On March 25, Tara Reade publicly came forward stating that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. The Biden campaign has denied the allegations.

The blatant media bias in handling the accusations of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Vice President Biden shows an extremely disturbing double-standard in due process. Apparently, the Left does not hold their own candidates to their own standards.

Yesterday, the Committee for Justice hosted a webinar on the Supreme Court and the 2020 election featuring RNLA Executive Director Michael Thielen, Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice, and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network.  In his remarks, Mr. Thielen outlined presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's history regarding judges and judicial confirmations.  He described how then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Biden presided over both the character assassination of Robert Bork, creating the new term "borking," and the late, discredited attack on Clarence Thomas that created the playbook used against Brett Kavanaugh:

It is not an optimal situation but let’s be real, context and the rule of law matter. Honest liberals and even Joe Biden give qualified agreement for holding the Wisconsin elections today.  Yet this is a bit extreme but typical of the reaction on the left.  

There are many problems with the left's reaction. First, keep in mind what Democrat Presidential frontrunner Joe Biden stated:

“There’s a lot of things that can be done; that’s for the Wisconsin courts and folks to decide,” former Vice President Joe Biden said last Thursday in a virtual press briefing, in which he insisted that in-person and mail-in voting could both be done safely—even though he considers the possibility of a national convention in the state to be a potential risk to public health.

A story that has not attracted the attention it should is Mike Bloomberg’s $18 million donation to the DNC.  No one should forget that the DNC changed its rules to allow the late-starting Mike Bloomberg on to the debate stage.  As another Democrat candidate, Andrew Yang, tweeted back on January 31. 

The DNC changing its debate criteria to ignore grassroots donations seems tailor-made to get Mike Bloomberg on the debate stage in February. Having Americans willing to invest in your campaign is a key sign of a successful campaign. The people will win out in the end.

— Andrew Yang🧢 (@AndrewYang) February 1, 2020

Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words is a great movie. I saw it this weekend and came away with three thoughts, none of which are on his legal philosophy, which is just touched on in the movie. But two of them are very relevant for today.

Many experts have concluded last night’s CNN Democratic Presidential debate was won by Mayor Pete Buttigieg.  Moreover many “conservatives” liked Mayor Pete.  However, on the issue that RNLA has been tracking- the candidate’s positions on judicial nominees and court packing- Mayor Pete was again a trainwreck last night. His position last night:

Now, I'm not talking about packing the court just with people who agree with me, although I certainly will appoint people who share my values, for example, the idea that women's reproductive freedom is an American right.

What I'm talking about is reforms that will depoliticize the court. We can't go on like this, where every single time there is a vacancy, we have this apocalyptic ideological firefight over what to do next.

Now, one way to fix this would be to have a 15-member court where five of the members can only be appointed by unanimous agreement of the other 10. 

2019 Republican Lawyer of the Year, former FEC Chair, and RNLA Board of Governors member Lee Goodman appeared on CNBC earlier this week to discuss the unsuccessful effort by the Biden campaign to have Facebook remove a Trump campaign ad it claimed was inaccurate.  Mr. Goodman summarized the law applicable to campaign ads:

It does not take a deep dive into the facts to determine that the Democrats' partisan impeachment case is on very shaky ground.  Actually, looking at the facts objectively from what we know from the Ukrainian perspective seems to show that former Vice President Biden, not President Trump, is the one whose activities should be receiving further scrutiny.

According to Webster’s a quid pro quo is "something given or received for something else."  Democrats allege Trump wanted dirt on Biden in return for foreign aid.  However, according to the New York Times reporter Ken Vogel: “The Ukrainians weren't made aware that the assistance was being delayed/reviewed until more than one month after the call."

As Nancy Pelosi pushes House Democrats toward impeachment, we thought we would gather some reactions and responses from all sides of the spectrum that you may have missed.  But first off, we have to commend the President who has called for the release of the transcripts of his conversation with Ukraine President Zelensky and Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans who “hotlined” and voted unanimously to pass a resolution to provide the whistleblower complaint to Congress. 

Trump is releasing the transcript.

McConnell moving the complaint to Senate intel.

You want transparency & the facts? You got it.

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) September 24, 2019

This is another installment of an ongoing series of posts summarizing 2020 Democratic presidential candidates' views on judges and the courts.  All posts in this series can be viewed here.

On Neil Gorsuch:

• In a March 28, 2018 interview on podcast, “Pod Save America,” Biden stated “I would work like the devil if I were in the Senate, if we had a Democratic Senate, to keep [another] Gorsuch from going on the court again. The single most damaging thing thus far, short of what may happen to our foreign policy, to all the things I care about, was Gorsuch going to the court.”^[1]

On Brett Kavanaugh:

• In a written statement on the September 29, 2018 hearings of Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Biden wrote, “What we witnessed yesterday from the Republican Judiciary Committee members was a degree of invective, blind rage and brute partisanship that threatens not only the Senate and the Supreme Court — it threatens the basic faith in fairness and justice that binds this country together.”^[2]
• Biden voted “No” for Brett Kavanaugh’s DC Circuit Court confirmation on May 26, 2006.[3]

His opposition to Trump’s judicial nominees:

• Of all of President Trump’s appointees to the Court of Appeals, only one was a district court judge who had a roll call vote when Biden was a Senator.  Biden voted ‘Yes.’[4]
• Of all the current district court judges appointed by President Trump, Joe Biden prevented one from becoming a judge by not offering timely senatorial “blue slip” approval of a candidate from Delaware.[5]