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      Kenneth Starr obituary

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      Kenneth Starr obituaryAmerican lawyer whose 1998 Starr report led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton Kenneth Starr, who has died aged 76 after complications from surgery, was the independent prosecutor whose investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in a real-estate project called Whitewater began in somewhat pious partisanship and descended into prurience. It led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury based on his lying about his relationship with a White House aide, Monica Lewinsky.The Clinton impeachment was an American watershed. Following the OJ Simpson trial of the mid-1990s, it established scandal as the fuel that powered television news, but more importantly it pointed the way to use congressional investigation in order to disrupt a presidency, a tactic followed repeatedly against the Barack Obama administration, including six House investigations, lasting more than two years, of the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, over the assault on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya.His proteges, including the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, and justice Brett Kavanaugh, Starr’s key Whitewater aide, spoke highly of him following his death. His career was inexorably bound to sex scandals, starting with his 1993 review of the Republican Senator Bob Packwood’s diaries in Senate ethics committee hearings over accusations of sexual abuse and assault.As part of Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team, Starr crucially lobbied federal authorities to drop their sex-trafficking prosecution and allow Epstein to plead guilty, in 2008, to lesser state charges with a far lighter sentence in Florida.Towards the end of his career, in 2016, Starr was forced to step down as president of Baylor University over that institution’s failure to pursue rape charges against football players.And while supporters rejected accusations of partisan hypocrisy, the man whose Whitewater mantra was “there’s no excuse for perjury – never, never, never. There is truth and the truth demands respect,” wound up defending the then president Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial, in 2020, having already, as an analyst on Fox News, advised that Trump’s impeachment would be “bad for the country”.Starr’s Washington career had its roots in his religious upbringing. Born in Vernon, Texas, he grew up in small towns in the state’s panhandle where his father, Willie D Starr, was a barber and sometime minister in the Churches of Christ; his mother, Vannie (nee Trimble), was a homemaker. They moved to San Antonio, where Kenneth was voted “most likely to succeed” in his high school.Following two years at what is now Harding University in Arkansas, he transferred to George Washington University in DC, graduating in 1968 with a BA in history. In 1970 he took a master’s in political science at Brown University, Rhode Island, and married Alice Mendell, who worked in public relations, before getting his law degree from Duke University, North Carolina, in 1973.After working as a clerk for the supreme court chief justice Warren Burger, in 1977 Starr joined the law firm Gibson Dunn. He went on in 1981 to become chief of staff to William French Smith, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general; two years later Reagan appointed Starr to the US court of appeals for the district of Columbia.In 1989 Starr left the bench to become George HW Bush’s solicitor general; Roberts was his assistant. The following year Bush considered Starr for a place on the supreme court, but Republicans in Congress feared Starr was not conservative enough. Ironically, Bush’s appointee, David Souter, turned out to be far less conservative than they had hoped. Two years later, Starr’s review of Packwood’s diaries convinced the ethics committee chair, Mitch McConnell, of Starr’s deft conservativism.So, when the original Whitewater independent counsel, Robert B Fiske, issued his interim report clearing the Clintons of fraud and of any involvement in the suicide of the White House lawyer Vince Foster, Fiske was ousted and, in August 1994, Starr appointed.By 1997, despite plea bargains and imprisoning witnesses who refused to implicate the Clintons, Starr had done little but endorse Fiske’s findings about Foster. He wanted to leave and become dean of public policy at Pepperdine College, but was convinced to stay until the 1998 elections.In January 1998, Clinton gave a deposition in a civil suit for sexual harassment filed by Paula Jones, saying he had never had a workplace affair; one of the women included in his denial was a White House staffer named Monica Lewinsky.Ken Starr: ‘There are eerie echoes of the past’Read moreTwo days later, Starr, who had advised Jones’s lawyers, was given tapes made secretly of Lewinsky admitting her affair with Clinton. This led to the orgy of coverage about semen-stained dresses and inserted cigars, as Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony set up a perjury trap for Clinton sprung by Kavanaugh, who aimed “to make his pattern of revolting behaviour clear, piece by painful piece”.As the case grew steamier, Kenneth Starr was rebranded “Ken” in the media, in an effort to make his shock more like an average Joe’s. Clinton was forced to answer a series of graphically explicit questions about the details of his relationship with Lewinsky. The House