On Thursday, North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp announced she will vote no on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. This was a surprise. Heitkamp, who has said little about the nomination until now, voted to confirm Trump’s previous Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch. The most recent polls show her losing ground to a male challenger who said of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations, “Nothing evidently happened in it all, even by her own accusation… It was supposedly an attempt or something that never went anywhere,” and then “Even if it’s all true, does it disqualify him? It certainly means that he did something really bad 36 years ago, but does it disqualify him from the Supreme Court?”
To Heitkamp it did. That the Kavanaugh vote may well go along party lines means Heitkamp is unlikely to win the same hosannas of bipartisanship bestowed upon Jeff Flake in the past week. Nonetheless, it required real courage, and the explanation she gave for her refusal was striking. As Senate Republicans have been shamelessly portraying Brett Kavanaugh as the victim of a Jim Crow-era lynch mob, and as Trump declares it “a very scary time for young men in America,” Heitkamp, a white woman under enormous political pressure in a right-leaning state, chose to make clear who she believes the real victims are.
That includes, but is not limited to, Christine Blasey Ford. “When I listened to Dr. Ford testify, I heard the voices of women I have known throughout my life who have similar stories of sexual assault and abuse,” Heitkamp said in a statement. “Countless North Dakotans and others close to me have since reached out and told me their stories of being raped or sexually assaulted — and expressed the same anguish and fear.”
In the end, Christine Blasey Ford’s privilege and access, her lawyers and her girlish voice and her desire to be of help, were not enough to grant her due process. Due process would have meant being interviewed by the FBI and having the man she accused be subject to a more searching inquiry than five-minute bursts from Democrats and aggrieved monologues from Republicans. It would have meant the FBI following up with the leads those lawyers offered. It wouldn’t have included Senate Judiciary Republicans using the press to pass on smears of Ford instead of having the FBI adjudicate them.
Heitkamp’s statement acknowledged that historically, many victims have gotten even less, and she evoked her work to expand the reach of the Violence Against Women Act: “I insisted that it include increased protection for Native women and girls”
If that sounds like banal press release talk, it isn’t. Those increased protections were the subject of a furious fight, waged five years ago, that wound up hinging on whether white men would be held accountable. A federally funded study found that Native women were not only likelier than other women to be victims of violence, they were ”significantly more likely to have experienced violence by an interracial perpetrator.” But the very notion infuriated Senator Chuck Grassley. “The non-Indian doesn’t get a fair trial,” he insisted back then.
That would be the same Senator Chuck Grassley who is presiding over Kavanaugh’s nomination now, amid an ever-louder conservative chorus that the judge — previously touted for his elite institutional acceptance — is actually the railroaded minority here. “We remember that Atticus Finch was a lawyer who did not believe that a mere accusation was synonymous with guilt,” said Senator John Cornyn. “He represented an unpopular person who many people presumed was guilty of a heinous crime because of his race, and his race alone.”
We also remember that Atticus Finch was a fictional white lawyer hailed as a hero for defending a black man against a white woman’s false charges of rape. That was based on an ugly reality, one in which white women’s stories of assault were only heard when their often false charges targeted black men and bolstered white supremacy; white women supplied the rationale for protection, and white men provided the mob violence. Today, powerful people understand that they need to at least appear as if they’re listening to women, even as they are reluctant to shift the balance of power any more than absolutely necessary. There are still white women who know they stand to benefit far more from aligning themselves with white, male supremacy than some objective standard of justice for all. The women supporting Kavanaugh – and voting to confirm him – are proof of this.
Thursday morning on NPR, Missy Bigelow Carr, one of the 64 women who had rapidly vouched for Brett Kavanaugh’s high school rectitude, said coolly of Ford, “I didn’t necessarily find her that credible.” Asked about Kavanaugh’s blustery, teary testimony, though, Carr replied, “I found it emotional, as did many of my friends and people that know me and know my support of Brett, who texted me and emailed me and spoke to me how they felt it was emotional, that they were crying in a lot of cases, sobbing in other cases. It was emotional to see. It was a guy fighting for his reputation feeling that it was him against the world, which I think it has been.”
The interviewer, Rachel Martin, asked Carr if she thought that, if Kavanaugh had committed sexual assault as a high school or college student, it would be disqualifying. There was a long pause. Carr sighed. “I think that would depend on it — I guess essentially it really depends, there’s so many degrees. I think now we’re in a day where times are a little different than they were back then with what those accusations were. I think you have to look at the entire life of somebody, not something they did as a teenager back in those days there was certainly drinking of beer, that’s when you’re doing these kinds of things. An incident in high school, it’s kind of hard to believe that at this level of federal government that that’s what we’re looking at to try to disqualify somebody from this position.”
So strong is the urge to defend Kavanaugh — whom she conceded she had mostly lost touch with since their youth — that she was offering a forgiveness Kavanaugh has never asked for. “A white patriarchy persists in part by making white women dependent on white men, and then ensuring that those women enjoy benefits in exchange for their support of those men’s continued dominance, at the purposeful expense of identification with, connection to, and support of other women,” my colleague Rebecca Traister writes in her book Good and Mad.
That was, of course, true in the era Cornyn was trying to evoke on Kavanaugh’s behalf, and it is true now in the refrain heard on the right from “mothers of sons.” Here’s NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch: “As a women, and as a mother of sons, I am horrified by where this is leading for boys in our country.” Memes circulated with messages like, ““Mothers of sons should be scared. It is terrifying that at any time, any girl can make up any story about any boy that can neither be proved or disproved, and ruin any boy’s life.” In Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae points out that the women who fought to protect racial hierarchy “justified their their political activism in the name of motherhood, attesting to the real power that particular gendered identities carried in the public realm. Often the assertion of ‘motherhood’ was understood to elevate their concerns and grant them a kind of moral supremacy.”
That moral supremacy, deployed on behalf of the men who run the Senate, the House, the Presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, was available to Heidi Heitkamp. It could have helped her stay a senator. This was her choice. Even if in the end it makes no difference to the outcome, her resistance matters.
The FBI Report Doesn’t Clear Kavanaugh. It Just Clears Republicans’ Consciences.
Michelle Ruiz, Vogue October 4, 2018
The FBI’s so-called “investigation” into Brett Kavanaugh is complete, and according to Republican Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, the as-yet confidential report reveals “no hint of misconduct” by Trump’s Supreme Court pick, former Keg City Club treasurer, and BFF of Tobin and Squi. The wheels are already in motion: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (who previously vowed to ”plow [Kavanaugh] right through” any opposition) has set up a preliminary vote for Friday, which, if he has the votes, will be followed by a final vote over the weekend. None of this is surprising, because the FBI probe was never really intended to unearth the truth about Kavanaugh.
