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September 18, 2019
Brett Kavanaugh farce is proof that justice is dead in America
By Will Bunch
How is it possible that the impeachment of a Supreme Court justice is unthinkable, but a 40-year-run for a man who may have lied under oath to get there, and to hide his past mistreatment of women, is thought to be no big deal?
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From Phildelphia Inquirer
The contours of that cover-up became clear this past weekend with the first excerpt from a new book by two New York Times journalists who spent a year reinvestigating Kavanaugh's confirmation fight, including the explosive allegations of sexual assault and misconduct by the federal jurist when he was a D.C.-area high schooler and an underclassman at Yale.
Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, the reporters behind The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, found seven people who could offer strong corroboration for Deborah Ramirez, Kavanaugh's Yale classmate who alleged that the future Supreme drunkenly thrust his penis at her when they were both freshmen in 1983.
I lived with Kavanaugh at Yale.The FBI never returned my call.
Many were in the same place; they tried to get in contact with FBI, with no luck. Now GOP senators are claiming FBI report showed "nothing they didn't already know." Bullshit.Opinion | I Lived With Brett Kavanaugh At Yale. The FBI Never Returned My Call. This was not a real investigation.huffpost.com
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Journalists had to do the vetting work that a politically warped and no-longer impartial Justice Department, forged by the most morally compromised White House in American history, refused to do. And now we know:
Just think about this. In 2016, we had a Senate majority leader in Mitch McConnell who plowed through the guardrails of democratic government and civil traditions by refusing to even hold a hearing on a nominee from the president that American voters had chosen in 2012 to pick their Supreme Court justices, Barack Obama. It was no big deal for McConnell and his GOP minions in the Senate majority to hold a Supreme Court seat open for an entire year while the court was hearing critical cases on the environment, corporate power, and civil rights to wait for their political long-shot to pay off.
Two @ nytimesreporters, @ rpogrebinand @ katekelly, spent months independently reporting out Deborah Ramirez's allegation against Brett Kavanaugh and found it credible and documented another serious claim of misconduct with an eyewitness: https://www. nytimes.com/2019/09/14/sun day-review/brett-kavanaugh-deborah-ramirez-yale.html "
Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not.Deborah Ramirez's Yale experience says much about the college's efforts to diversify its student body in the 1980s.
nytimes.com
But in 2018, heaven forbid that the 140-m.p.h. Kavanaugh confirmation could have been slowed down for just two or three weeks to allow the FBI to do what used to be its job and interview witnesses who could corroborate or in some cases maybe not corroborate the very serious allegations raised by Ramirez and Stier. Indeed, the authors Pogrebin and Kelly also found the woman in Stier's allegation didn't want to testify and told friends she didn't recall Stier's claim, so maybe a little more devotion to the truth would have helped Kavanaugh on some aspects of the probe. The real problem here is that McConnell, Team Trump, and probably Kavanaugh didn't want the truth. They wanted a fifth vote on the Supreme Court.
The whole Kavanaugh caper is emblematic of a Republican Party that cares everything about winning and nothing about this nation's democratic principles. As the Times' Paul Krugman pointed out in a slam-dunk column, the GOP abuses are taking place every day on Capitol Hill where whistle-blowers said to have serious evidence of government misconduct have been mysteriously silenced and in far-flung places like North Carolina, where Republican lawmakers rammed through a controversial budget-veto override by waiting until Democrats were attending a 9/11 commemoration. The only things nearly as bad at the GOP are the top Democrats and newsroom editors pretending that America's slide into authoritarianism is business as usual
But the new allegations about Kavanaugh seem to have touched an especially raw nerve. They have angered just about everybody on the left and on the right. For pro-Trumpers the people supposedly suffering from "economic anxiety" who instead packed rallies largely to scream "Lock her up!" about a woman who dared to run for president the fear of a world where men can't mistreat women without it eventually coming back to them is a fear that passes all understanding, with their anxiety over shrinking misogyny much greater than any supposed terror of rising socialism.
Donald J. Trump✔ @realDonaldTrump
I call for the Resignation of everybody at The New York Times involved in the Kavanaugh SMEAR story, and while you're at it, the Russian Witch Hunt Hoax, which is just as phony! They've taken the Old Grey Lady and broken her down, destroyed her virtue and ruined her reputation...
From President Trump himself to the usual Greek chorus of right-wing talking heads, there's fury at the New York Times (which indeed badly botched the presentation of this case, a complicated rabbit hole that you can read about here and here) for doing the legwork that Team Trump prevented the FBI from doing the kind of rage that rings loud for any assault on white-male privilege that you never see for, say, a report on Trump's 7,473rd violation of the Emoluments Clause.
Will Bunch is author of the new "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future", published by Free Press, which examines the calculated effort by the modern right wing to canonize the 40th president, and how that's harmed America on everything from runaway debt to failed energy policies to unchecked greed on Wall Street. He is senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog, Attytood.
Will has won numerous journalism awards, including a share of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting when he worked for New York Newsday. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, American Prospect, American Journalism Review and elsewhere, and he is author of one other book: Jukebox America: Down Back Streets and Blue Highways in Search of the Country's Greatest Jukebox.