Who Will Be the First Responsible Democrat?

As I write this, another flimsy, barely-remembered account of what might have happened in a prep school 30 years ago at a drunken party and might have been Judge Brett Kavanaugh but might not, has surfaced.

And the stink test is clearly failing the Democrats.

I will admit this.  Mitch McConnell's lack of action on the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in the waning months of the Obama Administration was unwise and inappropriate.  That was a political absurdity, when the more logical action would have been to slow-roll the nomination to a vote right after the election and simply reject the nominee on the same partisan vote that the Democrats started with Robert Bork -- as the Republicans' majority would have allowed.

I don't believe that nominees should be judged on anything but their qualifications and certainly not their politics, but "they did it first", and now we have "to Bork" as a verb.  Of course, with the exception of l'affaire Garland, only Democrats have practiced Borking; Republicans have overwhelmingly voted to approve the SCOTUS nominations by Democrat presidents.

But even the Democrats have, until now, only opposed Republican nominees based on politics and not invented personal smears, even for Justice Neil Gorsuch.  Or maybe they couldn't dig up anything on Gorsuch - or, apparently, make it up.

Well, those days are over.

We are now confronting the dredging up of hazily-recalled events that may or may not have happened.  Dr. Ford, the accuser of the boy Brett Kavanaugh once was, wrote a letter describing something (no one apparently gets to see it, an obvious denial of due process to the judge) that happened in high school in the 1980s.  It was not reported then, nor does anyone purported to be there have any recollection of such an event or of Kavanaugh even being there -- which he himself denies.

In the subsequently-reported incident, the claimant concedes to having been so drunk that she can't even recall if it was actually the young Kavanaugh in the first place.

Not a prosecutor in the nation would try to file such a case in the absence of a corroborating witness and with zero physical evidence.  Moreover, given the ample opportunity for either complaint to have been filed previously, either with the police at the time or at any of Judge Kavanaugh's subsequent confirmation hearings for his judicial appointments, imagine that, no one thought it helpful to make those incidents public at the time.

Dr. Ford apparently did not want to testify, until she did, and wanted Judge Kavanaugh to testify, absurdly, before she even testified herself before the Senate committee!  Her lawyer (a virulent anti-Trumper) actually wants the person accused to testify in response to something he knows nothing about before he's supposed to know what he is accused of.  This, madam counsel, is not China.

And yet, the Democrats in the Senate are lined up behind these unfounded accusations, demanding that the accusers be believed even as they deny more adult allegations against, say Bill Clinton.  And they are willing to delay the appointment of a Supreme Court justice based on 30-year-old allegations made, in both cases, by people who were supposedly drunk at the time.

We are supposed to be judging the judge based on his record, his judicial temperament and his character.  All those, for at least the last thirty years, have been impeccable and public.  As I wrote some time ago, the childhood imperfections that threaten a career are no more important than the passing good deeds that purport to sanitize the criminal.  Yes, please read that piece.

Is there not a single Democrat in the Senate willing to stand up and condemn this ridiculous tolerance of a political act that will not work, first, and is based on exactly zero that would produce a court case?  And, we should add, even if it happened, which it very likely did not, given the political nature of the timing, the thirty years of the man's life and career are what would inform him as a justice and inform the Senate as to his qualification to serve.

Not one Democrat willing to be their party's single voice of sanity in all this?  Nope, not a single one.

Doesn't that say all we need to know about the left that thinks it should rule us.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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