By Aaron Miller -
U.S law professors in their hundreds have signed a petition expressing objections against Brett Kavanaugh’s supreme court nomination and urged Senates to reject his application following his performance at last week’s hearing on sexual misconduct allegations.
Law professors have been gathering signatures for two letters that strongly argue that Kavanaugh be disqualified after his angry and tearful remarks to the Senate judiciary committee. The legal experts insist that Kavanaugh was contemptuous towards members of Congress, and showed a prejudicial streak that question his suitability and temperament for a lifelong position on America’s highest court.
The experts make reference to both federal law and the American Bar Association’s code of judicial conduct, highlighting Kavanaugh’s obligation to promote “public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary”. Kavanaugh has denied all allegations by Christine Ford that he attacked her at a party decades ago whilst they were at University of Yale. His credibility has been questioned by a former classmate who accused the aspiring high court judge of mischaracterising the extent of his drinking back at Yale.
Authors of one of the letters from a national group of female legal experts criticized Kavanaugh for showing a disrespect for women, after he lashed out at Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Kavanaugh later apologized for asking Klobuchar about her drinking habits when she tried to ask about his own.
“Judge Kavanaugh’s lack of respect for our democratic institutions and women in positions of power in particular revealed that he does not have a judicial temperament and is unable to adhere to judicial professionalism,” says the letter, from the women in legal education section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).
The second letter says that while the questioning Kavanaugh faced was “of course painful”, he chose to be “intemperate, inflammatory and partial” rather than assist senators trying to assess the allegation against him. Several professors have signed the letter including some from prestigious law schools such as Columbia, Harvard and Yale. The signatories say that despite having “differing views about the other qualifications of Judge Kavanaugh”, they are now agreed that he “did not display the impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of our land”.
MOCKED
Meanwhile, President Trump mocked Ford at a rally in Mississipi by questioning the credibility of her allegation and testimony.
How did you get home?, he rhetorically asked. ‘I don’t remember,”. “How did you get there? ‘I don’t remember.’ Where is the place? ‘I don’t remember.’ How many years ago was it? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”‘ Ridiculing Ford, he added “But I had one beer — that’s the only thing I remember”.