duly impeached, but the Senate acquitted Clinton. Starr rejoined the corporate law firm Kirkwood and Ellis, best known for defending the tobacco group Brown & Williamson.In 2004 he finally went to Pepperdine, as dean of the law school. In later cases he argued for Blackwater mercenaries accused of murdering civilians in Iraq, claiming they had “constitutional immunity”, and against California’s legalisation of gay marriage.He became president of Baylor, in Waco, Texas, in 2010, and chancellor in 2013. Although at least 17 women had accused football players of rape since he became president, he claimed during an investigation that “never was it brought to my attention there were issues”.He was found to have mishandled the accusations of sexual assault against members of the football team and removed as president in 2016; he then resigned as chancellor and as a professor of law.In his 2018 memoir, Contempt, Starr wrote: “I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation, but there was no practical alternative.”He is survived by Alice, their son, Randall, and two daughters, Carolyn and Cynthia, and by a sister, Billie Jeayne, and a brother, Jerry.TopicsUS newsBill ClintonHillary ClintonMonica LewinskyOJ SimpsonBrett KavanaughJeffrey EpsteinobituariesReuse this content More

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      Mitch McConnell greatly damaged US democracy with quiet, chess-like moves | Gary Gerstle

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      Mitch McConnell greatly damaged US democracy with quiet, chess-like movesGary GerstleWhile Trump’s coup attempt may have failed, McConnell’s own machinations have proven highly effective The January 6 committee has now revealed how far Donald Trump was willing to go to prevent the peaceful and lawful transfer of power from his presidency to that of Joe Biden. Yet, his deadly serious attempt to upend American democracy also had a slapdash quality to it, reflecting Trump’s own impulsive nature and his reliance on a group of schemers – Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Roger Stone and John Eastman among them – of limited ability. It is not entirely surprising that Trump’s coup failed.Another brazen GOP action, however, has succeeded – this one engineered by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, whose chess-like skills of political strategizing put to shame Trump’s powerful but limited game of bluster and bullying. The act to which I refer is McConnell’s theft of Barack Obama’s 2016 appointment to the supreme court, a radical deed that has dimmed somewhat in public consciousness even as it proved crucial to fashioning a rightwing supreme court willing to overturn Roe v Wade and to destabilize American politics and American democracy in the process.This summer may be one of the most consequential in US democracy | Thomas ZimmerRead moreMcConnell is widely considered to be a cynic about politics, more interested in maintaining and holding power than in advancing a particular agenda. This is true up to a point. But it is equally true that McConnell has believed, for decades, that the federal government had grown too large and too strong, that power had to be returned to private enterprise on the one hand and the individual states on the other, and that the legislative process in Washington could not be trusted to accomplish those aims. Hence the critical role of the federal courts: the federal judiciary, if sufficiently populated by conservative jurists, could constrain and dismantle the power of the federal government in ways in which Congress never would. It was fine, in McConnell’s eyes, for Congress to be paralyzed and ineffectual on most domestic issues, as long as the GOP, when in power, stacked the federal judiciary and the supreme court with conservative judges and justices. Thus, across Trump’s presidency, McConnell pushed 175 district court appointments and 54 court of appeals appointments through the congressional confirmation process, far exceeding in numbers what Obama had managed during the second term of his presidency.The supreme court, of course, was the biggest prize of all. The GOP had failed for 30 years to fashion a court to its liking, largely, it believed, because too many of its appointees – Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and even John Roberts – had gone “rogue” on key issues: gay rights, gay marriage, affirmative action, Obamacare and, most of all, abortion. McConnell was worried that the GOP would fail again, this time under his watch as majority leader. Hence his willingness to steal an appointment that by historical practice and precedent belonged to Obama.The tale of McConnell’s steal begins in February 2016, when Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, the lion of the judicial right, suddenly and unexpectedly died. Obama had just begun the last year of his presidency, and McConnell was entering his second year as Senate majority leader. McConnell immediately declared that he would hold no hearings on a new supreme court justice, regardless of whom Obama nominated. McConnell’s ostensible justification: it was inappropriate, he declared, for a president on his way out of office to exercise so profound an influence on America’s political future. Let the next president, to be elected in November 2016, decide who the nominee should be. That way forward would, McConnell argued, be a way of letting “the people”, through their choice of president, shape the supreme court’s future.Obama nominated a centrist (and distinguished) jurist, Merrick