Month: September 2018

Like nailing Jell-O to a wall
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump gave a press conference or something like it. The details themselves are perhaps unimportant. It was another episode of the Trump Show ahead of what this morning could be a much more dramatic and consequential affair if the Senate Judiciary hearing featuring Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford actually occurs.

The Washington Post offers an annotated transcript pf the press conference here.

“I don’t even know where to start,” Jimmy Kimmell told his audience, calling Trump’s performance — that’s what it was — “rambling, angry, jumbled, dishonest, and frequently incoherent.” It was “like the craziest voicemail from your mom ever.”

What struck me most was the reactions of women reporters.

Asked about doubts he expressed about Kavanaugh’s accusers, Annie Karni of Politico writes that Trump “left himself an escape hatch” should the nomination fail. He would listen this morning to Ford’s account of Kavanaugh assaulting her as a teenagers and maybe be convinced of something.

“They’re giving the women a major chance to speak,” Trump said. “Now it’s possible I’ll hear that and I’ll say hey I’m changing my mind. That is possible.”

Trump even floated the idea of choosing another nominee, a woman maybe, before rambling about how this could go on forever. He could pick five other people. They might turn down the offer because of what happened to “this wonderful man.”

Karni writes:

“I could pick a woman and she could have charges made from many years ago,” Trump said.

It was a typical Trumpian move, leaving his final position unclear — a frustrating exercise for Team Kavanaugh and Senate Republicans akin to nailing Jell-O to a wall.

Much like his rally speeches, Trump reveals how little he knows, how imprecise he is in recounting facts, and how little he cares about subjects that are not him.

Trump complained he himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by “four or five women who got paid a lot of money” to make up stories about him. The number is somewhere between 13 and 20. In a couple of documented cases, he is the one who paid them money.

“Women are very angry” over the holdup on Kavanaugh’s nomination, Trump claimed. “You know I got 52 percent with women. Everyone said this couldn’t happen — 52 percent.” Trump won 42 percent of women in 2016. He won 53 percent of white women.

The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker writes:

But what was perhaps most remarkable was just how transparent and revealing Trump continues to be, the 45th president of the United States offering glimpses deep into the recesses of his mind as he gleefully took the nation on a tour de force of everything from the fate of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh (uncertain, but to be determined Thursday) to the job security of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein (uncertain, but probably fine for now) to his relationship with the New York Times (uncertain, but definitely tortured).

Parker writes when asked why he tends to side with powerful men and disbelieve women, Trump twice offered “something of an evergreen admission — well known to White House aides who often compete to be the last person in the room with the president,” saying, “I can always be convinced. … I could be convinced of anything.” Like nailing Jell-O to a wall.

Before you punish yourself watching the Senate hearing at 10 a.m. EDT, take a few minutes to mentally loosen up and not think about the elephant who won’t be in the room: Mark Judge. The third person allegedly in the room with Kavanaugh and Ford during her attack is still hiding out at a beach house in Delaware.

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Friendly reminder

by digby

Trump went on and on in his press conference today about all the women who hve “falsely” accused him of sexual assault:

Donald Trump has claimed that a number of women were “paid a lot of money” to “make up stories” about him as he defended his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual misconduct.

Talking about the effect allegations from three women may be effecting Mr Kavanaugh, the president said: “When I see it, I view it differently… It’s happened to me many times. I’ve had many false charges.“

“When you say does it effect me? Absolutely. Because I’ve had it many times,” Mr Trump said regarding the allegations surrounding Mr Kavanaugh.

“I was accused by, I believe it was four women… who got paid a lot of money to make up stories about me,” Trump said as he continued to blast the media for repeating the allegations.

In reality, more than a dozen people have accused Mr Trump of sexual assault or harassment. The president has denied all the charges.

“I’ve had a lot of false charges against me,” Mr Trump said.

This has some more detail:

“I’ve been accused, I’ve been accused. I believe it was four women, you can check with Sean Hannity, you can check with Fox, because they covered it very strongly,” he said. “I was accused by four or five women who got paid a lot of money to make up stories about me. We caught them and the mainstream media refused to put it on television. They refused to even write about it. There were four women, and maybe more.

