Unfortunately for Feinstein, the Kavanaugh hearings would pit her stated principles against her partisan interests. To disrupt the Kavanaugh nomination, Feinstein and her Democrat colleagues would have to cast off long-standing traditions and violate some of their own deeply held beliefs. They would do it. This confirmation hearing would be like nothing that had come before it. No one would contest that congressional hearings are inherently political. But this time Democrats would have to cross lines they had never crossed before.
Having lost the presidency, Democrats in July 2017 were now facing a second existential threat as President Donald Trump would have the opportunity to replace retiring swing justice Anthony Kennedy. A qualified and energetic young conservative could occupy that seat for three decades. Having gambled and lost on the president’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, Democrats were now without the filibuster that would have given them the votes to block Kennedy’s replacement. They needed to do something drastic. They needed a narrative that would be disqualifying. Without a valid reason to reject the president’s nominee, they would have to create one.
The Kavanaugh Spectacle
The coordinated attempt to commit reputational murder for political gain is becoming a favorite trope of the left. The trope is effective, but only if people believe it. We should familiarize ourselves with the basic components of this screenplay, because we’ll be seeing a lot more of it now that House committee gavels are held by Democrats. If we are to push back against the false narratives, we have to be able to spot them quickly and expose them fully.
That segment of the Democrat Party that is unmoored from truth is particularly adept at the smoke-and-mirrors game. Not being limited by the constraints of truth, these people project false narratives in hopes of producing short-term gains for their party, sometimes at the expense of third parties whose lives are never the same afterward.
You can often distinguish the fictional narratives from legitimate ones by the extent to which they conform to a pattern. If a story is shaping up like it’s straight out of Hollywood, you know it’s probably fake.
Conflict is accentuated, with clear markers indicating who is on the right side. Plotlines are sensational enough to capture attention. A boring character is imbued with fictional characteristics that cast him as a hero or a villain. Plot developments are timed just right to wow the audience.
Stories like the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and the Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault narrative conveniently match the story arc that is most compelling to audiences, but do so at the expense of the truth. It’s easier than ever to dismiss truth and the rule of law when you’re in the grip of anti-Trump hysteria.
The Kavanaugh hearings showcase that hysteria at its apex. Just as it had at my town hall meeting, the opposition followed a prepared playbook. It goes like this.
The Media Machine: Democrat allies deliver a highly choreographed and coordinated rollout.
Upping the Stakes: Senate Democrats open with attempts to tie the nomination to their ongoing collusion investigation.
Stalling and Distraction: Democrats seek to obscure their specious narrative with pointless procedural posturing, followed by a race to amp up the drama.
Moving the Goalposts: Once the narrative is finally exposed, there’s the age-old tactic of moving the goalposts at the finish line. It’s a high-stakes game of Calvinball.
We saw many of these same elements as the Mueller investigation into Russian collusion drew to a conclusion. As long as the pattern provides short-term political gains, it doesn’t have to be true to be useful. The public provides those short-term gains when we uncritically accept the narratives being fed to us.
The Media Machine
The Kavanaugh narrative started with a plotline scripted long before the nominee was ever chosen.
Under the direction of seasoned veteran senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrats planned to create a narrative that the nominee (whoever it was) would be unfit, unqualified, and unacceptable for the Supreme Court. If the public didn’t buy it, they would come up with some sort of dramatic disqualifying event from the person’s past that would cause most Americans to unite against the nominee. The clock would run out on the 2018 midterms, the Democrats would take the House and Senate in a landslide, and the Supreme Court seat would be held open until 2020, when a presumably Democratic president would nominate a liberal judge to the Court, saving mankind and restoring balance to the universe. For Democrats, that would have been the best-case scenario.
In retrospect, the hearings did not turn out according to plan. Kavanaugh’s confirmation was not blocked, the narrative Democrats spun did not turn out to be credible, and at least one incumbent Senate Democrat believed the hearings cost the party her seat in the 2018 midterms. There were two problems: First, the nominee was miscast. Democrats were hoping for a radical extremist, a misogynist, or an inexperienced partisan. Kavanaugh was demonstrably none of those. Second, Democrats would inevitably do what people always do when not constrained by truth: overreach.
On cue, the July 9, 2018, announcement of Kavanaugh’s nomination triggered the first scene of any Supreme Court battle. This is the part where the nominee is cast as an extremist. Despite characterizations of being the moderate pick among those on the short list, Kavanaugh was immediately demonized as a radical. Never mind that just two days before the July 9 nomination, the Hill newspaper reported that Kavanaugh was facing pushback from social conservatives for being too moderate. According to the reporting, he would likely need Democrat votes to get confirmed. An opinion piece appearing in the New York Times the day of the nomination even made a liberal’s case for Brett Kavanaugh.
Undaunted by those facts, Senate Democrats and their allies pressed on with a script that sounded as though it had been designed with another nominee in mind. Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York rolled out the strategy with a July 10 floor speech setting out all the talking points—that Kavanaugh was “way out of the mainstream,” believed “the president doesn’t need to follow the law,” and had a long paper trail that would require lots of time for review.
The staging for this phase of the performance is well documented. A September 4 Politico story reported on a Democratic strategy session pitting the Senate Judiciary Committee’s “aggressive, often younger senators” against “veterans who prefer to adhere to the chamber’s norms.” Those norms would be not only challenged but in fact sacrificed in the days to come.
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders tweeted (without evidence, as Democrats like to say), “President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be a rubber-stamp for an extreme, right-wing agenda pushed by corporations and billionaires. We must mobilize the American people to defeat Trump’s right-wing, reactionary nominee.” Connecticut’s Senator Chris Murphy chimed in to call Kavanaugh a “Second Amendment radical” who was “way out of the judicial mainstream” and “far to the right of even late Justice [Antonin] Scalia.” The hyperbole didn’t end there.
Betting that most Americans were unaware of Kavanaugh’s mainstream record, the Senate’s outside allies were even more strident. Former Virginia governor and Hillary Clinton confidant Terry McAuliffe went so far as to make the outlandish claim that Kavanaugh’s nomination would “threaten the lives of millions of Americans”—a claim that would be uncritically repeated by many others, including student groups at Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Yale University.