From the beginning, the “investigation” was a way for retiring Republican Sen. Jeff Flake—and Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins—to perform some light moral gymnastics that gave the appearance of doing their due diligence on the publicly divisive nomination. Hilariously, Collins and Flake have already called the investigation “very thorough,” when it was anything but. Regardless, the probe has now served its purpose for Republicans: By drastically limiting its time and, more importantly, its scope, the FBI investigation has turned up likely very little. It doesn’t really clear Kavanaugh. But it does clear Republican consciences, paving the way for them to vote for a partisan judge with an unstable demeanor multiply accused of assault, and still sleep at night.
Flake said last week that he believed it would be “proper” to delay the full Senate floor vote on Kavanaugh pending an FBI investigation. But a proper investigation is not what the Senate got. Really a supplemental background check, the report had a firm one-week deadline from the get-go; the entirety of it ended up spanning a whopping three business days. Exactly six people were interviewed, all of whom had previously released statements making their memories (or lack thereof) crystal clear. A majority (four) of them were Kavanaugh’s high school friends: Mark Judge, P. J. Smyth, Tim Gaudette, and Chris Garrett. One was Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s high school friend, Leland Keyser, who has said she doesn’t remember the night of the alleged assault, but believes the allegations. The sixth interviewee was Kavanaugh’s second accuser, his Yale classmate Debbie Ramirez, who alleges he drunkenly waved his penis in her face.
More notable is who the the FBI didn’t interview: first and foremost, Dr. Ford, whose absence from the proceedings prompted condemnation from her attorneys, who said that any investigation that did not include her or the witnesses who corroborate her testimony “cannot be called an investigation.” In fact, of the three women who have come forward against Kavanaugh, the FBI only talked directly to one—Ramirez—while also ignoring Kavanaugh’s third accuser, Julie Swetnick, who alleges Kavanaugh and Judge groped women against their will and lined up as part of gang rape “trains” in high school. The FBI also declined to speak to some Yale classmates of Kavanaugh’s, who said they reached out to the FBI to corroborate some of the allegations, and to suggest Kavanaugh had been lying under oath, as well as to refute Kavanaugh’s tearful, downright hysterical insistence that he wasn’t a blackout drunk in his youth. One, Chad Ludington, told *The New York Times,,* “If he lied about his past actions on national television . . . I believe those lies should have consequences.” Us too! But guess what, Chad? They will not.
An investigation ordered by the Trump White House that was limited in what and who it could investigate was over before it ever began. It is absolutely no coincidence that authorities spoke overwhelmingly to Kavanaugh’s friends and didn’t bother to talk to anyone attempting to back up the accounts of the accusers. (We’ll wait for Jeff Flake’s calls for proper, civilized, bipartisan procedure.) This is particularly gutting with respect to Dr. Ford, who risked her reputation, her privacy, her family’s safety—everything, really—to come forward in the public interest of sharing that the man likely to be the country’s next Supreme Court justice assaulted her in 1982. Her attorneys may have spoken for many people when they said in a statement: “We are profoundly disappointed that after the tremendous sacrifice she made in coming forward, those directing the FBI investigation were not interested in seeking the truth.”
The sham investigation followed a sham hearing, as put on by the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee—which allowed only Ford and Kavanaugh to speak, but neither of the other two accusers—staging an epic he said/she said . . . only to shrug and decry the lack of evidence unearthed in that very he said/she said. Flake and others are just pretending to want the truth, when what they really want is an alibi; to stick by conservative supporters while dabbling in a little political theater for the CNN crowd. He—and Flake and Murkowski—are now free to vote their consciences. And rest assured, come November, so will we.
Brett Kavanaugh Investigation: I read Mark Judge’s book ‘Wasted;’ here’s what the FBI should have asked him. Opinion
By Erin Conroy October 4, 2018
The FBI has reportedly finished interviewing Mark Judge, the man named by Christine Blasey Ford as a witness to her alleged assault. The public might never know what he told agents, because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said he will keep the FBI’s final report confidential to Senators.
But Judge wrote a book about his booze-drenched high school years. I bought and read a copy of the memoir, Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk. It provides numerous tantalizing clues to behavior and events that the FBI could have been interested in. And—speaking as a lawyer—I believe it contains corroborating evidence for not only Blasey Ford’s account, but those of Kavanaugh’s other accusers: women whose stories all refer to extreme inebriation by Kavanaugh, Judge, and their high school friends. The book vividly evokes a culture at Georgetown Prep of widespread denigration of women that so many D.C. Catholic school alumna have publicly recalled in recent weeks. It also raises the question of whether Kavanaugh was grounded or otherwise disciplined along with his friends in the last weeks of his senior year, and whether the FBI has asked for or seen his calendars for the entirety of his time at Georgetown Prep.
Wasted tells a colorful, vomit-flecked background story that diligent FBI agents could have used in their questioning this week. Judge’s account of his & Kavanaugh’s “shenanigans” while at Georgetown Prep is like watching Pretty in Pink’s Steff on meth. The prep school boys appear soaked not just in alcohol, but in the currency of their own privilege, powerfully aware that their male classmates will never tell on them; that the cops will never treat them like average joes; and that their parents’ wealth, connections and privilege will always shield them from personal accountability. They all act as though no real reckoning will ever come. Does Kavanaugh still believe we are living in that same world? Do our senators?
“Bart,” the character who pukes and passes out after a hard night of drinking during Beach Week 1981, has been revealed as a nickname Brett Kavanaugh used himself among his Georgetown Prep buddies.
In addition, I propose that Kavanaugh may make a substantial appearance in his best friend’s memoir in a pseudonymous role as “Shane,” Judge’s best friend. Bart/Shane appears throughoutWasted as Judge’s co-conspirator in their extreme drinking, manufacturing fake IDs, proposing the Keg or Bust challenge at “Denny O’Neal’s” (which may be a pseudonym for Donny Urgo Jr.) parents’ party at the end of the summer, publishing the underground paper to brag about the Keg Club, targeting the houses of local all-girls’ Catholic school “virgins,” and, having been busted by “Father Carmen,” being punished alongside Judge and other seniors with failure to graduate on time. Was Kavanaugh, like Shane, held back from graduation and instructed to do another day of their community service instead?
Is Shane in any way a representation of Kavanaugh, described as Judge’s best friend?
All these questions ought to have been pursued by the FBI in interviews with Kavanaugh, Judge, and classmates this week. Was Kavanaugh one of the “twelve disciples”? Has the FBI requested his calendars for his entire time at Georgetown, including for his senior year, the time after the alleged sexual assault? Was he grounded by his parents or disciplined by the school in May of 1983? Did he attend graduation, or do community service? This should be researched in school records or interviews with several of his classmates.
