Most of us have seen the video of Senator Jeff Flake accosted in the elevator before the Senate Judiciary Committee vote to move the Kavanaugh nomination out of committee. Many of us have little doubt that it was staged. If nothing else, it provided cover for the actions of the spineless Senator.
Yesterday John Fund posted an article at the National Review which sheds some light on exactly what happened. Mr. Fund notes that the two women had to get past reporters and security officers in order to block a senators-only elevator in the U.S. Capitol. That should cause some concern about the safety of our legislators. Considering the 3017 attack on Republicans while they were playing softball, I would think the security at the Capitol would be better.
Let’s take a look at who those two women are. The article reports:
Ana Maria Archila and Maggie Gallagher were the two women who confronted Flake inside the elevator to express, as the New York Times put it, “a rising anger among many who feel that, too often, women’s voices are silenced and their pain ignored.”
Perhaps because the women expressed such raw emotion, few media outlets dug into their political activism. Archila is an executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy; she had spent the previous week in Washington engaged in protests against Kavanaugh. Gallagher is a 23-year-old activist with the group. The Center is a left-wing group that is heavily funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Indeed, as of 2014, the Open Society was one of the three largest donors to the group.
…Archila has another role beyond her duties as co–executive director of the Center. She is also a member of the national committee of the Working Families Party (WFP), a New York–based fringe political party that exercises outside influence in the Empire State because of the state’s unique law allowing candidates to run on more than one party line.
…The WFP was founded in 1998 by the leaders of ACORN, the now disbanded and disgraced group of community organizers for whom Barack Obama served as a lawyer, in Chicago in the 1990s.
The article concludes:
I have no doubt that the vast majority of protesters who want to stop Brett Kavanaugh are sincere and are merely exercising their constitutional rights. But imagine if two women had cornered a Democratic senator in an elevator and demanded an investigation of who had leaked to the media Christine Blasey Ford’s letter alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. (Senator Lindsey Graham said today that he planned to investigate the leak.) There would have been sputtering outrage in media circles, and reporters would have breathlessly hunted down any ties between the women and outside groups.
It’s a sign of media bias that the people from the well-funded groups behind the anti-Kavanaugh protests are described merely as “activists” and that their political motives and origins are largely unexplored.
The fact that these fringe-left groups are fighting so hard to stop Judge Kavanaugh convinces me that he needs to be confirmed. He represents a return to Constitutional Law that the political left does not want. He summed up his views when he reminded Congress that it was their job to make laws–not the Supreme Court’s. It is time to get back to the Representative Republic our Founding Fathers designed.