The current battle over Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme
Court has gotten about as dirty as it can get. Between Senator Cory Booker’s
fake “I’ll release confidential documents no matter the consequences to me” grandstanding
(the documents weren’t confidential, and in any case he had cleared their
release with the Committee Chairman that very morning) , Senator Kamala Harris’
setup photo of Kavanaugh not shaking the hand of the parent of a Parkland
shooting victim (Harris arranged for photographers to witness the parent ambushing
Kavanaugh as he was leaving the Committee room, and his security people naturally
moved him away from this possibly hostile stranger they didn’t know), and
Senator Pelosi’s editing Kavanaugh’s words to make it appear he said something
he didn’t say, things seemed about as dirty as they could get.
Now we have, suddenly and at the last minute, the convenient
appearance of someone who claims Kavanaugh tried to assault her back in high
school. This is a wonderful ploy, because of course there is no evidence to either
support or refute her claim, and in today’s politically-correct world the fundamental
principle of English law, that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, has long since
been abandoned. So simply the insinuation, the possibility, that this might be
true may be enough to destroy a man’s career.
These nominations have been getting dirtier and dirtier ever
since Senator Ted Kennedy in 1987 shamelessly smeared nominee Robert Bork in a nationally
televised speech, asserting that Bork held extremist views that Bork in fact
had never held. That set the standard, and the Supreme Court nomination process
ever since then has been getting dirtier and dirtier.
Whether Democrats manage to derail the Kavanaugh nomination with
this ploy or not, you can bet that Republicans will remember this the next time
there is a Democrat in the White House and she/he nominates a liberal judge for
the Supreme Court. What goes around comes around. Pity that nominee.
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