Nathan J. Robinson goes in on Kavanaugh
Why Everyone Should Oppose Brett Kavanaugh’s Confirmation
Regarding much of the "liberal case for Brett Kavanaugh" crap we've seen, like "he gave my daughter a clerkship and managed not to creep on her" and "he is a great carpool participant":
On legal jurisprudence, and the story conservatives tell themselves about how they don't make value judgements, they just interpret TEH LAW:
Quote:
NFFE v. Vilsack is not a particularly historically notable case. It’s not about abortion, immigration, indefinite detention, or the other “hot button” issues that are talked about during Supreme Court confirmations. I cite it because it shows very clearly that Kavanaugh is being dishonest when he talks about not imposing his “views.” The case requires a judge to impose their views. The question in the case is whether the government’s stated interest is sufficiently important to exempt it from the Fourth Amendment’s presumption against suspicionless searches. The majority thinks the government’s interest is hogwash (“a solution in search of a problem”). Kavanaugh thinks the exact opposite (“it would seem negligent not to”). This is a straightforward disagreement over which value is more important: the employee’s right to privacy or the government’s anti-drug initiative. The text of the Fourth Amendment cannot answer that question, and what you think of it is going to depend on whether you’re the sort of person who thinks government justifications for the drug war are nonsense (e.g., a liberal, lefty, libertarian, or left-libertarian) or the sort of person who thinks drugs can be very harmful and governments have good reason to want to root out drug use (e.g., a social conservative). Law requires balancing different interests, and balancing those interests requires value judgments.
But don't worry - when it comes to interpreting TEH LAW, or the calling of balls and strikes as John Roberts like to put it, Kavanaugh has done some tremendously stupid things:
Quote:
The Supreme Court had also confirmed explicitly that “since undocumented aliens are not among the few groups of workers expressly exempted by Congress, they plainly come within the broad statutory definition of ‘employee.’” Immigrants get, then, the rights that workers would ordinarily have under the NLRA.
But Kavanaugh dissented. He did not think unauthorized immigrants were “employees,” even if they were employed, and thought they should have no such rights. This was, he said, because in the time since the NLRA and the Supreme Court’s decision, Congress had made it illegal to hire unauthorized immigrants. If it was illegal to hire them, Kavanaugh said, they were not employees because they were never employed. Now, one can criticize this as a simple absurdity: How can it be illegal to employ unauthorized immigrants if it’s also impossible to employ them? Kavanaugh’s dissent was also shoddy even from a purely legalistic perspective. (Skip rest of paragraph if you find arcane legal discussions tedious.) <skipping for the purpose of this quote>
So Kavanaugh tried to strip away a fundamental right from undocumented workers, even if it meant using bad reasoning and concluding that you can be an employee (in that you fit the longstanding statutory definition) but not really an employee (in that you don’t get any of the rights).