"Advise and consent" or "advice and consent"?

Which is it? I'm hearing "advice and consent" — the nouns — but I write "advise and consent" — the verbs. I prefer the sound of "the Senate's advise-and-consent role" (which I wrote here and here).

Kavanaugh, testifying, told the Senators, "You have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with search and destroy." He said "advice," even at the cost of losing parallelism. "Search and destroy" are verbs. If nouns and not verbs are called for, he should have said "You have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with searching and destruction."

A big reason to say "advice and consent" is that the Constitutional text — Article II, Section 2 s— ays:

[The President] with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint... Judges of the supreme Court....

So maybe text should trump grammar, but if the text should so dominate how we speak, let's start saying "Judges of the Supreme Court." None of this "Justices" foolery.

Anyway, lest you think I'm a stickler for grammar, that's not why I've been preferring "advise and consent." I figured out the grammar after the fact, and I'm ready to hear anyone's explanation that I'm wrong about the grammar. I'm saying "Advise and Consent" because I read the 1959 best-seller "Advise and Consent" and I know the 1962 Otto Preminger movie!





Here's Wikipedia's plot summary of the book, which I'm setting out because there's some resonance with the recent activity in the Senate (boldface added):

A U.S. President decides to replace his Secretary of State to promote rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Nominee Robert Leffingwell, a darling of liberals, is viewed by many conservative senators as an appeaser. Others, including the pivotal character of Senator Seabright (Seab) Cooley of South Carolina, have serious doubts about Leffingwell's character. The book tells the story of an up-and-down nomination process that most people fully expect to result in a quick approval of the controversial nominee.

But Cooley is not so easily defeated. He uncovers a minor bureaucrat named Gelman who testifies that twenty years earlier then-University of Chicago instructor Leffingwell invited Gelman to join a small Communist cell that included a fellow traveler who went by the pseudonym James Morton. After outright lies under oath by the nominee and vigorous cross examination by Leffingwell, Gelman is thoroughly discredited and deemed an unfit witness by the subcommittee and its charismatic chairman Utah Senator Brig Anderson. The subcommittee is ready to approve the nominee.

At this crucial moment in the story, the tenacious Senator Cooley dissects Gelman's testimony and discovers a way to identify James Morton. Cooley maneuvers Morton into confessing the truth of Gelman's assertions to Senator Anderson who subsequently re-opens the subcommittee's hearings, thus enraging the President. When the President's attempts to buy Anderson's cooperation fail he places enormous pressure on Majority Leader Robert Munson to entice Anderson into compliance. In a moment of great weakness that Munson will regret the rest of his life, Munson provides the President a photograph, acquired quite innocently by Munson, that betrays Anderson's brief wartime homosexual liaison.

Armed with the blackmail instrument he needs, the President ignores Anderson's proof of Leffingwell's treachery and plots to use the photo to gain Anderson's silence.The President plants the photo with leftist Senator Fred Van Ackerman, thinking he will never need to use it. But the President has underestimated Van Ackerman's treachery and misjudged Anderson's reaction should the truth come out. After a series of circumstances involving Anderson's secret being revealed to his wife, the Washington press corps, and several senators, Anderson kills himself. Anderson's death turns the majority of the Senate against the President and the Majority Leader. Anderson's suicide and the exposure of the truth about Leffingwell's lies regarding his communist past set in motion a chain reaction that ends several careers and ultimately rejects Leffingwell as a nominee to become Secretary of State.

You can add this book to your Kindle for $10. I think I read it because it was assigned reading in my high school history class in the late 1960s. I believe it's considered to be one of the best novels about the workings of American politics.

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The Senate is about to call the roll on Kavanaugh...

... just as soon as these protesters can be cleared out of the gallery.

AND: That's it! Kavanaugh has survived the ordeal. 50-48, confirmation.

