Sep 23, 2018 5 min read

Two months ago, President Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court created by the retirement of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Kavanaugh is a good and decent man, a well-respected jurist on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He is a cum laude graduate of Yale and Yale Law School with an extremely impressive and noncontroversial professional history. He has authored over 300 opinions, so who he is and what and how he thinks is a well-known and open record. He is well-respected for enforcing the law as written in text and structure as well as the Constitution as written. He does not legislate from the bench.

As decent a person and as well-respected a jurist as Kavanaugh may be, his nomination was not even announced before the irrational forces of the left had rolled out the tar and feathers to paint the president’s nominee, whoever it might be, as the anti-Christ.

The far left group Democracy for America denounced Kavanaugh as a “reactionary ideologue” whose confirmation would “directly lead to the deaths of countless women with the dismantling of abortion rights.” The Women’s March said, “Trump’s announcement today is a death sentence for thousands of women in the United States,” without explanation as to how that might happen, of course.

Quite obviously, the left is trying to make the single issue of abortion an issue to oppose a conservative justice. For his part, Kavanaugh has often said he would “broadly respect legal precedent, including Roe v. Wade.” He has said that he interprets the law as written and does not make law. Obviously the left wants jurists who make law as they would like it made.

We weren’t two days into the confirmation process and, already, the left had concocted some of the most outrageous slander imaginable. For example, NBC spread a conspiracy theory that claimed there was a secret deal between Kennedy and Trump that Kavanaugh would be chosen as Kennedy’s replacement. Then there was Chuck Schumer’s claim that “he knows” Kavanaugh will obstruct the Mueller probe.

The fundamental problem is not Kavanaugh. The problem is that the Democratic political elite and Republicans have very different concepts of how our nation should run.

When leftists can’t achieve what they want through the legislative process, they resort to a weaponized judiciary. Examples are abundant. When they could not get enough states to legalize abortion, they resorted to the courts to “invent” a right to abortion where none existed before. When they could not legislate same-sex marriage, they convinced five judges to do what the American people and the elected Congress would not. Losing the power to create the world of their liking through a black robed mobocracy scares them to death, and they will fight with every dirty trick they can conjure up to keep that power. Adding Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is a worst-nightmare scenario for those who want to use the court as a left-wing weapon.

A week ago the left was in an absolute state of panic because confirmation hearings were almost concluded and they had found nothing but a superbly qualified jurist.

Then they tossed in the last Hail Mary effort to derail Kavanaugh, a completely unsupported accusation of an alleged “sexual assault” 35 years ago in high school.

This is not to belittle sexual assault when it is real, but this is not. This is the left resorting to desperation gutter politics.

To recap Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation, she says that sometime in the early 1980s, she’s unsure of even the year, she was at a party at a house she can neither remember nor identify, when a drunken person she alleges was Kavanaugh but can’t substantiate “attempted to assault” her. She was not harmed, her clothes were not ripped, no one else at the alleged party was aware of the incident, she walked away without further discussion, and she told no one of this for decades. An alleged “witness” denies any knowledge of the incident. A classmate said she heard third-hand buzz of “an incident” but could provide no details and will not testify. No one places Kavanaugh and Ford together, no one corroborates such an incident and nothing was placed in evidence to substantiate the alleged incident occurred anywhere but in Ford’s mind, and 35-year-old memories are notoriously fallible.

Now, however many years later, Democrats dredge this probably imaginary incident up to impugn a man of impeccable reputation. Sixty-five women have signed a letter testifying to Kavanaugh’s fine character, as have present and former associates.

Ford has resisted testifying for several reasons. First, the only reason she exists is that the Democrats want to drag the hearing on as long as possible in hopes of either the second coming or that Kavanaugh might withdraw. Second, if she testifies, it will be under oath, which brings perjury squarely into the discussion. She has not provided any details because they can be fact checked. How can one “testify” without facts?

Ford now says she will testify but only “under certain conditions.” One condition is that she gets to testify last. That’s a red flag all by itself. She gets to custom fit her version of the story.

Enough is enough. Ford has established no credibility for her accusation. Other theses have been proposed that are more credible than Ford’s. Chuck Grassley needs to set a date for the committee vote and then the confirmation vote.

Dave Ball is vice president of the Republican Party of Washington County and a Peters Township councilman.