The confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, already stuffed with more plot twists than a Shyamalan flick, just saw another dramatic 11thr-hour wrinkle. The Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to vote at 1:30 p.m. to send Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the floor—a vote that seemed like a foregone conclusion after Jeff Flake, the committee’s functional swing vote, announced his support for the nominee Friday morning. Moments before the vote, however, Flake decided to make his support conditional: He would vote to advance Kavanaugh out of committee, but would not vote for him on the Senate floor unless the vote was delayed for up to one week to allow for further investigation of the sexual assault allegations against the nominee.
“I’ve been speaking to a number of people on the other side,” Flake told the committee. “I think it would be proper to delay the floor vote for up to, but not more than, one week in order to let the FBI do an investigation limited in time and scope to the current allegations that are there, … I will vote to advance the bill to the floor with that understanding.”
Flake’s comments briefly threw the Judiciary Committee into chaos, as Republicans and Democrats alike tried to figure out exactly what Flake was saying his goal was. Flake voted with the Republicans to advance Kavanaugh out of committee moments later, but said he would not vote to confirm him on the Senate floor unless the Democrats were granted their request for an additional delay. Senate Republicans had initially planned to vote to confirm Kavanaugh as early as Monday.
Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual misconduct by three women, one of whom, Christine Blasey Ford, publicly testified before the Judiciary Committee Thursday. Ford alleges that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a house party in the summer of 1982, when she and Kavanaugh were high schoolers. In her account, she was on her way to use the bathroom when she was suddenly shoved into a bedroom, where a drunken Kavanaugh pinned her to the bed, groped her, tried to remove her clothing, and clamped a hand over her mouth, preventing her from screaming and making her fear he would inadvertently kill her. She also alleges that a friend of Kavanaugh’s, Mike Judge, was present.
It remains to be seen whether Senate leadership will go along with Flake’s gambit. Now that Kavanaugh’s nomination has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, it falls to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to hammer out whether or not to request that Flake’s FBI background check be reopened. If they were to agree to do so, the FBI would likely focus on elements of Ford’s testimony that the Judiciary Committee skimmed over, such as the testimony of Mark Judge.
McConnell would likely only agree to such a maneuver if he thought the nomination likely to fail without Flake’s vote. That would require securing yes votes from two of the Senate’s three other undecided members: Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, and Democrat Joe Manchin.