I was touched that Senator Murkowski withdrew her "no" vote in deference to Senator Daines who wanted — needed — to be present at his daughter's wedding, so that he did not need to rush back in the middle of the day to register the "yes" vote that was his to give.

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"Our Supreme Court confirmation process has been in steady decline for more than thirty years. One can only hope that the Kavanaugh nomination is where the process has finally hit rock bottom."

From the Susan Collins speech in the Senate yesterday.

I read that and thought, no, this is not rock bottom. There's more ahead, lower places to sink. Why wouldn't there be? Maybe the 2018 elections will punish the Democratic Party for what it did with the Kavanaugh nomination, and everyone will realize they'd better never do anything like that again. But to say that is to say, there is a lower depth, and they've got to get there before they'll see they've got to enter recovery.

Notice the connection between "rock bottom" and "hope": "One can only hope... the process has finally hit rock bottom." "Rock bottom" means more than just: at least we can't sink any lower. It means a confrontation with reality that shocks you into changing your ways.

On this notion of "hitting rock bottom" — no, don't go to Urban Dictionary! — I found an article (in NY Magazine) by Jesse Singal, "The Tragic, Pseudoscientific Practice of Forcing Addicts to 'Hit Rock Bottom'":

One of the many impressive things about Maia Szalavitz’s new book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, is how effectively she debunks various myths about addiction and how to treat it. In fact, the book’s main argument is that many people are misreading what addiction is altogether: It should be seen not as a disease or a moral or personality shortcoming, but rather a learning disorder. “Addiction doesn’t just happen to people because they come across a particular chemical and begin taking it regularly,” she writes early on. Rather, “[i]t is learned and has a history rooted in their individual, social, and cultural developments.”

Or, as Szalavitz put it to the Daily Beast: “If you don’t learn that a drug helps you cope or make you feel good, you wouldn’t know what to crave. People fall in love with a substance or an activity, like gambling. Falling in love doesn’t harm your brain, but it does produce a unique type of learning that causes craving, alters choices and is really hard to forget.”...

As Szalavitz explains, the idea comes from “one of [Alcoholics Anonymous’s] foundational texts, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.” She pulls this excerpt:

Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.’s, the remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything for a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.’s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self centered in the extreme, doesn’t care for this prospect—unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.

Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation.

Since the first of the 12 steps an A.A. member must work through is to admit to “admit their powerlessness” over their addiction, it makes sense that the program would embrace a device like “rock bottom.” It’s only when your alcoholism (or other addiction) has gotten so bad you’ve been kicked out of your house by your spouse, have alienated all your friends, and are down to the last $50 in your checking account, that you’ll finally be able to realize just how far you’ve fallen — or something. Fully buying into the program requires desperation, in other words, and to “help” addicts get to that desperate point is to help them recover: “From this perspective,” writes Szalavitz, “the more punitively addicts are treated, the more likely they will be to recover; the lower they are made to fall, the more likely they will be to wake up and quit.”

Szalavitz explains that this is a totally pseudoscientific concept.... For decades, Szalavitz writes, programs like Phoenix House and Daytop used “sleep deprivation, food deprivation, isolation, attack therapy, sexual humiliation like dressing people in drag or in diapers, and other abusive tactics in an attempt to get addicts to realize they’d ‘hit bottom’ and must surrender.”...

[W]hen it comes to “hitting bottom” and so many of the other pseudoscientific approaches to fighting addiction, the actual goal — or part of it, at least — has always been to marginalize the addict, to set them apart and humiliate them. There’s a deep impulse to draw a clear, bold line between us, the healthy people, and them, the addicts. What clearer way to emphasize that divide than to cast them down into a rock-bottom pit, away from the rest of us?

American politics is shot through with us/them rhetoric and emotion right now. I don't know the way out, other than to resist it myself, as I continue my daily scribblings here. I like hope as much as the next person, but I don't think hitting rock bottom is the beginning of a path of recovery, and if I did, I'd need to believe that the Senate can't go any lower, and I don't think the musings of Susan Collins are going to turn anyone back.