Nearly two dozen women have credibly accused the president of sexual misconduct.

“I think the number’s four or five, but one had a mortgage paid off her house, maybe $52,000 dollars,” he added.

Trump was likely referring to women’s rights attorney Lisa Bloom, who set up a GoFundMe for client Jill Harth, who said in a 1997 lawsuit that Trump forced her into a bedroom at Mar-a-Lago and attempted to rape her. As Snopes points out, Harth never even wished to go public with the accusation to begin with ― she was outed by reporters in 2016. And her GoFundMe raised only $2,317.

“And the one that reported it, I believe was offered $750,000 to say bad things about me, and she’s the one that reported it,” Trump continued. “This woman is incredible. She reported it instead of taking the money. So I’ve had numerous accusations about me. I mean they made false statements about me knowing they were false. I never met them. I never met these people. And what did they do? What did they do? They took money in order to say bad things.”

No.

The following statement was released by Lisa Boyne, Rachel Crooks, Samantha Holvey, Jessica Leeds, Melinda McGillivray, Natasha Stoynoff, Temple Taggart and Karena Virginia:

“President Trump’s attacks on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez are beyond the pale and utterly lacking credibility. We know from personal experience that he is a serial sexual harasser and abuser.

“Trump has dismissed our claims, lied about his conduct and attacked us. Now he’s painting with the same brush to salvage the Kavanaugh nomination. It’s a standard move from his playbook.

“We believe women, and we believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Debbie Ramirez and Julie Swetnick deserve to be heard. We stand with them in calling for a full, independent investigation of Brett Kavanaugh’s conduct in high school, college and beyond. Senators must not vote on his nomination until they have the facts.”

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Yuuuuuge

by digby

lol! https://t.co/EZa30mGxsl— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) September 26, 2018

All those lyin’ witches

by digby

This is what Fox viewers are seeing:

Tucker Carlson illustrates Kavanaugh accusations with clip from Salem Witchcraft Trial movie with hysterical teenagers concocting stories of satanic possession. Really. pic.twitter.com/86KsBR1K3o

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 26, 2018

Apparently, the defense, as exemplified by Lindsey Graham and Trump’s attorney Beth Wilkinson, the women who are making the accusations are the real criminals because they went to these parties and didn’t report what these boys did at the time.

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Trump and Kavanaugh are the natural heirs to the real father of the conservative movement: Richard Nixon

by digby

Roger Stone and Alex Jones

I wrote a long read for DAME Magazine called “Kavanaugh is the manifestation of the party of bad ideas. The SCOTUS pick, like Trump himself, did not happen in a void.” An excerpt:

Conventional wisdom says that Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States is a gift to the rabidly anti-abortion conservative evangelicals who have revealed themselves to be the most coldly cynical transactional voters in the country, throwing their loyalty behind the crude, fascist brute in the White House. It’s tempting to see this nihilistic lust for power as a symptom of Trumpism. But this goes much further back than that. Trump’s 2016 victory has simply brought GOP officials and the conservative movement leadership out in the open, and forced them to admit that they are not organized on the basis of a long intellectual tradition, but are, instead, a cynical political faction that uses propaganda and unscrupulous tactics to obtain and hold power.

Conservatives have long insisted on a fatuous conceit that they are “the party of ideas” driven by an intellectually rigorous adherence to a strict set of principles metaphorically defined as resting on an ideological three-legged stool of family values, small government, and patriotism. They used this framework to justify state-mandated conservative religious morality and patriarchy, laissez-faire economics to uphold white supremacy and an ever-growing global military empire. Academics and writers worked through these issues and they were quite successful in creating an ideological schema that politicians honed into poll-tested catchphrases and symbols designed to signal tribal affinity to American voters.

It is obvious in retrospect that the intellectual underpinnings of the modern conservative movement that evolved from its beginnings in the John Birch Society to its full glory in the Reagan Revolution were a bit of a con. The original influential thinkers were certainly serious in building their ideology, but as a practical political project, it always served as cover for the preservation of the white-supremacist patriarchal instincts of the reactionary American right wing.

