An injudicious man, unfit for judiciary

What America saw before the Senate Judiciary Committee was an injudicious man, an angry brat veering from fury to sniveling sobs, a judge so bereft of composure and proportion that it was difficult not to squirm. Brett Kavanaugh actually got teary over keeping a calendar because that’s what his dad did. His performance was right out of Norman Rockwell with a touch of “Mad Men.”

This is what you get from the unexamined life, a product of white male privilege so unadulterated that, until a couple of weeks ago, Kavanaugh never had to ask himself what might have lurked, and may still linger, behind the football, the basketball, the lifting weights, the workouts with a great high-school quarterback, the pro-golf tournaments with Dad, the rah-rah Renate-ribbing yearbook, the Yale fraternity, and the professed sexual abstinence until “many years” after high school. “Sometimes I had too many beers,” Kavanaugh said. “In some crowds, I was probably a little outwardly shy about my inexperience; tried to hide that,” Kavanaugh also said. Christine Blasey Ford, his steady accuser, made a persuasive case that, in the summer of 1982, she paid the price for the teenage aggression and insecurity linking those two avowals.

Kavanaugh swears under oath that he never “sexually assaulted anyone.” To entertain even the possibility of it would be to dismantle the entire edifice of his holier-than-thou life. He’s the all-American jock, the model only child. For God’s sake, he contingently, and a little presumptuously, hired four female law clerks to work with him at the Supreme Court, the first (prospective) justice to have “a group of all-women law clerks.” The words that resonate for me are the very words Kavanaugh used about his mother, Martha, the Maryland prosecutor and trial judge, whose trademark line was: “Use your common sense. What rings true? What rings false?”

For my common sense, Kavanaugh “doth protest too much, methinks.” Christine Blasey Ford rang true. I’ll take her “100 percent” over his. She felt no need to yell. Nor did she hide behind a shield of repetition. She did not succumb to pathos (“I may never be able to coach again”). She spoke with a deliberation, balance and humanity missing in the judge.

This was a job interview, not a criminal trial. The accusation against Kavanaugh — involving an incident 36 years ago in an undetermined location, uncorroborated by those present — would not currently stand up in a court of law. As a juror, with the available evidence, I could not say “beyond a reasonable doubt” that he committed this assault. (This, of course, is precisely the evidence that the FBI investigation that Kavanaugh evaded backing, and that Sen. Jeff Flake has now decisively endorsed, might produce.)

But Kavanaugh’s bleating about due process and presumption of innocence — his rage at a supposed “national disgrace” — misses the point. He failed the job interview. Who would want this spoiled man pieced together on a foundation of repressed anger and circumscribed privilege — this man who quite plausibly was the teenage drunk near-suffocating Christine Blasey Ford as he ground his body against hers, this man who may now have perjured himself — occupying a place for life on the highest court in the land?

I began this column by describing what America saw Thursday. But it’s not what all of America saw. Millions of Americans, including President Donald Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham, saw something else: a despicable Democratic Party conspiracy against an innocent and upstanding middle-aged judge, the latest victim, along with his family, of gender politics, the #MeToo revolution and an ascendant culture dictating that whatever women say must be true and whatever men say must be false.

The hearings were a Rorschach test for America’s tribes. They saw what they wanted to see. For Kavanaugh’s supporters, his rage was as good a primal scream for threatened white male privilege as may be imagined. No wonder Trump loved it. A tribal confrontation is not conducive to the establishment of truth. That’s why the FBI investigation is important. Despite Trump’s best efforts to trivialize the everyday lie, facts matter. Addressing the Democrats on the committee, Graham fumed:

“You want this seat? I hope you never get it.” But of course, as Democrats will never forget, Republicans stole a seat. Remember Merrick Garland? There is something so hypocritical in Republican outrage that it would be comical if the issue were not so grave. It’s hard to argue that America’s tribal democracy is not dysfunctional these days, but still the United States is a democracy.

Flake’s 11th-hour decision to demand a week’s delay before a full Senate vote to allow the FBI investigation — a decision driven by conscience over Republican Party allegiance — is a small act of honor in a tawdry time. It can take a while for democracies to zigzag toward the truth. Kavanaugh has revealed himself to be a man without measure, capable of frenzy, full of conspiratorial venom against Democrats. Justice would not be served by his presence on the Supreme Court.