I recently proclaimed myself less than charmed by “liberal feminist” Lisa Blatt’s all too charming endorsement of federal appellate court judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, calling it—a bit crudely, I admit—“high-end legal ass-kissing”. Well, if you’d like some legal substance to supplement my street invective, check out this article in Slate by Jamie Mayerfeld giving us unfortunately convincing reasons to believe that Kavanaugh is sympathetic to the “New Sovereigntist” notion that the U.S. president isn’t bound by sissy britches “human rights” notions of international law that prohibit torture. Because we don’t need no lousy, stinkin’ human rights around here.
Cases cited by Mayerfeld strongly suggest that Kavanaugh is an eager player of the legal shell games invented by the Bush Administration to deny any court any jurisdiction over anyone labeled a “bad guy” by the U.S. I previously “analyzed”, in fairly violent terms, some of these arguments in a piece called “Justice Scalia is a very big, very fat liar REVISITED”, expanding on an earlier, briefer post.1 Of course, the Obama Administration largely finessed this “problem” with its “killer drone” program, through which everyone we kill—at least every military-age male we kill—is automatically convicted of a capital offense on the grounds that we killed him. Problem solved!
- In the second post I promised to provide additional calumnies of Justice Nino, but never got around to it, so don’t look for them. ↩︎
