Supreme Revenge: Josh Holmes Interview
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- Опубликовано: 20 май 2019
- Josh Holmes is the former chief of staff in Senator Mitch McConnell's personal office. Watch this full candid interview with Holmes that was conducted with FRONTLINE during the making of the May 2019 documentary "Supreme Revenge."
This interview is being published as part of FRONTLINE's Transparency Project, an effort to open up the source material behind FRONTLINE’s reporting. View a version of this interview that includes an interactive text transcript, and explore dozens of other interviews shedding light on three decades of Supreme Court confirmation battles, on FRONTLINE’s website: www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/in...
Watch the full documentary, Supreme Revenge, here: www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/fi...
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These interviews have been incredibly insightful, and the questions provide an understanding of where we are now.
Notes for future reference -never under estimate your opposition and always value the long game.
Talented and swampy dude. True slime. Respect
McConnell or his goon in the interview? Honestly probs describes both of them
Judges should not be partisan ever.
I Whole Heartedly Agree. It Taints Justice and Destroys Freedom.
Josh is an impressive young man.
Why? What is Impressive about Josh's perspective? Mitch McConnell SAW A Parasitic "OPPORTUNITY" for An "EXCUSE" With the Battle to Appoint Bork'. NOTHING MORE. IF Anything Other Than That WERE True: Review McConnell's Conduct With Vladimir Putin's Associates:
•Close Associate Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
•The Lifting of Sanctions (In The McConnell Controlled) Senate On Oleg Deripaska: (Russian born) Len Blavatnik Donated 6.5 MILLION DOLLARS TO McConnell's "GOP/Leadership Foundation".
• Followed by the Oligarch Oleg Deripaska Investment of 200 Hundred Million Dollars In an Aluminum Plant in McConnell's Home State of Kentucky.
Yes, he helped pave the road to hell for this country at such a young age.
@@tblynch You lose, we win. Oh well.
@@555Trout Last laugh is coming. I like our odds.
@@tblynch I like your odds too. Zero.
The emphasis on Bork ignores two things:
1) That his role in the Saturday Night Massacre - in particular, his failure to resign after carrying out his order - raised legitimate questions;
2) More importantly, the nominee who was confirmed to the seat, Anthony Kennedy, was confirmed 97-0. So any claim that Republican nominees since Bork have necessarily been opposed on ideological grounds is simply not true.
Oh, and btw, he was confirmed in an election year.
The Premise of 'Revenge' is a Con Game and a sham, offered to Americans to disguise McConnell's real "Agenda" Rebuilding the Supreme Court To Meet McConnell's Wealthy GOP Donors Financial Interest and Needs.
Bork revealed his lack of Integrity and flawed character when confronted with a clear moral choice. Nixon had ordered Ruckelshaus and Richardson, to Fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (essentially, to Obstruct Justice) both refused to directly or indirectly, participate, knowingly, in an illegal act and immediately RESIGNED. Bork chose to knowingly follow an ILLEGAL order from President Nixon (Later, Bork revealed that Nixon had promised him the next seat opened on the Supreme Court).
Absolute Obedience to Power is Not a desirable trait in a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Revenge as McConnell's Political rationale is Ridiculous. As McConnell's subsequent behavior reveals, McConnell's actual Agenda is servicing his TRUE Constituency: the Wealthy GOP DONORS.
VOTE McConnell/Trump OUT Of OFFICE On November 03, 2020, along with the 22 McConnell Controlled GOP Senators Up For Re-election.
Bork was confirmed unanimously to the DC circuit court. There was absolutely zero concern about his role in the Nixon administration until it became politically expedient for the Democratic party. His hearing was an exercise in raw political power and marks the end of civility in SCOTUS nominations and the Democratic party, especially Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, bear the full responsibility.
Really he didn't spend all morning rehearsing "I like beer" in the mirror?
Shocking!
I really wish these interviews were done around now. The extreme hypocrisy that has happened that now affects our supreme court, which is a check on the senate/house's power, is appalling. And these senators won their states easily this past election. A truly divided nation with illegitimacy growing.
There is no precedent for not giving a Supreme Court candidate a hearing more than a year before an election.
*8 months.