Is Brett Kavanaugh “Shane,” the best friend described in Mark Judge’s book? Testifying to the Senate.SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
As a whole, Judge’s memoir of their years together at Georgetown Prep tends to undermine Kavanaugh’s sworn testimony, as well as raising questions that I hope the FBI asked of Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh, and their classmates (many of whom are helpfully named in Kavanaugh’s calendars for the summer months of 1982).
For example, based on the information in Judge’s book, Kavanaugh appears to have perjured himself when he replied to prosecutor Rachel Mitchell’s question, “Have you ever passed out from drinking?” by saying: “I — passed out would be — no, but I’ve gone to sleep, but — but I’ve never blacked out.”
Here’s a passage from the book:
“Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh?”
“Yeah. He’s around here somewhere.”
“I heard he puked in someone’s car the other night.”
“Yeah. He passed out on his way back from a party.”
Kavanaugh corroborates some of Judge’s memories, as well. For example, Kavanaugh testified before the Senate that he was assigned to do community service at a “soup kitchen.” So was Mark Judge: “For our community service job, Shane, Denny, and I were assigned to a soup kitchen in one of the poorest parts of DC. It was off of New York Avenue, a drug-infested neighborhood of broken-down row houses and empty lots.”
Given Kavanaugh’s testimony, the information in Wasted, and this week’s interviews with Mark Judge, the FBI should already be investigating whether Kavanaugh served at the same soup kitchen, and inspecting any records at Georgetown and/or the soup kitchen itself.
Those aren’t the only questions I would expect the FBI agents to ask witnesses this week, including Kavanaugh himself.
Kavanaugh and Judge both entered Georgetown Prep in 1979. Judge writes of being impressed by the widespread culture of drinking at Georgetown Prep: “Indeed, it soon became obvious that drinking was one of the major forms of recreation at Prep. On Monday morning the upperclassmen would return from the weekend with stories about keg parties, girls, and hours spent in bars in Georgetown….seniors would often go directly from class to a bar.” In Wasted, virtually everyone appears to have known of, tolerated, and even sometimes encouraged excessive inebriation among even underage students. Judge writes, “drinking was part of the culture we had grown up in, and you had to be near death before anyone thought you had a problem.”
Judge’s writings contradict Kavanaugh’s attempts in his testimony to give the impression that he and others drank legally while at Georgetown Prep. Judge makes it clear that to get around the known age limits, as juniors, Georgetown prep boys all had fake IDs made; that football players, who had “divine reverence” at Prep, organized “the best parties”; and that Prep kids’ parents “didn’t seem to care” what they did, whether it was Beach Week, hanging out at the bar or drinking at small and large house parties.
“For high schoolers from all over the Washington area, Georgetown was also party central…a bar on every block. There was only one minor problem: The drinking age in Washington was eighteen, and we were all seventeen. To get around this, we did what has become a rite of passage in modern America—we got fake IDs.” Judge goes on to describe how “Shane and the rest of our classmates” became the fake ID artisans, cutting, pasting and copying fake documents for themselves and ultimately students at other area Catholic schools.”
Did Kavanaugh make fake IDs with Judge? Did he ever have a fake ID of his own?
Judge writes that Georgetown Prep students used these fake IDs to drink to excess regularly at a local bar.“ On some Saturday nights the place looked like a party at beach week, with about twenty Prep guys, Mary and all her friends from St. Catherine’s, and girls from other Catholic schools. For the most part, our parents didn’t seem to care. For one thing, we lied, telling them that when we did go out it was only to someone’s house and we would have ‘one or two’ at most. Second, most of our parents were drinkers, and they expected us to experiment a little.”
School officials took notice—particularly the head of school—and tried to curb unlawful student drinking. To no avail. “At one school assembly, Prep’s headmaster, Father Carmen, brought in a priest who was a recovering alcoholic to speak to the students…Throughout most of his talk, we all cracked jokes under our breath or didn’t pay attention at all.”
Besides the bars, Judge describes the parties in homes where parents were away, as drunken blowouts: “most of the patio furniture was in splinters. The mailbox had been plowed over”; “houses destroyed by rampaging hordes of drunken teenagers.” He writes that “Shane” and “the other football players always organized the best parties…right in the center of action.”
Mark Judge’s memoir, Wasted (published by Hazelden), raises questions about Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.NEWSWEEK
Judge describes events during the summer of 1982, during the period Blasey Ford alleges that Kavanaugh drunkenly attempted to rape her, that could corroborate her account. Judge recalls spending between four to seven nights a week drinking with “the gang” at the bar and at classmates’ houses. Going a week without getting drunk was “unthinkable” that summer, which was almost without any parental supervision. “Because we were going to be seniors, our parents gave us tremendous slack. We were pretty much left alone to do what we wanted, when we wanted.”
He also corroborates Blasey Ford’s recollection that he worked at a local supermarket that summer while so “toxic from the alcohol” that he had stopped eating breakfast entirely. He describes blacking out at O’Rourke’s and waking up “in the fetal position with saliva running out of the side of my mouth” in a bathroom a few blocks away in the Four Seasons Hotel. This behavior was so unremarkable that Shane and Denny didn’t bat an eyelash when he disappeared.
Furthermore, Judge recounts one story of having sex with a drunken teenage girl that same summer under circumstances that call into question her ability to meaningfully consent to sex and his willingness to engage in such sexual activity. He heard a girl crying in his parents’ bathroom. “‘I passed out,’ she moaned, rubbing her eyes. ‘And now my friends have gone.’” Although himself “completely hammered,” Judge drove her home, where she invited him in for a beer. He interpreted her invitation to mean “ This girl wanted to have sex… .We went into her house, then into the kitchen. Laura opened the refrigerator and pulled out two beers. She had barely turned back around when I was on her. She moaned and put her arms around me….It was over in a matter of minutes….Laura mumbled. She was already half-asleep.” He doesn’t question whether perhaps she had simply passed out again.
The Kavanaugh hearings on TV at a New Haven pizza shop near the Yale University campus.YANA PASKOVA/GETTY IMAGES
This approach echoed Judge’s take on Beach Week as a great chance for any guy to get “lucky.” “Up until beach week it had all been minor league advances…Now I had an opportunity to make some headway. Most of the time everyone, including the girls, was drunk. If you could breathe and walk at the same time, you could hook up with someone.”
Georgetown Prep knew partying had become out of control, and made efforts to discourage it. In an effort to “cure” the weekend binge drinking, the head of school decreed that seniors serve in a community outreach program early on Sunday mornings, and graduation would be contingent on participation.
