1) The Democrats screwed America. It doesn’t matter if you believe Christine Blasey Ford or Brett Kavanaugh. Both sides were done a tremendous disservice by the manner in which Senate Democrats deliberately slow-walked these charges because they thought that they could be used to kill the Kavanaugh nomination.
Holding Ford’s allegations until after the initial hearings publicly exposed both Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh in ways that were absolutely unnecessary. It hurt both of these people and their families. And it hurt the rest of America, too. It has sowed discord in a society that is already on the brink. (Which makes it harder for women to bring assault claims.) It has taken a pole-axe to the last institution of government that the public had any faith in, while simultaneously breaking the Supreme Court confirmation process going forward.
And it did a disservice to the truth. Because the way to get to the truth—if that was even a possibility to begin with—was to handle this weeks ago when it could have been done behind closed doors.
The only people to benefit from what the Democrats did with Ford’s allegations is the group whose primary goal was stopping Kavanaugh from getting on the High Court. It’s despicable and they deserve the scorn of all Americans. And special scorn should be reserved for Dianne Feinstein, who—there is no other way to say this—simply used Ford, even though she understood what it would cost the woman.
2) Senators are the worst. As my colleague Rachael Larimore pointed out, the best part of the hearings was prosecutor Rachel Mitchell. She was serious, respectful, smart, and asked questions designed to shed light on the actual facts of case. The truth is, the hearings would have been more useful if Mitchell had conducted all of the questioning herself.
The senators, on the other hand? Disgraces. They filibustered and preened. They had petty procedural arguments. They looked exactly like the petty narcissists they are. And this goes, with at best two or three exceptions, for both the Democrats and the Republicans on the committee.
3) No matter what happens going forward, everyone has already lost. It doesn’t matter who you believe or who you want on the court. If Kavanaugh’s nomination implodes now, we have lowered the evidentiary standard for wrecking a nomination to the point where bad actors will be incentivized to make things up.
If Kavanaugh is confirmed, he will carry a cloud over him for the entirety of his tenure. Any decisions in which he’s the swing vote will be even more contentious. And you can bet the milk money that the next time Democrats have unified control of government, they’re going to want to expand the Supreme Court to 11 seats.
To paraphrase Tony Stark, there’s no throne here. There’s no scenario in which anyone rides off into the sunset, happy.
Everyone is walking away worse off than they were a month ago.
And it’s going to get worse still.
4) There is reason to believe either Ford or Kavanaugh; but you should not trust people who believe either of them with total certainty. What do we know, really? Not much. Both Ford and Kavanaugh made plausible cases for their versions of events. Both sides had inconsistencies. And you can construct reasonable answers for the holes in either of their stories.
Ford’s conduct thus far—not just at the hearing but from the moment she reached out to her elected representatives—seems to have been in good faith. And she has no discernible motive for coming forward.
Kavanaugh, of course, does have a motive to deny the charges, but his conduct in answering the committee has also been exemplary. He has not equivocated or lawyered his way through this gauntlet.
The hearings were a credibility contest, a Rorschach test, and as such, served mostly to reinforce people’s priors. But no impartial observer could emerge from Thursday with total certainty that one of the parties was representing the perfectly-true course of events.
If you aren’t split at least 80-20, then you’re probably looking at this wrong.
5) We are where we are. At the end of the day, it’s no use lamenting the foolish choices that led us to this point because we can’t unmake them. The best we can do is try to figure out what incentive structure led people to make them in the first place, and then try to change it.
That’s a big question. And the most depressing possible answer is that this spectacle—like the spectacle of the Trump presidency—is merely a symptom of the larger disease.
It’s impossible to look at the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings and not see America as a nation in decline.
6) This is Anthony Kennedy’s final kiss-off to the country. As Sonny Bunch quipped:
Kinda figures that Anthony Kennedy’s final gift to the GOP is a possibly-unconfirmable/probably-politically disastrous handpicked successor.
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) September 22, 2018
Tony Kennedy’s entire tenure on the bench was marked by arbitrary and capricious decisions in which American life was remade based on what the associate justice had for breakfast. His decisions sowed legal chaos by untethering constitutional law from any discernible logic or principles.
And as he rides off into the sunset, Kennedy tossed one more grenade into America’s living room.
