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

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