When the new policy was announced at the “O’Neals’” party after football camp at the end of the summer, Judge and his friends were “outraged” and organized what Judge calls the 100 Keg Challenge to fight back against having their right to drink curbed in any way.
‘You know why they’re doing this, don’t you?’ Denny said. ‘They know we go out and get tanked every weekend, and they want to make getting up on Sundays hell.’
‘We have to do something,’ I said. ‘They can’t get away with this our senior year.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Shane said, laughing. ‘Drink a hundred kegs and brag about it?
No one laughed. For a second, no one even spoke.
‘It’s brilliant,’ I said.
‘Wait a minute,’ Shane said. ‘You can’t actually be thinking of —’
‘A hundred kegs,’ I said. ‘We’re going to drink a hundred kegs, then brag about it.’
‘How?’ Shane asked.
Denny crumpled up the Saint and tossed it into the pool. ‘A good first step would be to have our own paper. The Saint is nothing but a propaganda machine for Prep.’
I sat up. ‘That’s it. We could start our own newspaper. We could drink a hundred kegs, then brag about it in our own paper.’
They drank their way through 100 kegs during the school year and bragged about it in a school paper they created. The drinking took a toll. “Once I felt the first lilting rise of a buzz, I had to keep drinking until I could hardly walk. Many of the other guys were the same way; while some got sick after just a few beers, the hard-core drinkers could go all night, and often did. None of us found this disturbing in the least…To us, being members of what I called ‘Alcoholics Unanimous’ was as natural as a swan drifting into the water.”
Kavanaugh was the Keg Club Treasurer: did he purchase all 100 kegs? Did he collect funds to do so from other students? Did these kegs serve underage students?
By March of their senior year, according to Judge, the friends were up to 80 kegs and some Georgetown boys were engaging in routine vandalism of the homes of D.C.-area “virgins” from Catholic schools: ”We only do students from Washington’s finer virgin vaults and only strike when she and her family are away..… all of them were…friends with guys who went to Prep.” The boys put together “the official journal of the 100-keg quest and everything that happened on the way” in Denny’s basement, and it also “championed… a rash of vandalism directed at the houses of Catholic girls. Several girls from Stone Ridge, Holy Child, Visitation, and other all-girls Catholic schools had gone on vacation with their parents only to come back and find their houses…so completely draped with toilet paper and shaving cream that you couldn’t see a blade of grass or a window pane.”
In May, an incident of vandalism by the Georgetown boys triggered a crackdown by the school (but not their parents). The boys’ ringleader was caught that night (and let go without consequence) by police; school administrators “held back” 12 boys, including “Shane” and Judge. The boys were under orders to complete their school work at community college over the summer and to do community service on graduation day—instead of graduating.
Did Kavanaugh graduate on time? Was he one of the twelve who were held back?
Judge writes that he and his pals were furious. “We had all put four years and thousands of dollars into Prep, and …they weren’t going to let us graduate on time.”
Judge writes that Georgetown parents took their kids’ side. “Other parents whose sons were not graduating—in the final tally there were about twelve of us—were calling to compare notes with my parents. When my parents found out how many had gotten busted, they eased up considerably.”
None of this deterred Judge and his friends: “there was still one piece of unfinished business. The keg count was at ninety-eight. Despite all the trouble we were in, we couldn’t end the year without reaching the magic number.”
The Saturday night before graduation, says the memoir, the friends gathered in the parking lot of the National Cathedral. “Modeled after the Notre Dame in Paris, its gray gothic towers reach toward heaven and take up a block the size of a football field. It has a large, dark parking lot in the back, and we had rented a van and put the two kegs in the back,” Judge wrote.
“At the top of the parking lot was a grassy hill with a large Celtic cross in the center. From there you had a panoramic view of the glittering lights of Capitol Hill. Shane, Denny, and I sat at the base of the cross, enjoying the view and getting drunk.
On graduation day, “Denny, Shane, and I went to the soup kitchen to work.”
Judge was shielded from testifying under oath by the Republican majority in the Senate Judiciary Committee. If the FBI officials were diligent, they read Wasted, as I did, and they sought answers to the key questions.
Erin Conroy is a graduate of Yale Law School; her current research projects include a proposal for the constitutional resolution of current political crises.
The opinions expressed are the author’s own.
Correction, 10/3, 8:00 p.m.:Kavanaugh’s calendar covered the end of his junior year at Georgetown Prep, not his senior year as originally written.
This Ruling Is Why Conservatives Are So Hopped Up on Brett Kavanaugh
They want—and need—to outnumber people like Judge Chen in the federal judiciary.
By Charles P. Pierce October 4, 2018
Getty ImagesChip Somodevilla
Why is almost the entire conservative apparatus hellbent on putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court despite the fact that he is a very big liar who lies a lot, occasionally when his lies are “hallowed by oath,” as the law books say? Why are conservative voters so het up about the federal judiciary generally? So things like this don’t happen any more. From The Los Angeles Times:
The ruling late Wednesday afternoon will relieve immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan from the threat of deportation. It came in response to a class-action lawsuit alleging that government officials approached their decisions about TPS with a political agenda, ignored facts and were motivated by racism. Administration officials deny those allegations, saying the program was never intended to provide a long-term reprieve…
“Absent injunctive relief, TPS beneficiaries and their children indisputably will suffer irreparable harm and great hardship,” Chen wrote. “Many have U.S.-born children; those may be faced with the Hobson’s choice of bringing their children with them (and tearing them away from the only country and community they have known) or splitting their families apart.” Chen said the government had failed to prove that any harm would come from maintaining the status quo.
Not only that, but Judge Chen also decided to explain the obvious motivation behind the administration*’s decision to send largely brown earthquake victims and refugees from war zones back down south where they came from:
“President Trump harbors an animus against non-white, non-European aliens which influenced his decision to end the TPS designation.”
At the same time, he said there were “serious questions as to whether a discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor” in the administration’s decision, which would violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. He cited statements by President Trump denigrating Mexicans, Muslims, Haitians and Africans, including his January remark about “people from shithole countries” and his June 2017 comments stating that 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS.”
The plaintiffs “have raised serious questions whether the action taken” by Homeland Security officials “was influenced by the White House and based on animus against non-white, non-European immigrants in violation of Equal Protection guaranteed by the Constitution,” Chen wrote. “The issues are at least serious enough to preserve the status quo.”
