Rest easy, ladies. Sen. Ben Sasse, white man of Nebraska, is here to reassure your anxious hearts: It is “simply not true” that Republican support for Brett Kavanaugh is a sign Republicans don’t care about you. Let’s let the man speak for himself:
“I’m here to talk about the false choice that is being repeated hour after hour after hour on television that this confirmation vote about one vacant seat on the Supreme Court, in that vote we are somehow going to be making a giant binary choice about the much broader issue of whether we do or do not care about women. That is simply not true,” he said.
Pshaw, it’s just one vacant seat on the Supreme Court, no big. It’s just the final vote to do anything from, at the shallow end, make abortion inaccessible for women in dozens of states and, at the deep end, completely overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s just putting a possible sexual assailant on the court without fully investigating the allegations against him. The question of whether Republicans do or do not care about women is so much broader than those two issues of whether attempted rape should be investigated and whether women should be able to decide when and whether to be pregnant.
Not a giant binary choice about the much broader issue of whether Republicans do or do not care about women? Maybe not, but only because they’ve already landed solidly on one side of that choice.
We have to listen to Sasse, though, because in addition to being a powerful white man who is talking, he is a Principled Republican who sometimes criticizes Donald Trump:
“We all know that the President cannot lead us through this time,” Sasse said. “We know that he’s dispositionally unable to restrain his impulse to divide us.”
He says, while defending his plan to vote for Trump’s nominee, a man who showed a very Trumpian disposition during last Thursday’s hearing into sexual assault allegations against him. Trump may not be able to lead us through this time, but Ben Sasse is by God going to explain how that’s the case while walking just a few steps behind Trump at all times. Not being led, oh no, but … following. Somehow the Republicans who talk like they’re principled opponents of Trump always manage to be just as dishonest as the Republicans who openly embrace Trump and his stream of lies.
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