Why California’s Chief Justice JUST QUIT the GOP — and CRUSHED it on the way out
It took a while, but one of the most powerful judges in the United States has curb-stomped her former political party over — for starters — the Brett Kavanaugh scandal.
Just days after publicly criticizing President Trump’s remarks as being harmful to the “rule of law,” California’s Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye told a news organization that she has left the Republican Party, registering instead as a no-party-preference voter.
In an interview with CALmatters on Thursday, Cantil-Sakauye said she decided to change her registration to no-party-preference after watching the confirmation hearings unfold for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, where he was grilled for hours on the alleged sexual assault of Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford when the pair were teenagers in 1982.
Cantil-Sakauye, a former prosecutor and Chief Justice of the Californial Supreme Court for seven years, had plenty to say in the CALmatters interview, and did not limit herself to the Kavanaugh mess. Clearly, her difficulty with what has become the Party of Trump has been simmering for some time
“I’ve been thinking about it for some time,” Cantil-Sakauye said, adding that she talked it over with her husband and friends. Their consensus, she said, was that “you didn’t leave the party. The party left you.” …
“I felt compelled to make a choice now,” said Cantil-Sakauye, the first Filipina-American Supreme Court justice and the second woman to serve as California’s chief justice. “It better suits what I do and how I approach issues.” …
Cantil-Sakauye last year sent a pointed letter to then U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly urging that federal law enforcement cease the practice of “stalking undocumented immigrants” to arrest them in courthouses. She warned that it would prompt immigrants to stop reporting crimes.
“Enforcement policies that include stalking courthouses and arresting undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom pose no risk to public safety, are neither safe nor fair,” she wrote.
[In the interview with CALmatters she added] “I don’t believe the attacks [on the juducual branch] are going to stop. I do not believe the undermining and marginalizing of the branch will ever stop. And it is people’s right to speak up,” she said.
Two days ago, Cantil-Sakauye issued an annual state-of-the-judiciary briefing that should make Federalist Society members’ heads explode:
The chief justice is [well, as of today, was] a Republican who was appointed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet she described the 600 court appointments that Governor Brown has made during his two terms as “fantastic.” She praised the state Supreme Court’s consensus-based approach and said she doubted that the court would be much different with a majority of Democratic-appointed justices.
“I think all of us value the fact that there can be no resolution without courtesy and civility and humor,” she said.
What this writer wouldn’t give for even a little of that in the Beltway.