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Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court Hardcover – July 9, 2019
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Justice Anthony Kennedy slipped out of the Supreme Court building on June 27, 2018, and traveled incognito to the White House to inform President Donald Trump that he was retiring, setting in motion a political process that his successor, Brett Kavanaugh, would denounce three months later as a “national disgrace” and a “circus.”
Justice on Trial, the definitive insider’s account of Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, is based on extraordinary access to more than one hundred key figures—including the president, justices, and senators—in that ferocious political drama.
The Trump presidency opened with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to succeed the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. But the following year, when Trump drew from the same list of candidates for his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, the justice being replaced was the swing vote on abortion, and all hell broke loose.
The judicial confirmation process, on the point of breakdown for thirty years, now proved utterly dysfunctional. Unverified accusations of sexual assault became weapons in a ruthless campaign of personal destruction, culminating in the melodramatic hearings in which Kavanaugh’s impassioned defense resuscitated a nomination that seemed beyond saving.
The Supreme Court has become the arbiter of our nation’s most vexing and divisive disputes. With the stakes of each vacancy incalculably high, the incentive to destroy a nominee is nearly irresistible. The next time a nomination promises to change the balance of the Court, Hemingway and Severino warn, the confirmation fight will be even uglier than Kavanaugh’s.
A good person might accept that nomination in the naïve belief that what happened to Kavanaugh won’t happen to him because he is a good person. But it can happen, it does happen, and it just happened. The question is whether America will let it happen again.
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Print length375 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherRegnery Publishing
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Publication dateJuly 9, 2019
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Dimensions6 x 1.3 x 9 inches
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ISBN-101621579832
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ISBN-13978-1621579830
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“It is to be hoped that this fine, even-handed book will help to bring an end to the political savagery that has characterized all too many Supreme Court confirmation hearings.” -- MARY ANN GLENDON, Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard University
“Justice on Trial reads like a John Grisham novel, filled with intrigue and well-paced plot development that’s a roller-coaster ride even if we know how it ends. This is destined to become the definitive account of a crucial episode in American life.” -- ILYA SHAPIRO, Cato Institute
“A riveting inside look at the nasty politics of character assassination that have plagued the confirmation process going back to my father, Robert H. Bork.” -- ROBERT H. BORK JR., president, Bork Communication Group
“Even if you closely followed the confirmation hearings, you will learn a lot from this real-life legal thriller.” -- JOSH BLACKMAN, South Texas College of Law, author of Unraveled
“An amazingly well-sourced, behind-the-scenes chronicle of a Supreme Court nomination process that became a national circus. Everyone concerned with how broken the judicial confirmation process has become needs to read this riveting blow-by-blow account.” -- RANDY E. BARNETT, Georgetown Law School, author of Our Republican Constitution
“The authors’ deep knowledge of the players and the constitutional stakes shines throughout the book and makes for a thrilling and revealing read.” -- EDWIN MEESE III, 75th U.S. Attorney General
"[A] brand new smash book with enormous amounts of actual real reporting, interviews, behind-the-scenes fact-digging and analysis… You won’t get it anywhere else unless you get this book.” -- Laura Ingraham, Fox News
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Regnery Publishing; First Edition (July 9, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 375 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1621579832
- ISBN-13 : 978-1621579830
- Item Weight : 1.35 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.3 x 9 inches
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Best Sellers Rank:
#81,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Courts & Law
- #27 in United States Judicial Branch
- #40 in U.S.Congresses, Senates & Legislative
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Before I purchased this book, I also read the bios of the authors. Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino. Both have diverse careers and involvement with the major television networks.
The book contains information that I have never read before and goes back in our history further than I expected. And, in the case of Judge Kavanaugh it also covers his background information including his hiring of his law clerks. I never thought about a nomination to the Supreme Court Justice being measured not only by their legal opinions rendered but also by their law clerks. Most interesting to me.
Christine Blasey Ford, of course, is covered in detail including the 5 extensions she was given to testify. In actuality, this process in DC is at times staggering. The number of written questions given to Brett Kavanaugh prior to his hearing were staggering. To paraphrase from this book....Scalia - 3 ; Gorsuch - 324 and Kavanaugh - 1287. Wow....
The bias of the media is also presented ...I stopped watching the news on TV at least a year ago. Just from switching the channels, I could see that some of them left out parts of the interviews or answers to some of the questions. One example in this book concerns MSNBC and the ariing of the Georgetown Prep portion. I call this bias by omission and it is certainly prevalent in most of the media. And, there are more examples than this particular one.
All in all, this is an in-depth analysis of not only the Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation but it goes back in our history to other Supreme Court nominations and confirmations.
It is well-written and I believe a most honest presentation of the events leading up to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. And, also the future of the US Supreme Court.
Most highly recommended and for multiple reasons.
