Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Rucho v. Common Cause, a partisan gerrymandering claim against North Carolina's congressional map, and Lamone v. Benisek, a First Amendment retaliation partisan gerrymandering claim against one Maryland state legislative district.  Both cases were before the Court last term and were sent back to the district courts for further proceedings.  As in the past, today the justices continued to search for a justiciably manageable standard for considering partisan gerrymandering claims:

This morning, the Supreme Court heard oral argument for the second time in a racial gerrymandering challenge to Virginia's 2011 House of Delegates district map in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill.  Back in 2017, the Supreme Court upheld one of the challenged 12 districts and sent the remaining 11 back to the district court for further review after determining that the district court had applied the incorrect standard.  On remand, the district court found that race had been the predominant factor in drawing the 11 districts and threw them out, and the House of Delegates appealed.

The RNLA will honor Mike Davis, former Chief Nominations Counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, with the 2019 Betty Murphy Award. Prior to serving Sen. Grassley, Davis worked in private practice in Denver where he chaired RNLA’s Colorado Chapter, clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch when he was on the Tenth Circuit, helped get Justice Gorsuch confirmed, and again clerked for Justice Gorsuch at the Supreme Court.

Last Friday, a group of students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky were provoked and attacked because of their Catholic beliefs and outward support of President Trump by wearing hats that said “Make America Great Again.” The students and their parents have been faced with threats of attack and fear that their families will be destroyed; this is the same hostility that Justice Kavanaugh and his family faced during his hearing and confirmation process.

At the end of last month, The Daily Caller reviewed the top 32 "worst cases of media misquotes, misleading narratives, major corrections and straight-up fake news" in 2018.  It's no surprise that nearly all of them portrayed President Trump, Trump Administration officials, Trump nominees, or Republicans in an inaccurately poor light.  What may be surprising is a full quarter, or eight, related to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court:

The Trump Administration and Senate leaders were ultimately able to confirm Justice Kavanaugh, but it wasn’t without great obstruction and bias from the Democrats. The below posts show how Democrats and liberals obstructed individuals' and officials' rights. In 2019, Republican officials will continue to fight the confirmation obstruction as many conservative judges await hearings on their nominations.

This is the first midterm election cycle since 2002 where any incumbents of the non-presidential party lost re-election.  The Democrats lost four such races.  In part this was because of their terrible treatment of Brett Kavanaugh.  Marc Theissen wrote last week in "Kavanaugh treatment gave Senate to GOP":

It cost Democrats their chance to regain control of the Senate. And it gave Republicans an expanded Senate majority that will allow them to confirm an even more conservative justice next time around.

. . .

None of that might have been possible had it not been for the Democrats’ horrific treatment of Kavanaugh. As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put it, the failed effort to stop Kavanaugh was “like an adrenaline shot” for the GOP base. Republican voters were outraged to see a good man accused, without a shred of corroboration, of sexually assaulting a teenage girl, exposing himself to a college classmate and participating in gang rapes in high school. They were disgusted by Senate Democrats’ insistence the burden was on Kavanaugh to prove he didn’t do it and by Democrats’ blatant disregard for the presumption of innocence. They were energized by Kavanaugh’s willingness to fight back and declare his treatment by Democrats a “national disgrace.” And they punished the perpetrators of that disgrace at the polls on Nov. 6. . . .

The lesson for Democrats should be clear: Character assassination does not pay. Quite the opposite, it backfired – big-time.

The Senate Judiciary Committee released a report into the attempted smear of then-Judge Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.  The first paragraph is below. 

In the weeks leading up to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation vote on October 6, 2018, investigators from the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary (“Committee”) diligently pursued all relevant allegations made against the nominee. This memorandum summarizes the Committee’s work and provides a status update on the Committee’s ongoing efforts to review and address additional matters that arose during the course of the investigation, including potential violations of Senate rules, potential witness tampering, and potential false statements made to the Committee in violation of federal law.

Almost four weeks after Justice Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in, the mainstream media and Democrats have gone strangely silent on the accusations with which they were so eager to smear then-Judge Kavanaugh while his confirmation was pending:

The fallout from the Kavanaugh smear continues with some on the left doubling down on the smears regarding Justice Kavanaugh drugging and organizing rape trains of teenagers and with others backing off.  This is all a result of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley’s 29 page letter referring Trump-hater lawyer Michael Avenatti and his “witness” Julie Swetnick to the FBI for criminal investigation for providing false statements, obstructing investigations, and conspiracy during Kavanaugh’s confirmation. 

Yesterday, NBC did a mea culpa claiming that they had been deceived by Avenatti:

Was this an intentional attempt to mislead our reporters? Evidence points that way... https://t.co/MOxE8WiGK4

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) October 26, 2018