Impeaching Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is heating up the Democratic campaign trail, but that trail runs cold in the Senate.
Lawmakers had little enthusiasm for trying to oust a sitting Supreme Court justice, despite a new book claiming to provide evidence of decades-old sexual misconduct.
“I think we do need to clear this up,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the Washington Examiner when asked about the allegations put forth in the The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, which claims to add new evidence and a new allegation of sexual misconduct from Kavanaugh’s teenage years.
None of the Democrats or Republicans who arrived in the U.S. Senate Monday night to vote on a nomination said they believed Kavanaugh deserved impeachment, despite calls from Senate Democrats running for president that Congress remove him from the high court.
Republicans scoffed at the new allegations against Kavanaugh, which were outlined in a New York Times opinion piece that later required an editor’s note to state the alleged victim of a second sexual misconduct claim does not remember it happening.
“The latest allegation was blasted out by a major newspaper despite the apparent lack of any corroborating evidence whatsoever,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday. “The reporting was so thin, the story ran not in the news section, but on the opinion page. In fact, they’ve already had to issue an enormous correction. The writers conveniently failed to note that the supposed victim herself declined to be interviewed. And several of her friends say she has no memory of any such thing happening.”
The allegations and the book were further discredited Monday when reporters began dissecting it for themselves and found no new evidence aside from a claim by former Clinton lawyer Max Stier that a drunk Kavanaugh dropped his pants during a party at Yale and some friends shoved his genitals into the hands of a woman who does not remember the incident.
Annie Clark, a spokeswoman for Sen. Susan Collins whose support helped confirm Kavanaugh, called the Stier claim “an accusation that lacks an accuser.”
A similar incident alleged by another Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, wasn’t backed up either, other than by a a male student who said an unidentified female student nobody has interviewed told him she witnessed it.
“It seems like they’ve gone from a full-throated call for impeachment to impeachment light,” Sen. Thom Tillis, a member of the Judiciary Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “A lot of that stems from the fact that their members are concerned with it.”
Tillis said he believes the furor over Kavanaugh on the Left will die down.
“I think it’s probably just another political exercise. I doubt seriously they draw up [impeachment] articles,” he said.
But it is the House that initiates impeachment, and liberal Democrats are clamoring for Kavanaugh’s removal.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley said she plans to introduce a resolution Tuesday calling on the Judiciary Committee to conduct an impeachment inquiry regarding Kavanaugh.
“We saw right through you then, we see right through you now. #ImpeachKavanaugh,” Pressley said on Twitter.
That panel has already announced plans to investigate Kavanaugh, so it’s more likely Chairman Jerry Nadler will add the book allegations to the list.
“We have our hands full with impeaching the president right now, and that’s going to take up our limited resources and time for a while,” Nadler said during an interview Monday on WNYC.
Democrats in the House and Senate are likely to demand scrutiny of the FBI background investigation conducted into Kavanaugh’s past, in particular a second FBI probe that occurred during Kavanaugh’s second round of hearings involving California professor Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual misconduct while the two were in high school.
Rep. Chris Coons told reporters Monday he sent FBI Director Christopher Wray a letter alerting him to Stier’s allegations and that they did not contact him.
Feinstein said she wants to find out why.
“I think the FBI did not do the investigation we’d hoped they would do,” she said.
Democratic primary candidates aren’t backing down.
“The fact that something has not been proven, it doesn’t mean it didn’t occur, right?” Sen. Kamala Harris, a presidential contender, said on NPR when told about the lack of witnesses to the allegations. “But if you don’t investigate it, if it hasn’t been investigated, then there’s not been a full airing of the issue.”