It was a great speech, but why did we hear this from her so late in the process she purports to decry? Why is she only willing or capable of saying these things when she's looking back on the wreckage?

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Right now: the Senate is voting on cloture for the Kavanaugh confirmation.

Only about 30% of the Democrats seem to be there.

UPDATE: Manchin voted aye. Murkowski no. Collins and Flake voted yes. Stragglers coming in and voting.

UPDATE 2: 51-49. Ayes have it.

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Trust the FBI! The FBI is the expert authority! Bring in the FBI! FBI!! FBI!!... ... The FBI did it wrong!

So annoying.

They cried out over and over for the FBI. The FBI was called in because it was supposedly neutral and expert and the proper authority. Then, when they didn't like what they got, they immediately flipped to saying the FBI didn't do it right.

I've seen this kind of game play before, and I when I see it, I get out my old Russ Feingold video:



"The game's not over until we win!"

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"White House Finds No Support in FBI Report for Claims Against Kavanaugh/Senators are set to review the FBI’s findings Thursday."

Reports the Wall Street Journal, but I don't have a subscription, so let's move on to the NYT.

The NYT headline plays it so neutral — "White House Sends F.B.I. Interviews on Kavanaugh to Senate" — that I infer the FBI report supports Kavanaugh.

“The White House has received the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s supplemental background investigation into Judge Kavanaugh, and it is being transmitted to the Senate,” Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said in the statement, which was posted on Twitter. “This is the last addition to the most comprehensive review of a Supreme Court nominee in history, which includes extensive hearings, multiple committee interviews, over 1,200 questions for the record and over a half million pages of documents,” he added. “With this additional information, the White House is fully confident the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.”

The White House statement gave no further details about the material, but an official briefed on the F.B.I. review said the bureau contacted 10 people and interviewed nine of them. It was not clear why the 10th person was not interviewed. The White House concluded that the interviews did not corroborate sexual misconduct accusations against Judge Kavanaugh.

That last sentence meets my idea of journalism better than does the WSJ headline. We only know what the White House says, not what it really found. It could be lying. Maybe it found some support but chose to make an absolute statement.

Let's check WaPo: "In 2:30 a.m. tweets, White House says FBI report supports Kavanaugh confirmation." That's neutral, but with colorful facets — tweeting, early morning hours — that might seem to minimize the seriousness with which the White House assessed the report. A reader of headlines might picture Trump — impetuous Trump — tweeting again, but it was Raj Shah (the spokesman cited in the NYT article).

Also in WaPo  "Senate moves ahead on Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination with a procedural vote expected Friday."

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Thursday that it has received the FBI’s completed report on Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, as partisan rancor continued to grow over the scope of the investigation into sexual assault allegations that have endangered his confirmation.

In anticipation of the report’s arrival, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday night teed up a key vote to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination for Friday. Until that vote, senators will be rushing in and out of a secure facility at the Capitol to review the sensitive FBI report that the bureau has compiled, looking into allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh.

“There will be plenty of time for members to review and be briefed on this supplemental material before a Friday cloture vote,” McConnell said Wednesday night.

Good! The vote should indeed take place on Friday (unless there's something specific and substantial in the FBI report that justifies cautious delay). If there's no corroboration, I'm glad for Kavanaugh and his supporters. I'm sorry for private citizen Christine Blasey Ford if she believes what she said and that the Senate would keep her accusations private, and I'm extremely critical of the Senators who allowed her accusation to become public. They ought to have made their own attempt at corroboration — or did they try and fail? — and we should never have been subjected to this ordeal. It was a shameful display, painful for just about everyone and the pain isn't over yet.

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The cruelest anti-Kavanaugh argument yet.

From "How This Brutal Confirmation Process Could Shape Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice" (Time):

Even if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, he will carry scars from the brutal process to get him there.... [A]s he limps over the finish line... the question could soon shift from whether he will be confirmed to what kind of justice he will be.

