The deranged nature of the modern Republican Party was on full display at the close of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony Thursday, as Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell insinuated that the retraumatizing charade Senate Republicans engineered for her should actually be blamed on Democratic partisans determined to sabotage Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the high court.
Mitchell began her final run of questions in a seemingly conciliatory tone, drawing Ford to agree that the process they’d just gone through was roughly the opposite of an effective method of getting at the truth of what Ford says happened to her in the summer of 1982. For a half-dozen yes-or-no questions, Mitchell seemed to be spotlighting the shambolic nature of the whole event as designed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Along the way, she familiarized Blasey Ford with the concept of a “cognitive interview” or “forensic interview,” an accepted best practice for getting at the truth of traumatic memories.
But after circling the issue in classic courtroom-windup fashion, Mitchell veered swiftly to her actual point.
“Did anybody ever advise you from Senator [Dianne] Feinstein’s office or from Representative [Anna] Eshoo’s office to go get a forensic interview?” Mitchell asked, focusing on the two Democratic female lawmakers. No, Blasey Ford replied.
“And instead of submitting to an interview in California, we’re having a hearing here today in five-minute increments, is that right?” Mitchell said.
Here, Blasey Ford paused a moment, seeming to realize she was suddenly being accused of having caused her own unhappy and highly public plight.
“I agree that’s what was agreed upon by the collegial group here,” she answered after a moment. But the prosecutor was ready to rest her case — nevermind the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be operating the borrowed time lent her by craven Republican men as though it were a trial court.
“I have no further questions,” Mitchell said, pivoting her chair to look up at Grassley.
And with that, the men who’d hidden behind Mitchell all day found their voices again, Sen. Patrick Kennedy (R-LA) jumping in to squabble with Democratic committee members over their refusal to participate in the closed-door interviews of Kavanaugh’s friend and alleged assault accomplice Mark Judge and others who’d attended the small gathering where Ford says Kavanaugh and Judge assaulted her.
The new political era where brash men like Donald Trump doggedly “say the quiet part loud” can make it hard to remember what subtler rhetorical warfare looks like. It’s worth unpacking what Mitchell was doing here. She’s suggesting that if only Blasey Ford herself — or the elected officials she reached out to who represent her part of the country, who helped her decide how to proceed — had had the decency to agree to meet with committee members in California, all this unfortunate theater could have been avoided. It is, in the telling of Mitchell and the Republicans who hired her, Blasey Ford’s own fault that they got to spend half a day insinuating she’s a liar, a fabricator, a partisan agent on a dastardly mission funded by the sorts of unknown-but-sinister forces who populate right-wing fever dreams. Alas and alack, she chose to play it this way, Mitchell suggested.
This is bullshit, of course. The only reason Blasey Ford was dragged before this committee in this fashion instead of getting the best-practices interview techniques applied to her credible allegations — which are corroborated in timeline if not in detail by Kavanaugh’s own records and Judge’s own books not to mention multiple character witnesses against each man — is that Republicans don’t want to delay a vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination by a few more weeks. The vote is currently scheduled for Friday, just one day after the hearing.
And the only reason they don’t want to delay it is that it would make them look weak, look like they take a woman’s allegations of sexual assault against a powerful man seriously even after nominating and embracing a president accused by some 20 different women of sexual assaults over a period of decades. Worse, it might mean things stretch til after Election Day, when it is possible — if only distantly — that the Republicans could lose their slim Senate majority.
Every other Supreme Court nominee who Trump might approve of would doubtless hold the same ideological fervor against reproductive rights that is core to the right’s generations-old campaign to keep the judicial branch in retrograde against whatever social progress gradually dawns on the rest of the country. There’s no substantive, material difference to the GOP or this particular White House in swapping out a conservative justice credibly accused of sexual assaults for one with a clean record and the same views.
But if they did that, they’d have failed to own the libs. So even if it requires elaborate opposite-day fictions such as the one Mitchell delivered to close out her interrogation of a woman who didn’t want any of this, the GOP is willing to do it. It’s the political theater equivalent of crying out “I’m not owned” repeatedly as you transform into a corncob.