Not to be outdone, the Women’s March organization tweeted that Kavanaugh’s nomination was a “death sentence” for women. Incidentally, the Women’s March receives funding from none other than Planned Parenthood, in addition to dozens of other left-wing nonprofit groups.
In a revealing slip, the Women’s March statement came with an introduction that read, “In response to Donald Trump’s nomination of XX [sic] to the Supreme Court of the United States, The Women’s March released the following statement . . .” Had they prepared the statement before they even knew the identity of the nominee? It sure looked that way. Just how coordinated was this rollout?
In a case of foreshadowing, NARAL Pro Choice America (short for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) appeared to get ahead of the script with a statement reading, “We’ll be DAMNED if we’re going to let five MEN—including some frat boy named Bret—strip us of our hard won bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.” Many people on the right focused on the hypocrisy of the fact that NARAL had no objection to Roe v. Wade originally being decided by an all-male Supreme Court. But the other interesting thing about this tweet is the reference to Kavanaugh as a “frat boy” with a frat boy name. That scene was slated for later in the show. How did NARAL already have the script?
Upping the Stakes
Having cast Kavanaugh as an extreme choice, Democrats next moved to connect him to their favorite narrative—the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. This messaging would deflect attention away from the challenging battleground of Kavanaugh’s unquestionably stellar judicial record and move back to the familiar territory of Russian collusion—a story line that had not yet lost its potency. At this point, they still believed with near-religious devotion that Mueller would ultimately indict the president. They were interested, not in determining whether Kavanaugh was qualified, but only in tying him to what they thought would become a slam-dunk case against the president. Democrats conflated accusations related to the president and his political team with reasons to question Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve on the Supreme Court.
Judiciary Committee Democrat and presidential hopeful Cory Booker, of New Jersey, sent a series of tweets before the hearings began in which he attempted to float the constitutionally suspect idea that a president who has been merely accused of something nefarious should not be permitted to make Supreme Court appointments. He tweeted:
The President of the United States was implicated in open court of a federal crime by his longtime personal lawyer. It’s increasingly urgent we stop Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh from getting a lifetime appointment to the highest court in our land.
Booker repeated the argument less than two hours later, trying again to sell the idea that allegations against a president were sufficient reason to keep him from doing his constitutional duty. Booker tweeted:
A president who is named by his longtime personal lawyer as an un-indicted co-conspirator should not be nominating Supreme Court judges for lifetime appointments.
On the opening day of Kavanaugh’s testimony, Judiciary Committee Democrat and presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar continued trying to tie Kavanaugh to the Mueller investigation in her opening statement, saying that Democrats’ duty in these hearings was to figure out whether Kavanaugh viewed the president as above the law and to delve into his view of “laws protecting the special counsel.” Once again, it was all about the Russia story.
A comparison of former senator Sessions’s statement at the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearing in 2009 with Feinstein’s statement at the Kavanaugh hearing shows just how politicized this latter hearing had become. Sessions criticized Sotomayor but based his criticism on the nominee’s record and views pertinent to her role as a Supreme Court justice. By contrast, Senator Feinstein’s statement at Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing lists a series of criticisms of President Trump.
Stalling and Distraction
Having established the narrative, the Democrats now merely have to distract the public from looking too closely. Believe it or not, the boring function of requesting documents can be weaponized to create quite a distraction. Document requests can be written in such a way that they build narratives that manipulate public opinion and contribute to the pointless circus surrounding false narratives. This tactic wasn’t unique to the Kavanaugh hearings, but the hearings are a textbook example of how the play is run. Pay close attention to how this particular tactic is deployed. As long as we have a Republican president in the White House, they’ll run this play again and again.
The trick with this gambit is making the public believe Senate Democrats actually cared about reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents on a nominee many had already pledged to oppose. The narrative depended on projecting a sincere desire to vet the man’s record, when the reality was a covert desire to delay the confirmation hearings.
The first step is the submission of a document request sufficiently broad that it will prove impossible to fill in any reasonable amount of time. The intent is not to review the resulting documents, but to rail about documents that are missing. If the document request is not broad enough, they run the risk of actually getting all the documents. Then they would have nothing to complain about.
In the case of Kavanaugh, Democrats wanted every document Kavanaugh had touched during his time as a White House staffer for the George W. Bush administration. In an unprecedented move, Chairman Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told the committee that Senator Feinstein demanded “the search of every email and every other document from every one of the hundreds of White House aides who came and went during the entire eight years of the Bush Administration.”
These documents would be difficult to get and of little value. Feinstein would have known many of these documents would be protected by executive privilege. All the better.
According to comments from Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas during the hearings, every single Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee had announced opposition to Kavanaugh before the very first hearing. Their minds were made up. No volume of documents was going to change them. It was all a sham.
By demanding an impossibly broad series of documents they knew would be both difficult to get and of little value, they had a pretext to do what they likely would have done anyway—refuse to meet with the nominee, a move that might conveniently also delay the hearings. Many of them did refuse, waiting until the cameras were on to ask Kavanaugh simple questions that a genuine seeker of facts could have ascertained long before the hearings.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer continued framing the Democrat narrative, gaslighting the public into thinking Kavanaugh was hiding his record.
In August, Schumer tweeted:
Republicans’ mad rush to hold this hearing after unilaterally deciding to block nearly all of Judge Kavanaugh’s records from public release is further evidence that they are hiding important information from the American people, and continues to raise the question, #WhatAreTheyHiding?
In a subsequent tweet, he wrote:
Republican efforts to make this the least transparent, most secretive Supreme Court nomination in history continue. They seem to be more frightened of this nominee’s record and history than any we’ve ever considered.