Please click over to the DAME site to read the whole thing. It all comes back to Nixon and his ratfucking dirty tricksters. He is the Godfather of all these soulless monsters.

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Trump’s taking over the Kavanaugh defense. OMG.

by digby

This is going to be nuts:

Trump has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the way Brett Kavanaugh has defended himself in wake of sexual assault allegations that have threatened to derail his Supreme Court nomination, multiple sources tell CNN.

It has led the President to believe that he must personally take charge of defending his embattled nominee ahead of Thursday’s critical appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trump made the decision to hold a news conference on the eve of the hearing, making it the fourth he has held as president.

Julie Swetnick, who attended a different high school in Maryland and is being represented by the lawyer Michael Avenatti, said she attended “well over 10” parties where Kavanaugh was present and saw him “drink excessively at many of these parties and engage in abusive and physically aggressive behavior towards girls.”

Kavanaugh denied the allegations in his most aggressive statement yet, writing: “This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone. I don’t know who this is and this never happened.”

But the President’s pushback was even stronger, declaring that Avenatti “is a third rate lawyer who is good at making false accusations, like he did on me and like he is now doing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh. He is just looking for attention and doesn’t want people to look at his past record and relationships – a total low-life!”

Update: Here’s what he said yesterday. I can only imagine how bad it’s going to be at his press conference today.

TRUMP: I think he is just a wonderful human being. I think it is horrible what the Democrats have done. It is a con game, they are really con artists. They are trying to convince — they don’t be — they don’t believe it themselves. They know he is a high-quality person, they don’t believe it. It just resist and obstruct. They are playing a con game, and they are playing it very well — much better than Republicans.

They are lousy politicians, they have lousy policy, they don’t know what the hell they are doing. They want to get rid of ICE, they want to get rid of law enforcement, they don’t want to take care of our military, they want to raise your taxes, but they are good at one thing: That is obstruction and con. He is one of the highest quality people. He said when he was focused on being No. 1 in his class at Yale, to me, that was so believable. I understand college very well, being No. 1 in your class. I understand a lot of things.

When he said that, I understood exactly. He was so truthful. But for the Democrats to be trying to make him into something — let’s be nice about it: Something he is not. . . . This isn’t his footing, he’s never been here before. He’s never had any charges like this. Charges come up from 36 years ago that are totally unsubstantiated.

I mean, you, as a president of a great country, Colombia, I mean how is this possible — 36 years ago? . . . And now a new charge comes up, and she says it may not be him and there are gaps. And she was totally inebriated and all messed up, and she doesn’t know. ‘It might have been him, or it might not have been him.’ ‘Gee, let’s not make him a Supreme Court judge.’

This is a con game being played by the Democrats. . . . These are the same lawyers who have been fighting for years. . . . It is a shame you can do this to a person’s life. I’ll tell you: Maybe even more important: Who is going to want to go before the system to be a Supreme Court judge or even a politician? I can tell you that false accusations of all type are made against a lot of people. This is a high-quality person, and it would be a horrible insult to our country if this doesn’t happen. And it’ll be a horrible, horrible thing for future political people. It cannot be allowed to happen. And the Democrats are playing a con game. C-O-N.

Q: Should the second accuser be allowed to testify?

TRUMP: The second accuser doesn’t even know — she thinks maybe it could have been him, maybe not. Admits she was drunk. She admits time lapses. This is a person, and this is a series of statements that is going to take one of the most talented intellects from a judicial standpoint in our country — keep him off the U.S. Supreme Court? He has the chance to be one of the greatest justices in the United States Supreme Court. What a shame . . . His wife is devastated, his children are devastated. I don’t mean, ‘Oh gee, I am a little unhappy.’ They are devastated. And it is because of these Democrats.

He’s obviously very interested in the details of these accusations.

