I wrote one month ago that I thought Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, should be confirmed by the Senate. I said this in light of his judicial philosophy and record. None of that has changed or been seriously questioned since then in my view. What has been seriously questioned since then for me is Kavanaugh’s character. Specifically, Kavanaugh is alleged to have committed a variety of sex related crimes, including sexual assault and gang rape.

While I don’t believe that general crimes committed as a minor should follow you into adulthood, there are some that are so heinous that they must be. Gang rape should be among those, if there are going to be any at all.

What Kavanaugh has been accused of is disqualifying if true, and doubly so if it were found that he were lying.

The key word there, however, is “if.” Finding out if Kavanaugh did the things he is accused of, and what standard we use to evaluate the evidence, is what is at issue. The accusations range from troubling to ludicrous.

The first and most well known was from a Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford. Ford alleges that in highschool Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while intoxicated at a party.

Ford sent a letter about the incident which stressed her desire for confidentiality to the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein recommended lawyers to Ford, all while not showing the letter to the head of the committee, Chuck Grassley.

She had the opportunity to ask Kavanaugh about the allegations during one of the Senate’s confidential hearings.

She did not.

She had the opportunity to ask Kavanaugh about it during one of their one-on-one meetings.

She did not.

Then, just after all of the hearings had finished days before Kavanaugh was to be voted on, the letter mysteriously leaked.

The press got hold of it, tracked down Ford, and quickly turned her into a household name. This is the only accusation to gain traction. In my view, rightfully so.

I’m very confident that Ford isn’t lying when she says that she is “100 percent certain” that Kavanaugh is the perpetrator.

However, this doesn’t change my support for his nomination.

One of the few areas where I agree with progressives on is criminal justice reform. They rightly point out that in the current system, defendants are often railroaded into draconian sentences for petty crimes. 

From Kirk Bloodsworth to William Barnhouse, people have spent years and years jailed, or in Bloodsworth’s case on death row, because of convictions based on eyewitness testimony that were later found to be false with the help of DNA evidence.

It wasn’t as though the people who identified them had any ill will toward them or meant to falsely accuse them, it is simply that our minds are flawed and we can often misremember things, including, and especially, details of traumatic events.

Given that the Judiciary Committee has interviewed two men who say that they, not Kavanaugh, assaulted Ford, according to Time Magazine. This seems to be worth considering.

But in this case, progressives throw all of that away.

They sound remarkably like the right-wing authoritarians they would usually oppose, mocking the idea that people are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

I think something awful happened to Dr. Ford.

I don’t think that it was Kavanaugh that did it, in light of his own emotional testimony.

Some have described it as “entitled” or “angry.”

I think that rather callously ignores that fact that Kavanaugh’s name, as he puts it, has been “permanently destroyed” by an allegation that does not have a single witness corroborating any aspect of the story, or any evidence at all beyond Ford’s testimony.

If you were wrongly accused of being a sexual predator in front of the nation, how exactly would you react?

How would you react if members of the political party that swore to oppose you no matter what leaked those allegations when it would be most damaging for you?

Many of these same progressives can describe for hours on end about the scourge of “toxic masculinity”, and about how it prevents men from sharing their feelings. But when a man gets emotional when defending himself from objectively egregious allegations, they react with mockery and derision.

I think neither Ford nor Kavanaugh are the villains here. I don’t think either have done anything wrong, and I think both are telling the truth as they see it.

If there is a bad actor here, it is Senate Democrats. They had this information in July. They refused to do anything to investigate its veracity. They did not bring it to the attention of Chairman Grassley. They did not ask Kavanaugh about it in public or private.

They did, however, offer to fly people out to interview her in private at her home, instead of making her come to Washington D.C. and creating a delay, according to the Des Moines Register.

Also obscured by these lawyers was Ford’s supposed fear of flying, when in fact she has flown to both Hawaii and French Polynesia in the recent past, according to her testimony.

In other words, her lawyers seem to have coordinated with Senate Democrats to delay the vote, which is all I think this has ever really been about.

Senate Democrats do not seem to care about Dr. Ford and if her allegations are true. If they had, they could have asked for an FBI investigation back in July.

It wouldn’t be fair to say they’ve poisoned the well. They’ve filled it with radioactive sludge.

In my opinion, all Senate Democrats were interested in doing is delaying the process until after the midterm election. If given the chance, they would have done the exact same to any vaguely conservative jurist nominated by President Trump.

In my view, Sen. Feinstein should be censured, if not expelled, for her role in this.

It was the Republicans who wanted Ford to testify, and repeatedly delayed the vote on Kavanaugh to do so.

It was the Republicans who attempted to investigate all of these accusations from reports in the media because their own Democratic colleagues refused to share the information with them.

This whole process has been, as Kavanaugh himself put it, a national disgrace.

It’s ripping the country apart. And the reason for that can be laid squarely at the feet of Senate Democrats.