According to AP News, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh suggested several years ago that the high court ruling in 1974 that forced President Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, leading to the end of his presidency, may have been wrongly decided. That decision was unanimous, by the way.
If there was every any doubt that Brett Kavanaugh was an extreme right-wing thinker, those doubts can be put to rest. The Senate Judiciary Committee released documents on Saturday that Kavanaugh provided as part of the Supreme Court confirmation process, and in those documents was a 1999 article where Kavanaugh pointed out three times that “the decision in U.S. v. Nixon, which marked limits on a president’s ability to withhold information needed for a criminal prosecution, may have come out the wrong way.”
In the January-February issue of the Washington Lawyer, Kavanaugh said, “But maybe Nixon was wrongly decided — heresy though it is to say so. Nixon took away the power of the president to control information in the executive branch by holding that the courts had power and jurisdiction to order the president to disclose information in response to a subpoena sought by a subordinate executive branch official. That was a huge step with implications to this day that most people do not appreciate sufficiently…Maybe the tension of the time led to an erroneous decision.”
Brett Kavanaugh’s belief in executive power of the President to control information has already been speculated to be an important factor in his nomination by Trump to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. Indeed, Kavanaugh’s belief could be of great importance to Trump if Special Counsel Robert Mueller seeks to force him to testify in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
As further evidence, the AP reports that when Kavanaugh was asked whether anyone sought assurances from him about the stand he might take on a specific case or issue, he answered “No.”
Of course no one asked about how he may stand on a specific case or issue since all the information needed is already there. He will back Trump wholeheartedly in his ‘executive authority’ as President.
This is reminiscent of “the King can do no wrong” mentality of the middle ages in Europe, when King’s were thought to be ordained by God to rule. The United States left behind that way of thinking in 1776 when we became a nation based in Democracy. The president of the United States is elected to serve the American people. He is subject to the law of the land, or the Constitution of the United States means NOTHING!
