everyone loved, recommended by both parties, poised to take the nomination, then blocked for years by the Republican party just as a total partisan f-you to Obama.

[zeveb]

> blocked for years

He was nominated on the 16th of March 2016; the election was on the eighth of November of the same year, and his nomination expired on the third of January 2017, less than a year later. No matter how you slice that, his nomination to the Supreme Court wasn't 'blocked for years.'

[lifeformed]

Whoops, you're right. I got that bit wrong.

[AcerbicZero]

Garland would have made an excellent choice instead of Kagan, or even Sotomayor, if there was a desire for a more balanced, more centrist SCOTUS. However after those two nominations replacing Scalia with Garland was obviously a bridge too far which the R's could not accept. As unpopular as it may have been, In a way, I don't really blame them, and it seems to have paid off for them in the long run.

[jerf]

"And there are plenty competent people with integrity."

But there are also plenty of people who lack integrity and, if it is permitted and gets them what they want, will fling arbitrarily nasty false accusations at people. There is no one with so much integrity that false accusations can't be made of them. You're pushing a rope.

[perfmode]

The Obama family has not had a single scandal.

[brodouevencode]

Shouldn't that office should be held to the same standards as the other three branches?

[int_19h]

No, because the other branches have failsafes, such as periodic elections. But with SCOTUS, if you make a mistake and confirm the wrong candidate for the job, the only remedy is impeachment, which is very hard to pull off (by design). Thus, the standards have to be extremely high.

[brodouevencode]

That was actually my point. The lifetime appointments are given because they want the appointees to act as freely as possible without consequence. This is a result of elections having consequences.

[commandlinefan]

> I’m happy to wait until the right candidate shows up

Well, you're in luck, because he was confirmed.

[lifeformed]

In Kavanaugh's case, the problem is deeper than the rape accusation itself. False accusations are horrible but we have to stop pretending that the people pushing for his nomination even cared if it was true or not. A majority of Republicans polled said that he should be confirmed even if it is proven he is a rapist. The Republican senators said they'd push the nomination through no matter what was found. It's clear from these facts that these Republicans were not approaching the nomination in good faith.

If you were interviewing someone for a job, and then found that he was accused of rape multiple times, do you:

A) Ignore them.

B) Not hire him.

C) Look into the situation more deeply.

D) Want to hire him even more.

I think we can agree C makes most sense, but most Republicans were pushing hard for D. They were an inch away from doing it without an investigation, but finally caved due to one holdout senator, and then did a quick crippled investigation where they couldn't even interview Kavanaugh or the accuser Ford.

As for the accusations itself, we know that Ford named Kavanaugh as her rapist to multiple people decades ago. We also know that Kavanaugh sent texts about how to deal with another accuser, before the accuser even went public. Also, he then perjured himself saying he didn't know about her until she went public.

Because of these reasons, I think the outcry against Kavanaugh's nomination was justified. If the Republicans really wanted the best person for the job, and if he really was innocent, they should have all agreed early on for a thorough FBI investigation which should clear his name. Instead, they made it a culture war issue and played up the circus. If they didn't want it to be a shame storm, they could've taken the allegations seriously and do their job to represent the will of the citizens.

We all know that we're not going to get 100% evidence of if he did it or not, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to find what we can and build up some percentage of confidence in the candidate. If the available evidence instills us with perhaps 30% doubt of his word, should that have a factor in our hiring decision? Or do we only consider 0% or 100% conclusions? Is 30% too risky for hiring someone for what is arguably the most important job in the world?

To be fair, I don't think a media circus crucifixion is the right outcome of an unproven allegation, but it's also wrong to totally disregard such allegations when making such a high-stakes decision. It seems fair to me to at least take a risk-adverse approach without casting total judgement on the candidate.

[perfmode]

Thanks for taking the time to write this analysis.