Like the rest of the Kavanaugh saga, it means different things to Democrats and Republicans.
It’s hard to be sure what’s coming next in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight. While opinions about Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Supreme Court have always broken down along partisan and ideological lines, the accusations of sexual misconduct have only widened that divide. Whether or not he is eventually confirmed, Kavanaugh may be a pariah to the Left for the rest of his life.
The emergence of a second accuser this past weekend in a story published by The New Yorker — and a third, with even more incendiary claims, represented by Michael Avenatti (Stormy Daniels’s lawyer) — has seemingly derailed any hope for Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Or at least that is the impression you get if you are a faithful viewer of CNN and MSNBC, where it’s accepted wisdom that Kavanaugh was not only a drunken frat boy but a symbol of everything that made the Me Too movement necessary.
Among Republicans and conservatives, a different narrative has emerged. The initial accusation from Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when he was 17 was uncorroborated and denied by the accused, but it still cowed the GOP Senate majority into delaying hearings and a confirmation vote. But while the second and third accusers would seem to create a dynamic in which confirmation is impossible, the nature and the provenance of these charges have had the opposite effect on many Republicans.
The fact that Deborah Ramirez, the second accuser, could not initially be sure that Kavanaugh was involved in the incident, and that no one could corroborate it, didn’t merely undermine its credibility. It convinced many Republicans that the story was a politicized smear rather than a search for the truth about the judge’s past. That Avenatti — the semi-comical figure who seeks to parlay representation of a porn star into a presidential run — was behind the third accusation was not likely to engender any trust from the judge’s supporters. Many Republicans were initially willing to see this issue at least partly from the perspective of the Me Too debate. But the timing and the provenance of the charges against Kavanaugh may well have convinced a critical mass of Republicans — including their leaders — that this is a purely political question on which retreat or surrender is unthinkable.
If third accuser Julie Swetnik’s wild charges — that Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were part of a rape gang — are corroborated, that obviously will be the end of this fight. But if, as seems far more likely, they turn out to be just one more uncorroborated attack on Kavanaugh, they may only reinforce the GOP’s determination to press forward. That would set up a climactic day of hearings leading to a vote.
The obvious analogy here will be to the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings. Indeed, that is a theme that Kavanaugh’s opponents have pressed since the first accusation was publicized. But like the rest of the Kavanaugh saga, that means two different things to Democrats and Republicans. For Democrats, the Thomas’s 1991 confirmation illustrated the political establishment’s contempt for women. For Republicans, the attacks on Thomas were a smear campaign.
While the notion that the Judiciary Committee insulted Hill and that the Senate ignored her credible charges has become the dominant narrative about that chapter of history, that’s not how Americans viewed it at the time. Americans were glued to their television sets during those hearings, but their initial impressions were very different from how that confrontation is remembered today. A raft of opinion polls taken at the time showed most believed Thomas, whose dignified anger about what he called a “high-tech lynching” resonated with many viewers, including African-Americans. Indeed, were that not the case, his confirmation would have been impossible in a Democratic Senate, where he ultimately received twelve votes from the majority in addition to support from Republicans.
It was only after the fact, as the Hill–Thomas story was retold through the prism of liberal journalists — Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson wrote a book about the case, later made into an HBO movie — that the narrative shifted to one in which Hill became the undoubted brave heroine and Thomas was damned as an angry and guilty man.
As Kavanaugh’s detractors have been quick to point out, a lot has changed since 1991. The Me Too movement is the culmination of a shift in which sexual harassment is no longer tolerated and women have felt empowered to speak out.
What has also changed is that, thanks to the 24/7 news cycle and the increasingly polarized nature of the media, the Left’s ability to demonize a conservative opponent no longer takes years to accomplish. While many Americans may have listened to Hill and Thomas testify with an open mind, that won’t be the case with Kavanaugh and those asserting his guilt.
Clarence Thomas may have been confirmed with a cloud on his reputation that eventually grew into a conviction that he was guilty. Yet even before Kavanaugh testifies about these charges, all left-leaning Americans may be convinced that he is guilty as charged. Nothing he says will shake that conviction, and almost everything they hear and read from liberal outlets will deepen their belief that he is a sexual predator and a liar.
That will be a heavy burden for Kavanaugh to carry for the rest of his life, even if he winds up spending it as a Supreme Court justice. His heretofore pristine reputation is gone, and there doesn’t seem to be any way it can be retrieved. Just as bad is that, unlike Thomas, who has been reviled by the Left but has been left largely alone to pursue what is by now a formidable judicial legacy, Democrats won’t be done with Kavanaugh even if they fail to defeat him. He should be prepared for a future in which congressional Democrats appease their base by attempting to revive investigations into his alleged high-school and college misbehavior. President Trump knows a Democratic House will at some point try to impeach him, and the same will likely happen to Kavanaugh, whether he is on the Supreme Court or remains an appellate judge.
Is it possible that liberal Americans will take a more measured view of these proceedings once the political furor dies down? Right now it’s hard to imagine such a possibility, since the country appears to be living in a moment where Steve Bannon’s line about politics being warfare has become an obvious truth. One day, however, more serious scrutiny will be given to the charges against Kavanaugh than they have thus far received from the liberal media.
It will be a long wait for a moment when Americans can think of Kavanaugh and his accusers other than as partisan piñatas or as symbols of the Me Too movement. But if that day ever comes, one hopes Brett Kavanaugh will still be alive to see it.