Every time a conservative jurist is nominated to the Supreme Court, he’s accused of perpetrating some heinous deed or harboring some reprehensible opinion. Neil Gorsuch was a plagiarist. Sam Alito was a racist and a sexist. John Roberts supported abortion clinic bombers. Clarence Thomas liked to talk about weird sex to female subordinates. Robert Bork was one of the worst people who ever lived.
Brett Kavanaugh was subjected to some of the most mindlessly tendentious treatment we’ve ever witnessed in a Senate confirmation hearing. Particularly memorable was Cory Booker’s demand that Kavanaugh explain a 16-year-old email on racial profiling without telling Kavanaugh what the email said (Booker claimed he couldn’t release the email although he had been cleared to do so—then released it as though he were breaking Senate rules). Kamala Harris cleverly edited a video to make it sound as though he considered birth control and abortion-inducing drugs the same thing, then posted the video on Twitter and claimed Kavanaugh was “going after birth control.”
We thought, though, that Kavanaugh would escape the confirmation process without a full-on smear of his personal character. We should have known better.
On Thursday Senator Dianne Feinstein of California released a cryptic statement that she had “received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigation.” The “confidential” accusation originally came in the form a letter to Rep. Anna Eschoo (D-Calif.) who passed it to Feinstein. The senator has not revealed the contents of the allegation, but the New York Times reports that “two officials familiar with the matter” say the alleged encounter “involved possible sexual misconduct between Judge Kavanaugh and a woman when they were both in high school.” Kavanaugh attended Georgetown Preparatory School in the early 1980s.
Of course, this has nothing to do with truth or concern for the accuser. It’s part of Democrats’ strategy of delaying Kavanaugh’s confirmation until after the midterm elections. Feinstein received the letter in July and so could have made her elliptical statement at any time during the nomination process, but for some reason waited till the hearings were over and other attempts to delay the process had failed. The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to schedule the vote for September 20. Democrats have one week to darken the judge’s reputation sufficiently to delay the vote yet again.
Good luck. The FBI tells the Washington Post that it has no plans to investigate the claim.
But Kavanaugh doesn’t need anybody’s defense against this allegation. It is an achingly obvious attempt to libel a good man for rank political ends. Kavanaugh has undergone six lengthy FBI background investigations, and many former colleagues and law clerks—male and female—have testified to his character. An anonymous accuser claiming he behaved badly more than 30 years ago means nothing.
That won’t stop the shameless hacks at left-wing clickbait sites from repeating the smear and pretending to be “troubled” by it. Already Ian Millhiser, “justice editor” at ThinkProgress, has posted a column headlined “Brett Kavanaugh has a mysterious #MeToo problem.” That’s right—“a #MeToo problem”; you know, like Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves. “Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh,” Millhiser writes, “may have committed a very serious crime—possibly even a sex crime. Or maybe he didn’t. That’s what we just learned from an extraordinarily vague press statement by Sen. Dianne Feinstein.”
Nope. That’s not what we “learned” from Feinstein’s statement, because you can’t “learn” that maybe a thing happened and maybe it didn’t. All we learned from the stunt—and all we’ll learn about the mendacious commentary on it from hitmen like Millhiser—is that Senate Democrats are willing to disgrace themselves and defame a good man in order to propitiate their most vicious supporters.
