I hereby retract my prediction that Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. I am not predicting the opposite, either. I am predicting every weekday in the next week or two will be like Wednesdays on the original Mickey Mouse Club. On Wednesdays, it was "Anything Can Happen" Day. And sometimes, it wasn't…because anything can happen on "Anything Can Happen" Day, including it not being "Anything Can Happen" Day…
Actually, I'm afraid it's going to be "Anything Can Happen" Day for as long as Donald Trump is in the White House. We don't know what this one-week F.B.I. investigation will uncover…and am I the only one who blinked a few times when Trump ordered it without denouncing the organization as an evil, treacherous band of Democrats who are out to destroy Donald J. Trump? When has this man ever accepted the legitimacy of any investigation or report that didn't tell him precisely what he wanted to hear?
But the F.B.I. folks may turn up some game-changer and we may also have a week in which the polls can settle down and reflect the impact of the hearings. I'm amazed how many people who had every political reason to brand Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as a lying opportunist had to concede she was "compelling and credible." I think some of them did not find Brett Kavanaugh's hysterical rebuttal speech particularly judicial but there still seem to be enough of those who don't care; they just want him seated because, damn it, they're running this country. One of my favorite political writers, Ezra Klein, had this to say…
The feminist philosopher Kate Manne coined the term "himpathy" to describe the "tendency to dismiss the female perspective altogether, to empathize with the powerful man over his less powerful alleged female victim." What Kavanaugh did today was activate the Republican Party's powerful sense of himpathy: His suffering was the question, and Ford's suffering, to say nothing of any further search for the truth, slipped soundlessly beneath the water.
We ended the day in much the same place we started: his word against hers. But even as everyone agreed Ford's word was credible, it didn't matter. There was still Kavanaugh's word. And it appeared, for Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, that that was enough. She was 100 percent sure and he was 100 percent sure, but it was his 100 percent sure that mattered.
I think Klein wrote that before the one-week investigation entered the picture but he still may be right. Read the whole article if you have time.
What will happen will happen, as things that will happen have a tendency to do. I do think though that both witnesses accomplished something. Kavanaugh pretty well buried the notion that Supreme Court Justices have to be at least a little apolitical. With other Liberal or Conservative justices, there was always the slight chance that they'd find the evidence in some matter of consequence so compelling and inarguable that they would break with "their side" and if only this once, be a swing voter. Kavanaugh made it pretty clear that he's not above partisanship. If he's seated, he will ignore the merits of any case and just vote for the Republican side and against whatever Democrats want. That probably delights some voters who, of course, will howl with outrage whenever there's a Liberal nominee who'll be that blatant about it.
And getting back to Dr. Ford, didn't she do a remarkable job? Testifying in something like that has to be terrifying and there's the danger that one errant word…one misphrased line will explode your whole position. A lawyer who advised me before I gave a deposition once told me I had to consider every syllable before I said it. This is a rough approximation…
I once had a client who said on the stand under oath, "Sam and I met for coffee…" and he didn't literally mean they had coffee. He meant they met somewhere to talk and there might have been refreshments of any kind. But the moment he said "coffee," the opposing lawyer pounced. Before my client could have corrected himself, the lawyer was announcing that Sam did not drink coffee and would swear to that under oath. In fact, Sam's entire family would testify under oath that Sam never drank coffee so my client had been caught in a lie. That it was immaterial to the case didn't matter. The lawyer was saying, "How can we trust a witness who would lie about something as basic as whether a man drank coffee?" It didn't completely destroy my client's credibility but it got him so flustered that the rest of his testimony was halting, unnatural and way too cautious. He no longer appeared to be speaking from the heart and that harmed his credibility.
Dr. Ford didn't make any of that kind of boo-boo. She appeared before a panel of powerful men who were eager to find some way to brand her a liar…and even folks on Fox News wound up saying she was believable. I'm not sure I could do that if you grilled me on whether it's true I hate cole slaw. Just about everyone believed her.
So if Bret Kavanaugh gets benched the way he wants to be, he will be the Justice who probably was drunk for much of his young adulthood and who thought rape was kind of male privilege and who lies repeatedly about it and probably everything. Once upon a time, I'd have though someone like that could never rise to a position of power in this country but now I think they can. In fact, someone has quite recently. Apart from the drunk part, that describes the guy in the White House.