All the reasons Brett Kavanaugh should not be on Supreme Court
I don’t know what’s going to happen – maybe has already happened by the time this gets published – about Brett Kavanaugh.
I do know that day by day, things keep coming out showing that he lied, misstated, dissimilated and misled repeatedly under oath at last week’s hearing.
Monday, a second Yale classmate, and former drinking buddy, Chad Ludington, came forward to say that he often saw Brett Kavanaugh extremely drunk while in college and once witnessed Kavanaugh throw a drink in someone’s face, starting a bar fight.
“When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive,” Ludington said.
On Tuesday, The New York Times published a 1983 handwritten letter that it says was written by Kavanaugh about a “Beach Week” rental. The letter was signed by “Bart.”
“P.S., it would probably be a good idea on Sat. the 18th to warn the neighbors that we’re loud and obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us,” he says at the end of the letter.
He also advises his Beach Week mates, “That any girls we can beg to stay there are welcomed with open ….” The sentence is left unfinished so you can draw your own conclusions about what he meant.
Why wouldn’t Kavanaugh admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that “Bart” was his high school nickname?
His explanations about the meaning of veiled references on his own yearbook profile page – published contemporaneous evidence – were either laughable or easily verified as lies by anyone with an internet account.
He claimed that the term “Renate alumnus” about a female acquaintance was a “term clumsily used to show affection, to show she was one of us.”
I call B.S.
The reference to the friend on the pages of Kavanaugh and nine football players was clearly bragging about alleged sexual conquest of her.
“Devil’s triangle” was not a drinking game as he said; it is a sexual reference to a threesome with two men and a woman.
“Bart, have you boofed yet?” in a yearbook reference was not about asking him if he had passed gas yet but rather a reference to ingesting booze or drugs anally. His explanation is just silly.
Kavanaugh said the reference to “ralphing” – Beach Week Ralph Club, biggest contributor – was about his sensitive stomach’s reaction to spicy foods? Come on.
He said the drinking age was
18 and seniors were legal.
It had already been raised to
21 by the time Kavanaugh became 18.
Maybe Kavanaugh and buddies were immature, spoiled brats mostly lying in those yearbook references about their sexual exploits and drinking.
My point is, he was lying again about those references just last week.
You may say, but they were little lies because he was obviously ashamed of his behavior so many years ago.
The yearbook and the reports of high school and college friends just makes Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of an attempted rape (or attempted Devil’s triangle?) more plausible, since excessive drinking and sexual assault often go together.
As Sen. Dick Durbin observed, “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,” the legal doctrine that if a witness is caught lying about one thing, the jury can disregard all his testimony as lies.
Aside from the lying, Kavanaugh’s performance at the hearing made Ford’s allegations seem virtually irrelevant.
He blustered, he cried, he yelled, he evaded, he was belligerent and arrogant, and he stalled to eat up Democrats’ time with endless repetitions about his wonderful academic and athletic record.
He spouted conspiracy theories and exhibited extreme partisanship, deferring to Republican committee members and arrogantly attacking Democrats.
Most tellingly, he refused to ask for an FBI investigation into the sexual assault allegations, while at the same time vehemently insisting he was completely innocent and wanted to clear his name.
(Some kind of FBI whitewashing has now been completed with the agency failing to interview 40 potential witnesses and refusing to even take the information some of those witnesses brought directly to it.)
I get that Kavanaugh was justifiably angry about the possibility of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court potentially being snatched from him after he thought he had it in the bag.
But honestly, he was the very model of a rich, white, privileged, entitled male and partisan political hack who had this to say, not in the white hot heat of the moment but in a prepared statement:
“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”
Really? “Theorize about conspiracies much?
No such fuss was raised over Trump’s first appointment, Neil Gorsuch, a 1985 graduate of the same high school who holds similarly right-wing views.
Those “millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups” Kavanaugh cites were raised in increments of $25 and $50 contributions to groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the ACLU and the NAACP.
Given Kavanaugh’s judicial record, those donors have good reason to be extremely and rightfully afraid of what Kavanaugh is going to do to this country for the next 35 years as the swing vote on an equally divided Supreme Court.
And he made no mention of the millions of dollars in money from outside right-wing groups urging his confirmation. We’ve all seen the ads on both sides.
On Wednesday an open letter to the U.S. Senate from more than 650 law professors from more than 100 law schools around the country was published.
“We regret that we feel compelled to write to you to provide our views that at the Senate hearing …, the Honorable Brett Kavanaugh displayed a lack of judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any court, and certainly not elevation to the highest court in this land,” they said.
Six hundred and fifty law professors! Does that count for nothing?
We may already have the answer today.
Jodine Mayberry is a retired editor, longtime journalist and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Friday. You can reach her at jodinemayberry@comcast.net.