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\n1. Innocent Until Proven Guilty<\/b><\/p>\n
\n1. Innocent Until Proven Guilty<\/b><\/p>\n
This began mainly with Lindsey Graham, who, before Thursday\u2019s hearings, reminded us of his own experience as a defense attorney. The rebuttal, of course, is that Kavanaugh is not on trial\u2014the committee\u2019s evaluation is founded upon an entirely different and more abstract set of principles. The Senate Judiciary Committee has full discretion to vote however they see fit; the Constitution provides no qualifications for SCOTUS justices and the process has nothing to do with rules of evidence or other elements of criminal investigations.<\/p>\n
2. No Proof<\/b> <\/p>\n
Commenters have been apoplectically insisting on this, but it misses the point. There may in fact be no real way of determining beyond a reasonable doubt what happened in that room, but the operative question is the dishonesty and lack of character and judgment with which Kavanaugh has defended himself in the present time<\/i>, and what this behavior reveals about his temperament and judgment (obviously important for a judge). And, there\u2019s plenty<\/i> of proof, not just that he lied repeatedly to the Committee, but specifically about the evening in question. (Not to mention the existence at least one eyewitness who has yet to testify under oath, whose appearance before the Committee would obviously address a need for \u201cproof.\u201d) <\/p>\n
3. Ford Can\u2019t Remember<\/b><\/p>\n
(Including variations: Ford was coached; the therapists have planted the memories; she\u2019s exaggerating etc.) This might work were the witness not a professor of psychology<\/i> (at Palo Alto University) and a research psychologist <\/i>at the Stanford University School of Medicine, fully willing and able to present her memories within a rock-solid academic framework. The well-founded psychological studies cited by Ford and others demonstrate that traumas of this kind are well-remembered despite delays in their being reported.<\/p>\n
4. It\u2019s a Liberal Conspiracy<\/b><\/p>\n
Clearly the most widespread and deep-rooted\u2014and angriest\u2014meme in use within the Senate chamber and in remarks to reporters. The problem is the timeline (see below): for Ford to have been \u201cput up to this,\u201d as a pawn in a devilish larger game (with Dianne Feinstein and her infamous letter in the Linda Tripp r\u00f4le), we would have known about all of this long in advance of the hearings; it\u2019s hardly a tactical advantage to wait until the final week of deliberations.<\/p>\n
5. It\u2019s Bad For Boys<\/b><\/p>\n
Donald Trump Jr. has, of course, dived headfirst into this one: How are we supposed to protect our male progeny in a world where \u201cany man\u201d may be \u201cdestroyed\u201d by accusations of rape? [Trump Jr.\u2019s tweet may be the best example of this one<\/i>.] Only between 2% and 10% of rape reports are determined to be false, and statistics regarding more general harassment claims are not much different.<\/p>\n
6. He Was a Kid<\/b><\/p>\n
The \u201cyouthful indiscretion\u201d argument was successfully used by George W. Bush\u2019s father and other supporters in 2000 to defend against recently-unearthed reports of the then-candidate\u2019s 1976 DUI guilty plea (when the \u201cyouth\u201d was thirty). The counterargument, of course, is Trayvon Martin, Trump-era detainees, and countless other American who are forced to sacrifice everything up to and including their lives in payment for their behavior as teenagers.<\/p>\n
7. It Was a Long Time Ago<\/b><\/p>\n
Variation on #6, adjusted to address changing mor\u00e9s in society; John Hughes movies etc. (and men\u2019s sarcastic ripostes about how \u201cthese days\u201d they\u2019re \u201cnot allowed\u201d to make certain remarks to women; grab them etc.). This gets into the broader arguments of the entire #metoo movement, and, therefore, into deep waters, but it\u2019s nevertheless easy to point out that Kavanaugh\u2019s alleged actions that night would be criminal in any decade\u2014and, according to a former Deputy Attorney General of Maryland (where the alleged attack occurred), \u201cattempting a sexual assault with the aid of another person counts as attempted first-degree rape, just as restricting a victim\u2019s breathing to stop her from shouting for help could fairly qualify as first-degree assault. Both are felonies with no statute of limitations in Maryland.”<\/p>\n
8. He\u2019s Been an Outstanding Citizen\/Lawyer Ever Since<\/b><\/p>\n
Maybe, if you don\u2019t look too hard at the r\u00f4les he played, not just in Ken Starr\u2019s odious Whitewater\/Lewinski impeachment proceedings, but during the 2000 Florida recount (and its famous \u201cBrooks Brothers Riot\u201d). In other words, Kavanaugh is a past master at precisely the sort of formalized smear campaign\/character assassination that he’s insisting he\u2019s the victim of, today.<\/p>\n
9. This Was Sprung on Senators at the Last Minute<\/b><\/p>\n
The timeline was dictated by Ford\u2019s wish to remain anonymous\u2014her original complaints came to Senator Feinstein long before Kavanaugh was even the final White House choice as nominee. (All of this was exhaustively covered in her testimony.)<\/p>\n
10. We\u2019re Politicizing It<\/b><\/p>\n
This is the most directly philosophical and abstract argument for Kavanaugh\u2019s confirmation and the hardest to refute, since the question of how one does or not \u201cpoliticize\u201d what\u2019s been tacitly understood to be an implicitly political process since at least the days of Oliver Wendell Holmes remains unclear. The low-hanging-fruit rebuttal is, of course, the Republican-controlled Senate\u2019s refusal to confirm Merrick Garland, which is clearly the most blatantly political treatment of a SCOTUS nominee in history\u2014Robert Bork\u2019s insistence that his 1987 rejection was \u201cpolitical\u201d did not get taken seriously at the time (Senator John Warner\u2019s Senate-floor speech declaring President Reagan’s statement that the opposition to Judge Bork was a ”lynch mob” was ”unbecoming the office of the Presidency\u201d is, of course, quaint by Trump-era standards).<\/p>\n
Bonus Argument: I Don\u2019t Care; I Just Want Him On The Court<\/b><\/p>\n
As the proceedings continue to drag out, this increasingly frantic position gains ground, being impulsively blurted out more and more\u2014but the rebuttal is, as with #10, philosophical. Expediency, hypocrisy, realpolitik<\/i> and moral\/ethical dilemmae are of course no strangers to politics, but maybe the best response to this one is simply to let it stand, as an emblematic symbol of just how far the principles of American governance have fallen in this dark and turbulent era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. Innocent Until Proven Guilty This began mainly with Lindsey Graham, who, before Thursday\u2019s hearings, reminded us of his own experience as a defense attorney. The rebuttal, of course, is that Kavanaugh is not on trial\u2014the committee\u2019s evaluation is founded upon an entirely different and more abstract set of principles. The Senate Judiciary Committee has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44556,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44554"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44554"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44561,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44554\/revisions\/44561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}