Trump’s remarks on Kavanaugh’s accusers are trying to push the Senate to do the wrong thing
President Donald Trump doesn’t have to believe the stories of sexual misconduct and assault being told by Coloradan Deborah Ramirez and Californian Christine Blasey Ford, but he should take their accusations seriously, pledge to investigate and treat these two women with respect.
Instead Trump tweeted on Friday: “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”
The president showed even less restraint when talking about Ramirez who came forward over the weekend to say she remembers Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh exposing himself to her in a dormitory at Yale University.
“She was totally inebriated and all messed up and she doesn’t know. It might have been him, or it might have been him. Gee, let’s not make him a Supreme Court judge. This is a con game being played by the Democrats,” Trump said Tuesday in an interview with reporters.
Those are precisely the type of despicable remarks that encourage women not to report sexual assault, sexual harassment or domestic violence. How many examples do we need as a nation of credible reports being brought forward decades after-the-fact because boys, girls, men and women were shamed into silence?
Jerry Sandusky, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Larry Nassar, and too many Catholic priests to mention by name have faced justice years after their crimes because of brave victims who came forward. And heaven help the first victim in almost all of those cases who were met with disbelief and anger at their accusations before other victims came forward to corroborate their stories. Trump and his fellow Republican Senators may want Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, but they should also want to make sure they don’t elevate someone to the highest court in the land without fully investigating these claims. Sen. Michael Bennet has called for an FBI investigation into the accounts of Ford and Ramirez, saying in a Tweet that “the nomination process should not move forward until the FBI investigates these allegations.” We agree. Every senator should be uncomfortable voting to put someone on the Supreme Court for life without fully investigating these two claims, and we think that calls for more than just having Ford and Ramirez testify under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee although that is a good place to start. This isn’t a question of criminal due-process that requires Senators to determine if Kavanaugh is guilty of these alleged crimes. This is a question of employment at the highest level of an honored profession and we are uncomfortable with someone taking a job on the U.S. Supreme Court while facing allegations of this nature.