Will Kavanaugh... dig in on the far right, radicalized by the experience? Will he swing the other way towards the middle, determined to improve his reputation among women? Or will he be able to move past it entirely?...

“What [Kavanaugh said at the hearing] was so explicitly partisan, so permanently political, so grudge-bearing, that I don’t see how somebody puts on a new robe, goes to a new court and forgets about that,” says John Q. Barrett, professor at St. John’s University School of Law. “The public will never forget about that. This guy, if he’s going to be confirmed, will now be heckled and protested and a pariah for the rest of his life for a segment of the country.”...

“It will raise questions about whether he could ever view any issue that touched on questions of sexual misconduct fairly, given what has happened,” says Melissa Murray, professor at New York University School of Law.

The linked article doesn't come out and make this argument, but it caused me to see it: Kavanaugh should be rejected because the confirmation experienced has ruined his mind. He's damaged now and can no longer think in the properly judicial way that was once within his capacity. A moderated version of that argument is that people will worry that he's now damaged and skewed and that's reason enough to keep him off the Court, to preserve the belief in the legitimacy of the institution.

I'm not making these arguments. I'm just seeing them and finding them horrendously perverse and cruel. Why not devise a confirmation process that is such an ordeal that it will drive out the very qualities we want in a judge? First, it would be torture, and second, you could never confirm a nominee. It's an inherently self-defeating process.

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The outside prosecutor Rachel Mitchell opines that the evidence would not justify bringing criminal charges and does not even meet a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.

According to the 5-page memo she sent to the Judiciary Committee Republicans, which WaPo got its hands on. The basis of the opinion is what a lot of Kavanaugh proponents have observed:

In the memo, Mitchell argued that Ford has not offered a consistent account of the alleged assault, including when exactly it occurred. Mitchell also noted that Ford did not identify Kavanaugh by name as her attacker in key pieces of evidence, including notes from sessions with her therapist — records that Ford’s lawyers declined to provide to the Senate Judiciary Committee....

[I]n the memo, Mitchell also argued that Ford “has no memory of key details of the night in question — details that could help corroborate her account,” nor has Ford given a consistent account of the alleged assault. Noting that Ford did not remember in what house the incident allegedly occurred, or how she left the gathering and got back home, Mitchell said “her inability to remember this detail raises significant questions.”

Mitchell also stressed that nobody who Ford has identified as having attended the gathering — including Mark Judge, Patrick Smyth and Leland (Ingham) Keyser — has been able to directly corroborate Ford’s allegations....

Mitchell notes that "There is no clear standard of proof for allegations made during the Senate’s confirmation process," but she is a prosecutor and she can only give an opinion from her point of view, from "the legal world, not the political world."

It is, of course, only her legal opinion, not The Legal Opinion in some grand sense, and she was chosen by the Republican Senators, who have their political goals and needs, even if she has none. And, really, we can't know if what she calls a legal opinion is really just that. She could be lying or unwittingly swayed by political or personal beliefs. We never know whether purported legal minds are really operating in some purely legal way (if such a thing is even possible).

The nominee, in the initial phase of the hearings, performed the usual theater of presenting himself as a judge who does nothing but decide cases according to the law. We in the audience of that theater may not really believe all that but think it's nevertheless close enough to get by, and it's only what every other nominee does, so we must suspend disbelief if we're going to have judges at all.

But when we see ourselves in this predicament, what can we do when we don't like the way the nominee leans? We could just accept the power of the President to make a nomination and demand that the Senate confirm as long as the nominee performs well in the usual theater of acting like a proper judge. The President won the election after all. That's a fact. But why defer there unless it's what you already want to do? Those who don't want a staunch conservative in the swing-vote-Kennedy seat want to resist. Trump didn't legitimately win, they might say — or: Obama didn't get deference when the Scalia seat opened up during his term.

