Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,32
rolled out the strategy with a July 10 floor speech setting out all the talking points—that Kavanaugh was “way out of the mainstream,” believed “the president doesn’t need to follow the law,” and had a long paper trail that would require lots of time for review.
The staging for this phase of the performance is well documented. A September 4 Politico story reported on a Democratic strategy session pitting the Senate Judiciary Committee’s “aggressive, often younger senators” against “veterans who prefer to adhere to the chamber’s norms.” Those norms would be not only challenged but in fact sacrificed in the days to come.
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders tweeted (without evidence, as Democrats like to say), “President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be a rubber-stamp for an extreme, right-wing agenda pushed by corporations and billionaires. We must mobilize the American people to defeat Trump’s right-wing, reactionary nominee.” Connecticut’s Senator Chris Murphy chimed in to call Kavanaugh a “Second Amendment radical” who was “way out of the judicial mainstream” and “far to the right of even late Justice [Antonin] Scalia.” The hyperbole didn’t end there.
Betting that most Americans were unaware of Kavanaugh’s mainstream record, the Senate’s outside allies were even more strident. Former Virginia governor and Hillary Clinton confidant Terry McAuliffe went so far as to make the outlandish claim that Kavanaugh’s nomination would “threaten the lives of millions of Americans”—a claim that would be uncritically repeated by many others, including student groups at Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Yale University.
Not to be outdone, the Women’s March organization tweeted that Kavanaugh’s nomination was a “death sentence” for women. Incidentally, the Women’s March receives funding from none other than Planned Parenthood, in addition to dozens of other left-wing nonprofit groups.
In a revealing slip, the Women’s March statement came with an introduction that read, “In response to Donald Trump’s nomination of XX [sic] to the Supreme Court of the United States, The Women’s March released the following statement . . .” Had they prepared the statement before they even knew the identity of the nominee? It sure looked that way. Just how coordinated was this rollout?
In a case of foreshadowing, NARAL Pro Choice America (short for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) appeared to get ahead of the script with a statement reading, “We’ll be DAMNED if we’re going to let five MEN—including some frat boy named Bret—strip us of our hard won bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.” Many people on the right focused on the hypocrisy of the fact that NARAL had no objection to Roe v. Wade originally being decided by an all-male Supreme Court. But the other interesting thing about this tweet is the reference to Kavanaugh as a “frat boy” with a frat boy name. That scene was slated for later in the show. How did NARAL already have the script?
Upping the Stakes
Having cast Kavanaugh as an extreme choice, Democrats next moved to connect him to their favorite narrative—the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. This messaging would deflect attention away from the challenging battleground of Kavanaugh’s unquestionably stellar judicial record and move back to the familiar territory of Russian collusion—a story line that had not yet lost its potency. At this point, they still believed with near-religious devotion that Mueller would ultimately indict the president. They were interested, not in determining whether Kavanaugh was qualified, but only in tying him to what they thought would become a slam-dunk case against the president. Democrats conflated accusations related to the president and his political team with reasons to question Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve on the Supreme Court.
Judiciary Committee Democrat and presidential hopeful Cory Booker, of New Jersey, sent a series of tweets before the hearings began in which he attempted to float the constitutionally suspect idea that a president who has been merely accused of something nefarious should not be permitted to make Supreme Court appointments. He tweeted:
The President of the United States was implicated in open court of a federal crime by his longtime personal lawyer. It’s increasingly urgent we stop Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh from getting a lifetime appointment to the highest court in our land.
Booker repeated the argument less than two hours later, trying again to sell the idea that allegations against a president were sufficient reason to keep him from doing his constitutional duty. Booker tweeted:
A president who is named by his longtime personal lawyer as an un-indicted co-conspirator should not be nominating Supreme Court judges for lifetime appointments.
On the