Kavanaugh sworn in after bitter, divisive fight
Trump nominee who faced allegations of sexual assault tilts top U.S. court to the right
WASHINGTON— A deeply divided Senate voted Saturday to confirm U.S. Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, delivering a victory to President Donald Trump and ending a rancorous Washington battle that began as a debate over ideology and jurisprudence and concluded with questions of sexual misconduct.
Kavanaugh was quickly sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy in a private ceremony. Trump exulted on Twitter. “I applaud and congratulate the U.S. Senate for confirming our GREAT NOMINEE, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, to the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote.
The Senate vote was 50-48, almost entirely along party lines. It did not go smoothly — protesters repeatedly interrupted the proceedings, with Capitol Police dragging screaming demonstrators out of the gallery as the senators sat sombrely at their wooden desks in the chamber below.
“This is a stain on American history!” one woman cried, as the vote wrapped up. “Do you understand?”
The result was expected; all senators had announced their intentions by Friday. Alaskan Sen. Lisa Murkowski — the lone Republican to break with her party — was recorded as “present” instead of “no” as a gesture to a Republican colleague, Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who was attending his daughter’s wedding and would have voted “yes.”
By voting present, she maintained the two-vote margin that had pushed the nomination past a crucial procedural hurdle Friday.
West Virginian Sen. Joe Manchin was the lone Democrat to support Kavanaugh.
But while the brawl over Kavanaugh’s confirmation may be over, people on both sides of the debate agree that it will have lasting ramifications on the Senate, the Supreme Court and the country.
As the senators entered their final hours of debate Saturday, hundreds of Kavanaugh opponents were massed on the steps of the Supreme Court.
They later rushed the barricades around the Capitol and sat on its steps, chanting “No means no!” as police began arresting them.
Women and sexual assault survivors around the country were furious.
Inside the chamber, protests erupted as Texan Republican Sen. John Cornyn delivered a speech deploring “mob rule” — a reference to the activists and sexual assault survivors who have roamed the Capitol in recent weeks, confronting Republican senators. “I stand with survivors!” one shouted. “This process is corrupt!”
Even some of Kavanaugh’s future colleagues sounded unsettled. On Friday, on the eve of the vote, two of them — Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — expressed concern that the partisan rancour around his nomination would injure the court’s reputation.
“Part of the court’s strength and part of the court’s legitimacy depends on people not seeing the court in the way that people see the rest of the governing structures of this country now,” Kagan said in an appearance at Princeton University.
“In other words, people thinking of the court as not politically divided in the same way, as not an extension of politics, but instead somehow above the fray, even if not always in every case.”
Once confirmed, Kavanaugh will shift the ideological balance of the court to the right, giving it a solid conservative majority. He will replace Kennedy, a moderate conservative who was its longtime swing vote, and at 53 he is young enough to serve for decades, shaping American jurisprudence for a generation, if not more. For Trump, who has made stocking the federal judiciary with conservatives a signature of his presidency, Kavanaugh’s confirmation will fulfil a campaign promise in the middle of a difficult midterm election.
He is already using Kavanaugh’s confirmation process to energize his base; at a recent rally, he fired up his supporters by mocking Christine Blasey Ford, the Northern California research psychologist who accused Kavanaugh of trying to rape her when they were teenagers.
Until Blasey went public, Kavanaugh’s confirmation seemed assured.
But her account — first in an article in The Washington Post and later in riveting testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee — unleashed a cascade of other allegations and prompted a last-minute FBI inquiry into the judge’s conduct.
Kavanaugh vigorously denied the allegations in his own angry and emotional testimony before the Judiciary Committee.
On Saturday, one of his accusers, Deborah Ramirez, who has said Kavanaugh thrust his genitals in her face during a drunken dormitory party at Yale, issued a statement deploring what was about to happen.
“Thirty-five years ago, the other students in the room chose to laugh and look the other way as sexual violence was perpetrated on me by Brett Kavanaugh,” she wrote.
“As I watch many of the senators speak. . . I feel like I’m right back at Yale where half the room is laughing and looking the other way.
“Only this time, instead of drunk college kids, it is U.S. senators who are deliberately ignoring his behaviour.”