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Kavanaugh’s crowd

by digby

Below is my correspondence to Mr. Davis of moments ago, together with a sworn declaration from my client. We demand an immediate FBI investigation into the allegations. Under no circumstances should Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed absent a full and complete investigation. pic.twitter.com/QHbHBbbfbE— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) September 26, 2018

Here is a picture of my client Julie Swetnick. She is courageous, brave and honest. We ask that her privacy and that of her family be respected. pic.twitter.com/auuSeHm5s0— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) September 26, 2018

In case you missed the details:

In a sworn declaration, Swetnick — a Washington, D.C., resident — said she was a “victim of one of these ‘gang’ or ‘train’ rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present” at a party in Washington, D.C., in approximately 1982.

“During the incident, I was incapacitated without my consent and unable to fight off the boys raping me,” she wrote, noting that she shared what happened with “at least two other people” shortly after the incident. “I believe I was drugged using Quaaludes or something similar placed in what I was drinking.”

Swetnick said she first met Kavanaugh and Judge, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s who came to the nominee’s defense, around 1980-1981. She described the two as “extremely close friends” who were “joined at the hip.”

She said she attended “well over ten house parties” from 1981 to 1983. Between 1981 and 1982, she said at these parties she began to notice Judge, Kavanaugh and others would attempt to “‘spike’ the ‘punch’ at house parties I attended with drugs and/or grain alcohol so as to cause girls to lose their inhibitions and their ability to say ‘No.’”

Kavanaugh and Judge, she said, would “‘target’ particular girls … it was usually a girl that was especially vulnerable because she was alone at the party or shy.” She said she has a “firm recollection” of seeing boys ― including Judge and Kavanaugh ― “lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room.”

HuffPost has not independently corroborated these claims.

address@email.com
Representatives for both Kavanaugh and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Avenatti, who also represents the adult film star Stormy Daniels, first said in a tweet Sunday that he had a new client with “credible information” regarding Kavanaugh and Judge.

The newest allegation comes days after Deborah Ramirez, in an interview with The New Yorker that was published Sunday, claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her and thrust his penis in her face during a party when they were both students at Yale University in the 1980s. Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the claims.

In an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum on Monday, Kavanaugh denied the sexual assault allegations against him and said he was not going “to let false accusations drive us out of this process.”

“We’re talking about allegations of sexual assault. I have never sexually assaulted anyone,” Kavanaugh told Fox News. “I did not have sexual intercourse, or anything close to sexual intercourse, in high school or many years thereafter.”

“We don’t need to be putting someone like that on Supreme Court for life,” he said during remarks at a launch party for newly formed political action committee “OMG WTF” last week in Los Angeles.

The lawyer also told Chris Cuomo earlier this month that there are “other individuals that are more qualified than this judge to sit on the Supreme Court and his [Kavanaugh’s] nomination should be pulled.”

Avenatti has made a name for himself as Daniels’ lawyer. He has not ruled out a potential presidential run in 2020, making appearances at the Iowa State Fair and a Democratic Party picnic in New Hampshire earlier this year.

The White House has remained steadfast in its support of Kavanaugh, and on Sunday, officials said the latest allegations were part of a “coordinated smear campaign.”

I went to some wild parties in my days. That period was loose and there was sex going on. But there were no gang rapes.
These boys were obviously part of an extremely toxic frat-boy culture at that Catholic prep school.

Hearts of darkness
by Tom Sullivan

Still from Apocalypse Now (1979).

Fear is their business. A ruthless one at that. An American faction that lost faith in itself is reduced to shibboleths and nihilism, resembling a death cult more than the hopeful experiment begun in Philadelphia so long ago. Members of the Peoples Temple two centuries later retreated from the world to the jungle camp of Jonestown, Guyana. There they drank cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid as their leader asked. Over 900 died in the mass murder-suicide, then the largest number of U.S. civilian casualties in a non-natural event prior to the September 11 attacks.

Much has been said of the United States being in or on the edge of a constitutional crisis. Along with it, we are witnessing the slow-motion suicide of a political party, led by a man who, like Jim Jones, means to take a lot of others with him, believers and nonbelievers.

For decades, the sitting president complained the world was laughing at us — U.S. He ran for the presidency in 2016, it is said, in retribution and defiance at being the butt of jokes at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. On Tuesday, representatives of the world gathered at the United Nations in his hometown of New York in fact laughed out loud at him. God knows what he does now. God knows what he asks his followers to do.

