The circus that grandstanding Democratic Senators turned last week’s Kavanaugh hearings into is a testament to the emptiness of the anti-Trump resistance. For hours they earnestly droned on about their need for an adjournment of the proceedings because they had not received thousands of documents accumulated during Kavanaugh’s role as a staff attorney in two or three Republican presidential administrations.
But they conceded that they had virtually all of the documents relating to Judge Kavanaugh’s service on the District of Columbia federal appeals courts, including hundreds and hundreds of opinions he authored, which are an infinitely more relevant barometer of what he would do on the Supreme Court –the object of the hearings, after all. It has also been pointed out that even when he wasn’t the author, he was usually counted as part of the majority of the judges deciding the cases so there should be little fear that this is some rogue in black robes.
So one wonders what they thought would be overlooked if they didn’t have access to research memoranda he drafted providing options on policy to presidents? The truth is there is little of substance to be gained by looking at those peripheral documents. Of course, their real goal was to muck up the process with delays and hope for lightning to strike.
And then there was the grandstanding by the disingenuous former prosecutor Sen. Kamal Harris setting up – not merely asking – an inane question that was incapable of a direct answer but calculated by its phrasing to leave the utterly false impression on the untutored public that the Judge was hiding something.
And then there was Sen. Corey Booker, blathering incoherently that he was a real life Spartacus of Greek myth, suggesting that he too was prepared to give his all for the country and release secret documents despite the personal peril it would subject him to.
And this sort of thing when on and on for days, with substance the exception rather than the rule.
Behind all of this? Democrats unabating refusal to accept the fact that Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election and gets to pick federal judges, including those, like Judge Brett Kavanaugh, whom he has nominated to sit on the United States Supreme Court.
So the anti-Trump resistance is alive and well – a driving force in American politics. And we are all the worse for it.