Back in July, Democrat senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren held a press conference on Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. “This has nothing to do with politics,” Booker said. “You are either complicit in the evil. You are either contributing to the wrong or you are fighting against it,” and he cited Psalm 23 in support of his comments.
“It’s hard to take statements like that seriously,” responded Texas Republican John Cornyn. “That’s completely unhinged and detached from any reality.” In the hearing for Judge Kavanaugh on Tuesday, Senate Democrats were even more unhinged and detached from reality.
“Good morning. I welcome everyone to this confirmation hearing on the nomination of,” said Senate Judiciary committee Sen. Charles Grassley when he was interrupted by California Democrat Kamala Harris, who got her start in politics under Willie Brown, and has been mentioned as a Democratic contender for president in 2020.
“We cannot possibly move forward, Mr. Chairman” Harris said. “We have not been given an opportunity to have a meaningful hearing on this nominee.” Actually, they had.
As Grassley explained the night before, there are more documents on Kavanaugh than any other nominee in history. For all but the willfully blind, Kavanaugh’s 12 years on the D.C. bench had provided ample evidence of his legal thinking
Grassley told Harris she was “out of order,” but Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who worked in the Nixon White House and falsely claimed to have served in Vietnam, pushed for an adjournment as protesters howled in the background. As they howled one shouted, “an illegitimate president cannot make a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court,” which aptly summarized the Democrats’ thinking.
Women showed up dressed in red-and-white handmaid costumes. Capitol police ejected some 70 protesters, including Linda Sarsour and Coyote Ugly star Piper Perabo.
“This is the first confirmation hearing subject to mob rule,” said John Cornyn. But the mob got some pushback from unexpected quarters.
One of the more than 60 interruptions came during the statement of Sen. Orrin Hatch. “I think we ought to have this loudmouth removed,” said Hatch. “We shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of stuff.”
Sen. Ted Cruz noted that the Democrats were not making a case that Kavanaugh was unqualified. “If it’s not about his judicial record, what is this fight about?” Cruz said. “I believe this fight is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt by our Democratic colleagues to relitigate the 2016 presidential election.”
Protesters believed Trump was an “illegitimate president.” Others charge that the nomination should not go forward while the Mueller probe is session. This ignores the reality that the Senate confirmed Stephen Breyer while Bill Clinton was under investigation in the Whitewater scandal.
The protests delayed the hearing by more than an hour but Grassley pushed ahead. Republican senators were in agreement that Kavanaugh is an outstanding and fully qualified jurist. His supporters include Yale law professor Akhil Amar. He voted for Hillary Clinton but is on record in the New York Times that the nomination of Kavanaugh was president Trump’s “finest hour.”
Late in the day Kavanaugh got to make his own statement. “A good judge must be an umpire—a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no litigant or policy,” he said. “I don’t decide cases based on personal or policy preferences. I am not a pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant judge. I am not a pro-prosecution or pro-defense judge. I am a pro-law judge.”
Kavanaugh also praised “superb chief judge Merrick Garland,” but that won’t be enough for the Democratic mob. Millennials who are puzzled by the proceedings might check out what Chappaquiddick veteran Ted Kennedy said about Reagan nominee Robert Bork:
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
And so on. The superbly qualified Bork failed to gain a seat on the court. Contrast that with Bush nominee Clarence Thomas. Former Communist Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) led the Democrats’ surge of fake accusations from Anita Hill.
This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.
The “high-tech lynching” charge enraged West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klucker who also voted against Thurgood Marshall. Clarence Thomas gained confirmation 58-42, and he is likely watching the Kavanaugh hearing with great interest. As President Trump says, we’ll see what happens.
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