We begin today’s roundup with a series of editorials calling on the Senate to vote against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. First up, The Washington Post:
We have not opposed a Supreme Court nominee, liberal or conservative, since Robert H. Bork in 1987. We believe presidents are entitled to significant deference if they nominate well-qualified people within the broad mainstream of judicial thought. When President Trump named Mr. Kavanaugh, he seemed to be such a person: an accomplished judge whom any conservative president might have picked. But given Republicans’ refusal to properly vet Mr. Kavanaugh, and given what we have learned about him during the process, we now believe it would be a serious blow to the court and the nation if he were confirmed. [...]
If Mr. Kavanaugh truly is, or believes himself to be, a victim of mistaken identity, his anger is understandable. But he went further in last Thursday’s hearing than expressing anger. He gratuitously indulged in hyperpartisan rhetoric against “the left,” describing his stormy confirmation as “a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election” and “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” He provided neither evidence nor even a plausible explanation for this red-meat partisanship, but he poisoned any sense that he could serve as an impartial judge. Democrats or liberal activists would have no reason to trust in his good faith in any cases involving politics. Even beyond such cases, his judgment and temperament would be in doubt.
The New York Times:
[H]e gave misleading answers under oath. Judges — particularly Supreme Court justices — must have, and be seen as having, unimpeachable integrity. The knuckleheaded mistakes of a young person — drinking too much, writing offensive things in a high school yearbook — should not in themselves be bars to high office. But deliberately misleading senators about them during a confirmation process has to be. If Judge Kavanaugh will lie about small things, won’t he lie about big ones as well?
Indeed he already has: During the course of his confirmation hearings, he claimed, implausibly, that he was not aware that files he received from a Senate staff member, some labeled “highly confidential” or “intel,” had been stolen from Democratic computers. Even the small lies, of course, aren’t so small in context, since they relate to drinking or sex and thus prop up his choir-boy-who-indulged-now-and-then defense.
USA Today also comes out against Kavanaugh’s confirmation:
His testimony also revealed a lack of candor. Honesty is so basic to sitting on the Supreme Court that it seldom gets discussed. This time, it can’t be ignored. Kavanaugh dissembled, evaded or parried just about every question on whether he engaged in excessive drinking, and sexual misconduct or innuendo, while in prep school and at Yale — reasonable questions after Ford charged that Kavanaugh was “stumbling drunk” when he allegedly assaulted her and numerous Yale classmates described him as a heavy, frequent and belligerent drinker.
The issue is not whether Kavanaugh drank too much or used off-color terms such as “boofed” more than three decades ago. It’s that he misled senators under oath just last week.
As does the St. Louis Post Dispatch:
A key swing vote on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., has said lying under oath would be “disqualifying” for Kavanaugh. As it should be.
The point of these hearings is not whether a high school or college student drank heavily, or whether he wrote sexually degrading things in his yearbook. At issue is whether a Supreme Court nominee has lied under oath.
Kavanaugh publicly failed this critical test.
Even if the big question of sexual assault can’t be verified after this week’s FBI investigation, too many credibility and temperament problems stand in the way of Kavanaugh’s ascension to the nation’s highest court.
The Bangor Daily News focuses on Trump’s mockery of a sexual assault victim (are you reading, Senator Collins?)
Big changes are needed in how we talk about and treat sexual assault and its survivors and perpetrators, no matter who they are, where they went to school or what jobs they hold.
It starts with not laughing at reports of sexual assault or mocking them as being too late or too vague.
Immediately, it also requires not accepting a rushed and constrained FBI investigation and not elevating Kavanaugh, who has shown he is unfit for the job, to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Brett Kavanaugh’s drinking buddies pen an op-ed calling him unfit for the Supreme Court:
We were college classmates and drinking buddies with Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. In the past week, all three of us decided separately to respond to questions from the media regarding Brett’s honesty, or lack thereof. In each of our cases, it was his public statements during a Fox News TV interview and his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that prompted us to speak out. [...]
[W]e felt it our civic duty to speak the truth and say that Brett lied under oath while seeking to become a Supreme Court justice. That is our one and only message, but it is a significant one. For we each believe that telling the truth, no matter how difficult, is a moral obligation for our nation’s leaders. No one should be able to lie their way onto the Supreme Court. Honesty is the glue that holds together a society of laws. Lies are the solvent that dissolves those bonds.
All of us went to Yale, whose motto is “Lux et Veritas” (Light and Truth). Brett also belonged to a Yale senior secret society called Truth and Courage. We believe that Brett neither tells the former nor embodies the latter. For this reason, we believe that Brett Kavanaugh should not sit on the nation’s highest court.
Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker:
Kavanaugh’s convenient late-arriving conviction that Presidents should be protected from investigation—late arriving since he evidently felt very differently when he was pursuing Bill Clinton—is catnip to Trump. And anyone who had illusions about Kavanaugh not being an acolyte of Trumpism should have been disabused by his partisan performance last week, in which he made it quite apparent. That’s the deal. That’s the trick. Everything else is simulation and dissimulation. Everything else is misdirection.
On a final note, John Nichols at The Nation writes a key piece on how Senator Mitch McConnell is “killing the Senate”:
No one has done more to diminish the deliberative character of the chamber than Mitch McConnell. He has invariably put partisanship—and service to the money that maintains his party’s current dominance—ahead of any duty he might feel to uphold democracy. And as the Senate’s majority leader, he is uniquely positioned to render it so dysfunctional as to be nothing window dressing for the White House. And he has done just that.