There’s one relevant question: Did Brett Kavanaugh do what Christine Blasey Ford says he did — or anything like it?
To answer that question, the Senate Judiciary Committee has proposed the best course of action: have committee staff, not politicians, question Ford and Kavanaugh under oath, behind closed doors if Ford wishes.
But Ford and Democrats don’t want such an inquiry, in part because they want to debate other questions besides Kavanaugh’s actual guilt or innocence.
You could see it Tuesday night and Wednesday when liberal guests were going on CNN and MSNBC saying things like, “We need to judge Brett Kavanaugh not just on what he may or may not have done but how he treats a woman’s pain.” Op-ed writers implying, “Did he do it?” is “the wrong question,” and that instead this inquiry must go “beyond the who did what and beginning to understand the context that leads such a question to be necessary in the first place.”
They want to turn this into a trial of “have men gotten away with sexual abuse in our culture for decades?” They want to make it a question of “is Christine Blasey Ford suffering?”
They want to make this a trial over whether rich white prep school kids have skated through life without ever suffering consequences.
Having these debates is good and fine. Having these debates inspired by the charges against Kavanaugh is unobjectionable. But those questions don’t inform Kavanaugh’s fitness for the job. The question is whether Kavanaugh did what Ford says he did.
It would make a mockery of our constitutional system to have Kavanaugh’s nomination die for the sins of other prep school boys.
And it also wouldn’t do any good. No redemption for any of our society’s sins would come from a political hit job torpedoing Kavanaugh’s nomination, if he is innocent.
Kavanaugh’s critics aren’t the only ones guilty of sticking irrelevant questions before the central question. Conservatives such as Dennis Prager have made the case that what a drunk 17-year-old did at a party 36 years ago doesn’t reflect on his current character or fitness.
Again, this is a debatable question. It may even be good to have that debate in the wake of this confirmation battle. But it’s a moot question with regard to Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh has repeatedly and categorically denied doing anything like what Ford says he did. If it turns out he did do it, or something like it, then he has flatly and publicly lied. If that’s the case, the White House should withdraw his nomination.
By all appearances, a majority of the Judiciary Committee and a majority of the Senate decided before this week that Brett Kavanaugh is qualified for the job. If he assaulted a woman years ago and lied about it this week, then that assessment must change. But that’s the only question. Anything else is academic.
