John Clune is one of Deborah Ramirez’s attorneys and he describes how Ms. Ramirez has repeatedly offered to testify to the Senate Judiciary committee, but has been rebuffed.
Republican Senators do not want to hear from Ms. Ramirez because they’d much rather carry water for Kavanaugh and install him on the Supreme Court despite serious allegations.
Senate Republicans aren’t calling Ms. Ramirez to testify because it’s a big risk. And in their minds, it’s not a risk worth taking when they have already settled on a strategy to discredit her claims without hearing her out:
Republicans have seized on the gaps in the story of a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, who told The New Yorker magazine that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a Yale dorm-room party but couldn’t remember some key details.
They say the gaps in her memory and an unsuccessful effort by The New York Times to find a witness to corroborate her story have raised new doubts about the allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford. [...]
“I think it just looks like more of an orchestrated smear campaign,” said a Republican senator who requested anonymity. — thehill.com/...
So here we have a craven Republican Senator who is only attacking Dr. Ford and Ms. Ramirez because they feel secure behind the anonymity offered to them by The Hill.
Republicans have felt emboldened to dismiss Ms. Ramirez partly due to the NY Times’ messy coverage. The New York Times allowed itself to publish a couple of lines that were quickly spun by Republicans to cast doubt on Farrow and Mayer’s reporting. Predictably, Republicans and Fox News ignored the NYT clarification from the next day.
The Times has also, to its credit, begun to highlight the class differences between Ms. Ramirez and Brett Kavanaugh:
But they came from worlds apart. Ms. Ramirez arrived at the rarefied halls of Yale from Shelton, Conn., a town just 30 minutes away, the daughter of a telephone company lineman and a medical technician. She attended a coed Catholic high school, St. Joseph, that was predominantly white but had a number of minority students, including Ms. Ramirez, whose father was Puerto Rican. [...]
At college, Ms. Ramirez put in long hours working at a residential dining hall and cleaning dorm rooms ahead of class reunions, common jobs for students who had to scrape together money for tuition. Fellow student dining hall employees described her as sweet, sunny and hard-working. — www.nytimes.com/...
Just how many dorm rooms do you think Brett Kavanaugh had to clean to “scrape together money for tuition”?
Can you imagine someone like Ms. Ramirez, the very personification of what we’ve been told is the American Dream, testifying in front of the Senate? How do you think most Americans would see her testimony against that of the son of a lobbyist and Judge, who his roommate says came across as aggressive and belligerent when drunk?
Republicans are right to be afraid of Ms. Ramirez’s testimony. Which is why they’ve been trying to paint vague, background quotes to undermine her credibility with gullible reporters.
This fear is also guiding their refusal to question Dr. Ford themselves and instead hide behind an attorney, who Mitch McConnell referred to as a “female assistant”.
Meanwhile, increasing numbers of non-senators who formerly supported Kavanaugh are asking for an investigation.
Three former Yale Law School classmates who endorsed Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh called Tuesday for an investigation into allegations by two women that he engaged in sexual misconduct in the 1980s. — www.washingtonpost.com/...
Of course, when you Republican Senators are painting tall tales with manure, you can be sure Trump is flinging around buckets full of bullshit. And as expected, Trump decided to malign Ms. Ramirez, going much further than the similarly inclined Republican Senators were willing to.
This is both shameful and destructive. But, as my teachers in India were fond of telling us, perhaps they’re “acting too smart” for their own good. The FBI has investigated numerous sitting judges and their investigations have sometimes resulted in the removal and imprisonment of justices. There’s no reason this procedure cannot be followed for a justice recently installed on the Supreme Court. Especially if the judge could be susceptible to blackmail and is believed to have lied on background checks and to the Senate in sworn testimony.
A Democratic president and Senate willing to take action to preserve a clean judiciary could authorize such an investigation and present the findings in 2020. If they do that, they will have a lot of support behind them, because women in this country have had enough of abuse from privileged men who believe they’re untouchable.
— @subirgrewal
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