Anyone Who Claims to Know What Happens Next Is Lying
WASHINGTON-The Senate calendar on Monday said that the World's Greatest Deliberative Body wouldn't convene until 3 p.m., and then only for a "pro forma" session. This enabled the members of the WGDB to huddle with their staffs and come up with the proper answer to any questions about dildos that might arise this week, and they will.
On Sunday, as god and the world now know, another woman came forward to Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker with some even more revolting allegations regarding Brett Kavanaugh's salacious salad days at Yale. These involve the sexual abuse of a woman named Deborah Ramirez at what appears to be a college party that landed somewhere between the court of Caligula and the most vivid parts of Clarence Thomas's imagination. They key graf is here:
She recalled that the party took place in a suite at Lawrance Hall, in the part of Yale known as Old Campus, and that a small group of students decided to play a drinking game together. “We were sitting in a circle,” she said. “People would pick who drank.” Ramirez was chosen repeatedly, she said, and quickly became inebriated. At one point, she said, a male student pointed a gag plastic penis in her direction. Later, she said, she was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words, as that male student and another stood nearby. (Ramirez identified the two male onlookers, but, at her request, The New Yorker is not naming them.)
A third male student then exposed himself to her. “I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.” She said that she pushed the person away, touching it in the process. Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic, in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married,” she said. “I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the he recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’ And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there.”
(Moreover, the increasingly inevitable Michael Avenatti has entered the Big Top, claiming that he has a client with evidence that Kavanaugh was part of a teenage clique that specialized in the gang rape of incapacitated teenage women. However, the New Yorker story, there is an account from a woman named Elizabeth Rasor, the college girlfriend of the absolutely inevitable Mark Judge, who claims that Judge told her tales of what he called consensual sex between a drunk woman and Judge and his friends. There's a film settling over this whole city at the moment.)
Anybody who tells you that they know what happens next is lying. So far, El Caudillo Del Mar-A-Lago is making brave noises. Senator Dianne Feinstein wants all hearings into the nomination postponed until an FBI investigation into this mess is concluded but, at the moment, there's no stomach for what an FBI investigation might reveal. Senator Mitch McConnell, who warned the White House that Kavanaugh would be a tough sell, knew about the Ramirez allegations a week ago, so it is fair to assume that, whatever else may be out there, he already knows it, and yet he told the Values Voters Summit last week that he was going to "plow on through" with the nomination, which is a very unfortunate metaphor in this context. In addition, McConnell's response to the news that the latest allegations were going to come up was to try and put the nomination into hyperdrive. However, McConnell is also pragmatist enough to know when to cut bait. If the Republicans decide to pull this nomination, it has to happen early in the week. Waiting until Wednesday-or, worse, until Thursday, when Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee-is completely untenable.
Meanwhile, the Republican brand took a real beating over the weekend as the party began to look like a walking sex-offender registry. Garrett Ventry, a media adviser working with the Republicans on Judiciary, had to resign when sexual misconduct allegations from his previous work in the North Carolina legislature came to light. (It turns out Ventry was recommended to the committee by the same PR firm that helped conservative activist Ed Whelan concoct that goofy doppelgänger alibi for Kavanaugh last week. Whelan has since taken a leave from his job as head of the Ethics and Policy Center, and I am living in the middle of a pornographic Allen Drury novel-Advise And Lack Of Consent.
So, before the whole thing really gets rolling this week, we should all take a look back at this McClatchy story from a year ago about how the curse of dark money is runs through the entire saga-which truly began, as you likely recall, when McConnell and the members of his majority made Merrick Garland a non-person after President Barack Obama nominated him.
When a small nonprofit called the Judicial Crisis Network poured millions into a campaign to stop the Senate from confirming Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick last year, and then spent millions more supporting President Donald Trump’s choice for the same seat, political observers assumed conservatives from around the country were showering the group with donations. Not so. Newly obtained tax documents show that JCN’s money came almost entirely from yet another secretive nonprofit, the Wellspring Committee, which flooded JCN with nearly $23.5 million in 2016. Most of Wellspring’s funds, in turn, came from a single mysterious donor who gave the organization almost $28.5 million - nearly 90 percent of its $32.2 million in revenues.
This is not bribing senators to vote the right way, or sponsoring Supreme Court justices as if they were NASCAR teams in order to get them to decide the right way. This is money invested in the cause of United States senators' not to do their jobs. And, of course, like Brett Kavanaugh, we have former Justice Anthony Kennedy to thank for this rot in the judicial system, too.
Like JCN, Wellspring - at one time tied to the donor network spearheaded by conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch - is a nonprofit that is supposed to be dedicated to social welfare functions and doesn’t have to disclose the names of its benefactors. Since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision loosened certain constraints on political spending, these and other 501(c)(4) groups have become increasingly politically active while providing anonymity to their donors. Often one group, like Wellspring, will act as a conduit, giving most of its funds to other, similar groups with political agendas. "It sounds like Wellspring Committee acted as a dark money conduit to provide an extra layer of secrecy to whomever was bankrolling the Judicial Crisis Network ads," Brendan Fischer of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington said in an email interview. "This has the effect of layering secrecy on top of secrecy, and almost entirely insulating donors from any form of public accountability."
It's all about money, and ain't a damn thing funny.
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