Tag: Brett Kavanaugh

WE INTERRUPT THIS RECKONING TO BRING YOU IN-JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Not even a week-long retreat to the abundant beauty and tranquility of a Rhode Island seashore was sufficient to tune out the wailing cries of a wounded nation. Oh, the sunsets were spectacular, and the serenity of the waves rhythmically meshing with each other cast a rare, momentary spell of harmonic convergence. But the peaceful stillness of the moment quickly yielded to people and their electronic devices, all digitally connected to a world neither serene nor harmonious.

Waves pounding the shoreline were drowned out by the anxious mutterings of those monitoring the week’s top story. Try as you might to ignore them, select, key words kept bouncing along the shore, like seagulls stalking an incoming fishing boat. Kavanaugh. Ford. Trump. Grassley. Flake. FBI.

A woman deep into her eighties and seated in a wheelchair consulted her smartphone and then yelled, “Crap,” to her friends, explaining that Flake had just announced he would vote yes on confirmation. “What’s this world coming to?” she asked, without an answer.

Two locals stumbled out of a tavern one night and, adhering to the Rhode Island prohibition on pronouncing the “r” sound, demonstrated how everyone had their own takeaway on the Kavanaugh story. Said one to the other: “The mutha fucka couldn’t even get laid in high school.”

By week’s end, we – Melissa, my wife and Rhode Island guide, and I – bade a sad farewell to our Newport escape, and an even sadder adieu to the illusion that the United States Senate would do the right thing and keep a deeply flawed man off our highest court. Instead, we returned home to grieve over this maddening disorientation: Senators who found Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations credible had rushed, in a surreal whirlwind of male anger, to make her alleged attacker an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now indelible in our collective hippocampus is the laughter and cheering of a Mississippi political rally as the president of the United States mocked and belittled Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony about an attempted rape. I will leave it to more knowledgeable moral philosophers to determine which is worse: a Supreme Court justice accused of youthful sexual abuse who lied under oath and displayed a demeanor of raging anger and partisan indignation, or a president who ridicules and makes fun of a sexual assault victim, and who has, himself, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women. Either way, we have them both, a disgustingly shameful package.

As we enter the second year of our #MeToo reckoning, it is painfully obvious that we have a split-screen approach to dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Outside the Washington beltway, accusations are now taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and the perpetrators are knocked off the highest of pedestals and shunned. Inside the beltway, not so much. In the most cynical of Machiavellian politics, ideology trumps sexual misconduct, provided you have the votes.

Stephen Wynn was a casino magnate. Charles Dutoit was the conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Peter Martins was the leader of the New York City Ballet. Shervin Pishevar was the founder of a venture capital firm. Matt Lauer was co-host of NBC’s Today Show. Russell Simmons was the founder of Def Jam Records. Leslie Moonves was the CEO of CBS. All of these men, and scores of others, were accused of sexual misconduct. They vehemently denied the allegations. There was no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But based solely on the credibility of the accusations, these men were forced out of their privileged positions. Indeed, there should be a high burden of proof to deny a man his liberty. But privilege can and should be denied on the basis of believable accusations

Sadly, that is not the way the political world works. If it did, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, and even President Trump, found Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. (For example: Senators Charles Grassley, John Coryn and Richard Shelby.) But they all voted to confirm their guy because his ideological bonafides as a conservative judge outweighed the credible possibility that he is a sex offender.

This toxicity of placing politics above morality and decency has been decaying our republic for some time. Trump is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. He boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. He is a serial liar. He has had extramarital relationships with a porn star and a playboy centerfold. Yet, Trump is embraced by evangelical Christians only too eager to give the sinner-in-chief a pass because they like his policies.

We encountered the same perverted moral reasoning 20 years ago with Bill Clinton. Liberal and feminist leaders not only gave Clinton a pass on Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, they mocked and ridiculed his accusers, insisting it was all a “vast right wing conspiracy”. The accusations, however, were every bit as credible as those offered by Blasey Ford. Jones said Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Willey said he grabbed her breast and placed her hand on his crotch. Broaddrick said he raped her. In each case, there was corroboration from friends the women had confided in immediately after the alleged incidents. Gloria Steinem, one of the giants of the women’s movement, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1998, defending feminists for standing with Clinton. She insisted – in the case of Jones and Willey – that he was guilty only of having made some “gross, dumb, clumsy sexual passes”, but that feminists stood with him because his policies were strongly supportive of women’s rights.

It is way past time that we remove the asterisk from all positions of political power when it comes to sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement should not be gerrymandered to apply only to Hollywood moguls, business executives and media celebrities. The reckoning needs to encompass presidents, supreme court justices and others wielding political power. If we really want to heal our culture, and no longer tolerate sexual misconduct anytime, anywhere, then there can be no more passes for sexual predators on the basis of their political policy portfolios. #MeToo can be fully transformative only if it also applies to #ThemToo, powerful men at the highest levels of government.

