Do Due Diligence

I can only imagine the anguish that a Senator who had not decided whether to vote for Brett Kavanaugh, someone whose decision lay in resolving the truth of Professor Blasey Ford's accusation, might have felt watching the drama Thursday.  I wonder if there were any such Senators.

I have no trouble at all believing both Dr. Ford's account and Kavanaugh's protestations of innocence.  Innocence is a state of mind, and I can easily believe that it happened, just as she said (sketchy though the details may be) and that he remembers nothing of it.  I don't even believe he would have had to have been pass-out drunk to lose his memory of it, just that what happened was not sexual assault in his mind, and he forgot about it.  When it came up recently, he readily convinced himself that it couldn't have happened. There can be that much difference in how people perceive events.

I do thank Senator Flake for his crisis of confidence (or of conscience), his second thoughts just after announcing his intention to vote to confirm.  We can call it courage, but it was certainly human, in the best sense of the word.  The result was a well-drawn political compromise, in the way these finally occur:  not horse-trading, but the merging of varying interests.

We can all wish that a week's investigation will firmly establish the truth of the matter, or of the Yale freshman dorm indecent exposure charge, but that is not the way this life works.  Truth reveals itself much more subtly than that, if at all.  I have no doubt that a persistent investigation would show that Kavanaugh's "white lies" were much more numerous and substantial than those that have already been uncovered.  If I were the FBI investigator, I would want to talk to that ex-girlfriend of Mark Judge, someone whose name I have not heard mentioned as an investigation interview subject.  Though it would all be hearsay, there could be no better source to get the hidden dirt.

The Senators who have the true leverage in this story are Senators Collins and Murkowski, as they have been for weeks.  Though they were not in the Judiciary Committee, they enlisted Flake to be their voice there, and he came through for them.  I have heard that they are both very concerned about process, and this will give them a chance to satisfy themselves and vote for confirmation, if that is what they feel they must do.  As for Sen. Manchin and Sen. Heitkamp, they have correctly understood that their best interest  (vote maximizing in the midst of challenging re-election bids) is to wait until the last moment to make their decisions, thus having all the information of their respective states' public opinion. Their votes are unlikely to be decisive, unless Collins and Murkowski both vote No.

Just as Flake desperately needed to find another door when he was cornered in the elevator by the women demonstrating their despair, Friday's change of story provided Mitch McConnell a way out from a difficult situation, as the immediate agreement both he and President Trump gave to the one-week delay proposal showed.   There had been  a scheduled vote the next day to set the date of the final vote--that was looking like a vote that McConnell was going to lose.  The vote to end debate was always the one he had to find all 51 Republicans to support, and now he has the means to get it--or rather, he will, in a week.

What it appears to me from Thursday's session is that Justice Clarence "Uncle" Thomas may find that he need not stay on any longer in the Court, for Justice Kavanaugh should adequately represent the men-feeling-aggrieved-by-women's-accusations constituency.  I don't dispute its existence, and it's probably growing, but does it really need two Supreme Court justices (and a President) to defend its interests?

Professor Ford's civic-minded sacrifice should have at least one positive effect, though it may not stop Kavanaugh's confirmation:  she will have provided the national culture something permanent, in terms of women's ability to speak out against bad actors.  And, though regardless of his guilt, based on his performance Thursday I would indeed describe Kavanaugh as a bad actor, I also find that the Republican base is in love with them (see Reagan, Trump).  As such, I think Kavanaugh's stance will also help juice up Republican turnout, which will make Election Night even more uncertain and much too interesting.

"The Ranking Member"and Team
I cannot help giving some reviews to some of the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee--for one thing, three of them seem likely to run for President, and this was their unavoidable national audition.  Of those three, Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota had the best moments, and she, along with moderates Blumenthal and Coons ended up winning the day for their team's search for delay, while Cory Booker and Kamala Harris were less successful in creating positive momentum for their embryonic candidacies.  I will cite the public service of Sen. Whitehouse (not in a close race this year, probably not running for President)  for taking on the ugly, unpopular task of going through Kavanaugh's damaging high-school yearbook quotations and the evasive and sarcastic responses that exercise was sure to elicit.

The Democrats on the committee stuck together, as they needed to do, and worked cooperatively.. I am concerned, though, about Sen. Feinstein, the "ranking member" (what a crummy title!) of the committee's Democratic contingent, who was unable to provide leadership in the meeting room--maybe she did better away from the cameras.  She was not able to provide a Kavanauvian denial of the leaking of Prof. Ford's original letter which had been entrusted to her (she denied it, but not very passionately), never showed much capacity to defend herself from the criticism (from all sides) for respecting Ford's privacy for so long,  and was clueless on Friday about what was going on.  While I don't see that she did anything improper, running for re-election this year at age 85, against another Democrat (the general election pits the two survivors of California's open primary), she might want to consider gracefully stepping aside.  Or, put another way, Californians might take another look, a more favorable one, at her opponent, Kevin de Leon.