@@TPT91 yes Thank u I stand corrected
The televised hearing process and vote and the televised Senate debate and vote is established as a current modern method of engagement by citizens on the candidates nominated by a President to lifetime positions on the Supreme Court.
In the previous pre-radio pre-television era newspaper coverage, public debates and speeches and pamphlets helped interested citizens participate in knowing what government was doing in the appointment process in Washington DC. We are blessed now with the opportunity to watch our government, our public servants, as they do the work we pay them to perform.
McConnell's willful withholding of the Senate's duty to complete the constitutionally established process for nominating and the constitutionally established process for Senate consent or dissent of Supreme Court candidates should not be accepted by citizens. It is a denial of the flow of Constitutional authority. A willingness to seriously abuse constitutional processes for partisan profit needs pushback.
Congress is part of the citizen's government. It belongs to our great collection of Constitutional declarations which guide citizen engagement with and agreement to what happens to us because of the authority we give to government to govern us.
Citizen engagement and participation in Supreme Court appointments does not include a ballot box. Because we do not get a vote, because we do not have the power to fire a life term justice, we depend on the media coverage, the live presentations, the robust skirmishes in the Senate to help us make up our minds about a candidate. What is so wrong about that?
Public employees refusing to do the constitutional work assigned to Congress one term and upending that choice in the next for a personal revenge? Horrifying.
Ideology fares no better as an excuse for McConnell's usurpation. It is as bad as refusing to do the work legally, fairly and in line with our national values.
Does our government belong to us, the governed, or not? Is the Constitution owned by a political party or a partisan group or a social class or those with a certain level of wealth or skin color or sex or special weapons? Or does it belong to all the governed?
This is the material question. This is the most important question for citizens to ask and answer, for the answer decides where authority to create, sustain, fund, defend and change government really resides.
McConnell was wrong when he single-handedly rendered a Constitutional prescription for processing a Presidential authority to nominate null and void. He caused a Presidential power to vanish. He violated the Constitution for a personal and illegitimate reason and the injury has still not been rectified. This injury is a bleeding wound on the body politic, a cancer metastasizing on our government, especially on the Senate, most certainly on the Supreme Court and forever in our history as long as truth tellers live to tell it.
What government does in our name matters. It matters 24/7 all year, year after year after year.
If we own it, if we are the masters and government is our hired help, our public servants, we must act as intelligent employers and demand a job performance from them that meets the level WE establish, not the one they wish to substitute.
Simply being elected does not give cart blanche to our Representatives to do as they wish. If they try we need to correct them. If we have insufficient power to do that effectively, we need to develop more.
Government cannot be presumed to correct itself when it slides off the rails. McConnell epitomizes what happens when scoundrels think too much of themselves and too little of their masters.
There was no precedent at the time of Bork for a highly qualified candidate to be given anything but deference and a prompt near unanimous vote. There was no precedent for Harry Reid eliminating the filibuster for circuit court nominees. Democrats started this uncivil and highly political process and they have reaped the whirlwind. Probably to the detriment of all of us.
@@cydoman8014 The view that McConnell "violated the Constitution" is not a serious one. The Senate has the authority to conduct its proceedings as it sees fit, as well as direct its internal procedures and processes. The Senate is responsible for exercising advice and consent, but they can also choose not to exercise it. The President requires it, but the Senate does not have to grant it.
He did not take away any power of the President; because the President has the sole power to NOMINATE justices. That's it. The Constitution does not guarantee confirmation or even fair consideration of his nominees. You can make the argument that this is unethical, but that is solely an argument which has nothing to do with the Constitution.
In discussing the ethical argument, you have to consider the context within which the Senate was operating. Conservatives were upset about the Bork nomination, but also about the fact that Democratic support for Republican nominees was always lower than the opposite.
Democrats changed confirmation rules to their benefit in 2013, and the Republicans warned that they would retaliate. You can say that this was to avoid Republican filibusters (despite a record number of judges, if I'm not mistaken, having been appointed up to that point), but the Democrats had done the exact same thing, executing the first successful filibuster for a nominee to the federal judiciary (Manuel Estrada) just a decade prior. They did the same to various other nominees.