Here's another thing that can be done when we don't like the leaning of a presidential nominee who adequately performs the Neutral Judge act in the initial political theater: Bring in something unrelated to his judicial work, something that makes him unacceptable, and allegations about something that happened in private long ago could do the trick.

But how good do these allegations need to be before they work? Rachel Mitchell can only say she has no idea. And if we are honest, shouldn't we admit that we're all drawn to the standard that gets us to the result we wanted before we ever heard about Christine Blasey Ford? I'd say no. There is one other factor: The short- and long-term interests of the 2 political parties. Republicans may fear that backing Kavanaugh now will hurt them. They might ruthlessly cut loose the damaged goods. Similarly, Democrats may see that voting Kavanaugh down will mollify their voters and energize conservatives in the midterm elections.

Maybe everyone's hoping that the FBI investigation will produce some very clear indications that Christine Blasey Ford is either lying or mistaken and the intensity of the partisan energy will dissipate. I don't think the FBI will save them. All the Senators have is one more week to worry about how to extricate themselves from this horrible trap they're caught in.

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Flake makes an ineffectual stand, but the Judiciary Committee votes to report the Kavanaugh nomination to the floor of the Senate.

The vote is on strict party lines. Senator Flake spoke just before the vote, and it seemed as though he was conditioning his vote on a one week delay, during which the FBI could do an investigation. But as his little speech wore on, it became apparent that he was only expressing the view that the Senate should delay its action for a week, but his committee vote would be yes. After the vote, it was made clear that everyone understood that the Committee has no power to dictate a delay to the full body of the Senate. The leadership of the Senate will decide how to go forward with the vote, and Senator Flake was only saying what he would need to feel "comfortable" voting for Kavanaugh in the full Senate.

ADDED: There's some discussion in the comments about my use of the word "ineffectual." I'll concede that Flake was effectual if the effect he meant to have was no effect. He was able to take a stand about how he felt about the importance of a one-week delay without causing the delay actually to occur. I do follow a general rule of thumb that people do what they want to do, and using that, I should say that Flake did exactly what he wanted, because he wanted the effect of no effect.

AND: Here's what confronted Flake as he made his way to the committee meeting this morning:

Women confront Sen. Jeff Flake after he says he'll vote yes to Kavanuagh: “That’s what you’re telling all women in America, that they don’t matter. They should just keep it to themselves because if they have told the truth you’re just going to help that man to power anyway.” pic.twitter.com/T7fSpyT69E

— CNN (@CNN) September 28, 2018

"You’re telling all women that they don’t matter — that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them, you’re going to ignore them... You’re just going to help that man to power anyway... That’s what you’re telling all of these women. That’s what you’re telling me right now. Look at me when I’m talking to you! You’re telling me that my assault doesn’t matter, that what happened to me doesn’t matter and that you’re going to let people who do these things into power! That’s what you’re telling me when you vote for him! Don’t look away from me! Look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me — that you’ll let people like that go into the highest court in the land!"

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The Committee vote on Kavanaugh is scheduled for noon Eastern Time.

I'm watching the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, voting along strict party lines. The Democrats moved to subpoena Mark Judge, and that failed. The Republicans voted to schedule the vote for noon, and that succeeded.

Now, some Democrats have walked out. Three I think. They've found microphones out in the hallway, and others remain in place, delivering statements. Right now, Leahy is repeating Dr. Ford's phrases — "indelible in the hippocampus" and "uproarious laughter."

His side has already lost, but it has not lost the midterm elections, and both parties have staunchly closed ranks for that upcoming battle.

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Let's watch the Kavanaugh hearing.

1. It's about to start. I'll update this post as we go.

2. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has taken her seat. She's nervously looking around, getting patted on the back. She's wearing a dark blue jacket over a dark blue top and has her hair done in a way that allows it to fall over her face and to need to be pushed back. Senator Grassley begins by apologizing to both Blasey and Kavanaugh for the incivility to which both have been subjected. He says he intends to preserve civility in the hearing and to make it "comfortable" for both witnesses.