Garland, in the hopes that it might soften McConnell’s and the GOP’s opposition. McConnell would not budge. He behaved as though no nominee had been put forward, allowing both Garland and Obama to twist in the wind across eight long months. We know the rest of the story: Trump won in November and nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s seat. Gorsuch was an arch-conservative jurist vetted by the Federalist Society. Knowing that he would be unable to secure the 60 votes necessary to bring closure to debate on the nominee, McConnell blew up the filibuster requirement for supreme court justices. Gorsuch was then confirmed (54-45) on the Senate floor.Technically, McConnell had violated no laws. The Senate, by simple majority vote, has the authority to remove the filibuster from virtually any issue at any time. With regard to supreme court nominations, the constitution simply states that the president has the power to nominate justices and that the Senate’s advice and consent are required for confirmation. Still, McConnell’s refusal to authorize any action on Garland broke with 150 years of senatorial precedent and practice. The Senate had rejected nominees in the past, but only after debate and a vote. Some who were told they had little chance of winning such a vote had voluntarily withdrawn their names. A few had seen their cases deferred for a few months. But the last time a nominee was made to suffer Garland’s fate – consigned indefinitely to purgatory – was 1866. And that ancient case had a plausible justification that the Garland case did not: the nomination had come from a president – Andrew Johnson – on his way to impeachment and possible removal from office.McConnell’s action was a calculated gamble. In early 2016, he did not know who or how strong the Republican nominee would be. But he regarded Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, as vulnerable and beatable. And he expected his defiance of Obama on a supreme court nomination to fire up the GOP base. The stakes of the battle made the substantial risk worthwhile. McConnell distrusted Chief Justice Roberts because of the latter’s critical role in preserving Obama’s Affordable Care Act – another example, in the majority leader’s eyes, of a GOP-nominated justice going “rogue”. A Garland appointment might well have strengthened the centrism of the court, which is where Roberts wanted the power of his court to lie. McConnell wanted a court that would resist that drift, even if it meant breaking with a time-honored senatorial precedent. The end – a “truly” conservative court – justified the means.Imagine, for a moment, that McConnell in 2016 had followed precedent and held hearings for and a vote on Garland. The moderate Garland might well have been approved and become Scalia’s replacement. Let’s presume, for the sake of argument, that the next two appointments went as they did: Brett Kavanaugh replacing the retiring Anthony Kennedy in 2019 and Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg when the latter died in 2020. Had this scenario prevailed, the court would have entered its 2021-2022 term with three progressives (Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor), one moderate (Garland), and five conservatives (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett).This hypothetical court may well have declined to overturn Roe v Wade. Two of the votes that Samuel Alito needed to assemble his majority in the 2022 case repudiating Roe (Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization) were weak ones: Roberts and Kavanaugh. Roberts astonishingly admitted in his concurrent opinion that he thought it wrong to use Dobbs to overturn Roe, even as he was voting to do so. Kavanaugh, meanwhile, laced his own concurrent opinion with the anguish of someone deeply troubled by the affirmative vote for a Roe reversal that he, too, was casting.What if Garland was sitting on this court rather than Gorsuch? Roberts, still in command of this court, may well have cobbled together a coalition to preserve Roe. He might have pulled a conflicted Kavanaugh to his side, and he might have worked out a deal with the court’s progressives (and probably Garland as well) similar in spirit to the one that Sandra Day O’Connor had engineered in Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992): jurisprudentially messy but workable as a compromise between America’s warring tribes. Were Garland sitting on this court, in other words, women in America today would still have a constitutionally protected right to reproductive freedom.McConnell could not have foreseen in 2016 the particular way in which a majority of justices would coalesce in 2022 to overturn Roe. But his actions then were designed to lay the foundation for this sort of outcome. He resolved long ago that he would allow no principle to stand in the way of his pursuit of a rightwing court. Thus, in October 2020, he did not hesitate to abandon the arguments he made in the Garland case to jam through the Senate Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, even though Trump was much closer to the end of his presidential term than Obama had been to his in 2016. The ends – a rightwing court –justified the means.McConnell’s machinations broke no laws. His 2016 supreme court steal, however, upended a century and a half of accepted senatorial practice. The price for the country has been high: damage to the court’s legitimacy, deepening cynicism about Washington politics, and a growing conviction that America’s ailing democratic system can’t be fixed.
