Ruth Marcus > Quotes

“classmates, her hand placed on his penis. This was, potentially, the corroboration that had been lacking, although one significant problem was that Harmon herself had told friends she didn’t recall any such incident and she refused to speak with reporters chasing the story. That didn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen, however: Harmon, in Stier’s recollection, appeared heavily inebriated at the time.”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“Kavanaugh is your guy,” he told them—he’s not some culture-warrior or right-wing ideologue but an establishment Republican. “He’s too big to fail at this point,” Davis argued. “If he fails we lose the Senate, Trump loses reelection, we lose the Supreme Court, we lose the country”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“the dynamic I had anticipated unfolded, but in a different way. It’s not that four, five, six, seven people came forward with different accusations. It was that a group of corroborative witnesses around two core credible accusations were simply shut out.”34”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“reached out to his golf club friend to say that both families had gone through a hard time and that he was glad Kavanaugh had been confirmed.”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“necessarily would be true of this particular nominee.”23 Even from a retired justice, it was an amazing public rebuke.”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary” is on point, and her anguished question is the most important of all: “Where’s the public confidence?”7”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“What were the rules the agents were following? With the list of people the FBI was interviewing seemingly limited to four—Mark Judge, P. J. Smyth, Leland Keyser, and Deborah Ramirez—this looked less like a searching inquiry than a con job. Coons called Flake, asking if he had agreed that only four witnesses would be interviewed. No, Flake said: it would be done “by the book”—that phrase again.”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“As McGahn later told the Federalist Society, “The greatest threat to the rule of law in our modern society is the ever-expanding regulatory state, and the most effective bulwark against that threat is a strong judiciary.”10 Overturning Chevron would help with Bannon’s promised deconstruction. And that, for all evangelical voters’ focus on the Supreme Court and social issues such as abortion, was the real goal. The emphasis on social conservatism and its associated hot-button issues ended with Scalia, McGahn said at the first meeting after the election to discuss the justice’s successor. It was now all about regulatory relief. On that score, McGahn said, Scalia “wouldn’t make the cut.”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“This was exactly the kind of tip a credible FBI investigation would pursue. It had been given a road map that led directly to Stier. It simply chose not to follow the trail.”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

“any senator, either, but one who had been his Yale Law School classmate.”
― Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover