Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes and Elizabeth Swisher, Kavanaugh’s classmates at Yale University, have taken the unusual step of publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post to urge the United States Senate to reject the Brett Kavanaugh nomination because he lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath, on national television.
All three say they’ve faced frightening consequences for coming forward, one had his/her computer server hacked at work. All three have faced threats. Nevertheless, they feel compelled to come forward with the the truth because the integrity of the Supreme Court itself is at stake.
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.
We each asserted that Brett lied to the Senate by stating, under oath, that he never drank to the point of forgetting what he was doing. We said, unequivocally, that each of us, on numerous occasions, had seen Brett stumbling drunk to the point that it would be impossible for him to state with any degree of certainty that he remembered everything that he did when drunk.
Small lies matter. These former classmates are truly brave for putting themselves on the line. Like, Dr. Ford, they point to their civic duty to tell the truth. Patriots.
None of this is what we wanted, but we 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.
Nobody is saying Brett Kavanaugh is unqualified because he drank or partied to excess in high school or college. Lying about it today, under oath before the United States Senate is absolutely disqualifying. Time and again, Brett Kavanaugh has had the opportunity to come clean, tell the truth, apologize to those he has harmed. If he had been truthful from the start, we wouldn’t be in this situation and he might already be in the process of being fitted for his new robe. Instead, he chose to double down on the lies, angrily lashing out at U.S. Senators during his job interview. It is obvious he doesn’t have the judicial temperament. All of it is disqualifying.
There is no chance he will act as an impartial judge, something the lifetime appointment absolutely requires. Republicans have dozens of conservative judges waiting in the wings. This country is being torn apart because time and again, they refuse to do the right thing, to find compromise, to hear women, people of color, to act in the best interest of all the people, not just the prep school, Ivy League, tax dodging, summer beach house-owning constituents buying their elections and golfing with them on the weekends.