Surely there is something to be said with regard to your point about either constitutionality or ethics that this was just as wrong as McConnell's use of his majority; after all, Democrats prevented federal judicial nominees from even receiving a full vote on their merits. The key difference is that Democrats did not even have an electoral mandate in that case.
One can argue that Republicans did have a mandate to block Obama's nominees, given that they won the Senate in 2014, with an agenda of slowing down Obama's reshaping of the judiciary -- and then proceeded to win the Senate in 2016 again, and 2018. So their mandate was affirmed and then reaffirmed. Ultimately, voters decided to put a check on the President's power to nominate, and McConnell exercised it.
This type of check had worked out with essentially the same result before, if not the same execution. More often than not, historically speaking, nominees who were nominated in the final year of a president's term were not approved when the Senate belonged to the opposing party. In that way, there is precedent.
In addition, Republicans simply did what Democrats either proposed doing or threatened to do. Joe Biden in 1992 suggested that the Senate should not hold hearings to any prospective nominee nominated by President Bush. Chuck Schumer in 2007 (two years before Bush's term would expire!) said that Democrats should not even consider ANY nominee if a Supreme Court vacancy opened up during that Congress.
Arguing that the Democrats never did this is irrelevant, because they never had the power to do it. You have to engage in limited counterfactuals based on what prominent Democrats were saying. Biden was the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee at the time he made his statement and Chuck Schumer was the Vice Chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus. One actually actively possessed the power to make good on the suggestion, and the other was a part of leadership whose statements can reasonably be construed to be representative of the party leadership.
You cannot argue that these views are not representative of the Democratic Party today, because these people lead the Democratic Party today. Joe Biden is a former Vice President and the current President, while Chuck Schumer is the incumbent Majority Leader of the Senate.
All of this is to say, blaming McConnell for an escalating situation that Democrats where actively poured oil on the fire and expressed that they would do exactly what McConnell later ended up doing is myopic. Looking at the bigger picture, it's clear that the Republicans and McConnell bear less responsibility for the federal judicial nomination process and the joke that's been made of it than current leaders on the opposite side of the aisle.
No wonder McConnel hired this clean cut prep school imp. Get a load of his studied, soothing, stiletto in the back voice. This guy must have gotten away with picking pockets all the way from high school to Washington D.C.
are there two Mitch McConnell's?
Yes. The good Mitch is held captive in bad Mitch's neck fat
I guess he (McConnell) changed his mind in 2020 haha @14 min or 13m 30 sec til 15m mark
How does he sleep?
his eyes look like taxidermy marbles
When has the Supreme Court gone "too far" in terms of rights...when it involves the right to privacy (i.e. abortion; homosexuality) and the right to health (Obamacare)...
If civil rights are your priority, how could a judge who stripped people of their civil rights be a good pick?
What civil rights are peopling being stripped of?
Simpson:
DC v Heller.
Garland was involved with a process on dc circuit court to revive a law that canceled the 2nd ammendment.
@@gulftoadah I did not know this 🤔
👍
Come on. Mitch's excuse for not confirming Garland was not sound then or now.
Frontline needs to stop being subsidized by taxpayers. Get this passive aggressive stealth liberalism bs off of public television.
McConnell takes on the characterization of "Fog-Horn Leg-Horn." He reminds me of a character who comes off as arrogant. His voice reminds me of this cartoon character. PBS Frontline interviews paint a picture of McConnell as a power-mad politician based on his declaration that there would be no hearings in 2016 for a new justice.
Obama provided a selection who was a centrist. As a Conservative, I want a better candidate, but I think Garland would have been okay. He is a compromise between two hostile ideologies. I questioned my GA Senators as to McConnell's actions to receive limited response.
My concern now is he wants to rush ACB nomination. I think the nomination process has to be slow and deliberate because that person could be on the court for 20-30 years. I believe that doing anything in a rush and sudden manner may have unintended consequences. I worry about the timing because the election is in November 2020. Moreover, I think Judge Coney Barrett will fill RBG's shoes exceptionally well.
