Posted on 09/18/2019 2:41:11 PM PDT by scottinoc
If I can produce someone who saw John Roberts’ penis in college, can we get the Obamacare opinion overturned?
As all MSNBC viewers are well aware, last Sunday’s edition of The New York Times ran an excerpt of the book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, which revives Debbie Ramirez's accusations against the Supreme Court nominee.
Quick reminder: This is NOT the Kavanaugh accuser with two front doors. It is NOT the Kavanaugh accuser whose own father warned that she had psychological problems.
This is the one who didn’t remember what Kavanaugh did to her for more than 30 years, until a few lefty friends helpfully reminded her that they’d heard something about it from a guy, who heard it from a guy, whereupon she spent six days “assessing her memories” during the nomination hearings -- and darned if it didn’t all come back to her!
What the guy who heard it from a guy heard was that, at a drunken party in a freshman dorm, Kavanaugh unzipped his pants and stuck his penis in Ramirez’s face.
Contrary to Pogrebin and Kelly’s claim that “at least” seven people “heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge," this vast array of witnesses includes only one person whose secondhand, rumor-mill story includes both Kavanaugh and Ramirez: Kenneth Appold.
(All we know about Appold is that he is a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary, meaning that he is less likely to believe in God than any person not a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary.)
The guy Appold claims he heard it from doesn’t remember it.
Are you following how absurd this is?
“Remember, this was just within minutes and not 30 years ago.”
LOL yes, we played that game in 1st grade or so. We called it telephone and it went through a class of 25 or so 1st graders. What came out at the end didn’t even share one word with the original statement. :)
The trick is to get it to court. According to the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, Judges can’t sue for libel at all, and political officials, as a practical matter, cannot either.The interesting thing is that, in that unanimous 1964 decision, the Warren Court held that the First Amendment denigrated the right of judges and officials to sue for libel - And Antonin Scalia, in a lecture, explained that the First Amendment actually did not, does not, change anyone’s rights at all.
What!! How can that be!! The answer is that the Bill of Rights in general, and the First Amendment in particular, were composed and ratified to set the rights of the people, as they were accepted to exist in 1787, in concrete. The Ninth Amendment could scarcely be clearer on this point.
But doesn’t the First Amendment create freedom of the press? NO! Freedom of the press existed in 1787, and so did limits on that freedom. If freedom of the press were absolute, pornography would be absolutely legal - and so would libel. There would never be any cases brought against either. And we know that isn’t true.
The trick lies in the wording of 1A referring to the freedom of the press. Not absolute freedom, but freedom as understood in 1787.
Consequently the logic of the Sullivan decision is defective. 9-0 ruling or not.
The Warren Court Said That 1A Denigrated the Right Of Officials to Sue For Libel. That was WRONG.
See post #7
. . . but again, “Wouldn’t stand up in court” is in the subjunctive mood. What we need to be able to say is that it “did not stand up in court” - meaning that
- it got to court, and that
- the plaintiff who sued for libel prevailed in court.
My #44 asserts that SCOTUS has a legitimate way of both accepting the case - in the teeth of the unanimous 1964 Warren Court claim in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that 1A denigrated the right of officials to sue for libel - and finding for the plaintiff once there.
I withdraw the joke, Your Honor.
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