The authors of The Education of Brett Kavanaugh claim that the current Supreme Court justice exposed himself while drunk at a party as a student at Yale University. Reactions to the reporting have been predictable, and have been split along party lines. Democrats want to hold impeachment hearings; Republicans want the 2018 nomination hearings to suffice. The backdrop for all of this is the possibility that Kavanaugh will become part of a conservative bloc that will overturn Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, and other cases that civil libertarians hold as crucial. If he can be impeached, this line of reasoning goes, those decisions cannot be overturned.
Such plans seem desperate. The legal issues involved in ascertaining the truth three decades after an event would be difficult to overcome. It seems unlikely that an impeachment could be achieved based on more “he said, she said” testimony. The case for impeachment also assumes that there are enough people in Washington who care about taking the blur out of the line between bad taste and misdemeanor criminality.
It seems far more productive for members of Congress to focus on problems that they should solve, education and infrastructure highest among them.
Even though concerns that Kavanaugh will help to over turn important cases for civil libertarians are completely valid, attempting to impeach him for a drunken action in college is–in all practical applications–no more than grasping at straws. After reading these reports, any reader can conclude that if Kavanaugh acted in this way in public–drunken or not–then his actions behind closed doors were probably not all of moral upstanding. However, despite everyone drawing negative inferences on Kavanaugh’s moral backbone, this is not enough to impeach someone over. Focusing on this problem is only drawing the attention away from more pressing problems that should hold Congress’s attention.
Congress is notoriously slow at deciding things, so I agree that their time should be better spent elsewhere. Education would be a great thing to talk about. Spending so much time debating on whether or not this is even worth the time is not efficient. After all, if everyone had speculative dirt from decades ago dragged up then legislature would be even more slow moving than it is now. Is this a problem that needs to be addressed? It is. Is it a problem that needs to stick around indefinitely because seven people say something happened a decade ago? Personally, I do not think so.
These accusations are impossible to truly prove, especially with today’s society of SOME dishonest women that discredit the say of others. Also, not every person is perfect. Of course, this wouldn’t justify the actions yet I can confidently say, under these conditions, that every politician everywhere is worthy of an impeachment trial as they have for sure done things. We vote people for who they are, not what people think of them, and now that they are in office I feel we should let them do their job for 3 minutes without interrupting so maybe, on the off chance, our government could function for a couple of minutes.
Supreme Court Justices should be politically neutral and not part of a political party. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case, and Kavanaugh was appointed even though he was obviously politically biased in favor of the Republican Party. I think that impeachment may be a little extreme, even if he doesn’t deserve to be in office. He did go through the necessary hearings and was appointed anyway, so he does have some right to his seat on the Supreme Court. I think unless he actually acts on something blatantly unconstitutional, he should remain in office. We shouldn’t attempt to impeach him solely based on his political leanings; we should only impeach him if he clearly goes against the Constitution.
Despite all the media attention that was on Kavanaugh during this time, he certainly should not be impeached for what he said. Though not ordinarily a theme in a Supreme Court nominee hearing, the question of what kind of drinker Kavanaugh was — and what he may have done under the influence of alcohol — emerged as one important, and disturbing, focus. Even though he may have gotten “belligerent and aggressive”, like Abby stated, Kavanaugh certainly shoould not be impeached for this.