Alas, we all know this drama all too well. Sooner or later, Judge Chen’s quite logical decision to hold the president* accountable for the policies that inevitably spring from his bone-deep bigotry will run headlong into some Federalist Society clone who has supped for a decade or so at the bounteous banquet of wingnut welfare, and who understands quite well what he now owes to the people who have spread before him this magnificent largesse—in short, a safe hack who is in the bag.
This person either will find a misplaced comma that allows him to overturn Judge Chen, or he will invent some improvisational konztitooshunal hocus-pocus that only he understands—hello, John Roberts, and the “equal sovereignty of the states”—and that is designed only for the specific political circumstances of the moment. And, poof! Back to the gangland killing fields of El Salvador. It is entirely possible that, if Judge Chen gets extremely lucky, and his injunction even makes it all the way up to the Supreme Court, that Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh will be the one who does the deed. And won’t that complete the circle in a lovely way?
If You Dare Accuse a ‘Good’ Man, Republicans Will Put You on Trial
Trump and Lindsey Graham are the drum-majors of the male grievance backlash parade—and the polls are following them. Women, it’s going to take a village.
Margaret Carlson October 4, 2018
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
How do you know that white male privilege survives the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in the wrenching Brett Kavanaugh hearings?
Here’s how: It’s when the backlash occurs simultaneously with the frontlash; when, after a moment of worrying about a woman attacked, we’re asked to worry more about a man accused; when the president gives a moment of respect to that woman, Dr. Ford, as “very fine” and “compelling,” but not as much as he gives to that man, Kavanaugh, who is so “very special,” the likes of whom Trump has never encountered.
And when the president, before a wildly approving audience at a rally in Mississippi—in support of a woman candidate, no less—mocks Ford mercilessly, in a mincing, high voice, answering “upstairs, downstairs, I don’t know” to one of many questions he posed rhetorically that Ford couldn’t answer. The raucous laughter of the crowd brought to mind Ford’s most “indelible” memory of the night in question, when Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughed at her uproariously.
How fast the backlash against survivors has been, and how far it’s gone since President Trump, when at first held on a short leash by aides, said the right things. That followed the initial promise from top White House aide Kellyanne Conway that Ford would not be ignored or insulted. That was rendered inoperative on Wednesday morning when Conway defended Trump’s performance one night earlier saying he was merely addressing factual inaccuracies in Ford’s story: “She’s been treated like a Fabergé egg by all of us, beginning with me and the president.”
If you think Trump was off on his own just being Trump, as bad a spokesman for respecting women as he is for convincing daddy’s heirs to pay taxes on their billion-dollar inheritance, listen to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) at the Atlantic Festival in Washington the morning after. He often boasts of voting to confirm Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, which gave him cred to come out guns blazing to rally his colleagues taken aback by just how believable Ford was. Fresh off a phone call with Trump backstage, Graham painted himself as a good cop to Trump’s bad one but with the exact same message.
“I would tell him [Trump] knock it off,” Graham said. “You’re not helping.” He hardly improved upon it. Invoking the late Sen. John McCain, who he said was always willing to move on from a slight, Graham’s words may have been more coherent but no less demeaning. Ford was at best confused, without one piece of corroborating testimony, he said, and at worst a pawn of calculating Democrats doing a weak imitation of Republicans stalling Merrick Garland’s consideration. What is happening, he said, is “despicable.” In that sentiment, Graham said he’s “never seen my party so unified.”
REALLY?
With that, Graham removed any possible lingering doubt. Women, be warned, it’s now Republican policy: If you dare to accuse a “good man,” as defined by the GOP, or a powerful one, or both, Republicans will put you on trial.
To women, Ford raised more than enough doubt about Kavanaugh’s presumed innocence that he should have to rebut her. Instead, he roared back with partisan jibes and conspiracy theories supplemented by preposterous gray lies that did no such thing.
Still women, both independents and Democrats who have reason to be as “terrified” as Ford, are losing ground to GOP men, and a surprising number of GOP women, as races around the country tighten. The enthusiasm gap held by Democrats for months is closing. Ads aimed at getting overdogs like fierce Trump groupie Kanye West, who can’t bear feeling for one moment like an underdog, out to vote are working.
Listen to this ad in North Dakota, where Rep. Kevin Cramer is challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. He’d already said that it’s “tragic” if something like what Dr. Ford described happened—a description that includes pinning her to a bed, trying to remove her clothes, and smothering her screams. Tragic, but not disqualifying for Cramer, who added that Ford’s charges were “more absurd” than Anita Hill’s.
The ad begins: “Judge Kavanaugh fought back, clearing his name, defending his honor. Sen. Heitkamp, stand with President Trump, Judge Kavanaugh, and all who thought this was a national disgrace. Or stand with them,” them being Ford and Democrats. Heitkamp, who’s clomped across most of the prairies in her state hugging not just voters but cattle, has fallen a dangerous 10 points behind Cramer. A Republican-leaning group is spending about $12 million on similar ads.
Substitute Sen. Joe Manchin’s name and an almost identical ad is blanketing the airwaves in West Virginia. Pre-Kavanaugh, Manchin was running comfortably ahead by double digits by wielding like a club his protection of coal miners and others who depend on coverage of pre-existing conditions against opponent Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who’s suing the federal government to end such coverage. In what could be a life-or-death vote for those afflicted by opioid addiction or black lung disease, Manchin has lost four points this month as Republicans increasingly side with the person who would take their health care away. You’d think Kavanaugh, who enjoys a 56-26 approval in the state, were on the ballot.
The elation women felt after seeing Ford tell her story that prompted so many others to tell theirs is dissipating. The FBI investigation is grudging and all too limited, likely to lend the GOP more of a fig leaf than unearth facts that would buttress and jog Ford’s memory. Republicans plowed on through as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised, scheduling a vote even before the FBI sent its findings to Capitol Hill.
Sen. Jeff Flake’s crisis of conscience will end. If Kavanaugh’s writings against the settledness of Roe didn’t move Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), she will have done her bit for women by supporting reopening Kavanaugh’s background check and nothing more. Only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is in play.
The Beatles sang that we all say we want a revolution, that we want to change the world. But not so much in the face of white male privilege reasserting itself, the automatic assumption that a powerful man is to be believed over any woman.
Hell, it turns out, has no fury like a man accused. That doesn’t mean that in the long struggle for equality, women haven’t moved upward. It just means that if the cultural reckoning we thought would happen with Ford’s remarkable testimony is to be realized, women have to vote in numbers never seen before. It will take a village.
Brett Kavanaugh: Republican senator attacks Trump as unfit to lead a divided America
The Independent October 4, 2018
A Republican senator has launched an attack on Donald Trump as unfit to lead an America divided by the looming vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.
Ben Sasse used a Senate speech to lambast the president for publicly mocking Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Mr Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school.