      Gary Gerstle is Mellon professor of American history emeritus at Cambridge and a Guardian US columnist. His new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, will be published in April
      TopicsUS newsOpinionUS politicsUS supreme courtMerrick GarlandRuth Bader GinsburgAmy Coney BarrettBrett KavanaughcommentReuse this content More

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      Grand jury indicts man accused of trying to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh

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      Grand jury indicts man accused of trying to assassinate Brett KavanaughNicholas John Roske, 26, faces a possible life sentence after federal grand jury indictment The man accused of trying to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh at the US supreme court justice’s home in Maryland last week is facing a possible life sentence after a federal grand jury indicted him on Wednesday.Nicholas John Roske, 26, faces one count of attempting to murder an associate justice of the supreme court, federal prosecutors said in a statement.The maximum penalty for anyone found guilty of that crime is life imprisonment, though it’s rare for federal convicts to face the stiffest punishments possible.Prosecutors on Wednesday said they have also moved to seize from Roske weapons and ammunition discovered on him at the time of his arrest near Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They include a Glock pistol, two magazines with 10 rounds each, pepper spray, a tactical knife and burglary tools, according to a court filing Wednesday.Federal agents allege that Roske traveled from his home in Simi Valley, California, to Maryland to kill Kavanaugh because a leaked draft opinion on 2 May showed the supreme court judge and other of his fellow conservatives had provisionally voted to overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that established the nationwide right to abortion.Roske called the Montgomery county, Maryland, emergency communications center on 8 June and confessed his plans before carrying them out, agents have alleged. He was arrested and also told investigators that he was upset with Kavanaugh because he believed the judge would loosen gun laws at a time when there has been a recent spate of deadly mass shootings, including at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.Between Roske’s arrest and indictment, the US House gave final approval to a bill expanding security around supreme court justices and their loved ones after the leak of the draft abortion opinion ignited protests nationwide.The legislation cleared the Senate on 9 May and on Tuesday passed the House by a vote of 396-27.Joe Biden has said he intends to sign the legislation into law once it is brought to his desk, with his press secretary adding in a statement that the president “condemns the actions [of Roske] in the strongest terms.”“Any threats of violence or attempts to intimidate justices have no place in our society,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, also said.TopicsBrett KavanaughUS supreme courtUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himself | Moira Donegan

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      Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himselfMoira DoneganWhen conservative men like Rittenhouse and Brett Kavanaugh express their feelings, it is an act of thwarted entitlement – or a threat His voice choked up and his face went red. The young man squinted and panted, his mouth pulled up plaintively towards his nose, his answers to the questions coming out in gasping little bursts. Kyle Rittenhouse, on the stand testifying at his trial for killing two people and wounding a third last summer at a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was not crying for the men he killed, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. He was crying for himself, describing what he said was his mortal fear that night in August 2020, when he opened fire on the protesters using an AR-15. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Rittenhouse gasped, describing how he had confronted and ultimately killed the two men while he was guarding the lot of a car dealership. “I defended myself.”Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the shooting; he is 18 now. The young man’s emotional testimony had a practical purpose: it was a performance meant to make him seem helpless and childlike, and to convince the jury in his homicide trial that there was a reasonable possibility that he was in fear for his life when he shot the three men. But to many, the emotion of Rittenhouse’s testimony seemed to stem not from his memories of the incident, but from the indignant entitlement of a white man thwarted in the enforcement of his own privilege.Many compared Rittenhouse’s tears during his testimony to those of Brett Kavanaugh, who shouted, red-faced and spitting, during his confirmation hearings, when he was asked questions about his alleged assault of Christine Blasey Ford, back when he