KAVANAUGH RIDES THE RAPIDS ON TRUMP’S RIVER OF DENIAL

As Brett Kavanaugh continues to deny his way to the Supreme Court, we are witnessing the nauseating effects of Trumpian Justice, a bizarre jurisprudential model in which the vigor of denial obliterates any search for the truth.

There’s an amazing passage in Bob Woodward’s just-released book that perfectly captures the Republican game plan to beat back sexual misconduct accusations against the judge. The author recounts a conversation in which Trump offered advice to a friend who had acknowledged some “bad behavior toward women.” According to Woodward (Page 175), the president told his buddy never to show weakness.

“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” Trump is quoted as saying. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny everything that’s said about you. Never admit.”

This is the closest thing Trump has to a moral code. At least 16 women accused him of sexual misconduct. He called each one of them a liar. Then he was elected president. Denial worked well for him, and he has been championing it ever since. He was the only major Republican leader to stand by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in the face of credible accusations that Moore molested young teenagers years ago. “He totally denies it,” said Trump in his endorsement of Moore. “You have to listen to him.” Even after former aide Rob Porter resigned over domestic abuse allegations from two ex-wives, the president stood by his man. “He said very strongly that he’s innocent,” Trump told reporters. “. . .you have to remember that.”

The Donald even carried his denial creed into foreign policy. Remember the Helsinki summit? Discarding his own intelligence agencies’ compelling evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president stood with the Kremlin, saying: “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” He’ll take a good strong denial over facts any day, particularly if it advances his interests.

Right now, Brett Kavanaugh could not have a better denial mentor than Donald Trump. In pursuing his personal manifest destiny of a lifetime Supreme Court seat, the judge has stuck steadfastly to the Trumpian script. Responding to allegations of an attempted rape in high school and an incident a year later when he allegedly flashed his penis in front of a fellow Yale student, Kavanaugh used phrases like, “completely false allegation”, “this never happened”, and “a smear, plain and simple”.

No wishy-washy, plain vanilla denials for this guy. No, these were Trump-trademarked denials, filled with righteous indignation of steroidal strength. The judge didn’t merely deny the allegations, he “categorically and unequivocally” denied them. So strong were the denials that news organizations exhausted a thesaurus of adverbs expressing strength. Fox News had Kavanaugh “vigorously” denying the claims. In USA Today, he “forcefully” denied them. He “strongly pushed back” on NPR, “fiercely denied” the accusations in The Hill, and “strenuously” denied them in The Daily Beast.

Leave it to conservative Republicans to throw cold water on this culture-changing #MeToo moment. In their desperate rush to stack the court before the midterms, they have brought a year’s worth of momentum to a grinding halt. Prior to this sorry episode, we seemed to be on our way to changing the protocol for sexual misconduct claims. The accusers were to be taken seriously, respected and listened to. Thorough investigations were to be conducted. And any unwanted sexual contact was absolutely wrong.

For virtually every man so accused during the reckoning, there were thorough investigations that lasted weeks, if not months (examples: Leslie Moonves, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, Jeffrey Tambor). Many of the men accused of inappropriate behavior issued apologetic responses and went out of their way to respect their accusers, a huge cultural shift in tone from days gone by (examples: Lauer, former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, Geraldo Rivera, James Franco and Richard Dreyfuss). Compare, for example, Kavanaugh’s fortified denials to Charlie Rose’s response to multiple sexual misconduct allegations: “It is essential these women know I hear them and that I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior.”

It is now throw-back September – in an election year – and the retro-Republicans of the United States Senate appear hell-bent on ignoring sexual misconduct claims against Kavanaugh while bullying and disparaging the women who made them. It’s altogether proper to thoroughly investigate sexual impropriety accusations against a celebrity chef before letting him back into the kitchen, but if we’re talking about a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, don’t waste time looking at the facts, just measure the guy for his robe and get him on the bench before the base heads to the polls.

Unless at least two Republican senators decide to put process above politics, Brett Kavanaugh will soon take his place on the bench of the nation’s highest court. There will be no FBI investigation into the accusations against him. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell will take their victory laps. It will be left to the rest of us to sort through the ashes of this disaster. We must find a way to make sure that our values of gender equality, fairness and decency are never again torched in the public square, and that even the strongest of denials never trump an honest search for the truth. The first step in that journey begins on election day.

A SCRIPT FOR THE KAVANAUGH FINALE

Here’s a modest proposal for ending the Brett Kavanaugh melodrama: Strap down the judge with polygraph equipment and ask him about Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations. If he fails the lie detector test – the same one Blasey Ford has already passed – his nomination is off the table. If he passes? Then he joins Clarence Thomas as the shamed-but-confirmed male caucus of the United States Supreme Court. Put the whole thing on pay-per-view and give the proceeds to a #MeToo organization, just like CBS is doing with Les Moonves’ severance pay.

