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struggle4progress

(118,041 posts)
Fri Aug 31, 2018, 03:42 PM Aug 2018

Kavanaugh's role in championing a segregationist

By Billy Corriher
August 31, 2018

When U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh worked as an attorney for President George W. Bush, he helped to get Charles Pickering of Mississippi on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — despite questions about whether the attorney and former prosecutor left the Democratic Party because it embraced civil rights in the 1960s. Kavanaugh downplayed his role in the Pickering nomination at his first confirmation hearing in 2006, but recently released emails raise questions about whether in doing so Kavanaugh misled the Senate.

During his 2002 confirmation hearing, Pickering refused to answer a senator's questions about his decision to leave the party after the 1964 Democratic convention. Pickering told a local paper at the time that Mississippians were "heaped with humiliation and embarrassment" after black delegates, whom the state Democratic Party refused to seat, formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and demanded to be included.

The Democratic-controlled Senate rejected Pickering's initial nomination, but Bush renominated him after Republicans took control in 2002. New evidence then emerged that countered Pickering's claim that he had worked to improve race relations. Records unearthed by a reporter at Salon showed that Pickering had actually "worked to support segregation, attack civil rights advocates who sought to end Jim Crow, and back those who opposed national civil rights legislation" ...

A few years later at his own confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh testified that Pickering was "not one of the judicial nominees that I was primarily handling." However, the new emails show that on Jan. 28, 2003, he had a list of six "to-do" items related to the Pickering confirmation ...

https://www.facingsouth.org/2018/08/kavanaughs-role-championing-segregationist-judge

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