One of the strangest chapters is a compilation of the mania of the mobs, beating on doors, being hauled away by the cops, mailing coat hangers to senators, etc. The “fight with everything we have” approach of Schumer, Harris, and Booker culminates on the eve of confirmation with the chapter “All Hell Breaks Loose,” where the woman Ford appears, suddenly, after Feinstein kept Ford's letter secret for 20 days before springing it on the nation at the last minute.
Without taking anything away from the book, there are limitations of the written word compared with the actual videoed hearings. Remember Ford's streamed testimony, with her equivocations, memory lapses, supposed fear of flying, the "second front door" that wasn't, and “recovered memory” 30 years later. She didn’t know the year of the assault, or the house, how she got there, how she got home—a 3 hour walk, we are to believe. Supposed party attendees had no recollection of a party or an assault.
Supposedly she hadn’t wanted to go public, but earlier had contacted the Washington Post, retained a radical lawyer (recommended by Feinstein), took a lie detector test with no transcript available, and scrubbed clean her anti-Trump social postings. Seeing her live and in person, any rational person could tell she was delusional. By contrast, seeing Kavanaugh defend himself against unfounded and unverified charges with passion and conviction—and yes, disgust—is hard to convey by the written word. And yet, “Justice on Trial” does it well.
Regrettably missing from the book (as mentioned by others here) is an investigation into who leaked the letter in the first place—my guess is Sen. Hirono—and a fuller explanation of the final FBI investigation which found no evidence confirming Ford’s assertions and dismissed them out of hand. I can only think that the quick writing turnaround made this further effort impossible. But what we have here is quite enough to illustrate how mad many in the country have become.
About the authors’ conservatism: It comes through most tellingly in their respectful treatment of Ashley and Brett Kavanaugh’s faith. It’s mentioned several times without a hint of a sneer. I can only imagine what subsequent books from others will do with this material. The authors also are plain in their judgement of the haters. The writers’ stupendous amazement is clear at the manic mobs, senatorial F-bombs, spittle-sprayed denunciations, and even (yes) threatened violence between senators. Further, the authors' judgement of blatant media bias with absolutely no exculpatory reporting throughout the hearings rings true and accurate. The reporting is thorough. There is no “bias” when what’s before our very eyes is so obvious. Buy this book.
Top reviews from other countries
I am not going to pretend that I believe in any way in the good faith of those who opposed Kavanaugh's confirmation. Just when that seemed about to proceed, Californian Senator Dianne Feinstein suddenly produced a letter on which, it transpired, she had been figuratively sitting for quite some time. The letter contained obscure allegations against Brett Kavanaugh from an academic at a California campus associated with left-wing causes (well, it's in California). The accusations involved events supposedly from when the accuser and Kavanaugh were both still at school. Everything about the claims was vague: date, location, even the basic circumstances. Witnesses were named, but none had any recollection of the purported events.
Yet it was the age of #metoo. The reputations of numerous prominent Democrats had been trashed and the party desperately needed to turn the problem into one for the Republicans. Despite her inability to produce any evidence whatever to support her claims, the accuser was "believed," even though her own untrustworthiness was clearly on display. She supposedly had a terror of flying, which she convolutedly ascribed to her mythical experience with Brett Kavanaugh. Luckily, this fear of aeroplanes didn't kick in when she went on holiday to Hawaii.
It is a flaw in the legal systems on both sides of the Atlantic, apparently, that multiple analogous allegations can be treated as mutually supportive, even when they provide no real support at all, in evidentiary terms. Several accusers now exploited this, as did the left-leaning media. The allegations against Kavanaugh started life as preposterous and went downhill from there, but there was no lack of appetite for them. As the authors point out, "...more than one thousand female Yale Law School graduates signed a letter supporting Kavanaugh's accusers." Nice to know those graduates at least learned, at vast expense, how to write their names, even if they remained a bit sketchy about that whole law thing.
Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino themselves are appropriately judicious, a quality that completely escaped Kavanaugh's antagonists. This very well written book never reads like a polemic, even if it's clear where the authors' sympathies lie. Kavanaugh's appointment was finally confirmed and, as a Supreme Court Justice (surprise, surprise), he has been boringly middle-of-the-road in his opinions.
(That has not, however, stopped the attacks on him. Democrats were plotting to impeach him before and all the way through his confirmation hearings and those threats have not stopped since then. In reality, it is unlikely that the Democrats will ever have enough Senate votes to secure impeachment, so Plan B seems to be to expand the numbers of Supreme Court Justices and pack it with people with left-of-centre opinions and no qualms about legislating from the bench.)
This book is quite a shocking illustration of the state of Washington DC politics today, but that is no reflection on the writers, who deserve every credit for their work.
If you didn't follow the drama closely while it was happening, this book is a great retelling.
This is a very comprehensive history of the confirmation battle, from the 2016 battle over Merrick Garland through to the final confirmation vote.








