Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusation is very important and deserves a real investigation. It is important, but it is not urgent. Kavanaugh does not seem to be a clear and present danger to women, especially now that he is infamous.
There is a separate issue which is both important and urgent but has been largely buried under the news of yet another sexual assault being ignored by the Republicans in power.
If you want to understand the truth about a candidate, you need to know their actions in addition to their words.
This process often includes things like reviewing their career. For example, reviewing the history of a judge’s decisions, disciplinary actions taken against them, or public records involving them. The amount of prep requires balancing the amount of work to be done while allowing the process to be as speedy as possible.
Then, the confirmation hearing itself starts and runs until enough people are comfortable enough that they understand the candidate in order to decide if he’d be able to do the job.
The Senate is not ready to confirm Kavanaugh. This can be seen easily by the fact that the White House provided 42,000 documents the night before the confirmation hearing. There’s no way that anyone could possibly have reviewed the documents in any way.
The Democrats keep sounding the alarm that no one could possibly review the information in time, but I guess the Republicans either had a head start or just wanted to get Kavanaugh in as soon as possible.
Confirmation hearings should allow Congress to understand the candidate, and make sure that they’re not someone that is untrustworthy or potentially dangerous.
“gray pillars” by Claire Anderson on Unsplash
This is a lifetime appointment. If they misjudge his support for their causes, they’re screwed. Worse, if he’s removed for misconduct, they stand to pay heavy consequences from their constituents.
They’re taking on a very real risk by supporting the man in this rushed manner. So why would they be doing that?
Personally, I believe it is a move to protect Trump from the Democrats. If Senator McConnell and others like him believe that the Democrats are treating Trump unfairly then they may try to protect him. If they instead think that Trump should not be in power, they could still want to protect him since they can leverage him for their own needs.
There is evidence that suggests Kavanaugh would protect Trump. If someone did want to protect Trump, then this would be a reasonable tactic to take.
Kavanaugh helped investigate President Bill Clinton as part of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s team in the 1990s. Looking back, Kavanaugh wrote in his 2009 article, “the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal investigation offshoots.”
His argument was that the president these days has many weighty responsibilities — wars, economic crises, the threat of terrorist attacks — and shouldn’t be encumbered by criminal investigations or charges, or civil lawsuits, while in office.
“I believe that the President should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office,” Kavanaugh wrote in 2009, three years after Bush appointed him to the D.C. Circuit. “This is not something I necessarily thought in the 1980s or 1990s. Like many Americans at that time, I believed that the President should be required to shoulder the same obligations that we all carry. But in retrospect, that seems a mistake.”
Another possibility is that they just need *someone* they trust in the seat sooner rather than later. Gamble v. United States could be a motivation. The case could overturn the dual-sovereignty doctrine, which could allow states to prosecute someone who was pardoned at the federal level.
People that Trump pardons, even potentially himself, could currently still be prosecuted for relevant state crimes.
Within the context of the Mueller probe, legal observers have seen the dual-sovereignty doctrine as a check on President Donald Trump’s power: It could discourage him from trying to shut down the Mueller investigation or pardon anyone caught up in the probe, because the pardon wouldn’t be applied to state charges. Under settled law, if Trump were to pardon his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for example — he was convicted last month in federal court on eight counts of tax and bank fraud — both New York and Virginia state prosecutors could still charge him for any crimes that violated their respective laws.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/trump-pardon-orrin-hatch-supreme-court/571285/
In my opinion I think Brett Kavanaugh likely did act inappropriately at a bare minimum with women in his past, but that’s not proof. I see plenty of evidence to warrant an investigation, but the appointment does not seem likely to stop for it.
Separately, and far more urgently, we cannot let Trump put Kavanaugh in place. Once Trump is leaves power through election, term limits, or impeachment, the new government can try to select Kavanaugh if they’d like. I suspect he won’t be nearly as attractive an option to the Republicans who remain once the Trump issues are settled.
