Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, whom Democrats value apparently for her willingness to say anything, laid out her party’s approach on Sunday to judging accusations of sexual assault.
“I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases,” she said. The closest she came to mentioning a case was that, she claimed, “he very much is against reproductive choice.”
That is, she and the Democrats dismiss his denials because he is thought to oppose abortion and does not pledge allegiance to Roe v. Wade. This is a perverse corruption of the rule of law, but Hirono deserves thanks for a rare moment of Democratic honesty in a confirmation process characterized by that party’s utter disgrace.
There are still open questions on Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh. We look forward to assessing them and his denials when they are both under oath on Thursday. We hope Republicans will do the same. But, while they should not prejudge Kavanaugh or Ford, they also should not treat Democratic demands or questions as though they were in good faith.
The latest uncorroborated accusation against Kavanaugh, from a college classmate, was generated, it seems, by Democrats pressuring a reluctant woman to point the finger at him. The woman had not said Kavanaugh was the perpetrator until the partisan campaign stunts of this past week.
After this thin story went public, Democrats hid their role in its creation and pretended it was legitimate. This disgusting behavior is becoming their norm.
Hirono admitted that Democrats wouldn’t be hitting Kavanaugh so hard for alleged sexual assault if he sided with Democrats on abortion. They aren’t really interested in what happened in Chevy Chase in 1982 (just as they were uninterested in what happened to the victims of former President Bill Clinton’s sexual predations against Juanita Brodderick and Paula Jones) but about protecting the fictitious constitutional right to abortion.
Democrats also showed their hand when they objected to the idea of having staff lawyers for the Senate Judiciary Committee question Kavanaugh and Ford. They made it obvious that they wanted only senators doing the questioning. Why? Because they hoped for perfect TV moments of old, white, Republican men grilling a woman who says she was sexually assaulted.
Preferring that spectacle to a lawyerly inquiry with less politics revealed that Democrats have less interest in getting to the truth of the matter than they do in creating political fireworks.
Similarly, they keep trying to push back any hearing in which Kavanaugh and Ford are both put under oath. This is not the behavior of people hungry for the truth.
Why wouldn’t Democrats want to get to the truth? It would be uncharitable to posit that Democrats don’t believe Ford but are nonetheless weaponizing her accusations — only sociopaths would do that. The most likely remaining explanation is that the truth of the accusation is irrelevant to them, compared to the potential political gain of playing this right.
It’s the same with the decision of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to keep Ford’s letter a secret and not to investigate it for weeks.
They are playing dirty politics. Their first goal is fundraising and stirring up the base — they’re raising cash on this, so better to drag it out as long as possible. Their second goal is winning over female voters by beating a drum about the war on women they invented a few election cycles ago. Their third goal is an outside shot at defeating Kavanaugh and then declaring it’s too late to nominate a replacement before the next Congress comes in.
For all these purposes, delay and spectacle are preferable to truth and openness. The acquisition of power in the midterm elections, and the abortion lobby’s agenda, are pre-eminent on the Democratic agenda.
It’s not clear whether the Democrats have sunk to a new low; their destruction of Robert Bork four decades ago makes that difficult. But they have surely never sunk lower, and they continue to plumb the depths.
