KAVANAUGH’S CREDIBILITY & INTEGRITY ARE NOW AT ISSUE

…Judge Brett Kavanaugh

As a Supreme Court nominee, Kavanaugh has had the behavior of an adolescent

I had seriously hoped that I would not need to write anything further about Judge Kavanaugh and his accuser, Dr. Christine Ford.

But the issue is not that it matters how many beers Brett Kavanaugh drank in High School or college.  And do we really care what he wrote in his and others year book?

The reality is that even those are trivial questions, the real issue is what the supreme court nominee says about it now, and what that says about him as a qualified nominee.

The point is that a Supreme Court nominee should be judged on his legal abilities and especially on his or her judicial temperament. 

The way Judge Kavanaugh’s recent interview attacked the Democrats, the Clinton's and those senators that had questioned him, he displayed the temperament of a highly partisan individual.  If this was meant to show him as an independent, impartial individual, well it truly failed.  He, from my P.O.V., totally disqualified himself from being on the highest court in the land.

It is understandable that Kavanaugh and his supporters have scoffed at the recent focus on the judge’s adolescent behavior, but as a nominee, he has unfortunately had the behavior of an adolescent.

As I said, what Kavanaugh says from now on, will tell us what that says about him as a person.

As the Senate and the country deal with the difficulty of assessing the decades-old allegations against Kavanaugh, his current conduct and present-day statements are becoming a legitimate, indeed unavoidable, element of the confirmation debate.

To the point that Kavanaugh has misrepresented or has been otherwise dishonest in his testimony and other public statements, that bears on the central question of his believability.  In this he-said/she-said situation, it is totally relevant if he has said numerous things that have turned out to be untrue.

Even if you put aside how it might help us decide what to make of the sexual assault allegations, the matter of Kavanaugh’s honesty is an issue in and of itself.

In the beginning of his interview and his angry eruption, he sounded less like a judge, and more like an aggrieved total partisan.  For me, this goes to the core of Kavanaugh’s lack of fitness. On this point, it is not helpful to Kavanaugh’s case that he arrived for a second turn at the witness table with pre-existing questions about his truthfulness.

The definitions of what the words in his year book such as “Boof” or “Devil’s Triangle” mean, such as does “Boof” mean “flatulence” or “having sex”, and does “Devils Triangle” mean “a drinking game” or a “sexual act”?  Now, a senator should care less about the real meaning of these words, but for Kavenaugh to not be forthcoming with the truth about these words in his year book, it does say something about the judge.

As Brett Kavanaugh faces a sexual misconduct allegation, The Post’s columnist Ruth Marcus asked, “Who's responsible for the burden of proof?”  Or by Kavanaugh’s sworn testimony that the yearbook phrase “Renate Alumnius” was “clumsily used to show affection, to show she was one of us, but it was misrepresented by a dirty-minded media circus.”  That surely doesn’t sound much like an independent Supreme Court nominee.

That statement insulted the questioner’s intelligence, and it raises fundamental questions of trustworthiness, when Kavanaugh could just as easily have said something like: “It was dumb and offensive, and I am deeply sorry.”

The stories of Kavanaugh’s high school and college drinking behavior are even more disturbing. The drinking is immaterial.  No one should care if young Kavanaugh was a stumbling or even belligerent drunk so long as there is “no evidence that the adult Kavanaugh suffers from a drinking problem today”.

But if Kavanaugh at Georgetown Prep or Yale Law, drank not just to excess but to the point of abusiveness and/or his lack of remembering, that lends some credence to the damning accounts of Dr. Ford and Deborah Ramirez, the sex act accusers.  Kavanaugh’s evident desire to play down his drinking by saying: “Sometimes I had too many beers,” as he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.  That may be totally true, but it is not very dignifying.

Being totally candid would have served the nominee better than his aggressiveness and his “how-much-did-you-drink-Senator?” response.  That has become even more clear with the emergence of Yale classmates’ depictions of Kavanaugh as “a very sloppy drunk” with “an angry streak that came out when he was drinking,” and with the revelation of a bar fight that allegedly started with Kavanaugh throwing a drink in a patron’s face and ended with the police being called.

Kavanaugh’s statements do not need to be put into the language of perjury, as no one is going to prosecute Kavanaugh over his disputed recollections.

Some GOP senators, are already determined to see Kavanaugh confirmed, and they will dismiss all of this as partisan distraction. For others, it will serve as confirmation of another excuse for that of which they are already convinced: that Kavanaugh should be defeated.

But for the undecided anguished few, the choice is getting harder, not easier. Kavanaugh’s credibility and integrity are now fairly at issue.

The nominee put himself there and in doing so, made his situation far more precarious than it needed to be.

Copyright G. Ater  2018