Okay, noted, so you don't have any problem with a likely though not legally proven sexual assaulter on the SC (and to be abundantly clear, this is a hypothetical scenario we are talking about, I said IF there had been such evidence). Do you think all Republicans in the Senate (or enough for confirmation, so nearly all) would have reasoned the same way?

I don't know why you would use instantly disproven exaggerations like 'not enough to get a single Democrat to cross party lines'. Clearly a single Democrat, Joe Manchin, DID cross party lines. Heitkamp might conceivably have done the same if Kavanaugh had behaved differently during the hearings - she did vote to confirm Gorsuch, as did Donnelly. Or she might not have, we'll never know.

I don't think Merrick Garland had a 'right to be heard'. I do think that by simply refusing to even have hearings and eventually a vote, McConnell further escalated the existing trend towards hyperpartisan behaviour in Supreme Court nominations. As I said in my reply to Tyr, I'm very much aware that Democrats also bear a lot of responsibility for that trend, possibly the majority of it. And I mentioned Graham's voting record on Obama's picks in that same post.

As for the second part, if we disagree on the fundamental point of whether or not Ford made her accusation in good faith (which doesn't necessarily mean that it's true, just that she believes it to be true), then obviously we're not going to agree on much else here, either.

I don't personally remember the Clinton impeachment case, but according to Wikipedia, five Democrats in the House voted for at least some of the four articles of impeachment, while five Republicans voted against all of them.

Nonsense. I don't say that I'm neutral or perfectly objective, but I certainly also condemn Democrats when they take overly partisan positions that get in the way of finding solutions. And fyi, I've gone on the record on Facebook defending both Collins and Manchin for their respective votes in favour of Kavanaugh - not that I would've voted the same way, but I do respect their decisions and don't think they deserve to be pilloried for them.

Since I've noticed many times that your definition of 'conservative' is basically 'things that I approve of', I'm afraid only you can answer your first two questions. Obviously there are plenty of cases of bipartisan legislation being crafted, where generally people on both sides are given credit for having launched it, so hard to say which side reaches out more often.

Sure, the three famous cases of controversial SC nominations in modern history have all been Republican appointees, but that doesn't exactly prove anything. At least, not unless you have credible evidence that there were comparable accusations against some Democratic nominees as there were against Thomas and Kavanaugh, and that the Republicans nobly declined to make use of those. In the Thomas case, frankly, from what I can see, Anita Hill had more reason to complain about those hearings than Thomas himself. I'm less familiar with the case of Bork, who seems to have been rejected more based on his positions (and of course the Saturday Night Massacre).

I'm sorry, but expressing distaste for Trump is simply common sense. I'll agree that she shouldn't have said it, but let's be serious, most Republican politicians and I dare say perhaps a conservative SC justice or two would have had, perhaps still have, similar sentiments about how terrible a candidate Trump was.

Not sure how the Sotomayor thing is partisan, either, however stupid or reprehensible you may find it.

Politico had an interesting article recently about the Gary Hart scandal back in the 1988 election. Comparing his scandal to the way people like Bill Clinton misbehaved in far more serious ways without paying such a political price for it, they concluded that it's hypocrisy and doing bad things that don't stroke with your public image which hurt politicians' reputations the most. And given the importance of the religious right in Republican politics, before Trump it was indeed very difficult for Republican politicians to make a national career unless they had an upright, clean reputation. Now with Trump, we do see clear evidence of that conclusion - even among conservative Christian supporters, his sexual misbehaviour is ignored and minimized, because they knew from the start what he was like. Which must be really infuriating to a great number of Republican politicians - especially someone like Mark Sanford, whose career was ruined by behaviour not nearly as bad as Trump's (or Clinton's, yes), then he built it up again, only to lose his seat in a primary for the crime of having his own opinions and having failed to suck up to Trump thoroughly enough...

It's true that the liberal media has paid a great deal of attention to the cases where Republican politicians were accused of things like prostitution, solliciting gay sex in public or simply adultery, but when such cases involve people who publicly advocate against gay rights or sexual promiscuity, and preach about family values, well, see above. Everybody loves to attack hypocrisy in others.

As for Byrd and Thurmond - as far as I'm concerned they both had reprehensible pasts, and yes, of course Thurmond started out as a Democrat, but since the segregationist voters switched en masse to the Republican party along with him, I don't think it makes much sense to act as if the modern Democratic Party is more responsible for them than the modern Republican party. The endless controversies over the Confederate flag and monuments in the South, and the respective positions of Democratic and Republican politicians on those, should make pretty clear that the positions of parties may change quite radically over longer periods of time.

After that post, that's a pretty hilarious closer.