National attention over the last weeks has focused on Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. The news is awash in allegations of sexual assault and drunken debauchery by Kavanaugh both at his prep school and at Yale. Tomorrow, the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary will reopen hearings on Kavanaugh’s nomination. The judge and Christine Blasey Ford, one of the women accusing Kavanaugh of assault, will testify in what, for Kabuki theater, promises to be a helluva show.

Republicans on the panel claimed they didn’t need the FBI to investigate Ford’s allegations. They would do it themselves. Now they don’t have the guts to question her in front of cameras. They know how it would look to women across the planet. They retain enough self-awareness to know, try as they might, they could not mask their feelings. They have farmed out the questioning to Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell.

Ahead of the Thursday hearing and the confirmation vote already scheduled for Friday, Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina formally announced Tuesday he will vote to confirm. Announcement of the Friday confirmation vote drew a sharp response from Democrats:

“Senate Republicans aren’t even pretending to consider Dr. Ford’s testimony,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) tweeted Tuesday. “Rushing a vote sends a clear signal: They don’t value survivors. They don’t believe women.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called Republicans’ announcement of a hearing Friday “outrageous.”

“First Republicans demanded Dr. Blasey Ford testify immediately,” she tweeted. “Now they don’t even need to hear her before they move ahead with a vote.”

Will to power

Speculation continues about the fate of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Rosenstein is scheduled to meet Trump Thursday in what the White House could see as a distraction from Ford’s testimony.

But while attention is focused elsewhere, Natasha Bertrand reports in The Atlantic Republicans are looking elsewhere for means to shield their leader from the law. They have a sudden interest in the double-jeopardy clause of the Constitution:

The Utah lawmaker Orrin Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, filed a 44-page amicus brief earlier this month in Gamble v. United States, a case that will consider whether the dual-sovereignty doctrine should be put to rest. The 150-year-old exception to the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause allows state and federal courts to prosecute the same person for the same criminal offense. According to the brief he filed on September 11, Hatch believes the doctrine should be overturned. “The extensive federalization of criminal law has rendered ineffective the federalist underpinnings of the dual sovereignty doctrine,” his brief reads. “And its persistence impairs full realization of the Double Jeopardy Clause’s liberty protections.”

The American Civil Liberties Union considers the dual-sovereignty logic “specious.” But Bertrand shouldn’t have to spell out why Hatch has intervened now.

Within the context of the Mueller probe, legal observers have seen the dual-sovereignty doctrine as a check on President Donald Trump’s power: It could discourage him from trying to shut down the Mueller investigation or pardon anyone caught up in the probe, because the pardon wouldn’t be applied to state charges. Under settled law, if Trump were to pardon his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for example—he was convicted last month in federal court on eight counts of tax and bank fraud—both New York and Virginia state prosecutors could still charge him for any crimes that violated their respective laws. (Both states have a double-jeopardy law that bars secondary state prosecutions for committing “the same act,” but there are important exceptions, as the Fordham University School of Law professor Jed Shugerman has noted.) If the dual-sovereignty doctrine were tossed, as Hatch wants, then Trump’s pardon could theoretically protect Manafort from state action.

And thus, indirectly, Trump himself. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos observes, “Republicans, always talk a good game about promoting the sovereign right of states … so long as what the states are doing agrees with them. But here Hatch is willing to take a power away from every state.”

Whatever it takes to win. Principles be damned. Ethics be damned. “Settled law” be damned. Women be damned. The world be damned.

And so it might.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

“Nobody’s got the guts to say it because of all this sexual harassment crap…”

by digby

Here's Susan Collins commenting on Kavanaugh's high school yearbook page: pic.twitter.com/HQuHxdOTmL— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) September 25, 2018

Huh. Where did she get that I wonder?

Well, it turns out that it comes from Alex Jones’ Info-wars:

Jones seized on a picture from the yearbook that shows a girl posing in a skirt. The girl pictured has a black bar covering her face, and neither the Infowars aggregation nor Cult of the First Amendment identified the individual as Ford (nor did the original yearbook page, as shown on either site). Still, Jones not only repeatedly said it was her in the photo but also suggested that the person’s decision to wear a miniskirt — which, to be clear, is innocuous in its own right and not probative of anything — made her a “hussy” and “captain of the sluts.”

