Kavanaugh mixes sports and politics
Supreme Court nominee uses baseball to deflect questions about record
Last week Christine Blasey Ford gave an interview to the Washington Post alleging that Brett Kavanaugh, the U.S. Supreme Court nominee now undergoing confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, sexually assaulted her at a house party when they were both teenagers.
Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, has been invited to testify before the U.S. Senate in a hearing that could shape Kavanaugh’s supreme court bid and alter the course of U.S. jurisprudence for decades to come. The 53-year-old Kavanaugh was nominated by a president, Donald Trump, who vowed during his campaign to build a Supreme Court that would overturn the landmark abortion rights case Roe v Wade.
Predictably, Kavanaugh denies Ford’s allegations, and is also prepared to testify.
So how do sports figure into a potential showdown between a controversial supreme court nominee and the woman accusing him of sexual assault? Prominently. Sports form the subplot of the narrative Kavanaugh and his supporters have put forward since his nomination in July. Selected by a famously divisive president, Kavanaugh leans on the creaky idea of sports as a unifying force by weaving his history as a baseball fan and basketball coach into his talking points. Stressing that he coaches girls helps Kavanaugh try to bolster a record on gender issues that might otherwise be charitably characterized as problematic.
Within hours of Kavanaugh’s nomination, Arizona Cardinals president Michael Bidwill used his team’s website and Twitter account to trumpet his support for his high school football teammate. Bidwill also added his name to a letter of recommendation penned by several other fellow graduates of Georgetown Prep, an exclusive private school in Washington, D.C.
Yankees general manager Brian Cashman also co-signed, even though his team is based in a county that voted 88.7 per cent in favour of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election.
Even the first major red flag of Kavanaugh’s nomination process — credit-card debt pegged at $60,000 to $200,000 — was sports-related. Kavanaugh, who earns $220,600 (U.S.) a year as a circuit court judge, explained the debt reflected the normal behaviour of a diehard sports fan. When Kavanaugh and his friends bought Washington Nationals season tickets, he charged them all to his card and his friends paid him back promptly.
“I’m a huge sports fan,” Kavanaugh wrote in response to questions about the debt from senate Democrats. “I have attended all 11 Nationals home playoff games in their history. (We are 3-8 in those games).”
The message Kavanaugh conveyed is subtle, yet clear.
He might disagree with millions of Americans on whether a sitting president can be indicted, or he could join the Supreme Court and do the bidding of a president who seeks to roll back abortion rights, but his Nationals fandom purports to transcend political divisions and mark him as a regular guy.
As confirmation hearings began earlier this month, Kavanaugh broadcast his bona fides as a basketball coach to his two grade-school-aged daughters, and even brought several of their teammates to Washington, D.C. Speaking to the Senate judiciary committee, Kavanaugh rhapsodized about the fulfilment he feels helping girls grow into confident athletes.
In a benign reading of Kavanaugh’s repeated references to coaching girls, he’s signalling that, despite his status, he’s an everyday suburban dad who devotes his scarce free time to teaching young women life lessons through sport.
But we can also view the move as a Kavanaugh’s preemptive declaration of feminist credentials, and a bid to immunize himself against unflattering details of his record on gender that eventually emerge.
Ford’s Washington Post interview provided the most explosive example. She alleges that in 1982, a 17-year-old Kavanaugh cornered her in an empty room during a house party, pinned her to a bed, groped her and tried to remove her clothes.
Kavanaugh says it never happened. Republican supporters like Orrin Hatch contend that even if Kavanaugh committed the assault, he’s entitled to outlive his teenage mistakes — a troubling message to send about a judge who touts his coaching of preteen girls as a job qualification.
And it’s another gender issues question mark for a nominee with a muddled understanding of women’s health. Under questioning from Republican Ted Cruz, Kavanaugh called birth control pills “abortioninducing drugs.”
Those three words revealed Kavanaugh, who could one day be tasked with crafting laws governing abortion rights, as stunningly uninformed about how contraception works.
If basketball coach Kavanaugh exhibited similar confusion over the difference between a jump shot and a layup, players and parents would revolt — yet he remains in the running for a spot on a Supreme Court that will inevitably hear reproductive rights cases.
Except Kavanaugh’s wellpublicized connections to the sports world aren’t intended convince Democrats to drop opposition to his supreme court nomination, or help him do to the job if he’s confirmed.
They’re just meant to create the perception that’s qualified.