Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,35
down a highly qualified Supreme Court nominee.
The first day of the confirmation hearings was carefully scripted by Schumer, according to CNN. Citing an anonymous source, CNN reported that Schumer himself had worked through the preceding weekend with Judiciary Committee Democrats to lay out a plan. “Democrats agreed to protest the document issues at the beginning of the hearing with the goal of slowing down the process,” CNN reported.
That’s when the real show began. Who can forget the drama of those hearings and their immediate aftermath, with all the suspense of carefully timed plot twists, last-minute bombshells, emotional outbursts, and Oscar-worthy performances by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee? Perhaps the influence of the Democrats’ Hollywood acolytes had rubbed off on them.
The drama was just getting started. Cue the choreography between Senate Democrats and nonprofit political groups. On the opening day of the hearing, Politico reported, “They created a spectacle by hijacking the hearing as soon as it started and calling for the committee to adjourn against a backdrop of liberal activists being arrested in protest.”
The DNC’s surrogate Planned Parenthood was in the thick of the battle, announcing on the hearing’s opening day a six-figure ad buy against Kavanaugh in Washington, D.C., and Alaska, where moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski was expected to be a swing vote. In a tweet on the hearing’s opening day, the nonprofit posted:
The disruptions we’re seeing during Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing pale in comparison to the disruptions and lengths women already take to access safe, legal abortion. This is what the resistance looks like, and we’re going to fight like hell to #StopKavanaugh.
Yes, they would. At one point in the hearings, Republican senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina referenced a tweet from NBC suggesting that the protests, which were supposedly in response to a late document released the night before, had been coordinated by Leader Schumer in a conference call prior to that document’s release. He asked point-blank whether committee Democrats were involved in that call. Democratic senator Dick Durbin of Illinois admitted, “Mr. Chairman, there was a phone conference yesterday and I can tell you at the time of the phone conference many issues were raised.” The protests were just part of the script.
Presidential hopefuls on the committee capitalized on progressive anger to jump-start fund-raising for their nascent presidential campaigns, with CNN reporting, “As the hearing was under way, both Booker and Senator Kamala Harris of California—often cited as potential 2020 presidential contenders—sent emails to supporters asking them to sign up with their names and contact information to stand against Kavanaugh, often seen as a way for senators to build contact lists.”
Senator Booker had one of the most memorable moments of the hearing when he pointlessly broke committee rules to score political points. In promising to release a classified email he had inappropriately referenced publicly, Booker declared, “This is about the closest I’ll probably have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” thus becoming a meme and a mockery. Later the public learned the disappointingly benign document had been cleared for release the previous night. But Booker’s intended unauthorized release of classified information was one more Senate norm sacrificed in the effort to score points against Donald Trump.
Despite all the drama, the wall-to-wall news coverage, the screaming from activists, and the scheming from Senate leadership, the hearings weren’t going well. The radical extremist narrative predictably didn’t stick. The Russia collusion narrative was implausible given the paucity of evidence at the time. The #whataretheyhiding narrative didn’t stand up to the fact-checkers. But Senator Feinstein still had one card left to play.
In a departure from long-standing Senate norms, Feinstein held that card back until the very last minute. She was sitting on a new allegation—a new plot twist—for which there had been no foreshadowing. Sensational allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted a woman in high school were being made by an unknown source. Although Senator Feinstein had known of these allegations for weeks, she never so much as hinted at them until just prior to the confirmation vote.
This craven attempt to amp up the drama and suspense was not the act of a person making a sincere attempt to get to the truth. It denied Kavanaugh that most fundamental right of due process. This was someone fearful the show would not go on if she took time to actually vet the allegations.
Kavanaugh had come to the confirmation process with a long record of mentoring and empowering female law clerks, volunteering in the community, and coaching girls’ sports