Three named women have now accused Brett M. Kavanaugh of committing serious sexual misconduct as a young man. At Thursday’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, we will hear the testimony of only one of those three women.
And we will not be hearing from Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s high school friend, even though two of those women have also charged that Judge was an accomplice to Kavanaugh’s alleged misconduct.
This is because Republicans don’t want to hear from any of those additional people.
.. Reopening Kavanaugh’s FBI background check would provide lawmakers with a wealth of such independently gathered information, which would enable them to better assess what they hear from Kavanaugh and Ford. The American public would also be in a better position to assess that competing testimony. It is obvious on its face that this would be better for our “discourse” than what we are now seeing. Today’s proceedings appear almost deliberately constructed to ensure that half the country believes the outcome of this confirmation battle — whatever it is — is deeply unjust.
Barring a reopened FBI background check, Republicans could subpoena Kavanaugh’s high school friend Judge, who according to Ford participated in the alleged assault. Michael Avenatti’s client Julia Swetnick has now claimed she witnessed repeated efforts by Judge and Kavanaugh to inebriate women so that they could be gang-raped. Judge could testify to — and be cross-examined about — all of this.
.. a genuine, impartial fact-finding effort would buttress confidence that there is a workable process in place for clearing up such “character assassinations,” which might make “good people” more prone to public service, not less.
.. Blumenthal points out still another problem: Each senator will have only five minutes to question Kavanaugh.
“He has been well prepared to filibuster,” Blumenthal said of Kavanaugh. “Do we cut him off and appear disrespectful? Or do we in effect allow him to squander our time?”
Giggling Kavanaugh Implicates Georgetown Prep ‘Friends’ For Alcohol-Related ‘Trouble’
9/6/18: Sen. Kennedy (R-La.) question Kavanaugh about “getting into trouble” at Georgetown Prep, eliciting nervous laughter from Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh tells Sen. Kennedy (R-La.) that at Georgetown Prep “I had a lot of friends, I’ve talked a lot about my friends. And they’ve been here. So it was very formative.”
When Kennedy presses his question about “trouble,” Kavanaugh replies, “That’s encompassed by the friends, I think.”
Kennedy concludes by saying he’s decided to not ask Kavanaugh whether his underage friends were “sneaking a few beers past Jesus.” Kavanaugh shakes his head, says “Hey,” and giggles again.
Cornyn takes the mike, saying, “I for one am grateful for the senator’s self-restraint.” close
Why Haven’t Republicans Abandoned Brett Kavanaugh?
“Judge Kavanaugh slightly rehearsed but very believable,” Bill O’Reilly said on Twitter—and this is from a man who knows something about both sexual-assault allegations and the way cable news can be used to smother them.
.. That Kavanaugh was reportedly compelled to grant the interview suggested how weak his position had become. The truly powerful broadcast their sentiments directly on social media; the televised interview tends to be for those who enjoy celebrity but not control.
.. Estes Kavanaugh’s presence suggested that an older form was being attempted, in which the wife humanizes the husband. “He’s decent, he’s kind, he’s good—I know his heart,” she said.
But these affirmations seemed peripheral, since she met her husband in 2001, nearly two decades after the two alleged incidents, in high school and in college.
.. Had he ever drunk so much that he could not remember the events of an evening? “Never happened,” Kavanaugh said.
.. In a high-school yearbook, the Times discovered, Kavanaugh and seventeen other students listed themselves as Renate alumni, a reference to a young woman named Renate Schroeder.
.. His freshman-year roommate at Yale, James Roche, who became a friend of Deborah Ramirez, told The New Yorkerthat Kavanaugh was “frequently, incoherently drunk” and went on to say, “Is it believable that she was alone with a wolfy group of guys who thought it was funny to sexually torment a girl like Debbie? Yeah, definitely. Is it believable that Kavanaugh was one of them? Yes.”
.. asking the senators on the Judiciary Committee to accept that Ford mistook his face but also to believe that many of his contemporaries and his friends mistook his character.
.. a Supreme Court confirmation will hinge on whether a young man in the nineteen-eighties drunkenly degraded women or comported himself as a figure of Catholic chastity—represents a breakdown of the most successful effort of the Trump Administration, the confirmation of conservative judges.
.. Trump chose judges
- screened by the conservative Federalist Society,
- the Republican Senate confirmed them, and
- Fox News supported them.
The entire process could take place—as Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation did—within the conservative ecosystem.
.. “Fake news” is, among other things, a declaration of a boundary that defines which information will and will not matter to Republicans.
.. Then the second set of accusations, from Ramirez, helped insure that MacCallum’s interview of the Kavanaughs was a real journalistic endeavor, not soft-focus rehabilitation, and forced Kavanaugh, on the record, to commit to a defense that requires a suspension of disbelief.
.. The credibility of the accusations has compelled the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, all men, to take the extraordinary step of handing over their authority to interrogate Ford to a female prosecutor
.. This time, Republicans couldn’t seal off the process from pressure.
.. With the midterm elections drawing close, the President under investigation, and the Senate majority dependent on the narrowest of margins, “plow right through” is not a declaration of strength. It is an effort to manage political weakness.
.. Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates say the mentions of Renate were part of the football players’ unsubstantiated boasting about their conquests.
.. When Ms. Dolphin signed the Sept. 14 letter, she wasn’t aware of the “Renate” yearbook references on the pages of Judge Kavanaugh and his football teammates.
The Feigned Victimhood of Bill Cosby, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas
But it is even more jarring in the context of late-stage Cosby, the moral scold, the comedian turned societal heckler who launched that career by literally defending the police shooting of presumably unarmed black men. In a 2004 screed that came to be known as the “pound cake” speech, he said,
People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged: “The cops shouldn’t have shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, “If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.” Not “You’re going to get your butt kicked.” No. “You’re going to embarrass your mother.”
It is difficult to find adjectives equal to the scale of Cosby’s hypocrisy.
.. Cosby’s appeal lay in his representation of a particular node of racial progress.
.. A young Richard Pryor bristled at the anodyne swath of culture that Cosby occupied in the sixties and the pressures it placed on other comedians, particularly black ones, to create humor that soothed the racial anxieties of a white audience.
.. Cosby served as a brief for a particular kind of racial equality. The indignation on Tuesday stemmed from his presumption that, in America, equality means equal impunity.
.. Clarence Thomas referred to the 1991 Senate inquiry into his own history of sexual harassment as a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”
.. This is the rhetoric of men whose definition of victimhood is the inability to victimize others.
.. If Kavanaugh ascends to the Supreme Court without a formal investigation into the accusations made against him (all of which he has denied), it will be, in part, because a black man established a model for how best to present oneself as a victim in public. This is a form of interracial unity that the country could do without.
.. Cosby and Kavanaugh are twin exemplars of a kind of amoral amnesty. It is granted to men of great talent and wealth and to those born to men who possess either talent or wealth.
.. Cosby’s poverty-hectoring tours and the book “Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors” is the corrosive effect of irresponsibility.
.. He inflicted this trauma at least sixty times over.
.. There is no accounting for the mechanisms of deflection or rationalization that allowed him to behave in this way while simultaneously denouncing others for far smaller concerns, like what they choose to name their children.
He might not ever do what he has demanded of so many others—take responsibility—but he can no longer avoid being held responsible.