Senate hit a low 27 years ago by demeaning Anita Hill. McConnell should avert a repeat.
It’s not, as Mitch McConnell says, the 11th hour.
The Senate is under no deadline to confirm a Supreme Court nominee and has time for a proper investigation of the sexual abuse allegation against Brett Kavanaugh before awarding him a lifetime vote on the Supreme Court.
Remember, Majority Leader McConnell kept a Supreme Court seat vacant for 10 months after it became open in 2016. McConnell insisted on letting the court go for almost a year with a vacancy. What harm can there be now in devoting a few weeks to fulfilling the Senate’s duty to thoroughly vet and consider would-be justices?
The pressure that Republicans are putting on Christine Blasey Ford to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday — without other potentially supportive witnesses or any preliminary investigation by the FBI or anyone else — exposes their vow to “hear” her as tokenism. They want to appear in sympathy with the #MeToo movement; it is an election year. But their impatience is perfectly consistent with the Republican quest to conceal key parts of Kavanaugh’s past.
McConnell warned the Trump White House that Kavanaugh’s lengthy paper trail would present obstacles to his confirmation. Kavanaugh served as an insider in the George W. Bush White House and before that as an assistant in special counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of the Clintons.
Republicans solved the paper trail problem by keeping thousands upon thousands of documents secret, in an extraordinary departure from past practice. Rather than the National Archives deciding which documents to release, the decision was made by Bill Burck, a private attorney employed by George W. Bush. Burck also is Kavanaugh’s close friend.
Despite the whiteout, Democrats still were able to show that Kavanaugh, a federal appeals court judge, gave misleading or inaccurate answers to senators during his judicial confirmation hearings in 2004 and 2006, casting doubt on both the reliability of his current testimony and his character
Running for president, Trump took McConnell’s advice by releasing a list of likely Supreme Court nominees. Some credit the list of conservatives for persuading conservative voters to back Trump. Why didn’t Trump follow McConnell’s most recent advice? Since helping Starr pursue criminal charges against the Clintons, Kavanaugh has done an about-face, taking an expansive view of presidential power, even writing that Congress should pass a law exempting a president from criminal prosecution or investigation. Trump is hoping that having Kavanaugh and his earlier appointee, Neil Gorsuch, on the court will give him an advantage as criminal investigations into various aspects of his campaign and administration proceed.
Republicans in the Senate, including Kentucky’s McConnell, seem determined to help Trump do just that — even if it makes collateral damage of countless victims who are weighing whether accusing a powerful man is worth the risk, even as young people wait to learn just how much privilege is automatically conferred upon a 17-year-old white male.
Some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were there 27 years ago when it recommended the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, despite law professor Anita Hill’s testimony that he had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor. In the years since, Hill’s testimony has largely been corroborated, while her demeaning treatment by senators of both parties has gone down as one of the Senate’s all-time lows — a low that McConnell can and should keep the Senate from repeating.
This story was originally published September 19, 2018 at 7:33 PM.