Tomorrow Grassley needs to say something like this:
This has been quite an ordeal. The confirmation of a Supreme Court justice was not supposed to be like this. It was supposed to rest on their records, their characters, and while we do have the FBI undertake background checks, it is assumed that major problems would show up in twenty years (or whatever it is) of public service.
Judge Kavanaugh has had a great many people vouch for his character. Everyone who has worked with him has applauded him, his family believes in him, and some 75 women have come forward to specifically vouch for him. He has a lot of support. He has a lot of women in his life who have known him for a long time, and who respect him and who do not believe that, at his worst, he was ever as bad a person as he is said to have been, by one person who was here yesterday, and two who emerged at the last second to level outrageous accusations from long, long ago.
Here is my view: we CANNOT and SHALL NOT make this the new standard. We cannot make every nominee to the Supreme Court go through this, if they happen to favor judicial opinions which are unpopular with an element of our society which is highly ideological, well organized, and willing to go to nearly any length to disrupt our process.
Mrs. Ford may be telling the truth. I don’t know. It is also possible she is NOT telling the truth. I don’t know that either. But if we make unsubstantiated allegation the new standard, there is no new low which is not possible. We make a mockery of the process. We turn the next Supreme Court confirmation hearing into a circus, IN ADVANCE, if the nominee is presented by a Republican, and, in the current hyperpartisan atmosphere, specifically President Trump.
We KNOW, from their own public speeches, that the Democrats vowed to oppose ANYONE President Trump put forward. Anyone. Ponder that. Judge Kavanaugh, obviously, is someone, and they have certainly been as good as their word.
But the Senate is supposed to be a place of sober contemplation. It is supposed to be where our most experienced leaders, our wisest minds, go to temper reckless populism–which is represented by the House, in all its sometime exuberance–with quiet consideration, and mature discussion.
It is ironic that we are in fact considering a man for the highest court in our land. Our laws are fashioned from the principle that many can be convicted in so-called Court of Public Opinion, who are in fact innocent. Lynch mobs do deliver immediate action, but their history of delivering justice is, to put it in the best possible light, mixed, and their history of great injustice is long and well documented.
We do things the way we do for a reason. We do them because, on balance, they are most likely to render justice, to render decency, to render fairness.
And in my view the standard moving forward should be clear: if we could not so much as bring a criminal case with regard to any given serious allegation, then we should not consider it at all. Yes, fine, we need to do background checks, of course. If there are any patterns of behavior discussed in hushed tones and anonymously, then that needs to be known and brought into the deliberation room, brought into the light.
But short of that, there is no limit to how many sensational charges can be brought. Perhaps next time it will be from 50 years ago. Perhaps next time there will be a murder in some foreign country, or even here. Perhaps even now, strategists are contemplating the stories that will be told in 3 years the next time this situation occurs.
As I say, I don’t know if Professor Ford is telling the truth. And this is core, salient fact of this case: we don’t know. We can’t know. She can’t tell us where this alleged assault happened. She can’t tell us when. She has no contemporaneous witnesses whose credibility is equal to the seriousness of the allegations. No prosecutor in the country would bring charges based on the evidence.
In this country, people do not go to jail based on hearsay, and asking us to delay one moment longer in confirming Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is to ask us to convict him of a crime no one here can provide sufficient evidence he committed.
Therefore, I move for an immediate vote.