When federal Judge Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump we figured the confirmation by the Senate was pretty much a done deal, and that was all right by us. Over the weekend Kavanaugh’s promotion became less certain, though, and by now that’s also all right by us.
Kavanaugh’s requisite testimony before the majority Republican Senate judiciary committee was a predictably partisan affair, with the Democrats trotting out all their usual alarmist about what might happen if the Supreme Court starts deciding things according to what the Constitution plainly says and its ratifiers plainly understood. Even so, the Democrats also had some admittedly more compelling complaints about all the documents that Kavanaugh had withheld until the last moment and some potentially perjruous statements he made during the hearings and especially the quite expansive view of executive privilege that he’d described in some undeniable documents that had been obtained, which is will well worth noting given all the Trump-related cases that might eventually wind up in the Supreme Court.
Our admittedly amateur opinion is that the Democrats are on less firm constitutional ground as they worry that Kavanaugh might be the fifth vote need to overturn the abortion rights declared in Roe v. Wade, but our more expert political is that they’ve got a winning electoral issue if it does come to pass, so of course they made a bit deal of that.
None of that was likely to prevent Kavanaugh’s nomination, however, and none of it kept us from being more or less all right with that. Even when that oh-so-California-Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein spoke at the end of the week of an anonymous source who alleged that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her way back in his prep school days, Kavanaugh seemed a safe pick. He had a long list of character witnesses, including the girls’ basketball teams he’d coached and his fellow prep school carpoolers and their children, and that was to be weighed against an anonymous accuser’s accusations vaguely described by an undeniably partisan Democrat.
Over the weekend, however, a 51-year-old-professor of research psychology with appointments at both Palo Alto University and Stanford Univerity named Christine Blasey Ford went on the record as Kavanaugh’s accuser, and even after so many years she seems to have some corroborating evidence for an account that is quite unpleasantly specific. She claims that during a teenaged party in the early ’80s at a house in the tony little town in Maryland’s Montgomery County, two drunken boys from a nearby elite prep school cornered in her a room, and proceed to grope and rub themselves against as one held a hand over her mouth. She now names the two boys as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and bus fellow classmate Mark Judge, a filmmaker and author who has written for publications ranging from The Washington Post to the Weekly Standard. Both have plenty of character witnesses, but so does Ford, and sh’e released a family therapist’s record that show she’s been telling the same story long before anyone ever heard of Kavanaugh, and she can no longer be accused of hiding her reputation behind anonymous charges.
Judge was also the author of a roman a clef titled “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-x Drunk,” which mentions a classmate named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” puking in cars and passing out on the way home from parties. That’s by no means conclusive proof of anything more nefarious than the usual teenaged obnoxiousness, of course, but given everything else it suggests that there might something to the tale a well-credentialed professor by the name of Christine Blasey Ford is staking her reputation on. At the very least, it should tie up the confirmation process for a few more news cycles.
Given everything else, it might even wind up preventing Kavanaugh’s confirmation. All that talk about Roe v. Wade already had two abortion rights-favoring women Republican Senators from quirkily Republic states wavering on Kavanaugh’s nomination, which is decisive given the Republican’s razor thing margin in the upper chamber, and credible accusations of sexual assault will also further scare off those Democrats running for re-election in the states won by Trump. Not to mention the concerns about Trump packing the Supreme Court for his inevitable cases there.
If we were betting types and had any money to wager, we’d still be inclined to bet a few measly bucks on Kavanaugh’s confirmation, but at this point we’d insist on better odds than we did before, and we’ll hold out some hope that one way or the other the truth will prevail.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 