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niyad

(113,027 posts)
Thu Jul 12, 2018, 12:24 PM Jul 2018

Kavanaugh lauded late Chief Justice Rehnquist for dissenting in Roe vs. Wade and supporting school p

(FUCK YOU, you gestational slaving, woman-hating POS)

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh lauded late Chief Justice Rehnquist for dissenting in Roe vs. Wade and supporting school prayer

http://www.latimes.com/resizer/lGecxBPvm2odnSBXvL3XbszPk3w=/1400x0/www.trbimg.com/img-5b463fe7/turbine/la-1531330531-1uujrqpnjc-snap-image
(backpfeifengesicht!!!!)
Judge Brett Kavanaugh poses for photographs before meeting with lawmakers at the Capitol on Wednesday. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, gave a revealing speech last fall in which he lauded former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist for having dissented in Roe vs. Wade and for rejecting the notion of “a wall of separation between church and state.” He also praised the late chief justice’s unsuccessful effort to throw out the so-called “exclusionary rule,” which forbids police from using illegally obtained evidence.
All three of areas of law — abortion, religion and police searches — are likely to be in flux if Kavanaugh is confirmed and joins the high court this fall.

Kavanaugh’s comments are significant because they were in a speech, not a court opinion in which he was bound by precedent, said David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “He is not writing as a judge. This is him telling us his own views. And while he doesn’t come out and say ‘the dissent is right,’ it is pretty clear he agrees with Rehnquist,” Cohen said. Agreeing with the dissent, however, would not necessarily mean that Kavanaugh would now vote to overturn a long-standing precedent. In the speech, Kavanaugh said Rehnquist “was my first judicial hero,” noting that he started law school at Yale in 1987, a year after President Reagan had elevated Rehnquist to be chief justice. Rehnquist had been the court’s lone true conservative for many years, and Kavanaugh said he felt much the same at Yale.

“His opinions made a lot of sense to me. In class after class, I stood with Rehnquist. That often meant in the Yale Law School environment of the time that I stood alone. Some things don’t change,” he said at a Constitution Day address delivered at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in September 2017. He cited five areas—“criminal procedure, religion, federalism, unenumerated rights and administrative law” — where Rehnquist stood fast against the liberals and moved the law to the right. He “would be the first to say that he did not achieve full success on all the issues he cared about. But it is undeniable, I think, that he brought about a massive change in constitutional law and how we think about the Constitution,” Kavanaugh said.

Kavanaugh noted that Rehnquist joined the high court in 1972, only a few months before the justices heard a challenge to a Texas law that made all abortions a crime, except those done to save the life of the mother. In Roe vs. Wade, along with Justice Byron R. White, Rehnquist “ultimately dissented from the court’s 7-2 holding recognizing a constitutional right to abortion,” Kavanaugh said. The Bill of Rights did not include an explicit right to abortion, and Rehnquist believed a new, “unenumerated” right should gain constitutional status only if it was “rooted into the traditions and conscience of our people. Given the prevalence of abortion regulations both historically and at the time, Rehnquist said he could not reach such a conclusion about abortion,” he said. Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe vs. Wade said “the states had the power to legislate with regard to this matter,” he added. Later, as chief justice, Rehnquist tried, but failed by one vote, to overrule the abortion decision in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. Kavanaugh did not mention it, but Justice Anthony M. Kennedy cast a decisive vote to preserve the right to abortion in that case.

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http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-kavanaugh-rehnquist-20180711-story.html#

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