Fallout from the Kavanaugh Hearings: A Permanent Cloud?

Conventional wisdom suggests that, if confirmed, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh forever will be “smeared” and stained by past frenzied unfounded allegations of sexual assault.

Yet the opposite just as well may be true. As a Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh would have withstood every imaginable smear and slander and yet stayed defiant in defending his character and past, proof of both his determination and principles. His near-solitary rebuttal to his Senate accusers may suggest that Kavanaugh could prove to be among the most fearless justices on the Court.

Indeed, the only lasting effect, if any, of the serial smears lodged against him might be that in the future, as in the case of Justice Thomas, Kavanaugh would be essentially immune from progressive media attacks. What he went through likely has inoculated him from the Georgetown-party-circuit syndrome of conservative Supreme Court judges’ eventually becoming more liberal by the insidious socialization within the larger D.C. progressive media, political, and cultural landscape.

Incidentally, contrary to popular opinion, Clarence Thomas hardly remains under a permanent cloud after his ordeal. What stopped further Robert Borking for a while was the resistance and pushback of Clarence Thomas. Far from being ruined by unproven charges, he resisted the mob, got confirmed, and thereby established a precedent that innuendo, ipso facto, would not derail a nominee. For three decades, Thomas has not been regarded as suspect by most Americans but is seen as inspirational for his courage in facing down character assassination.

We have a strange standard of calibrating relative Supreme Court comportment. Thomas certainly has never said from the bench anything remotely like Justice Ginsburg’s “Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

Nor has Thomas weighed in on contemporary politics with the zeal of Ginsburg’s defiant political slap:

I can’t imagine what this place would be. I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.

Ginsburg then suggested that a possible Trump victory in 2016 reminded her of what her late husband might have said: “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand.”

Nor at his confirmation hearings did Thomas speak of his qualifications in anything approximating racially chauvinistic terms, analogous perhaps to “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Being unfairly smeared by Senate Democrats for decades will not keep one under a permanent cloud of suspicion, but one might be after weighing in from the bench in support for eugenics, or talking about moving from the U.S. after the election of an opposition president, or espousing racial chauvinism.

The Courageousness of Coming Forward?

We are asked to believe that accusers of sexual harassment are to be believed, apart from their gender and ideology, because “coming forward” cannot be an easy thing to endure and leads only to infamy, shaming, and loss of privacy (rather than book contracts, media empathy, and movie renditions). But it depends.

No doubt, in the short term, perhaps the attention is adverse. In the long-term calculus of progressive politics, however, the assured public recognition can lead to career enhancements and publicity that are hardly negative, especially if one, in Joan of Arc fashion, is seen as the person who saved, or at least attempted to save, the progressive community from a conservative such as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In other words, our popular culture, universities, foundations, media, celebrity world, publishing, Hollywood, and entertainment industry are both progressive and powerful adjudicators of our national culture. Those who lodge accusations of sexual harassment against conservative political figures are canonized in such circles (e.g., an Anita Hill); those who come forward to lodge complaints against liberal political figures (e.g., Monica Lewinsky, Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Karen Monahan) are demonized and shunned.

Call out Keith Ellison for recently alleged sexual battery, or produce a police record of an earlier complaint (such as a record of a 911 call from 2005), and one is at best ignored and at worst demonized; call out a teenage Brett Kavanaugh for an alleged sexual assault 36 years ago, without corroboration, and one is lauded as courageous if not saintly. Again, the common denominator has never been just allegations of sexual assault per se, but also the respective ideologies of the accuser and accused.

One of the weirder aspects of the Kavanaugh spectacle was the sanctimoniousness of Senate Democrats who picked away at Brett Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook of some 36 years past. In the past ten days, we have been lectured, admonished, and sermonized by an array of the senior leadership of the Democratic Senate, who by any fair ethical standard have long ago been found ethically wanting.

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