Reality Check 101

As of Friday, the 28th, the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh has been moved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee for a vote on the floor of the Senate.  Senator Jeff Flake, the swing vote in the committee, allowed the vote to pass on one stipulation; that there would be yet another FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh’s life, this time supposedly, specifically, regarding an allegation of sexual misconduct while Judge Kavanaugh was in high school in 1982 at the age of seventeen and then another while he was a freshman at Yale. 

For anyone who has not been following the drama, the initial charges were leveled by Christine Blasey Ford after she came to understand her trauma in therapy in 2012 from a recovered memory.  Even though she now has vivid recollections for things like music that was playing, the layout of the house, and the details of the supposed attack, that is all there is.  She would have been fifteen years old at the time and unable to drive or legally drink.  However, she can provide no information about the date of the event, the suburb it was in, the location of the house, the exact number of kids at the party, how she got to the house in question by what driver, or how she got home after her escape.  All three of the individuals whom she named as present at the party have submitted sworn statements that they have no memory of the event or of Brett Kavanaugh ever acting the way Ford has described.  Two other women have registered complaints as well and with the same absence of any evidence other than their claims.

In contrast, Judge Kavanaugh provided his written calendar/diary from that summer which document his activities to the day.  More than that, hundreds of classmates and professional associates over the entire span of his adult life have disputed the claims as outside the realm of possibility.

With all of that as background, the two-week long process came to a head on the 27th and 28th.  Because of the new one-week delay, by the time this is published the outcome for our Supreme Court will probably still be in limbo.  Nonetheless, there are some things that bear careful examination and introspection.

What is at stake in this appointment could be a generational shift of the Supreme Court to an originalist (strict interpretation of the Constitution) majority.  That is the worst fear of the Democratic party.  Because we now live in a nation which is increasingly governed through federal courts, the loss for liberals of deciding power at the very top would blunt decades of being able to circumvent the co-equality of the legislative and presidential (administrative) branches of government.  To put it very bluntly, this is a grappling for power between the forces of conservatism and liberalism.

While witnessing the two days of the Judiciary Committee hearings another equally profound change of process was undeniable.  It was the devolution of Congress’s orderly, objective, dispassionate role as a body tasked with “advice and consent” in judicial appointments into a morass of appeals to emotional “me too” movement-style demands to believe female accusations over factual evidence.  It was painfully on display, excruciatingly so, that Judge Kavanaugh’s life and career was to be sacrificed no matter what the cost. 

That a presumption of guilt against a citizen of this nation would operate at the highest levels of government was embarrassing, demeaning, and a travesty of one of the dearest principles of our legal system, not to mention the deepest tenant of justice.  Now comes a historic degradation of judicial dignity without shame or humility.  Those in authority have moved to destroy the objectivity of law for the sake of claim over fact.

There is no dispute that Dr. Hill has been traumatized. But some awful realities also exist.  According to the University of Michigan Law School National Registry of Exonerations, from “Exonerations in the United States 1989-2012, 80% of all false convictions of sexual assaults including rape, are the result of mistaken identity.  Just as troubling, 23% are from false accusations or perjury.  Must the accuser be right even if trauma or evidence says otherwise?  Why?

Every culture or civilization goes through convulsions and seismic shifts for good or for ill.  The United States has had its share.  The brutalization of Judge Brett Kavanaugh will rank with the most consequential of them within the nation’s norms of judicial order.  If Anita Hill was trade school, Christine Blasey-Ford is undergraduate school.  Graduate efforts will be nightmarish.