US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Misconduct Complaints Hit Dead End

* The full Judicial Conference won’t revisit investigation
into complaints over Supreme Court confirmation hearing
*Complaints concern Brett Kavanaugh’s temperament and truthfulness
stemming from response to scrutiny over sex assault
allegations

The judiciary won’t review its decision finding that it lacks
authority to investigate misconduct complaints against Justice
Brett Kavanaugh stemming from his fiery denial at his confirmation
hearings of sexual assault allegations.

The Judicial Conference, the full policy-making body of the
federal courts and the end of the line for complaints against
judges, will let stand an Aug. 1 ruling by an in-house committee
finding that Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court precludes
further review by the judiciary.

David Sellers, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the
U.S. Courts, told Bloomberg Law at the conclusion of the
conference’s biannual meeting that there has been no talk of
revisiting the matter and that the committee decision is final.

The full Judicial Conference led by Chief Justice John Roberts
has the authority to review the committee’s work, but there is no
right to it for any party, according rules on judicial conduct
proceedings. The final conclusion of the complaints leaves
impeachment as the only available remedy.

The development comes amid new furor over allegations of lewd
conduct attributed to Kavanaugh from his days as an undergrad
decades ago at Yale, and the FBI investigation of related questions
during his confirmation vetting.

It also comes at the time of some questioning of the
effectiveness of conduct guidelines and in-house efforts to hold
federal judges to account, and the lack of conduct standards for
the Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh, 54, hasn’t said anything publicly in response to the
latest allegations reported by the New York Times. But President
Donald Trump and a number of Republicans in Congress blasted the
report, a part of which was corrected by the newspaper, as a smear
job.

Trump tweeted that the “Radical Left Democrats and their
Partner, the LameStream Media,” are trying to “scare [Kavanaugh]
into turning Liberal!”

Now the Radical Left Democrats and their
Partner, the LameStream Media, are after Brett Kavanaugh again,
talking loudly of their favorite word, impeachment. He is an
innocent man who has been treated HORRIBLY. Such lies about him.
They want to scare him into turning Liberal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2019^[1]

Some Democratic presidential candidates responding to the Times’
report called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment. But House Judiciary
Chairman Jerrold Nadler didn’t immediately support that step.

Nadler told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show the next step was to
question FBI Director Christopher Wray on the thoroughness of the
Kavanaugh investigation. Wray is already scheduled to appear before
the panel next month.

“We’ll have to see where we go from there,” Nadler said, noting
that the relevant question is whether a Supreme Court nominee lied
to the Senate during
the confirmation process.

But Nadler said the committee currently has its “hands full” on
the question of whether Trump should be impeached.

Sen. Kamala Harris, a Judiciary Committee member and 2020
Democratic presidential candidate calling for a Kavanaugh
impeachment inquiry, suggested the House panel could create a task
force and retain outside counsel to investigate the justice if
committee resources are taxed.

One Supreme Court justice, Samuel Chase, has been impeached.
That was in 1804, and he was acquitted by the Senate. Eight lower
court judges have been impeached and removed from office, the
latest in 2010.

Temperament Complaints
The allegations that were before the Judicial Conference mainly
involved dozens of complaints about Kavanaugh’s temperament and
fitness for the high court following his response at his bitterly
partisan confirmation hearings dominated by allegations he sexually
assaulted a teenager while the two were in high school.

Kavanaugh denied the assault claim, but he acknowledged in an
op-ed that his tone during the hearings “might have been too
emotional.”

At one point in the proceedings, Kavanaugh called the
confirmation process a “calculated and orchestrated political hit”
and suggested that it was Democrat’s “revenge for the
Clintons.”

In its August decision, the Judicial Conference’s Committee on
Judicial Conduct and Disability upheld the conclusion of a special
panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth
Circuit that the judiciary had no role in investigating
Kavanaugh.

The panel found that the judiciary can’t review misconduct
complaints against sitting Supreme Court justices even if they
weren’t yet on the court when a complaint was made.

Kavanaugh was a judge on the D.C. Circuit when nominated to the
high court by Trump in July 2018.

Fallout from the Kavanaugh saga and sexual harassment complaints
that forced Judge Alex Kozinski from the California-based Ninth
Circuit in 2017 have spotlighted #MeToo-era attention on the
difficulties of holding federal judges to account in certain
instances.

Kozinski escaped scrutiny by the judiciary by retiring, and the
code of conduct established for federal judges in lower courts
doesn’t apply to the Supreme Court. The court currently doesn’t
have its own guidelines, but the justices have said they
voluntarily follow the code that governs their lower court
colleagues.

Justice Elena Kagan told Congress this past spring that Roberts
was considering whether the court should adopt a code of its own.
The Supreme Court had no update when asked by Bloomberg Law this
week.

Culled from news.bloomberglaw.com