3. Grassley criticizes Democrats for sitting on the allegations, allowing them to leak out belatedly, and failing to resolve matters in a bipartisan way. Democrats, he says, are to blame for the pain that "Dr. Ford" has suffered in recent days. He praises himself for doing he could to accommodate her. (I put "Dr. Ford" in quotes to indicate that's what she is being called here. I had switched to calling her "Blasey" after reading in the NYT that she preferred that name. From here on, I'll write "Dr. Ford" without quotes.)

4. Dianne Feinstein: "She wanted it confidential, and I held it confidential, up to a point..."

5. Feinstein casts an aspersion on Grassley: He didn't introduce Dr. Ford. Grassley, angered, interrupts to say that he didn't forget to introduce her. He was going to introduce her at the point when he was inviting her to begin speaking.

6. Still waiting for Feinstein to finish reading her intro statement. Dr. Ford seems to be struggling to keep her composure. After Feinstein, I presume we will hear Dr. Ford read this statement, already released to the press.

7. "I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified...." she begins, in a creaky voice.

8. Sorry, but I got an hour and a half behind. Will resume.

9. Now, I've watched the entire opening statement by Dr. Ford. She seemed very credible to me. Though she was reading, she seemed to be reliving a real, traumatic experience. It's hard to imagine that she could be infusing her speech with that kind of emotion phonily. Even an excellent actress would have difficulty affecting that kind of emotion.

10.  Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor brought in to ask questions for the Senators, receives 5 minutes of time from Senator Grassley. Mitchell's use of the time is awkward, because she begin with documents that Ford must read and comment on, and Ford takes her time and makes small corrections to the documents. Grassley interrupts to say his time is up, and shifts the proceedings forward to the next Senator, Dianne Feinstein,

11. Feinstein takes her turn and focuses on the difficulties Ford experienced as her name became known. This material bolsters Ford's credibility, especially to the extent that it seems that Ford knew how painful this exposure would be before she decided to go public. Feinstein's time runs out quickly and Mitchell gets another 5 minutes to continue where she left off.

12. Mitchell's approach enables Ford, just by being careful, to slow everything down. The time will run out. The day will end. Maybe Kavanaugh supporters wanted it to play out like that, but Ford is a credible person, and I think the Republicans chosen approach, including the use of Mitchell, will backfire on them, and Kavanaugh will not be confirmed. I'm saying this at 11:06 ET in my recording, that is, an hour before I'm writing this update.

13. At 11:13 ET, Ford speaks of the "indelible" memory of Kavanaugh and Judge laughing — "having fun at my expense." "I was underneath one of them, while the 2 laughed, 2 friends having a really good time with one another."

14. At 11:56 ET, during the questioning by Senator Whitehouse, I exclaim aloud: "The Democrats are winning by a lot here." Whitehouse is talking about the lack of an investigation.

15. Grassley gets angry and yells — about why there is no new investigation — but it feels so wrong that he's yelling in the presence of Dr. Ford. She's the allegedly traumatized victim — don't yell around her! The Republicans are either too bland — operating through Mitchell — or irksomely angry — through Grassley. Do they know how badly they are losing right now? I wonder how Brett Kavanaugh is doing.

16. I'm skipping ahead, looking to see if Kavanaugh's testimony has begun. It has not. I talk with Meade for a while about what Kavanaugh might say if he were asked if he is 100% certain that Ford is wrong when she says she's 100% certain that Brett Kavanaugh did what she remembers. Here's what I imagined Kavanaugh saying: I cannot be 100% certain. I know that I drank far too much on some occasions when I was an immature teenager, and though I've said that I don't remember ever suffering alcohol-induced amnesia, I cannot know for an absolute certainty that it never happened. Watching Dr. Ford testify has been a horrific experience for me. What if there is a blank, dark spot in my memory where drunken young Brett Kavanaugh did what Dr. Ford describes? I pray to God that's not true, but I cannot say 100% that it's not true, and if it is, I am so terribly sorry. I beg Dr. Ford's forgiveness. I hope for God's forgiveness. I hope that my life's work as a sober adult makes up for what I may have done all those years ago. I still believe I have devoted and useful service to give to my country, and I humbly submit myself to your vote, Senators. And I thank all of you for considering my case, and I want Dr. Ford to know that my heart goes out to her, and my heart goes out to every victim of sexual assault. Thank you.

