At a press conference before Tuesday’s confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Judiciary ranking member Dianne Feinstein said that Democrats were planning a “silent protest.”
If only!
Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley barely uttered a full sentence on Tuesday morning before Democrat Kamala Harris—not coincidentally a 2020 presidential hopeful—interrupted him. “Mr. Chairman . . . Mr. Chairman . . . We cannot possibly move forward, Mr. Chairman.” So began the first hour of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing: a six-hour spectacle of disingenuous arguments and madcap play-acting. Democratic senators Blumenthal, Booker, and Hirono joined Harris in an apparently orchestrated performance of interruption. Grassley could hardly get through a full sentence of his opening remarks without a Democrat calling to postpone the hearing.
Thanks to a supremely arrogant 2014 decision by then-Democratic majority leader Harry Reid to rescind the filibuster for judicial nominations, Democrats don’t have the votes to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation. And so they feel obliged to prove to their most enthusiastic supporters back home that they’re doing something—anything—to stop the inevitable.
When Democratic senators weren’t interrupting, their ideological cobelligerents were shouting at four- or five-minute intervals in an attempt, successful at first, to throw the meeting into pandemonium. Protester after protester had to be escorted from the room in what, as NBC News reported on Tuesday, was a planned protest coordinated by Democrats on a conference call over the weekend.
That’s why Judiciary Democrats didn’t appear troubled by the hooliganism. In fact, they planned and relished it. “What we’ve heard is the noise of democracy,” Dick Durbin said after one outburst. “This is what happens in a free country when people can stand up and speak, and not be jailed, imprisoned, tortured or killed because of it. It is not mob rule. There have been times when it is uncomfortable . . . But it does represent what we are about in this democracy.”
Grassley and others tried to offer reasonable responses to complaints about the thousands of allegedly crucial documents Democrats claim they need to see before they vote. Kavanaugh has written scores of opinions and published many articles on questions of law and policy. The documents he handled as staff secretary to President George W. Bush would be relevant if the question before the committee were Kavanaugh’s politics, but they are not relevant to his judicial philosophy. That may be the judicial philosophy of most Democrats and progressives—a judge simply imposes his political opinion—but it is not Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy, and Democrats know it.
Of course, committee Democrats don’t care about those documents. They aren’t even interested in delaying the vote on Kavanaugh’s conformation, which they’re smart enough to know is inevitable. They’re interested in proving to Democratic activists and donors that they are committed to the cause of opposing “conservative” judges.
Hence the unlovely amalgamation of Democratic senators and their boorish agents shouting at the nominee. In order to prove their progressive bona fides to the zealots whose support they need in the next primary, Democrats are increasingly willing to make themselves the instruments of extremists and rabble-rousers. Often they themselves ape the antics of their activist allies—recall for instance the 2016 “sit-in” in which House Democrats refused to leave the floor until they were granted a vote on gun control legislation.
This behavior makes their primary campaigns easier, but it has slowly turned deliberative hearings in which reasoned disagreement was once still possible into a series of performance venues, with elected lawmakers urging their unreasoning champions to shout the things they can’t quite say.
It was hard for those not in the room to hear what the protesters were shouting, but one was heard to say: “Cancel Brett Kavanaugh.” That is about the mentality to which Senate Democrats have sunk.