Okay, as Jonathan Swift did with his Modest Proposal, I jest. Still, there is more poetic justice in that scenario than we are apt to see from Chairperson Charles Grassley and his 10 fellow white male Republican elves who control the Senate Judiciary Committee. Oh, to see the gnashing of all those pearly white conservative teeth over the sight of an originalist judge wired to a lie detector machine! Would the American Civil Liberties Union come to his rescue? The ACLU has long led the legal battle against polygraph testing in employment situations. On the other side? You got it: the conservative, originalist bar, including Kavanaugh and his Federalist Society buddies.

The far right has long adored lie detectors. Just ask Vice President Mike Pence. Only days ago, he offered to be polygraphed in order to prove that he did not write the anonymous New York Times op-ed that labeled Donald Trump amoral and unhinged. (Do we live in interesting times, or what?) Kavanaugh himself has waxed eloquently on the usefulness of lie detectors “to screen applicants for critical law enforcement, defense and intelligence collection roles”. Writing the decision in a 2016 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case, Kavanaugh called polygraph testing “an important tool” to keep undesirables out of significant jobs.

It may be an important tool to Judge Kavanaugh in the abstract, but now that it affects him personally, don’t expect to see him in a blood pressure cuff and skin sensors anytime soon. The polygraph is not going to resolve this issue. The question before the Senate is not about truth. It’s about votes. As long as the Republicans hold together, they can push the nominee over the finish line, and lock in a conservative majority on the court for a generation or more. As soon as two Republican senators jump ship, however, Kavanaugh is finished and Trump pulls out his Federalist Society list of reasonable facsimiles.

Meanwhile, this Capitol Hill political crisis has brought out hardball tactics eerily reminiscent of the ugliness that surrounded the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill fiasco 27 years ago. The focus inside the beltway is much more about counting votes than addressing the meta issue of what happens to women who accuse powerful men of sexual assault.

The Republican boys club in the Senate has attacked Blasey Ford’s veracity and “suspicious” timing every day since the California research psychologist went public with her accusation. Overcome with their hunger to get their man on the court, this aging Senate fraternity of old white guys wants to know why these women wait so long to make their accusations. How many television appearances, books and op-eds by sexual assault survivors will it take for us to learn that women who speak up subject themselves to a whole new round of abuse that, in many cases, is worse than the original assault?

Last week at this time, Christine Blasey Ford was in the middle of her life: doing research, teaching classes, raising children. Following a torrent of death threats after her name was revealed, she and her family had to flee their home. She is unable to work. She and her husband are in an undisclosed location and the children are being cared for elsewhere. Why, indeed, don’t women speak up more often about this stuff?

Meanwhile, Grassley and his crew are busy planning the stagecraft of a Senate hearing, should Blasey Ford decide to appear. Mindful of the horrendous optics from the Anita Hill hearing, where the young law school professor was grilled by a gaggle of old white men, Grassley suddenly noticed that all of the Republicans on his committee are men. He said earlier this week that they may bring in a woman to interrogate Blasey Ford. Borrowing from their own rhetoric, the Republicans have had 27 years to put women on that committee. Why wait until the last minute?

Over at the White House, Kavanaugh is being thoroughly prepped for his testimony. I get the importantance of preparing a judicial candidate for testifying about various legal nuances, like saying, “Roe v Wade” is “settled law”, but declining to call it “correct law” so he can vote later to unsettle it. But how many more ways are there to say that he did not, in a moment of drunken abandon at the age of 17, throw himself on Blasey Ford, grope her, cover her mouth to stifle her screams and try to undress her?

It’s important to remember that this moment in time is not just about the political composition of the Supreme Court. It’s also about how we view sexual assault and harassment, and how we treat the perpetrators and the accusers. We are, after all, in the middle of a reckoning on that subject. Giving Christine Blasey Ford, in 2018, the Anita Hill Bum’s Rush Treatment of 1991 is a perverse reversal of moral thought in this post-Harvey Weinstein world.

Here’s how this story should end: Without making a factual determination on the sexual assault allegation, the Senate should reject Kavanaugh’s nomination. Such a decision does not “convict” the judge of anything. But it acknowledges the reality that Blasey Ford could be right. Why take the risk of putting a man who attempted to rape her – and then lied about it – on the country’s highest court? It’s not as if he is facing jail time. He remains on the country’s second highest court. He can commiserate with fellow Judge Merrick Garland, who was denied a Supreme Court seat by Senate Republicans without so much as a whisper of bad behavior.

Such an endgame doesn’t alter Republican dreams of a conservative Supreme Court. The bull pen is packed with like-minded ideologues just waiting to take a seat on the bench. What it does do, however, is send a clear message that we have entered a new era, a time when we take accusations of sexual assault seriously, a time when one brave woman coming forward can change the face of history, and not ruin her life. Sadly, I strongly suspect we have not yet reached that time.