The sainted “moderate” Susan Collins is pushing this garbage? That makes her no better than that creep Alan Simpson in the Anita Hill hearings:

In his questioning Saturday of Judge Clarence Thomas, Senator Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, said:

“I really am getting stuff over the transom about Professor Hill. I’ve got letters hanging out of my pocket. I’ve got faxes. I’ve got statements from her former law professors, statements from people that know her, statements from Tulsa, Okla., saying, ‘Watch out for this woman.’ But nobody’s got the guts to say that because it gets all tangled up in this sexual harassment crap.”

Senator Simpson’s press secretary, Stan Cannon, said the Senator would not make the correspondence public nor describe it more fully because “he would prefer to wait if Anita Hill comes back to ask her about it directly.” The committee announced this evening that Professor Hill was expected to testify again on Monday.

Interviewed this morning on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” Mr. Simpson elaborated. He said he had received a letter on Saturday from a female lawyer in Tulsa, calling it “the most derogatory letter I have seen to date.”

“I’m not going to use it,” he said. “It’s not sworn to. The woman said she would give an affidavit.”

The Senator’s staff said the letter had come from Mary Constance Matthies, a lawyer in private practice in Tulsa. Reached by telephone, she said she had indeed faxed a letter on Saturday to the majority and minority counsels of the Senate Judiciary Committee. ‘For What It’s Worth’

Ms. Matthies would not discuss the substance of her letter except to say it did not refer to Judge Thomas nor to sexual harassment. She said the information she had passed along was “third-hand to me, and I passed it on in the for-what-its-worth category.”

Asked whether she thought Senator Simpson had described her letter properly, Ms. Matthies replied: “People make different interpretations of things. I don’t want to call Senator Simpson a liar. I don’t know what else he was referring to. It would not be the way I would characterize the letter.”

When Mr. Simpson refused in his television interview this morning to describe the information he had received more fully, Andrea Mitchell, an NBC News correspondent, said, “You’ve raised this now at the hearings, and you’ve raised it just now on national television. Isn’t this McCarthyism of the worst order?”

Mr. Simpson responded: “Well, not in my mind. McCarthyism in the worst order is to have someone gather up everything on a man for 105 days that has nothing to do with his ability to serve on the United States Supreme Court. Your people have done a magnificent job of that, going into his garage to see what the titles of his books are.

Maybe if the Republicans stop nominating right wing hit men like Bork and sexual harassers like Thomas they won’t have these problems. Kavanaugh is both.

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A little bit nutty and a little bit slutty redux

by digby

Trump today:

President Trump on Judge #Kavanaugh confirmation process: “This is a con game being played by the Democrats.” pic.twitter.com/rHDDaTO4z0

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 25, 2018

At least he didn’t say she was too ugly for Kavanaugh to shove his wang in her face. That was positively restrained of him considering what he said about the women who accused him of grabbing their crotches and forcing his tongue down their throats.

But he’d better watch himself:

Republican Party leaders may be insisting that they will install Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, but Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is offering a blunt warning of her own: Do not prejudge sexual assault allegations against the nominee that will be aired at an extraordinary public hearing on Thursday.

“We are now in a place where it’s not about whether or not Judge Kavanaugh is qualified,” Ms. Murkowski, a key swing Republican vote, said in an extended interview in the Capitol Monday night. “It is about whether or not a woman who has been a victim at some point in her life is to be believed.”

One of two Republican women in the Senate who supports abortion rights — Susan Collins of Maine is the other — Ms. Murkowski was always expected to be a critical vote in Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. But she is making clear that, beyond matters of abortion, she is deeply troubled by Christine Blasey Ford’s story of a sexual assault by Judge Kavanaugh when she was 15 and he was 17.

Collins might be wobbly too. If those two go then we might see a couple of the other GOP women or a few Republicans who call themselves men make a move too. (I doubt it but you never know.)

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