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SALT LAKE CITY — Sen. Orrin Hatch again went off on Democrats trying to block the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, turning to astrology and frozen pizza snacks to make his point.
In a speech on the Senate floor Friday, the Utah Republican decried critics of the Washington, D.C., appeals court judge turning to his days at Yale as a sports reporter for his college newspaper to assess his judicial views.
From the New Yorker:
"Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor who mentored Barack Obama, zeroed in on the lead sentence in Kavanaugh’s account of a midseason game against Cornell: 'In basketball, as in few other team sports, it is possible for one person to completely dominate a game.' Was this a harmless observation? Tribe noted, 'Kavanaugh’s seeming fascination with single-player domination might be a muscular view of executive power.'"
Hatch said he had a good laugh over that, and that it's "beyond absurd" that Kavanaugh’s observations about basketball somehow reveal his views about executive power. He wondered what other "hidden insights" might be gleaned from "obscure sources."
"Should we do a deep dive on Judge Kavanaugh’s zodiac sign to see what it might say about his judicial temperament?" Hatch said.
"He’s an Aquarius by the way, and Mars is in retrograde, so we all know what that means: Judge Kavanaugh is going to destroy America. He’s going to burn down the Capitol, coronate himself king, and make confetti of the Constitution. The stars have literally aligned for this man to usher in Armageddon," he said.
"The real question is, how am I the only one seeing this? And why hasn’t The New Yorker written a think piece about it already?"
If people want to understand Kavanaugh's view on the separation of powers, they won't find it in articles from his college newspaper or in his wife's emails, but in his opinions as a federal judge, he said.
"Of course, Democrats know this," Hatch said. "But like a kid procrastinating his homework playing video games and microwaving Bagel Bites, they are looking for any distraction at all to avoid actually analyzing Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial record."
Hatch said he looks forward to Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings starting Sept. 4 because Kavanaugh's judicial record will take center stage.
Several Senate Democrats called for the hearings to be put on hold after the conviction and guilty plea of two of President Donald Trump's former aides earlier this week.
"The possibility of criminal wrongdoing by the president, combined with existing doubts that Brett Kavanaugh believes a president can even be investigated, demand further review of this situation. Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing should be delayed," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday.
