"Advise and consent" or "advice and consent"?

Which is it? I'm hearing "advice and consent" — the nouns — but I write "advise and consent" — the verbs. I prefer the sound of "the Senate's advise-and-consent role" (which I wrote here and here). Kavanaugh, testifying, told the Senators, "You have replaced ‘advice...

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A retired law professor just unseriously hoped that Vox has hit rock bottom.

Here's what I'm looking at:Oh, isn't it interesting? There's a new essay that purports to see “troubling similarities” between Hitler's Germany and present-day America. And it's "different" from all the old essays that already claimed to see and be troubled by similarities....

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"The Me Too movement is real. It matters. It is needed, and it is long overdue... I found [Ford's] testimony to be sincere, painful and compelling.

"I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events," said Senator Susan Collins, explaining her vote for Brett Kavanaugh. "We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence."Reported in "Collins...

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"My hearing testimony was forceful and passionate. That is because I forcefully and passionately denied the allegation against me."

Writes Brett Kavanaugh in The Wall Street Journal (not blocked by a paywall):At times, my testimony—both in my opening statement and in response to questions—reflected my overwhelming frustration at being wrongly accused, without corroboration, of horrible conduct completely contrary to my record and character. My statement and answers also reflected...

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The intemperance of the law professors' "judicial temperament" letter.

I see over 1,000 names on this anti-Kavanaugh letter, many of them names of people I know. I've been with a lot of law professors over the past 4 decades, and the best law professors I have known have routinely expressed disbelief that the judicial opinions they read state the real reasons why the judges decide the cases the way they do. And I don't...

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"Students Filed Title IX Complaints Against Kavanaugh to Prevent Him From Teaching at Harvard Law."

The Harvard Crimson reports, naming a student who supposedly said she'd filed a complaint with the University’s Office for Dispute Resolution and has been urging other students to do the same. We're told that "at least 48 students had signed an online petition certifying they had filed a Title IX complaint against the nominee."The student who...

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Oh! I'm surprised at myself, forgetting the first Monday of October! Did anyone notice the actual Supreme Court cranked back into gear today?

The empty seat is so interesting that maybe you, like me, forgot to hail the return of the actual Supreme Court today. I'd given in a thought now and then, maybe last week, but it slipped my mind today until just now.Here's Joan Biskupic at CNN, noting the return of the Court, but forefronting the unfilled seat: "An empty space and an idle microphone:...

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Slate — at the behest of my son John — corrects a false accusation that Kavanaugh lied.

Here's a link to the tweet.Here's the follow-up correction tweet:On 9/12 I criticized @thinkprogress for a headline claiming that Kavanaugh "said" he'd overturn Roe. On Friday I made the same mistake, writing that Kavanaugh "claimed" he was legal to drink in HS. Thanks to @jaltcoh...

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The outside prosecutor Rachel Mitchell opines that the evidence would not justify bringing criminal charges and does not even meet a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.

According to the 5-page memo she sent to the Judiciary Committee Republicans, which WaPo got its hands on. The basis of the opinion is what a lot of Kavanaugh proponents have observed:In the memo, Mitchell argued that Ford has not offered a consistent account of the alleged assault, including when exactly it occurred. Mitchell also noted that Ford...

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"Governor Jerry Brown virtually admits it's a bad idea even while signing it: 'I don’t minimize the potential flaws that indeed may prove fatal to its ultimate implementation.'"

"A terrible law, which will be bad for women and men. Laws and economics are not zero-sum; we can all lose," writes my son John, facebooking "California becomes first state to require women on corporate boards" (NBC).Brown's statement continued: "Nevertheless, recent events in Washington, D.C. — and beyond — make it crystal clear that many are not...

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Elena Kagan won't talk about the Kavanaugh controversy, but she will talk about how the Court functions with only 8 Justices.

Kagan was speaking at UCLA law school on Thursday night, and she spoke with experience about the problem of an 8-Justice Court's vulnerability to 4-4 splits, since that is the situation her Court confronted for the year that passed between the death of Antonin Scalia and the swearing-in of Neil Gorsuch."None of us wanted to look as if the court couldn’t...

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"Anita Hill Says Kavanaugh Accuser Hearing 'Cannot Be Fair.'"

That's the headline at NPR (with audio). What's unfair about the Senate hearing? Hill says:"In a real hearing and a real investigation, other witnesses would be called, including witnesses who could corroborate, witnesses who could explain the context of the experiences of Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh during that period in their lives, as well...

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"I know that lying to the Senate is a crime just like lying to the FBI, but, culturally and politically, people do think the FBI actually is the super-serious police..."

"... and since doing background checks is part of its portfolio, having the FBI do a seventh or add an addendum to the sixth background check of Brett Kavanaugh doesn’t seem crazy to me. Lots of people reject all of this and say that the GOP should stop the circus and just vote right now.... But if [Christine Blasey Ford] passes the threshold of sounding...

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With the devious use of the disjunctive "or," Michael Avenatti raises a cloud of "gang rape" suspicion around Brett Kavanaugh.

I'm reading the shockingly titled Daily News article "Brett Kavanaugh and pals accused of gang rapes in high school, says lawyer Michael Avenatti."“We are aware of significant evidence of multiple house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the early 1980s during which Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge and others would participate in the targeting...

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"I've got to admit that if I had to say right now, who is more likely to be telling us what is closer to the truth — no stakes, no burden of proof, just who is more likely — I'd have to say her."

I wrote in the comments to a post that linked to a WaPo article and simply quoted Christine Blasely Ford's husband. He'd said, "Her mind-set was, 'I’ve got this terrible secret.... What am I going to do with this secret?' She was like, 'I can’t deal with this. If he becomes the nominee, then I’m moving to another country. I cannot live in this country...

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