With Credibility Blown, Kavanaugh Should Withdraw

      As Maine goes, so goes the nation, according to the well-established political maxim. So it was more than a local story last week [Sept. 19] when the Pine Tree State's largest newspaper, the Portland Press Herald, called on federal judge Brett Kavanaugh to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court as the state's moderate Republican senator, Susan Collins, remained undecided about her potentially decisive vote.
      The newspaper's editorial board saw no need to wait for what is shaping up as a truncated hearing on the accusation by the California research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenaged students at nearby private schools in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Instead, the editorial opined that Kavanaugh's credibility was already "blown" by his "evasions" during his two days of contentious questioning by a politically divided Senate Judiciary Committee.
      The editorial found Kavanaugh's promises to be "an impartial arbitrator" if confirmed hard to swallow in light of the fervent support of "right-wing activists at the Federalist Society" and "the far-right Judicial Crisis Network" with its dark-money funded TV advertising campaign. Kavanaugh seemed sincere, the editorial noted, but nobody believed him. "Not telling the whole truth about his politics makes his sexual assault denial harder to believe," the editorialists' headline-writer aptly explained.
      Through the week, the committee's chairman, Iowa's Charles Grassley, stubbornly resisted requests from Ford's lawyers, echoed by the committee's Democrats, that the FBI investigate her allegation that Kavanaugh, two years her senior, forced himself upon her in a drunken bedroom assault at a house party. In Ford's telling, Kavanaugh attempted to undress her and covered her mouth to muffle her screams as Kavanaugh's bad-boy schoolmate, Mark Judge, egged him on and eventually joined in.
      Without an FBI investigation, Ford's lawyers argued, a hearing with only Ford and Kavanaugh as witnesses would inevitably operate to her disadvantage by pitting a private citizen's uninvestigated accusation against the sworn testimony of a veteran federal appellate judge. President Trump could have asked the FBI to reopen its standard background investigation and document the available corroboration, such as Ford's 2012 session with a therapist. But instead Trump had his White House staff help Kavanaugh prepare for the hearing in two days of "murder boards" with questions he could expect to face.
      With the FBI on the sidelines, the Washington Post and multiple other news organizations stepped in to add important factual context that made Ford's accusation believable and Kavanaugh's categorical denial less so. Whatever his academic accomplishments at Georgetown Preparatory School may have been, Kavanaugh was shown in detailed stories to have been part of a hard-drinking, party-loving crowd with retrograde views about relations between the sexes. Screen saves from Prep's yearbook showed Kavanaugh bragging about underage drinking and his friend Judge recycling a Noel Coward quote that women should be "struck . . . like gongs."
      In his testimony, Kavanaugh quoted Georgetown Prep's motto, "Men for others." In a speech at Catholic University's law school in 2015, however, Kavanaugh told his audience of a different motto that put the school in a less favorable light. "What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep," Kavanaugh recalled. "That's been a good thing for all of us, I think," he added.
      Apart from Kavanaugh's partisans, multiple analysts and commentators saw indicia of credibility in Ford's accusation. Trump broke his Twitter silence eventually by questioning Ford's failure to report the episode until her summertime letter to her local congresswoman. Trump's complaint prompted a new Twitter hashtag,  #WhyIDidntReport, with dozens of explanations from sexual assault survivors about the personal embarrassment and real-world difficulties of reporting an offense.
      Kavanaugh painted himself in his testimony as a dedicated feminist, proud of hiring women for a majority of his law clerk slots over the past 12 years. But that boast was tarnished when the Yale law professor Amy Chua, responsible for placing 10 students in Kavanaugh's chambers, was reported to have advised female law students that Kavanaugh "likes a certain look" in his female applicants. Ironically, Judicial Crisis Network found a Barbie Doll-lookalike acquaintance of Kavanaugh's to feature in a TV ad that praised her longtime friend as, among other qualities, "empathetic."
      Kavanaugh's judicial opinions, however, show him to be anything but empathetic. He did what he could to prevent a Mexican teenager, impregnated by a rapist and detained by immigration authorities, from having an abortion. That contrast between political spin and Kavanaugh's actual record is only one of the many examples of dissembling from Kavanaugh, the White House, and the far-right lobbying machine.
      Next week's hearing could be another example: a phony show aimed at discrediting Ford more than finding the truth. The rush to judgment, arbitrary from the outset, now has more urgency for Republicans after an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll registered a 38 percent to 34 percent plurality of Americans opposed to Kavanaugh's confirmation, making him the least popular Supreme Court nominee in 30 years of polling.
      Even before that poll, the Press Herald saw Kavanaugh's possible confirmation as essentially anti-democratic. "An unpopular president and a two-vote advantage in the Senate is not a mandate for radical change on the Supreme Court," the newspaper concluded. "Republicans should convince Kavanaugh to withdraw, and start working with their Democratic colleagues on a list of nominees who the American people could really trust."