My statements are critical of him because I am only Joe-Average. The problem I have with McConnell is he has been in Washington since 1984. He needs to go home because I do not think he represents his state anymore; instead, he serves himself. He has forgotten he is a public servant. McConnell lacks manners and fails to realize, like Fog-Horn, that his actions may seem right to him, but he blows things up.
Finally, I realize that a politician has to compromise to get things done, but the way they carry themselves matters on both sides of the aisle. Do they have the ethical conviction to care about their voters, or do they act in their donors' $$$ best interests? Manners, thoughts, and deeds will always count.
Whats with the coughing 🙄
He probably just needed some water
The interviewer should have pressed this man on some of the nonsense that he talks.
In-DAMN-Deed! What Utter Nonsense. If McConnell's Agenda, hadn't ONLY Served To Further ENRICH The Wealthy GOP DONORS, perhaps this Gobbledygook might be plausible. BUT McConnell? McConnell has ONLY Addressed his Exceptionally Wealthy Donors and Constituents TO ENRICHED Mitch McConnell.
McConnell has Represened Kentucky for 40 Years.
The State of Kentucky is:
-47th in Education, there are only 50 States (and it not much better in other Categories).
-44 In Income
-47 In Health Care
-40 In Overall Ranking
VOTE McConnell/Trump OUT Of OFFICE On November 03, 2020 Along With The 22 McConnell Controlled GOP Senators Up For Re-election.
💯💯💯💯
The fabulous peru secondly snore because cafe dimensionally spot in a far november. thirsty, screeching pocket
It is "hold a grudge for 30 yrs" and that's not the way good gov't works. It is immature and petty and Kennedy has been long gone. It's all about power for McConnell and look what we have now
You give Mitch McConnell to much credit
interviewer anti trump angle in a insidious way.
Josh Holmes says Senator McConnell supported Civil Rights, but yet he was against reparations for slavery. I guess McConnell's support only went so far. 😔
It’s your civil right to get money for someone else’s suffering?
Reparations have nothing to do with civil rights.
@@ucfqb It appears it was the “right” of slave owners to get rich off the suffering of slaves. 😖
@@kevinwoolley7960 Yes, reparations are connected to Civil Rights. The slaves were deprived of pay for their labor. For 250 years. I’d say that was a violation of their civil rights.
@@justmyopinion9883 That's completely irrelevant to the topic of reparations today.
Senator Moscow Mitch with Moscow's help represents 50 years of Kentucky bitter heritage...
Out of all the nicknames for a politician, Mitch has some really good ones. Cocaine Mitch, Turtle Mitch, Moscow Mitch. I like Cocaine Mitch the best though lol
cry harder, Democrats trying to invoke Moscow and pretend at patriotic fealty is a weak irony of this era. yours is the Socialist coalition, yours is the Corporatist Media in unholy alliance with same...but your spell is broken, can't be fixed, and all your remaining tools contradict each other.
you are so screwed.
THIS INTERVIEW WAS DONE 2015? BEFORE TRUMP WAS ELECTED?
I always thought FRONTLINE was respected journalism. This is so bias! (The whole series.) I am very disappointed with PBS.
Can you please explain how you find it bias? Seriously.
In my view, they have interviewd people from both sides, asked them all more or less the same line of questions, and left it to us to like their responses, or dislike their responses. Personally, their is lots that I dislike, but lots that I like. And I find it in totality very informative, and educational.
Please respond shall you see this.
@@leibelpape5526 OK I will not give a quick answer, but will go back and listen to all and reply with the best answer I can. I may have been hasty because I was trying to find out why some things were so messed up. Give me a little time.
@@walterarchibald1318 This is the exact opposite of bias. They, they just allowed the people they interviewed complete freedom to tell their stories in their own words. What you perceive as bias is just the difference of their world view and yours. These videos are actually quite illuminating because these people are being candid, and you don't get any spin but instead hear exactly what they really believe. I'm a leftest and have always wondered if those on the right actually believe what they say or just spinning for the cameras. Here you can see what these people really think and it's actually a little shocking at times. I think it's brilliant. I've always loved Frontline, and been a fan since day one, but this piece and these interviews have given me more insight in a week then I have gotten in years, when it comes to what these people are really about.
Merrick Garland would have been much better than Kavanaugh.