1. As I write this, Brett Kavanaugh is on his way to the White House. That’s a bad omen for the appeals court judge. It could mean the president has changed his mind about nominating him to the US Supreme Court (though given that Trump is Trump, that seems unlikely).
2. What happened? On Sunday, a psychology professor by the name of Christine Blasey Ford came out publicly as the author of a letter accusing Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teens in the 1980s.
3. Ford alleged Kavanaugh & another boy, both drunk, pulled her into a bedroom during a party. Kavanaugh appears to have attempted rape. He tried to pull off her clothes. He covered her mouth when she screamed. The other boy jumped on them, sending them all to the floor.
4. The United States Senate has been here before. As you know, law professor Anita Hill, in the 11th hour before Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991, accused the future justice of sexual harassment.
5. Back then, Thomas cast himself as the victim of the “old order,” but instead of being “hung from a tree,” he was “lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate.” Things are different now.
6. Aside from the fact that Kavanaugh isn’t black, he’s up for confirmation in the middle of this great period of purging, in which 219 mostly white men in positions of social and political power are being held to account, at long last, for their crimes.
7. Kavanaugh can, and has, said he didn’t do any of the things he’s accused on doing. That might be enough to quiet the nerves of Republicans eager to confirm. All 10 Dem have called for a delay on the vote Thursday. 3 Rs agree. And now, Kavanaugh is on his way to visit Trump.
8. If Trump pulls his nomination, it will be a rare instance in which this unwise president did something prudent. But this president has responded to this present #MeToo moment about as well as you’d expect him to.
9. My gut tells me he will do what he’s done with previous white men, himself included, who have been accused of sexual crimes. He’ll say, more or less, “I asked him if he did it. He said no. That’s good enough for me--on with the confirmation process.”
10. If he’s smart (which is a debatable point), Trump will cut Kavanaugh off, present his administration as friendly to the demands of women around the country, tap someone else equally conservative, safe in the knowledge that he’ll rule in ways favorable to the GOP agenda.
11. If the Republicans stick with the schedule, they risk deepening a feeling I have been writing about lately—the desire for revenge. As I wrote last week, it isn’t all that surprising that thousands of women (most women of color) are running for offices high and low.
12. On Friday, I wrote: “They saw what happened to the most competent presidential candidate in modern memory and said to themselves: that’s wrong, that so wrong that I’m going to do something about it.” stoehr.substack.com/p/dont-underra…
13. Put another way, many women already fear, with good reason, that Kavanaugh’s nomination will spark a wave of state laws banning abortion, laws that will wind up in front of the Supreme Court, laws that the court will most likely uphold.
14. But that was before these credible claims.
15. It’s one thing for the GOP to go all-in for man who will strike down a precedent protecting a women’s right to privacy. It’s another for the GOP to go all-in for a man who will strike down Roe while having gotten away, scot-free, with a sexual crime.
16. That’s like telling the country that the GOP is not only a men’s club.
It’s anti-women, too.
It’s anti-women, too.
17. It's a struggle to write such thread without boiling over with rage at the idea of what I might do if a boy did this to my daughter. Tell me how I'm doing. Sign up! stoehr.substack.com/p/not-just-a-m…
