@Marauder erstmal danke für die Antwort.
Aber der Artikel sagt für mich wenig konkretes aus, beantwortet nicht meine Frage, wie
@Quiron mit so großer Sicherheit ein Urteil fällen kann, dass Kavanaugh "noch übler" als McCain sei!
Denn genaugenommen sagt der Artikel genau eines aus, dass er auch keine abschliessende Antwort geben könne, sondern nur mehr oder weniger vage Indizien nennen kann:
There is no shortage of speculation about his personal or political worldview — but it’s not especially uniform. In the days after he was announced, court-watchers mined Kavanaugh’s old opinions and emerged with conflicting accounts of his ideology. His abortion rulings are simultaneously too liberal and too conservative. He’s both opposed to and supportive of the Affordable Care Act. He’s most similar to Chief Justice John Roberts and most similar to Justice Clarence Thomas.
It seems like there should be a better, more systematic way to evaluate Kavanaugh’s political ideology than hunting for clues in past rulings. It’s easy enough to do this for justices once they’re seated on the Supreme Court, but for relatively obscure federal appeals court judges like Kavanaugh, the ideological signals are dimmer, and quantitative political scientists must get creative.
They’ve found indicators about ideology in judges’ votes, hiring decisions, political donations, the text of judges’ rulings, and the language used to talk about them. It’s impossible, of course, to predict with certainty how Kavanaugh will vote if he ends up on the Supreme Court. But taken together, these tools can provide us with a general guide for where Justice Kavanaugh might land.
Die von dem Artikel dann herangezogenen Aspekte sind dann aufgeführt, jeweils mit Methode und Begrenzungen der Methode:
Using judges’ votes as a proxy
The gold standard for measuring the ideology of Supreme Court justices is by looking at judges’ votes on cases. Its measurements are called Martin-Quinn scores, and they place the justices on a familiar left-right spectrum.
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Tying these findings to ideology, though, is tricky. At best it just shows that Kavanaugh disagreed with his colleagues more often, not how he disagreed with them.
Using politicians’ ideology as a proxy
One of the oldest and most widely used methods for measuring judicial ideology is based on a simple idea: A judge’s views on key political issues are likely to be fairly similar to those of the people who appointed him.
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Because Kavanaugh was appointed to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, he has no home-state senator for the purposes of JCS, which means that his score is based entirely on the ideology of his appointing president in the year he was confirmed. In Kavanaugh’s case, that’s George W. Bush in 2006. It is a thin basis on which to project a judge’s ideology.
Using money and clerks as a proxy
Another approach is to follow the money — specifically, campaign donations by judges. For this, Sen and other political scientists and legal scholars have mined an enormous data set of political contributions by public figures, including federal judges. According to these scores, Kavanaugh sits roughly in the middle of the ideological distribution of conservative judges.
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The problem is that there are limits to how much a political donation can tell us about any person’s political views. “One interesting thing about Kavanaugh is that he’s actually donated to Democrats and Republicans, which is unexpected,” Sen said.
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In an effort to get a different predictor of ideology — with a bigger data set to draw on — Sen and her co-authors also took a look at the political leanings of judges’ clerks.
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As innovative as this method is, though, there are downsides. Although many judges look for at least some clerks who are ideologically similar, some may also hire “counter-clerks” — people with opposing ideological views who can challenge and sharpen the judges’ arguments. And lower-level judges, including district court judges, may simply care less about their clerks’ views because so few of their cases hinge on contested legal questions.
Using judges’ language and evaluations as a proxy
A new approach examines the text of reports written about judges by an assortment of lawyers who have argued in their courtrooms. These are compiled in a legal almanac with entries that read like a Zagat guide for judges, with snappy quotes about their friendliness and hostility to a host of legal issues.
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Some remain skeptical of text-based measurements for judges. They might work well in Congress, Sen said, where members use colloquial language in floor speeches that is readily identifiable as conservative or liberal — “death tax” and “estate tax,” “fake news” and “alternative facts,” or “pro-life” and “anti-choice,” for example. Legal language, however, is jargony and typically avoids these colloquialisms, making it much harder to tease an ideological signal out of the noise.
In Gesamtsumme kommt der Artikel zum Ergebnis, dass Kavanaugh wohl ein konservativer Richter sein wird, aber für eine genaue Einschätzung wie die von
@Quiron "noch übler als McCain" bietet der Artikel keine ausreichende Grundlage, sondern sagt eben eher aus, dass man das noch nicht wissen könne, sondern höchstens ein Bauchgefühl haben kann:
All of these approaches add up to one general conclusion: If confirmed, Kavanaugh is likely to be a very conservative justice in the mold of Alito or Neil Gorsuch. Predicting exactly where he’ll fall is harder to do, but given the court’s composition, it doesn’t matter whether he’s the second- or third-most conservative member of the court — the question is whether he’ll join the solid bloc on the right-most side of the court or stake out territory in the center-right, like Roberts.
For some court-watchers, though, the clue-hunting method remains more appealing than cobbling together the results of several clever — but imperfect — quantitative analyses. Blackman, the law professor, said he viewed Kavanaugh as most similar to Roberts. Since we’re natural empiricists here at FiveThirtyEight, we asked why. “You won’t like my answer,” he said. It was simply that he’d been following Kavanaugh’s career closely for over a decade.
Eben aus diesem Grund wüsste ich gerne, welche zusätzlichen Infos
@Quiron hat, die es ihm erlauben, mit solcher Sicherheit ein so harsches Urteil zu fällen!
Quiron schrieb am 07.10.2018:@otternase Du hast John McCain als "reaktonör" und Schlimmeres beschimpft. Brett Kavanaugh ist in dieser Hinsicht bei weitem übler.
