Every lawyer will tell you that you don’t want a witness opening the door to a new line of questioning if it’s one you have not planned and don’t want the jury to hear.
Tonight, with his remarkably insincere Op-ed in the WSJ (and since when do SCOTUS nominees publish Op-eds to make a case for confirmation? Since never) — tonight with that Op-ed, Kavanaugh opened that new line of questioning.
He made what had been a cultural and political assertion that he is biased and lacks appropriate judicial balance and fairness into a clear, clearly appropriate objective measure of his fitness and suitability for the high court.
Every senator now has a clear path to decide whether his lack of those qualities is reason to vote against confirmation of his nomination.
Oh, and the Op-ed itself? It is a wholly, last-minute insincere pack of excuses and apologies aimed at Collins, Murkowski and Manchin (oh yah, and Flake, the Hamlet of the Senate?).
In it Kavanaugh says he was there, before the committee last week, as a son, father and husband.
No he wasn’t. Not in the least. He was there as a nominee to be one of nine members of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Christine Blasey Ford is a daughter, a mother and a wife but she was not there as any of those. She was there as a witness to the character of a man nominated for the nation’s highest court.
She didn’t make Kavanaugh explode in partisan rage, make him sneer at U.S. senators, make his face contort with hate.
No. No, he did all that all by himself, in fact Kavanaugh announced at the outset that he had thrown out the original testimony he’d prepared — or someone in the White House counsel’s office had handed him more likely, and written the juvenile, adolescent screed he delivered instead.
What he showed in that hearing is that Brett Kavanaugh grew up a brat. His conduct was that of a brat. The Op-ed say he is still that self-serving, denying, obfuscating brat.
Brett the Brat.
We don’t get to read the FBI report concerning its further examination and its truncation of that examination of matters concerning the Kavanaugh nomination.
We should. We own it. We paid for it. The FBI and all the rest of them work for us. Instead we get to read this loathsome Op-ed (if we choose to read it).
Call your senators — tell them that report belongs to you and you want the damn thing released to you and all the rest of the public in this country.
You dial 202-224-3121 and work your way through the voice menu to get to your senators — or any others you want to tell that you want the damned report: It belongs to you, to me, to all of us not to them.
The man’s liberty is not at stake, there is no further or greater risk to his reputation in that report than is already in the public domain. He is a nominee for the Supreme Court, our court, not his, not theirs, ours; and we have an absolute right to know what is in it.
Tell your senators that, but get there early Friday because McConnell is determined to ram this through in the next 36 hours.
Peeling the Onion 
Carl, Excellent piece of writing. The appellation — Brett the Brat — fits him; he tried it on for size during the hearings and he showed how well it fit.
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