Kavanaugh Conservatives vs. Booker Democrats

Christopher Caldwell - is a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard.

But it was a Kafkaesque situation for Kavanaugh: Since Ford could not (or would not) say when and where the incident took place, it was literally impossible for him to exonerate himself conclusively. “Doubts” had been “raised.” Raised by people with a desperate political interest in raising them, it is true. But those who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee are no more immune than ordinary human beings to the lazy-minded heuristic that when accounts clash, the truth must lie “somewhere in the middle.” When Ford finished testifying on Thursday morning, Kavanaugh’s nomination appeared to be finished.

The moment Kavanaugh began to speak, he broke that logic. The senators were not adjudicating a difference of recollections. They were not adjudicating at all. They were engaged in a “grotesque and coordinated character assassination . . . a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” Now the middle ground was gone, and a new understanding was in place: Whether Ford was lying or misremembering, what was happening was not a hearing but a show trial. ...

Kavanaugh’s foes were comfortable voting against him on the basis of temperament. The question is not “whether he’s innocent or guilty,” said Cory Booker. “I am emphatically not saying that Kavanaugh did what Ford says he did,” says Wittes. “The evidence is not within 100 yards of adequate to convict him. But whether he did it is not the question at hand.”

What is that supposed to mean? This amounted to saying that Brett Kavanaugh lacks a “judicial temperament” because he objected to being summarily executed following a show trial. If you permit the criteria of culpability to shift, then you have the circular logic typical of totalitarian regimes. Just as there are people famous-for-being-famous, now there are people guilty-of-being-accused.