17. I picture Trump watching the hearings with Ivanka. Somehow I imagine Ivanka reacting like me. I wonder what they are saying to each other. Remember that Trump said at his press conference yesterday that he would watch and judge Dr. Ford for himself, that he had an open mind about it, and he could "believe anything."

18. I've been listening to Kavanaugh for a long time without stopping to write anything. Let me quickly say that I'm finding his opening statement extremely powerful and persuasive.

19. It was a long day! Let me try to wrap up this post. I thought Kavanaugh did really well in his written statement, expressing strong outrage and real emotion. In the questioning, this demeanor sometimes felt too strong. He interrupted and shouted back and seemed to show some hate and contempt for some of the Senators. He said more than once that his family had been "destroyed," and yet his wife is his "rock." The rock is not destroyed.

20. This was the ultimate he said/she said. Both were tremendously strong and they told diametrically opposed stories. If I had to decide, I would not go by who's more likely to be telling the truth, but how everything we've heard weighs on the question whether or not to confirm. In view of everything we know about Kavanaugh, does he deserve confirmation even with the degree of doubt we have about something terrible he might have done when he was 17 (and a couple of other, much weaker allegations)? I suspect most people will end up in the same position they had on him anyway, because it's a matter of weighing. But when I think about how BK and CBF could be so far apart, I have 3 explanations: 1. BK has some alcohol blackout holes in his memory, and what CBF remembers is in one of them, 2. CBF has a false memory and really believes it (caused by some genuine trauma), 3. BK has no route but forward, and he knows he did it, but feels entitled to what he's worked all his life to attain. Since there's no way back to his old life, he must force his way through this obstacle. And he's barreling ahead to save his life and save his family. Cornered, he had to fight like hell, and that includes lying.

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"Anita Hill Says Kavanaugh Accuser Hearing 'Cannot Be Fair.'"

That's the headline at NPR (with audio). What's unfair about the Senate hearing? Hill says:

"In a real hearing and a real investigation, other witnesses would be called, including witnesses who could corroborate, witnesses who could explain the context of the experiences of Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh during that period in their lives, as well as experts on sexual harassment and sexual assault."

I think Hill is using the idea of corroboration very broadly, since there are no other witnesses for the incident Blasey alleges nor are there witnesses to her contemporaneous hearsay about the incident. Hill is, I think, talking about witnesses who heard Blasey tell her story after Kavanaugh became a Supreme Court prospect, decades later, as well as general experts on how to understand and interpret the behavior and testimony of those who tell of sexual victimization.

Hill goes on to reject the Senate as the investigator. The Senate, she says, is not a "neutral body." And, speaking of her own experience before the Senate Judiciary Committee, there is "an inherent power imbalance."

The Senate has the constitutional role to decide whether to confirm the nominee. I resist the idea that it "cannot be fair." It must be fair, and if it is not, it still makes the decision. It makes a lot of decisions, and many of them are unfair or believed to be unfair. Yell and scream about that. I guess that's what people, including Hill, are doing. The Senators are responding to the political pressure, and whatever they do, they'll be criticized. Delay or don't delay. Vote yes or no. And there are lots of elections in 6 weeks, so we the people who think the Senate is unfair/fair will have our say.

NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of posts about Kavanaugh this morning. Comments on this post should only be about this article. Here's my post warning you that a series of posts is forthcoming. If you want to draw attention to other articles, do so in the comments section for that post, not this one.

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