I am appalled and outraged at the spectacle presented in yesterday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senators should vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Senators should also lodge a complaint to the Ethics Committee against Senators Grassley, Hatch, and Graham for the unethical, extremist, partisan tactics they used to subvert the already hampered efforts of the Judiciary Committee to determine the veracity of allegations against Judge Kavanaugh and whether or not he fit to serve on the Supreme Court.
Yesterday morning Dr. Ford testified in the Senate Judiciary Committee through her terror and spoke the truth. The laughter of Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge is seared into the neuropathways and lodged in the neural nodes of her brain and is viscerally felt throughout her body. For the last 36 years and for the rest of her life, she will feel that physical, disabling pain and fear. She will hear and feel that laughter.
Extreme right-wing hatchet men
Even as I write this, “the Honorable” Judge Kavanaugh has shown his unhinged, white-eyed rage at having his carefully established persona challenged. He has responded with the belligerence, threatening physical posturing, and hostile, obtuse, and untruthful non-answers totally common to abusers. In this, he was aided by the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and other Republican hatchet men on the Committee.
There is no doubt that Kavanaugh knows that his background, if investigated will show that the Brett Kavanaugh presented in his high school yearbook and his good friend, Mark Judge’s memoir is the real Brett Kavanaugh; that the women who have come forward and the many people who have written about his “mean” drunkenness are telling the truth about Kavanaugh’s character. There is no doubt that the extreme right-wing hatchet men Grassley, Hatch, and Graham know that Kavanaugh’s character, like the character of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, will not bear up to a directed FBI investigation.
As a person who has lived with male abusers and who has worked as a paralegal handling misdemeanor domestic abuse cases, I have seen the successful public, professional mask abusers wear to cover the despicable on-going abuse they carry out in private towards those within their power and the low-level sadism carried out in public to undermine those they feel to be lesser than themselves.
I have seen the police and emergency room photos and read the police reports chronicling the handiwork of well-groomed, socially prominent abusers. I am in no doubt that Kavanaugh has an abusive character.
Hallmark of a sadist
I have no doubt that the rage and belligerence he today is the hallmark of a sadist who has had the truth of his person presented to him. He is exactly the person who would place his hand over the mouth of his victim so that others in the vicinity would not hear the screams and he could take pleasure and feel power in being able to do harm while at the same time being a pillar of society.
Chairman Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and Lindsey Graham pumped themselves up to defend the right of abusers to abuse anyone who opposes their belief in their right to power over those of “lesser” worth. Again, we see the rush to depict the abuser as the victim of a scurrilous assault from immoral enemies. That any reasonable, rational attempt to gather verifiable evidence is attacked as illegitimate.
Not fit to be a judge anywhere
Kavanaugh is not fit to sit as a judge in any court, let alone the Supreme Court. But this nation needs to have a thorough FBI investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh to present verifiable, factual corroborating facts concerning the allegations against Kavanaugh. The damage done to the Senate Judiciary Committee by the same hatchet men who sat against Anita Hill needs to be repaired. Grassley, Hatch, and Graham need to be brought up before the Ethics Committee for their propaganda tactics that undermined the work of the Judiciary Committee.
The American people wanted and deserve to have a just investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh. Minority Leader Feinstein had correctly followed her obligation to keep Dr. Ford’s letter confidential and not speak of it to Chairman Grassley or any other person until Dr. Ford had come forward. She especially was under an ethical obligation not to speak of the allegation to Kavanaugh before Dr. Ford gave her permission to go public with her allegation. Regardless of when the allegation was made public, the Judiciary Committee was procedurally capable of examining the new allegation.
The Judiciary Committee is the venue the American people have to make this determination. The senior Majority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were unwilling to fulfill their sacred, non-partisan, Constitutional responsibilities and were forced by the American People to have today’s hearing.
Instead of shouldering their responsibilities to the Constitution and the American People, they have shown themselves unworthy of their office. They have stood up for authoritarianism and against the rule of law. For the sake of our Constitutional Democracy, the Senate needs to hold them accountable and censor them for their unbridled lust for power.
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Just when you think stealing children from their parents, drugging them, putting them into cages and forcing them to sleep on concrete floors, no one to change their diapers, sending one year olds into court alone…you think that’s the lowest Trump’s GOP can go.
Then yesterday happens and we see the Republicans debase themselves for no good reason.
Trump could have easily reached into the stack of names given him by the Federalist Society and submitted a conservative judge without Kavanaugh’s sleazy background.
Gorsuch did not have these problems, and he’s sleazy all day long.
Yesterday was sad, for America, for women, for men, and it’s continuing in the Senate this morning.
There’s no need for this.
November is coming and it can’t get here soon enough.