The call by some Democratic presidential candidates for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh made the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette today.
It was interesting to me given the origin of this story in the New York Times, which buried the impeachment call story inside the print edition that was dropped on my doorstep along with the D-G this morning. There’s undeniably some news there. New York Times reporters, in the course of reporting a book on Kavanaugh’s confirmation, found there WERE witnesses who could corroborate accounts of Kavanaugh’s behavior as a Yale student. What’s more, the FBI was informed of these potential witnesses and failed to investigate. Kavanaugh may have lied at his confirmation hearing.
The Times didn’t report this in a news story in the first place. It was revealed in a Sunday op-ed by the book’s authors. The op-ed didn’t lead with the news. Rather, it led with the fact that one woman who’s stood by her account of assault wasn’t a privileged kid like Brett Kavanaugh. The Times compounded the weirdness with an offensive promotional Tweet, later withdrawn. (See above.) The Times also gave the Trump tribe material to slam the article by failing originally to mention that the woman at the center of a second allegation of misconduct by Kavanaugh — reported by a male student — has declined to talk about the incident and her friends say she doesn’t recall it.
Kavanaugh will not be impeached. Being credibly accused by multiple women of sexual assault (and even bragging about it) is clearly not a bar to service in high public office. Nor is lying. Kavanaugh might even earn still more sympathy points. It certainly won’t turn him liberal, as a Trump tweet suggested this morning.
The Washington Post also initially covered this story in a review of the new book, though today it is reporting the facts in a straightforward fashion.
That Post review, by journalist and lawyer Jill Filipovic, has much to recommend it. Its headline:
In this account of the Kavanaugh hearings, no heroes or villains — just humans
What follows is an account with some sympathy for all, along with the observation that Kavanaugh remains on the highest court in the land while the lives of women who came forward have been changed forever and not for the better.
She writes that the authors concluded women were mistreated by a youthful Kavanaugh but that he’d become a better man over the years. Filipovic finds a broader story and it’s worth a listen.
In the origin story of each of Kavanaugh’s achievements is a hand up, usually extended by another man. He attends a prestigious high school because his parents can afford it. He is not remembered as a particularly brilliant student nor a particularly political one; he is a blank slate whom few seemed to know well outside of partying and sports. His grades were good, but there are no stories of virtuosity, just a heavy-drinking, clean-cut young man who seemed to be the median kind of person at an elite university like Yale in the 1980s.
But he was born and bred in a universe of privilege and access, and then afforded opportunities and the benefit of the doubt from men who looked like him. Among them: Circuit Court Judge Alex Kozinski, for whom Kavanaugh clerked, and who was eventually felled by accusations of pervasive and blatant harassment and assault of female clerks and employees, including showing them explicit pornographic images and circulating such images on an email list. Kozinski and Kavanaugh wrote a book together and spoke on the same panels; Kozinski also helped screen clerks for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and invited Kavanaugh to assist him. Kavanaugh got the clerkship in the first place because he played basketball with Yale law professor George L. Priest, whom Kozinski called for a clerk recommendation. Priest suggested Kavanaugh, who wasn’t a hugely impressive student, “but I got to know his character from basketball,” Priest told Pogrebin and Kelly. Once Kavanaugh was a judge himself, he hired Kozinski’s son as a clerk, despite the junior Kozinski’s mediocre grades.
Kavanaugh made and remade himself in the image of these men, and so despite being good but not wildly special, he was eventually elevated to the height of his profession.
The Kavanaugh story, in short, is one of privilege. This happens to be at the root of a lot more in current political tribulations than Kavanaugh’s seat on the Supreme Court. Those that have it are reluctant to give it up.