Kavanaugh will likely fail
I am saddened to report this, but I am now convinced that next week the search will begin for a new Supreme Court nominee.
Had Senator Grassley held the vote this week as planned, that might have been avoided. Several factors have influenced my thinking here:
- The allegation made by Christine Blasey-Ford. Probably not true, but the plausibility is influenced by the next two items.
- The allegation that Brett Kavanaugh gave a speech to the Federalist Society in 2014 during which he described very heavy drinking in law school.
- The allegation that Mark Judge wrote a book describing his friend “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who drank heavily in high school, including “passing out coming home from a party.”
The last two items are reported (with excerpts) in Mother Jones, an extremely left-wing and unreliable source. By “unreliable,” I mean this: Mother Jones was the organization that won a court case in which they asserted that they could completely fabricate quotes by an adversary, if they honestly believed the person would have likely made such a statement. In that 1997 Los Angeles case, Mother Jones created a quote from a GOP consultant (for Bob Dole) that he never said, in which he “admitted” to a criminal act. Their rationale was that if Sipple was as bad as his divorce papers made him out to be (he won that, by the way) then he likely would have made the brag. That was allowed to stand.
Mother Jones is now reporting on Judge Kavanaugh’s speech and his friend Mark Judge’s book. In no way does it admit what was alleged, but it provides a “major drinker even back to high school” context that Susan Collins and a couple of others will not be able to withstand. And of course, the speech and book excerpts will be all over the media very soon, probably tonight.
I am not pleased at these events, but I am aware of them and have grim expectations regarding their impact.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Originally published at DeHavelle.com. You can comment here or there.