And he said the US had become riven by black-and-white “tribalism” over Mr Kavanaugh’s nomination. He insisted the impending vote on whether to confirm the judge’s elevation to the country’s highest court was not ”a giant binary choice about the much broader issue of whether we do or don’t care about women”.
The Nebraska Republican said on Wednesday night: ”We all know that the president cannot lead us through this time. We know that he’s dispositionally unable to restrain his impulse to divide us.
“His mockery of Dr Ford last night in Mississippi last night was wrong, but it doesn’t really surprise anyone – it’s who he is.
“Similarly it was wrong last week when he said that, quote, ‘If the attack on Dr Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local law enforcement authorities’.
“It’s wrong when people insinuate that a woman bears blame for her sexual assault because she was drunk. This reinforces the stereotypes that have caused millions of women to bury their experiences of abuse and assault for decades.
“This kind of repugnant nonsense creates excuses for abusers.”
It marked a sharp departure from his previous treatment of Dr Ford. While making clear he still backed his nominee, the president had described his accuser as a “very credible witness”.
In his address on Wednesday night, Mr Sasse, a member of the judiciary committee, said he had “urged the president to nominate a woman” to the Supreme Court before Mr Trump announced he was picking Mr Kavanaugh on 9 July, but did not say who in particular he had suggested.
“Although I’ve said many complimentary things about Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his distinguished record of 12 years of service on the DC circuit court, I will say I urged the president, back in June and early July, to make a different choice before he announced this nomination,” he said.
“I urged him to nominate a different individual, I urged the president to nominate a woman.
“Part of my argument then was that the very important Me Too movement was also very new and that this senate is not at all well prepared to handle potential allegations of sexual harassment and assault that might have come forward. This was absent knowing a particular nominee.”
Observers have cast doubt on whether Mr Sasse will run for re-election to the Senate in 2020 following his claim earlier this year that he considered leaving the Republican Party “every day”.
It came as senators prepared to review the results of an FBI background investigation into Mr Kavanaugh, following a string of sexual assault claims against the nominee.
A copy of the agency’s probe will be made available at a secret Capitol Hill location.
The White House believes the investigation contains no information that corroborates the allegations against Mr Kavanaugh, according to the Wall Street Journal, while Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein criticised the FBI for failing to interview either the nominee or his most prominent accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
Senators are expected to vote on moving forward with Mr Kavanaugh’s nomination on Friday, with a final confirmation vote likely over the weekend.
Many Of Brett Kavanaugh’s Ex-Classmates Wanted To Talk — But FBI Reportedly ‘Ignored’ Them
Dominique Mosbergen, HuffPost October 4, 2018
Dozens of people reportedly reached out to the FBI in recent days in the hopes of sharing potentially helpful information as the bureau conducted its “limited” probe into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
But the individuals say investigators did not respond to their outreach — a silence that has prompted questions about just how “limited” in scope the inquiry really was.
The White House announced in the middle of the night on Thursday that it had sent the results of the FBI’s supplemental background investigation of Kavanaugh to the Senate. “With this additional information, the White House is fully confident the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” deputy press secretary Raj Shah said on Twitter.
Hours earlier, NBC News reported that more than 40 people “with potential information into the sexual misconduct allegations” against Kavanaugh, including multiple high school and college classmates of the judge, had tried to contact the FBI to no avail.
Attorney Alan Abramson told the outlet that he’d reached out to the bureau on behalf of his client, who he described as a friend of Deborah Ramirez, the Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s who has accused the judge of thrusting his penis in her face at a college party.
Abramson said Ramirez had told his client in the early ’90s “about an incident that happened during Ms. Ramirez’ freshman year at Yale.” He said his client was willing to provide this “pertinent information” to the FBI — but said he had not heard back from the bureau.
On Thursday, HuffPost guest writer William Scheuerman wrote that he lived in the same residential hall at Yale as Kavanaugh, and that he’d called the FBI to suggest a list of people they should contact. The FBI didn’t get in touch with him, Scheuerman said, or with the other friends and neighbors who tried to contact the bureau.
Kenneth Appold, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary who’d been a suitemate of Kavanaugh’s when the alleged incident with Ramirez occurred, told The New Yorker that he’d also not been contacted by investigators despite having reached out to the FBI and submitting a statement through the bureau’s website.
Appold said he had not been present at the party where the alleged incident had taken place, but said an eyewitness told him about it soon after it occurred.
“I can corroborate Debbie’s account,” Appold told the magazine. “I believe her, because it matches the same story I heard 35 years ago, although the two of us have never talked.”
According to The New Yorker, several other former Yale classmates of Kavanaugh’s said they’d reached out to the FBI about the judge “but had not received a response.” Two high school acquaintances of Kavanaugh’s said they’d submitted sworn declarations to the FBI but had not been contacted by the bureau.
Also on Wednesday, CNN published several more examples of former Yale classmates of Kavanaugh’s whose attempts to contact the FBI with information had amounted to naught. The outlet noted that none of these individuals claim to be direct witnesses of the alleged incident with Ramirez.
Liz Swisher, a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s who had … questioned Kavanaugh’s truthfulness about his drinking at Yale in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN she had not been contacted by the FBI. Chad Ludington, another former classmate who said he often drank with Kavanaugh during their early years at Yale, also filled out a form, but had not been contacted back by the FBI as of Wednesday afternoon.
[…] Mark Krasberg, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico who was also a classmate of Kavanaugh’s and Ramirez’s without direct knowledge of the alleged incident, had also not heard back from the FBI despite numerous attempts to reach out to lawmakers’ offices and FBI offices directly.
Quoting security experts, CNN noted that it’s not unusual for the FBI to ignore requests from people who reach out to them with information.
“As a general matter, if the FBI is conducting an investigation … they decide who they need to talk to,” said Carrie Cordero, a former counsel to the U.S. assistant attorney general for national security.
Still, Democratic lawmakers have expressed alarm at the FBI’s apparent overlooking of potentially important witnesses in their probe of Kavanaugh.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a statement Wednesday that she had “serious concerns that this is not a credible investigation.”
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the FBI’s investigation did not appear to be sufficiently thorough.
“[It] doesn’t sound like the complete, thorough investigation that frankly senators deserve and would be due if you had a thorough background check,” Gillibrand said.
According to The New York Times, the FBI reached out to 10 people and interviewed nine as part of its probe into Kavanaugh’s past. Ramirez said she was interviewed by two agents at her lawyer’s office in Boulder, Colorado, last week; and three former classmates of Kavanaugh’s ― Mark Judge, Tim Gaudette and Chris Garrett ― were reportedly also questioned as part of the investigation.
