Republicans Can’t Abandon Brett Kavanaugh Without Confronting Their Own Depravity
There was always the obvious explanation for Senate Republicans' determination not to allow Christine Blasey Ford's sexual-assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh to slow down his confirmation even one little bit: They knew, either because reporters were asking them about stories or because this is the way things usually unfold when the world learns about bad men, that with each passing day, it grew more likely that more women from Kavanaugh's past would come forward with stories of his misconduct.
Sure enough, on Sunday, The New Yorker published an interview with Deborah Ramirez, who says that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party during their freshman year of college. Civil rights lawyer and ill-advised presidential candidate Michael Avenatti claims to represent a third woman, who he says will soon make still-to-be-detailed accusations of her own. Suddenly, Christine Blasey Ford is not on an island surrounded by howling Republicans, the last meddling inconvenience that stands between them and the Supreme Court majority of their dreams. Suddenly, Christine Blasey Ford has people, and the task of refuting the notion that Kavanaugh is unfit to serve is a lot more complicated.
On Monday, the nominee vowed in a defiant (and, for the first time, a little desperate-sounding) letter that he would not be "intimidated into withdrawing from this process," despite the "coordinated effort to destroy my good name." He and his wife also sat for a soft-lit Fox News interview in which he revealed that he was a virgin in high school and for "many, many years" afterwards—a fact that, if true, would not be inconsistent with either Ford's or Ramirez's accounts.
In the Senate, his staunchest enablers remain so: Literal dinosaur Orrin Hatch blasted Democrats for their willingness to "stop at nothing to prevent Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation," while dependable Trump sycophant Tom Cotton called it a "campaign of delay and character assassination." Mitch McConnell bemoaned the death of the "presumption of innocence," advancing the disingenuous and farcical position that Kavanaugh's hearings are a criminal trial and not a job interview that has turned up a ton of notable red flags. The president, who is well-versed in the art of defending alleged predators in order to advance a partisan agenda, dismissed the scandals as a "totally political" stunt and that he is "with him all the way."
This collective stubbornness is perhaps the strangest aspect of what has been a very strange confirmation battle, because there are plenty of glowering Federalist Society drones who are not the subject of multiple credible allegations of sexual assault, and who, if confirmed in his stead, would spend the rest of their careers working diligently to implement the very same anti-choice agenda that Kavanaugh espouses. He is a means to an end, and the longer this drags on, the harder it will be for Republicans to jam through a replacement-level ideologue before the midterm elections, when their razor-thin Senate majority might very well disappear altogether.
Why are these people straining to defend someone so expendable? First, a party whose entire judiciary-related pitch to voters is "We're gonna overturn Roe, everybody!" is not one predisposed to taking seriously a woman who alleges mistreatment by a powerful man. The GOP's decision to make abortion one of its core issues has yielded a generation of goons in elected office, who view the entire world through a lens that denies women autonomy over their bodies. In a weird twist, the party's intransigent misogyny on one issue—the Kavanaugh allegations—might be hamstringing their ability to achieve their most misogynist goal of all. This irony would be funnier if both ends of it weren't so profoundly depressing.
This insistence on clinging to Kavanaugh also indicates that at last, the this morally bankrupt, win-at-any-cost approach to the Supreme Court has broken the Republican Party's brain a little. Everything that happened after they hijacked the Garland nomination was supposed to be a business decision—a cynical and indefensible power grab, but one they knew would work if they stuck to the plan. At some point since, running up the score became as important as winning the game. It is no longer enough to hand life tenure to an anti-choice zealot; they must hand life tenure to the particular anti-choice zealot they anointed, because they have spent the last two-plus years getting their way, so why should now be any different?
At this point, Senate Republicans are like sheepish entrants in an oversold lottery: Their odds of winning shrink a little more each day, and they kind of know it, but the jackpot has ballooned to a point at which they can't imagine allocating their funds to a more sensible contest. Sure, we could get someone else to set the country back 75 years, they think. But if we can make Brett Kavanaugh happen, we'll get to own the libs, too. And so they shrug, extol his virtues on the Senate floor, and buy themselves a few more tickets.
The most fundamental reason they can't cut Kavanaugh loose, though, goes back to the man who tapped him for the job: No meaningful distinction exists between his alleged misconduct and the allegations that have dogged Donald Trump for his entire life. Admitting that their support for their president's Supreme Court nominee is wrong would constitute a tacit admission that their support for their president is wrong, too. The same force that compelled Republicans to stump for Roy Moore in Alabama, and to dissemble after "shithole countries" and Charlottesville, is what compels their unyielding support for Brett Kavanaugh: This party welcomes all forms of depravity, as long as it yields results.
