Kavanaugh clash nowhere near peaceful resolution
WASHINGTON – Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court over the weekend, far from settling the fierce debate over his confirmation, has inflamed the nation’s political and cultural fissures for the midterm elections next month and well beyond.
The repercussions from the most brutal battle over the high court’s makeup in a generation could end up affecting all three branches of government: which party wins control of Congress on Nov. 6, what issues define the White House contest in 2020 and whether Americans have faith in the Supreme Court – not to mention the decisions that will follow from the court’s new conservative majority.
As senators voted on the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s controversial nominee, protesters in the gallery shouted, “Shame!” Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment was approved, 50-48. He was promptly sworn in at a private ceremony at the Supreme Court, and he is likely to be sitting on the bench for oral arguments Tuesday.
Republicans are triumphant and Democrats enraged.
“The anger is real,” Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on ABC’s “This Week.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Kavanaugh’s combative and emotional response to allegations of sexual assault, and the argument that he was the victim of character assassination, succeeded in galvanizing GOP voters in red states.
Sen. Joe Manchin, running for reelection in West Virginia, a state that Trump carried by a wide margin in 2016, was his party’s only vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination. Another Democratic incumbent running in a red state, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, acknowledged that her vote to oppose Kavanaugh bolstered the odds that Republican challenger Rep. Kevin Cramer would defeat her on Election Day.
Democrats said Kavanaugh’s confirmation could boost their efforts to gain control of the House by rallying voters who believe the president and Senate Republicans refused to treat seriously women’s accusations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh.
California professor Christine Blasey Ford alleged Kavanaugh tried to rape her at a house party when they were high school students in Maryland. Kavanaugh denied the accusations.
Democrats need to flip 23 Republican-held seats to win a majority.
“Our country needs to have a reckoning on these issues, and there is only one remedy,” Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer of New York said on the Senate floor just before the roll call on Kavanaugh, a vote he knew his side would lose. “Change must come from where change in America always begins: the ballot box.”
Trump also used the moment to rally voters to turn out in November.
“You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob,” he tweeted. “Democrats have become too EXTREME and TOO DANGEROUS to govern. Republicans believe in the rule of law - not the rule of the mob. VOTE REPUBLICAN!”
Democratic presidential hopefuls declared their opposition to Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
“I see the pain and the hurt,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said a few hours after the Senate vote. He spoke at a Democratic fundraiser in Iowa, site of the opening presidential caucuses. “This is a time in our country when we need to stay faithful.”
There are four weeks to go before the midterms. The consequences of Kavanaugh’s confirmation seem guaranteed to deepen the demographic divisions between the two major parties that have fueled an increasingly fierce partisanship in American politics – divisions by gender, by generation, by geography.
Officials on both sides suggested there could be legal and political fallout over Kavanaugh.
If Democrats win the House of Representatives, the Judiciary Committee will open an investigation into allega- tions of sexual misconduct and perjury against the justice, according to Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who is in line to be the committee’s chairman. He didn’t answer questions about whether that might mean impeachment proceedings.
Trump said the women who stepped forward should face unspecified penalties for making what he derided as “fabricated” allegations against the Supreme Court nominee. “I think that they should be held liable. ... You can destroy somebody’s life,” he said in an interview late Saturday on Fox News.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan expressed concern about whether Americans would continue to have faith in the high court as independent and fair-minded.
“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,” she said at a Princeton University conference. “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.”
At the moment, that seems optimistic.