was Rittenhouse’s age. Both of the displays prompted questions about their sincerity and opportunism. Was Rittenhouse really crying? Was Kavanaugh just putting on a show for Donald Trump to watch on TV? But they both also pointed to a peculiar phenomenon that remains little understood: the rightwing use of public displays of white male emotionalism as a political tool.In one sense, the two men’s conduct under oath was quite strange. Both of them appear to be self-conscious avatars of white conservative masculinity, and their ideology would seem to preclude male emotionalism, as traditional gender norms have historically justified male dominance precisely because of men’s supposed stoicism and self-control. As Vox’s Jamil Smith put it: “We’re generally unfamiliar with seeing boys and men exhibit their emotion in such a public way. Vulnerability and common conceptions of manhood, especially among conservatives, have not traditionally been bedfellows.”And yet conservative white men’s emotions are increasingly coming to the forefront of political life, and they seem to animate much of the Trumpist right. In practice, such men express their emotions all the time. They express them at Trump rallies, when they jeer at the mention of perceived enemies and cheer for lines of chauvinism and anger. They express their feelings when they picket abortion clinics, screaming at women walking inside and threatening the staff. They express their feelings when they fly Confederate and “Blue Lives Matter” flags; they express their feelings when they vote, and when they pick petulant fights with the service workers who ask them to wear their masks inside stores and restaurants. The common thread in these rightwing expressions of masculine emotion is that when conservative men express their feelings, they don’t do so as a gesture of humility or need. Instead, they wield their feelings as a threat.Kyle Rittenhouse judge in spotlight after angry reprimand of prosecutionRead moreArguably, both Rittenhouse and Kavanaugh were expressing their emotions when they committed their famous acts of alleged violence. It’s impossible to know what was in his mind, but Rittenhouse’s actions leading up to that night in Kenosha indicate that what brought him there was anger, or maybe a desire for glory. Rittenhouse says that he came to Kenosha to protect local businesses from demonstrators; he had appointed himself a vigilante, out avenging the interests of property and police against the protests. It’s hard not to suspect that he daydreamed about himself as a lone wolf who doesn’t play by the rules, like an action movie hero who wears a bandana as a headband and a cutoff denim vest. The rifle that Rittenhouse used to kill Rosenbaum and Huber was illegal for him to possess. Asked why he didn’t use a handgun, he told the court that he had chosen the semiautomatic rifle because “it looked cool”.For Kavanaugh, the project of decoding his emotions the night he allegedly assaulted Christine Blasey Ford is also speculative, but Ford’s testimony, along with documents made public during the hearings, paints a portrait of Kavanaugh as a young man with a vivid, if not especially varied, emotional life. His calendar from what was probably the month of the party shows him working out and calling his football friends by nicknames; he goes to their houses for “’skis” (“brewskis”: beers). In Ford’s account, he sounded satisfied with himself. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. “The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” Kavanaugh was a boy, like Rittenhouse, with an inflated sense of his own importance. The emotion he seemed to have expressed most clearly in those years was a consuming and profoundly unearned sense of his own superiority.The fact of the matter is that for Rittenhouse, the question of emotion will be central to his case. The question of his legal guilt or innocence hangs on whether he felt endangered at the time of the shootings – a subjective experience that, conveniently, only Rittenhouse himself can speak to. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh now sits in a position of superlative power. Maybe the problem is not that these white men don’t express their feelings enough. Maybe the problem is that their feelings have too much power.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS newsOpinionGenderUS politicsThe far rightWisconsinBrett KavanaughUS supreme courtcommentReuse this content More

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      John Roberts calls Schumer’s remarks on justices ‘dangerous’ in rare rebuke

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      Schumer spoke about Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh outside court while high-profile abortion case was being argued The chief justice of the US supreme court has taken the unusual step of criticizing as “inappropriate” and “dangerous” comments that the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, made about conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Related: The […] More