Kavanaugh fight tests women’s movement
His fate, treatment of accuser have makings of pivotal political event
In his first appearance before the nation, Judge Brett Kavanaugh positioned himself as an ally of social change for women in America. Standing beside President Donald Trump at the White House, Kavanaugh spoke of being a father of daughters and a coach to a girls basketball team. He hailed his mother’s legal career. He boasted that most of his clerks had been women.
Coming in the era of #MeToo and the Women’s March, of greater attention to wage inequality for women and campus sexual assaults, Kavanaugh was trying to reassure the many women around the country who may have been assessing him, and the president beside him, warily. He was, after all, a 53-year-old jurist and ambitious veteran of Republican politics who would be a potentially decisive vote on litigation over women’s rights — including the right to terminate a pregnancy.
But if Kavanaugh’s nomination was freighted with import for women, the battle over his confirmation has swelled into an event of titanic consequence in the country’s evolution on matters of gender and women’s equality. A judge who could well overturn Roe v. Wade — handpicked by a president who has faced allegations of sexual misconduct — now faces an accusation of sexual assault that has plunged the Senate into chaos less than seven weeks before an election. Kavanaugh has denied the allegation.
The fate of his nomination and the Senate’s treatment of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, who reached a tentative deal to testify on Thursday, have the makings of a pivotal point in U.S. politics — the crest of a wave building since Trump’s election. Women have
marched and voted in powerful numbers. They have run for office with recordbreaking success. And women of all political stripes have come forward with new confidence to identify and challenge men who have exploited them. Ford, 51, a California professor, was 15 at the time of the alleged assault.
The likely public testimony by Ford and Kavanaugh would be a wrenching apex in the decadeslong struggle over the legal and social status of U.S. women, unfolding in the shadow of a presidency that has profoundly alienated many women.
Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood, which opposes Kavanaugh’s nomination, described the confirmation struggle and the Senate’s handling of Ford’s allegation as a clarifying moment and a test for the country.
“This is a distillation of the entire two years’ trajectory for women in this country,” Laguens said. “Are we respected? Are we believed? Are we equal?”
Ford’s appearance would represent a moment of extreme peril for Republicans who control the Judiciary Committee — an all-male panel on the GOP side whose members have answered her allegation with suspicion or resentment.
Yet Republicans — including conservative women — have been deeply resistant to reconsidering Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Their determination to confirm him may put Republicans at odds with the clear tide in U.S. politics since Trump’s election. The victory of a man captured on tape boasting about groping women, over a candidate who would have been the first female president, touched off a backlash among women that has fueled mass marches, huge turnout by female voters and record number of female candidates.
But if the cultural mood of the country has appeared to turn strongly in favor of a progressive women’s rights agenda, Kavanaugh’s nomination is also the pinnacle of a different social movement: the 45-year quest by activists on the right to overturn Roe v. Wade, the court decision that made abortion legal nationwide. For decades, tens of thousands of people have participated in the annual March for Life, and 2 in 5 women believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, according to the Pew Research Center.
And allies of Kavanaugh say they are unwilling to back down over a single accusation they distrust, and one that comes after a contentious and highly partisan nomination hearing, calling the stakes far too high.
“The left wants this to be about the veracity of #MeToo, but it’s not,” said Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, a group that led a “Women for Kavanaugh” bus tour this summer. “The election was about the direction of the country. This was a reckoning of what was promised. There’s been millions of dollars spent, thousands of volunteer hours spent on behalf of this nominee; it’s finally coming to the vote.”
At stake for conservatives are not only future court decisions to restrict abortion rights but also decisions to advance religious liberty laws.
Critics of Kavanaugh’s nomination say her allegation has brought the significance of his nomination into sharper focus. A poll published Friday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found that among women, 28 percent supported Kavanaugh while 42 percent were opposed.