Conservatives also began explaining the seriousness of the battle to senators. They had a simple choice, wrote Sean Davis of The Federalist: stand up to the smear campaign or lose their majority in the Senate. “The mood among GOP voters right now is unmistakable: they are out for blood,” he wrote. “If Kavanaugh is confirmed, they’ll eagerly turn out in November to defeat Democrats and their lies. But if Kavanaugh is jettisoned, they’ll gleefully sit back and let the GOP get destroyed in November,” he wrote.45 As one of Grassley’s aides put it, Kavanaugh had become “too big to fail.”
The media were lined up against Kavanaugh; left-wing activists, having drawn blood, were newly energized; and Republican senators were wobbling—Kavanaugh needed help. Some of that came from outside organizations.
On the day Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, Penny Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America (CWA), announced, “We plan to devote considerable resources to this effort, and we expect to win. Our happy warrior/activist ladies relish the fight and shine in these historic moments.”46
Since the nomination of Robert Bork, CWA, with its half-million members, thirty-five state directors, four hundred chapters, and forty-two college chapters, had made the confirmation of Supreme Court justices a priority in its grassroots political work. The group’s core issues were “sanctity of life, defense of family, education, religious liberty, national sovereignty, sexual exploitation, and support for Israel,” and the Supreme Court played a role in almost all of them.
The conservative CWA was not a rubber stamp for Republican nominees, however, having come out against Harriet Miers. But Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees had enabled the group to vet the names and be prepared to step up immediately when one of them was chosen. CWA’s prompt endorsement was enormously helpful for Kavanaugh’s cause. The American Family Association and other conservative organizations had raised objections. CWA made plans for a “Women for Kavanaugh” bus tour in August in Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, Alabama, Florida, and West Virginia. Trump had carried all these states in 2016 and most of them had competitive Senate races in 2018.
The midterms loomed large for both sides in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle. Republicans held a razor-thin majority in the Senate. Donald Trump’s improbable victory had roiled the political classes. Democrats had picked up two Senate seats in 2016 and another one in a special election the following year. The numbers in 2018 were favorable for the Republicans—of the thirty-five seats in the election, twenty-six were held by Democrats—but this would be Americans’ first chance to register their opposition to Trump at the polls, and surveys showed many Democrats and disenchanted Republicans were eager to do so. The Republican base, by contrast, wasn’t eager to vote in the midterms, particularly for members of Congress, who had accomplished little while in power and weren’t seen as supportive enough of Trump.
CWA had shown up for the first round of hearings and for every business meeting held by the Judiciary Committee. Their women had been praying for senators, as they had done in previous confirmation battles. While the media focused on the often-colorful liberal activists, the polite and modest women of CWA sat quietly in the hearing rooms or gathered in small groups to pray in Senate buildings. The Kavanaugh team, afraid of unduly politicizing the confirmation process, had discouraged CWA from busing in women from out of town for the initial hearings, and it was too late to make such plans for the second set of hearings.
CWA was not surprised when the allegation against Kavanaugh came out. The day of Kennedy’s retirement, Nance had told colleagues in a staff meeting as well as contacts at the White House that the nominee, whoever he was, would face an allegation of sexual assault, probably from his distant past, such as high school. Nance didn’t take sexual assault lightly. She had spoken publicly about the sexual assault and attempted rape she endured when pregnant with her daughter. But she knew that the political incentives were aligned to weaponize #MeToo allegations. One of the reasons she preferred Amy Coney Barrett for the nomination was that it would be more difficult to make a #MeToo accusation against her.
The women of CWA analyzed the allegation and Kavanaugh’s response and concluded that there was no reason to drop their support of the nominee. It was a risky move for a women’s group, and they worried about their credibility if they were found to have made the wrong decision. They meditated on the biblical story of Jeremiah, who was falsely accused of treason yet trusted in God. When they decided to stick with Kavanaugh, they found that their members rushed to support him. And they added new prayer intentions: the protesters who were testifying to their own pain and brokenness and the women around the world who are victims of abuse and sex trafficking.
Like CWA, Tea Party Patriots (TPP) had been working to change the Senate, with judicial appointments in mind, well before the current vacancy. Though they were not shy about promoting outsiders and rebels in the primaries, they often endorsed and assisted Republicans they had opposed in the primaries because of the overriding importance of judges. They may not have agreed with those candidates on every issue, but they knew that a Democratic senator was a guaranteed vote for Obama’s judges or, later, against Trump’s.
That decision originated among the membership, not the leaders. As much as they hated “establishment” politicians, these Tea Partiers demonstrated more sophistication than they ordinarily get credit for. They appreciate the importance of the courts because they know their other goals all depend on having judges committed to the rule of law.
TPP had been active during Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation process, engaging in its signature brand of person-to-person outreach to build support. They hosted hundreds of house parties, to which activists could invite their friends to learn about Gorsuch and then take some form of action—from writing or calling their senators and writing letters to the editor to collecting signatures on petitions and hand-delivering them to a local senator’s office. For Kavanaugh’s nomination there wasn’t time to organize house parties, but they distributed “how-to” guides to their members, tapping into people’s excitement about having specific tasks they could carry out.
When the allegations against Kavanaugh broke, TPP evaluated the evidence and the statements on both sides before proceeding. They had painful experience of unfounded allegations’ being deployed as political weapons, as when TPP was blamed for a mass shooting perpetrated by someone completely unaffiliated with the group. “I know how it feels to be accused of something that I did not do and could imagine what Brett Kavanaugh would be thinking and feeling,” remarked Jenny Beth Martin, the group’s co-founder. Beyond the “he said–she said,” all the evidence supported Kavanaugh, and that was enough for their decision.
Susan B. Anthony List (SBA), an organization that supports pro-life politicians, was another group that took a pause after the allegations broke. Senate races were important to them because of the decisive role of judges in abortion policy. They had also switched from opposing Trump to enthusiastically supporting him when he signed—and even added to—their pro-life pledge. That support meant engaging with nearly 1.5 million people in the 2016 campaign, a number that went up to 2.7 million for the 2018 campaign. After evaluating the evidence, SBA resumed its efforts on behalf of Kavanaugh in states with Senate seats in play, sending more than one thousand people to knock on doors by mid-September. The middle-aged women who account for most of SBA’s local directors were outraged at the presumption of Kavanaugh’s guilt, and they saw that in key states such as Missouri there was actually an increase in support for Kavanaugh following the allegations.