Underneath The Borking

What is being done to Judge Kavanaugh is a borking. It’s an eleventh-hour attempt to make sure he never sits on the Supreme Court. It is based on a thirty-some-year-old charge that cannot be substantiated or disproved. On an interesting side note, a classmate at one point posted on Facebook that the incident happened and was the talk of the school for days. Unfortunately, the incident evidently happened in the summer when school was not in session. One thing everyone needs to consider is whether or not they want to live in a country where when you are up for a promotion a person can come out of the woodwork and deny you that promotion based on an unsubstantiated claim that you did something inappropriate in high school. The other thing to consider is patterns. Is there a pattern of abuse in Judge Kavanaugh’s life? Is the pattern there that was there with Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and some other public figures? If there is a pattern, this charge needs to be examined more closely. If not, it is time to move on and understand that the charge can be neither proven or disproven and therefore must be dismissed.

Yesterday The New York Post posted an editorial about the circus this nomination process has become.

The editorial states:

It didn’t have to be this way.

Feinstein didn’t have to leak the anonymous accusation to the press, contrary to Ford’s wishes. Or she could have urged Ford to go public early, giving both parties enough time to be heard.

Even now, Feinstein and her colleagues could back a committee hearing, without which Kavan­augh has no realistic opportunity for mounting a defense. Kavan­augh is a judge and a political operator. But he ‘s also a father and husband.

But no. Senate Dems have settled on the ugliest means available, even by the standards of the body that added the verb “Borking” to our political vocabulary. The question is: Why have Republican high-court nominations brought out the worst from the left, going back to the Ronald Reagan era?

The short answer is that liberals fear their major cultural victories of the past half-century are democratically illegitimate. Not a single one was won at the ballot box, going back to the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold decision, which recognized a constitutional right to contraceptives. From abortion to gay marriage, plus a host of less titillating issues, modern liberalism has lived by the Court. And liberals fear their cause will die by the Court.

Unless, that is, they block conservative encroachments into the judiciary by all means necessary. Hence, Borking and Clarence Thomas-ing. And hence, too, the naked slandering of Mitt Romney in the course of the 2012 presidential campaign, to forestall his shifting the Court to the right.

I wish I could say that the way out of this impasse is for the right to double down on the gentle conservatism represented by Romney, the Bush dynasty, and the late John McCain. Perhaps that is the right course in the long term. But for now, it is imperative for the health of American democracy to resist the liberal ruthlessness that is on display in the halls of the Senate.

The verb “to Kavanaugh” must not be permitted to enter our lexicon, lest the step to unfreedom become irrevocable.

This is where we are. The only way out is to confirm Judge Kavanaugh so that this does not happen again. The last-minute sex accusation did not work on Clarence Thomas and it should not work on Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe after two strike outs, the Democrats will stop using this technique.