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The Left is damaging legal systems for a political win

I’m sick of the goings-on in the joke that passes for a U.S. Senate today. Instead I¹m reflecting on today’s article by Daniel Henninger, one of the WSJ’s best columnists.

Personally, I believe Dr. Ford might have been subjected to some horrific event in her teen years. It can only be a belief; we have only her word. I have no way to judge whether Brett Kavanaugh had anything to do with it if it happened. I doubt that Dr. Ford can know, though I believe she believes she knows. It was decades ago. Human memory is notoriously unreliable. Our brains aren’t video cameras. Some facts never can be known because they’re just too old and there just isn’t enough to go on. But Henninger insightfully makes a much more important point: for the sake of a political win, the Left in this country is destroying our legal system by refusing to apply traditional methods of determining facts.

I’ve been a lawyer since 1978. We used to have a great system for testing disputed facts. We used to have a great system for protecting not only victims of crimes, but also victims of false accusations. It involved a requirement to state a claim with specificity and within a short enough period that the claim could be tested with available evidence. Sure, this places burdens on actual victims. That’s the price for preventing, or at least minimizing, punishing the innocent. The Left is destroying that system. And when they are done, we will be left with mob rule. It’s destroying centuries of developed and tested jurisprudential methodology that exists for only one reason. That reason is to protect you and me. Kavanaugh today; you tomorrow. When that protection has been destroyed to achieve political ends, we all will find out what it’s like to live in a paradise of the Left, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, or China. That’s where we are heading.



Maurice Emmer

Aspen