Other than Ramirez, at least two other women have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct: Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor who claims the judge sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers; and Julie Swetnick, who has accused Kavanaugh of being present during a “gang rape” in the early 1980s. Neither woman was interviewed by the FBI.
Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the misconduct allegations against him.
Speaking to The New Yorker, Ramirez said this week that she was troubled by what she described as the FBI’s apparent lack of willingness to substantiate her claims.
“I am very alarmed, first, that I was denied an FBI investigation for five days, and then, when one was granted, that it was given on a short timeline and that the people who were key to corroborating my story have not been contacted,” she said. “I feel like I’m being silenced.”
The White House refused to say on Wednesday whether the Trump administration had limited the scope of the FBI’s investigation into Kavanaugh.
Earlier in the week, President Donald Trump had claimed the bureau would have free rein to interview whomever they needed.
This story has been updated with details of Scheuerman’s account.
This Vicious Buffoon Is a Vessel for All the Worst Elements of the American Condition
Donald Trump, American president*, disgraces his office once more.
By Charles P. Pierce October 3, 2018
Getty ImagesMANDEL NGAN
Everyone who does not agree with me is a traitor and a scoundrel.
—HRH George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland
This video should be the only news from now until Election Day, and probably beyond that, all the way to the next Election Day in 2020 as well.
This video captures perfectly where we are as a nation at this moment in history. It shows with startling clarity the end result of civic disengagement and democratic apathy. It shows without question that we have allowed our republic to fall into the hands of a sociopath whose feeling for his fellow human beings can be measured against a poker chip. It shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the better angels of our nation have been sold out to anger, and greed, and stone hatred. It shows precisely the depths to which our fellow citizens will follow this bag of old and rancid sins. Some of those citizens know better. Some of them don’t. All of them are dangerous blockheads.
Getty ImagesMANDEL NGAN
Look at the man behind the seal of the President of the United States, mocking the recollections of a survivor of sexual assault. In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing “Amazing Grace” in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
Getty ImagesMANDEL NGAN
And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
We have had good presidents and bad—a Buchanan is followed by a Lincoln who is followed by an Andrew Johnson, and so forth. But we never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We have had presidents who have been the worthy targets of scalding scorn, but James Callender went after giants. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
Watch him make fun of the woman again. Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut the fuck up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don’t have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch him again, behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn’t he a funny man? Isn’t what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.
Democrats in Congress finally got the FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh’s past for which they’ve been loudly clamoring these past few weeks, thanks to the affecting testimony from his chief accuser and the dramatic turnabout of a principled Republican senator.
And President Trump has actually managed to put aside his antipathy for federal law enforcement long enough to let the investigation play out, deferring to Senate Republicans generally and assuring the FBI, through his lawyer, that it can expand the inquiry however it sees fit. That’s more than I would have expected.
So you’d think that maybe, just this one time, we could all actually do something critical for the country — mainly to get some clarity on all the charges and counter-charges that were flying around the Senate hearing room last week, with nothing less than a Supreme Court seat hanging in the balance — without the whole thing devolving into some kind of trivial, self-abasing public circus.
You’d be wrong.
Because while the FBI is doing what it’s supposed to do, which is to determine whether Kavanaugh blatantly misled the Judiciary Committee on some key facts, Democrats and a lathered-up news media have decided that the truest test of Kavanaugh’s character is whether anyone anywhere ever saw him drunk, or whether he ever acted like a full-on idiot in college.
In case you’re coming late to this space, let me just pause here to say that this is the third time in as many weeks that I’ve written about Kavanaugh’s nomination. I already made the point that his lack of reflection and nuance when it came to all of this made him a dubious candidate for the court, and that Republicans could find someone better.
Nothing I saw at his combative appearance before the Judiciary Committee led me to think otherwise. I found Kavanaugh’s evident nostalgia for his prep school days to be a little cloying and creepy in a middle-aged man.
But that’s an entirely separate matter from whether he’s confirmable or not, and so is most of the other stuff that suddenly qualifies as news about Kavanaugh’s youth.
Seriously, why do we care if some guy who knew Kavanaugh in his freshman year claims he drank too much and sometimes got mean? And how does it matter to anyone if Kavanaugh got into a bar fight in 1985 and threw ice at a guy, or if he and his high school buddies once trashed a beach house?
I stole a street sign once in high school. It didn’t make me a car thief.
Yes, I understand, Kavanaugh told the Judiciary Committee he wasn’t a crazy party animal and never blacked out. So I guess the argument is that if he would shade the truth about his teenage drinking, then he would lie about anything — up to and including sexual assault.
But just because he might doesn’t mean he did. And we also have to at least acknowledge the fact that an awful lot of Kavanaugh’s Yale classmates are liberals who would love to deal a mortal blow to his nomination, and it’s really not fair that any one of them can now get themselves on CNN to spout sinister recollections of his freshman persona.
What’s happening this week is that the controversy around Kavanaugh’s confirmation ordeal is starting to feel less like an extension of the #MeToo moment and more like the John Tower hearings of 1989.
Tower, a former senator, was President George H.W. Bush’s pick for defense secretary, but his nomination got swept up in allegations of drinking and womanizing — a vortex of innuendo propelled largely by the confluence of Democrats looking for a scalp and conservatives who had never forgiven him for backing Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in 1976.
Tower became the first Cabinet nominee from a new president ever voted down by the Senate — and an enduring symbol of how ugly and personally ruinous our politics had suddenly become.
Kavanaugh doesn’t deserve that kind of martyrdom. He stands accused by a credible witness on the public record of having attacked and humiliated her as a young man, and if it’s even partly true, then he’s chillingly remorseless about it.
If he knows he’s lying, or even if he doesn’t know for a fact that it didn’t happen, then he’s allowing this woman, Christine Blasey Ford, to be mocked and degraded all over again, and that would be inexcusable.
But that — and not his weekly beer intake, or his having gotten tossed from a bar, or even his obnoxious behavior toward senators on the committee at last week’s hearing — is the thing that would truly keep him from serving. That’s the thing that will cost him critical Republican votes.
We’re likely never going to know with certainty whether Kavanaugh did what his accusers say he did. But a few things are both knowable and relevant, and hopefully the FBI is more focused on them than grandstanding Democrats and cable hosts are.
First, there’s this question of what Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s high school buddy and later a conservative gadfly, told agents when they spoke to him Tuesday.
Ford puts Judge in the room when the assault took place, which would be an absolutely crazy thing to do if she were lying about what she recalled. Judge has said nothing publicly beyond denying that the attack took place.
If he was any more equivocal than that with the FBI agents, even just to allow that a party like the one she describes might have taken place, then it’s much harder to dismiss her story.
