Watch Jim Jordan Annihilate a Lying Witness

Legal progressives really have a gift for coming up with attacks on judges and judicial nominees that don’t withstand elementary scrutiny. So it is with the Reverend Robert Schenck. As the latest issue of National Review summarized:

The New York Times tells us that the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former pro-life activist, has renounced his anti-abortion views and is “trying to re-establish himself now as a progressive evangelical leader.” And he is now saying that Justice Samuel Alito or Alito’s wife leaked in advance the outcome of the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision. According to Schenck, Gayle Wright, a donor to the nonprofit Schenck then oversaw, had a private dinner with the Alitos, after which she told him how the case would come out. We are skeptical: The Times could find no documentary evidence of a leak; Wright and Justice Alito have denied the report; and it is hard to see what difference it would have made. The claim seems calculated to obfuscate justified anger at the still-unattributed leak of the entire opinion in Dobbs. That leak led to protests and threats aimed at the justices and enabled defenders of legal abortion to rally earlier in the election cycle. Schenck also details an ethically dubious effort in which he was involved to influence the justices through social contacts, but even the Times concedes that “it is unclear if Mr. Schenck’s efforts had any impact on legal decisions.” Which raises the question of why the Times put it on the front page — or would, if we did not have a strong hunch about the answer.

House Democrats, running out of time to hold hearings aimed at delegitimizing the Supreme Court, decided to trot out Reverend Schenck, apparently without much due diligence. It went about as badly as you might guess. Jim Jordan, not a man to hold anything back, conducted a textbook cross-examination to demonstrate an invented story in Schenck’s book, and Schenck’s demeanor is that of a man who knows that he has been caught dead to rights and under oath:

For a lawyer who appreciates a good questioning and is regularly appalled by its rarity in Congress, this was fantastic viewing; but it is also painful to watch a witness who recognizes that his own entrails are about to be wrapped around his neck, and there’s really nothing he can do but stammer.