Hell no on Kavanaugh!
Some people are very upset over
Donald Trump's pick
for the Supreme Court.
He is a dangerous man!
Are you ready
for a fight?
What are they so upset about?
What's at stake is freedom for LGBTQ Americans,
for equal rights,
for civil rights!
People are freaking out.
They are freaking out because
they don't understand those top areas,
whether it's abortion or gay rights,
or Citizens United that people on the left
tend to be concerned about.
There's really not gonna be a change.
That's because the court, especially
Chief Justice Roberts
respects precedent,
especially when people have come to
depend on previous decisions.
After a quarter-million gay marriages
and 45 years of legal abortions,
the court's unlikely to reverse itself on those issues.
I will nominate
Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
But if Kavanaugh replaces Kennedy,
there will be changes.
Individual freedom.
What does Kavanaugh mean for that?
He's great there, probably better than Kennedy.
Retiring Justice Kennedy
sometimes ruled against individual liberty,
like when he said it was okay
for a Connecticut town to grab Suzette
Kelo's property and little pink house
because the developer who might pay more in taxes
wanted her land.
Kennedy voted for the bad guys.
He voted to take away the property from the people.
Kavanaugh could very well be the fifth
vote to overturn Kelo.
Trump's nominee has got to go! Hey hey!
One major area that people might be upset about is
affirmative action.
We won't stand for Donald Trump's attempt
to use the Supreme Court as a weapon
against all of our progress.
Kavanaugh could provide the
fifth vote to overturn that 40 year-old
experiment with using racial preferences
to promote some kind of nebulous
diversity.
Lawsuit against Harvard University
for discriminating against
Asian-American applicants.
That case against Harvard's racial preferences may
reach the Supreme Court soon and the
court may end affirmative action.
The court with Kavanaugh on board may also
toss out some gun restrictions.
He has written one of the leading lower
court opinion expanding the scope of the
individual right for armed self-defense.
He's not a gun nut.
He's a constitutionalist.
Kavanaugh has a history of
reining in government regulators.
All these alphabet agencies
that increasingly intrude in people's lives,
he has written at length that the
government keeps doing things that it
doesn't have the power to do.
The Constitution's separation of powers
protects individual liberty.
At his nomination announcement at the White House,
he talked about how the separation
of powers is there to protect liberty.
That's fantastic. I think Libertarians
will like the push-back on government excess.
But Kavanaugh does side with
government on one form of excess.
The government was collecting all of our
metadata, all of our phone records.
Kavanaugh ruled that he was just fine with it.
He said that the NSA is justified
in collecting metadata on
Americans as part of the--
He volunteered to write that.
He was enthusiastic that
this serves a critically important
special need - preventing terrorist attacks.
But the government says we're
aware of no instance where the
program discovered an attack.
That's his worst case.
Now it's unclear how that
extends beyond the national security
surveillance area.
He has a lot of good opinions
on police needing a warrant or
laws being drawn so broadly
that prosecutors are convicting people who
are not guilty.
Clearly he defers to the
government on national security grounds,
but most judges and justices do anyway.
At least on other forms of regulation,
Kavanaugh has a strong record
of not deferring to government.
We have a moral obligation to act on climate.
As a judge in DC, Kavanaugh voted to
strike down some environmental rules.
Some EPA regulations where the staff
just said, we're gonna do this?
That's right.
I mean, I like the idea of clean
air and clean water.
There are federal laws that protect that,
but in the last decade, the EPA has taken a
lot of liberties.
But it's their job.
Clean the air, clean the water.
EPA does not get a free-floating power under the
Constitution or otherwise to do what
they think is best.
It's Congress' job to say, you know our
air isn't clean enough.
Here's how you should be doing your job, EPA.
Why is it better for Congress to do it?
Congress is elected,
and if we don't like what it's doing,
we can fire it.
That's the way the checks and balances work
And that's why it's so important that courts
hold the bureaucrats feet to the fire.
Hey hey, ho ho,
Kavanaugh has got to go!
The Libertarians should definitely be happy
with Kavanaugh.
He's not going to agree with us
all the time certainly,
but no justices or judges do.
The fact that we're looking around the edges to see
what sorts of things we can disagree on
shows how far we've moved in 10 or 20 or
30 years.
Right.
At least now people and
judges talk about limiting government
and how regulation's out of control.
That's new
compared to the last 10, 20, or 30 years.