Second, there’s the case of Chris Garrett, whom Kavanaugh calls “Squi,” for reasons we probably don’t want to know. Garrett was all over Kavanaugh’s handwritten calendars from that summer, and Ford told the committee something very significant — that she had dated Garrett for a while.
You’d have to assume the FBI knocked on Garrett’s door. And if Garrett admitted to having dated Ford that summer, then Kavanaugh is almost certainly dissembling when he says he doesn’t remember socializing with her. It would cast fatal doubt on everything else he says.
These questions go right to the heart of Kavanaugh’s integrity and his fitness to serve. But by flying off in all directions to air 35-year-old stories about whether Kavanaugh partied too much or threw an occasional punch, hyperventilating critics in the press and the opposition party do something worse than trivialize the process.
They risk making Trump look right about their motives, and Kavanaugh look like a man deserving of sympathy.
They make it appear for all the world that the resistance to Kavanaugh’s nomination is more about destroying his reputation than it is about making sure we don’t put a liar — or, worse yet, a sexual aggressor — on the most important court in the country for the rest of his life.
For Democrats, that kind of overreach is a pretty good way to squander what should be a historic advantage heading into the midterm elections. And for a besieged media, hysterical reporting of college bar fights would seem like a pretty good way to waste whatever credibility we’ve earned.
Let’s let the FBI do its job this week. And while we’re at it, let’s consider what it means to do ours.
More Than 500 Law Professors Condemn Kavanaugh For ‘Lack Of Judicial Temperament’
Matt Ferner, HuffPost October 2, 2018
Law professors condemn Kavanaugh for ‘lack of judicial temperament’
Scroll back up to restore default view.
More than 500 law professors from nearly 100 law schools around the nation have signed a letter to the U.S. Senate to say that the volatile temperament Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh displayed on Thursday as he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee disqualifies him from sitting on the nation’s highest court.
“We regret that we feel compelled to write to you to provide our views that at the Senate hearings on Thursday, September 27, 2018, the Honorable Brett Kavanaugh displayed a lack of judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any court, and certainly for elevation to the highest court of this land,” the letter says.
The letter is signed by many high-profile law professors, including eight from Yale Law School, where Kavanaugh obtained his law degree. The letter remains open for additional signatures through Thursday, when it will be presented to the Senate.
The legal experts fault Kavanaugh for failing to remain open to the necessary search for truth after being accused of sexually assaulting a girl when he was a teen and instead becoming “repeatedly aggressive with questioners.” The signees also criticize the judge for indicating that he believes allegations made by professor Christine Blasey Ford and other women are “a calculated and orchestrated political hit” by members of the Democratic Party rather than acknowledging that the Senate must try to understand and investigate the facts surrounding the allegations.
“Instead of trying to sort out with reason and care the allegations that were raised, Judge Kavanaugh responded in an intemperate, inflammatory, and partial manner, as he interrupted and, at times, was discourteous to questioners,” the letter reads. The law professors cite two statutes, governing bias and recusal, that require a judge to step aside if he or she is at risk of being perceived as being unfair.
The FBI is investigating Blasey’s allegation that a drunken, teenaged Kavanaugh pinned her on a bed, groped her and covered her mouth when she tried to scream during a gathering of high school friends. Kavanaugh has denied her allegation, along with allegations of sexual misconduct from two other women. On Friday, Republicans gave the FBI one week to look into these claims.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is eager to put Kavanaugh on the court, regardless of the allegations against him, said Tuesday that he’s aiming to hold Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote this week.
“We have differing views about the other qualifications of Judge Kavanaugh,” the professors state in the letter. “But we are united, as professors of law and scholars of judicial institutions, in believing that Judge Kavanaugh did not display the impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of our land.”
Another open letter was also made public Tuesday, this one directed at Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), signed by more than 800 faculty, administrators and staff at colleges and universities who live and work in Maine, urging her to vote no on Kavanaugh’s nomination. All of the signatories have students and colleagues who are survivors of sexual violence, and many who signed the letter are survivors themselves.
“We are at an historic juncture, and your vote, your words, and your actions as our representative will be a focal part of what happens this week,” the letter to Collins says. “Will you send a message to the tens of millions of American women and men who are victims of sexual violence that their experiences will be met with indifference and even disbelief? Or will you make a choice for the greater good, and send the message that survivors can trust that they will be heard if they have the courage to come forward?”
2 Of Brett Kavanaugh’s Former Classmates Withdraw Support For Him
Jennifer Bendery, HuffPost October 2, 2018
WASHINGTON ― Two former law school classmates of Brett Kavanaugh’s who previously vouched for him wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to say they are withdrawing their support for him because of “the nature” of his recent testimony.
“Under the current circumstances, we fear that partisanship has injected itself into Judge Kavanaugh’s candidacy,” Michael J. Proctor and Mark Osler say in a letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairman and ranking member, respectively. “That, and the lack of judicial temperament displayed on September 27 hearing, cause us to withdraw our support.”
Proctor and Osler were among 23 classmates of Kavanaugh’s at Yale Law School who signed a letter in August pledging their support for his confirmation. At the time, they cited his “exemplary judicial temperament” as a reason for their support. But after watching Kavanaugh’s explosive behavior in his confirmation hearing as he addressed the sexual assault allegation against him by Christine Blasey Ford, the two former classmates say they can’t stand by him in his Supreme Court bid.
“The reason for our withdrawal is not the truth or falsity of Dr. Ford’s allegations, which are still being investigated, but rather was the nature of Judge Kavanaugh’s testimony,” they write. “In our view that testimony was partisan, and not judicious, and inconsistent with what we expect from a Justice of the Supreme Court, particularly when dealing with a co-equal branch of government.”
Meanwhile, three of Kavanaugh’s former clerks who had written a letter supporting him told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday that they want to clarify that they are “deeply troubled” by the sexual assault allegations against him.
“We write to clarify that, like many Americans, we have been deeply troubled by those allegations and the events surrounding them and were encouraged by the initiation of a formal FBI investigation, which we believe is warranted,” reads a letter signed by Will Dreher, Bridget Fahey and Rakim Brooks. “We hope, for the good of everyone involved, that this investigation will be independent and thorough.”
The FBI is investigating Blasey’s allegations that a drunken, high-school-age Kavanaugh pushed her into a room, pinned her on a bed, groped her and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. He has denied her allegation, along with allegations of sexual misconduct by him from two other women. Republicans gave the FBI one week to look into these claims.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is eager to put Kavanaugh on the court, regardless of the allegations against him, said Tuesday that he’s aiming to hold Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote this week.
