Senate votes on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination

More than a month after testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Christine Blasey Ford is still getting death threats.

Ford told the committee that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school in the 1980s. Now, her lawyers said in a statement to NPR on Thursday, “Justice Kavanaugh ascended to the Supreme Court, but the threats to Dr. Ford continue.”

By engineering the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has won a tremendous partisan victory — but at the cost of tremendous damage to the Court itself.

The Supreme Court’s legitimacy depends on most Americans viewing it as above the partisan fray, an institution whose decisions are driven by legal reasoning, not by the justices’ partisan leanings.

The battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court is over, and Republicans have won.

The 53-year-old DC Circuit Court judge will be promoted to the nation’s highest court, where he could well sit for decades. Christine Blasey Ford’s decision to come forward with sexual assault allegations against him, as inspiring as it may have been to many across the country, did not, in the end, prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Forty-nine Senate Republicans and one Democrat just confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the United State Supreme Court. No allegations, no protesters, no public opinion poll showing Brett Kavanaugh is the most unpopular person to be elevated to the nation’s highest court in recent history was going to stop them.

To the senators who confirmed him, it did not matter that Christine Blasey Ford testified for four hours under oath and told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she was “100 percent” certain Brett Kavanaugh was the boy who pulled her into a room at a high school party 36 years ago and tried to force himself on her. It did not matter that Kavanaugh appeared to, at best, mislead senators in his own testimony. It did not matter that, unlike Clarence Thomas who also faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the public thought Kavanaugh’s accuser was more credible than he was.

Key Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Friday that she’ll vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, bringing the total number of senators who’ve voiced their support for the candidate to 50.

Collins delivered a nearly hour-long speech on the Senate floor in which she underscored Kavanaugh’s career highlights and rejected criticisms the nominee has received during his confirmation hearings, including about his views on Roe v. Wade, LGBTQ rights, the Affordable Care Act, and access to birth control.

On Friday, many Americans had pinned their hopes on Susan Collins.

Seen as a crucial swing vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination ever since President Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court, she only became more pivotal after Christine Blasey Ford stated publicly that Kavanaugh had assaulted her when both were in high school. She became “the most sought-after senator in Washington,” as Vox’s Dylan Scott put it, meeting with multiple sexual assault survivors as she weighed her final decision on Kavanaugh.

Even before the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh emerged, Alaska Native groups were pressuring Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a key swing vote, to reject his nomination. “She heard our concerns about Judge Kavanaugh’s record on the constitutional rights of Native peoples,” the Alaska Federation of Natives, a powerful lobbying bloc representing 186 federally recognized tribes in Alaska, wrote in a press release on Friday.

And after Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her accusation that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party in the 1980s, some indigenous Alaskans redoubled their opposition.

As the Senate appears poised to narrowly confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in a Saturday vote, congressional Democrats are vowing the fight isn’t over.

For the past week, House Democrats have been saying they’ll take over the investigation into Kavanaugh’s background if they win in the 2018 midterms. Five Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee — including ranking member Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) — have called for an investigation into the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh. (Kavanaugh has denied all the allegations made against him).

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) — a red-state Democrat who crossed party lines to vote for President Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch — announced on Friday that he would vote for Brett Kavanaugh, a statement that all but cleared Kavanaugh’s path to the Court.

Manchin’s statement was released shortly after Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) — another closely watched swing senator — announced her support for the nominee.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) will vote yes on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, she said Friday afternoon, in an announcement that all but ensures Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Collins defended Kavanaugh at length in a Senate floor speech, calling him qualified, praising his “record of judicial independence,” and portraying opposition to him as driven by partisanship and “special interest groups.” Based on her reading of Kavanaugh’s record, and her conversations with him, Collins said she does not expect him to strike down Roe v. Wade, same-sex marriage rights, or Obamacare’s preexisting conditions protections.

In 1991, 67 percent of Americans surveyed told pollsters that if Anita Hill’s accusation of sexual harassment was true, it should sink Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Twenty-seven years later, a nearly identical percentage, 69 percent, of Americans said that if Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault was true, it should sink Brett Kavanaugh’s.

After nearly three decades, Americans aren’t taking accusations of sexual misconduct by potential Supreme Court justices more seriously. “The public has not moved on that one in 27 years,” concluded Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin Madison political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center.

The FBI has a one-week window to complete an investigation into sexual assault and misconduct allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — and thus far, its witness list has been a subject of scrutiny.

Questions began emerging about the FBI’s review pretty much as soon as the investigation got underway. This past weekend, multiple outlets reported that President Donald Trump was curtailing the number of people the FBI could speak with and limiting the scope of its investigation to allegations brought forward by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez. The White House has since vigorously denied these reports and said it’s giving the FBI free rein to do whatever it needs to do to make sure a review is effectively completed.

President Donald Trump got up onstage at a Tuesday night rally and berated a survivor of sexual assault.

There is no other honest way to describe the president’s performance. He performed a mocking interpretation of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate, highlighting gaps in her memory and misrepresenting her testimony to try to discredit her story. In contrast to other Republicans, who had gone to great lengths to say they believed something had happened to Ford, the president dismissed her — casting the man she’s accused of assaulting her, Brett Kavanaugh, as the real victim, a target of a Democratic plot that Ford is presumably in on.

Now that the FBI is conducting an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, there are essentially three paths forward.

First, investigators could find something — anything — to corroborate the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford, the Palo Alto professor who alleges Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school, of Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate who said Kavanaugh exposed himself to her while drunk at a party, or both. That would put the onus on the three skeptical Republican senators: Sens. Jeff Flake (AZ), Susan Collins (ME), and Lisa Murkowski (AK).

During Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee became visibly aggravated, characterizing the confirmation process as a “circus.” But during a segment on The Daily Show later that night, host Trevor Noah had a different analogy in mind, calling the nationwide attention to Kavanaugh’s and Ford’s respective testimonies “a sad Super Bowl.”

In the 12-minute segment on the hearing that captivated a nation, the host expressed disbelief at Kavanaugh’s aggressive behavior during his testimony. “This guy was such an asshole, it looked like he was auditioning for a Snickers commercial,” Noah said, referring to the ads in which people rage until they’re given a candy bar.

For all the nostalgia they can inspire, school yearbooks are often full of things we’d rather forget: unflattering pictures, suggestions from people we may have liked more than they liked us urging to “keep in touch,” and awkward memories of who we once were.

Rarely do they serve as anything more than an occasionally bittersweet record of a very specific time in our lives. But in a major exception, the meaning of yearbooks and what young humans have memorialized in them is currently at the center of a national conversation with history-making repercussions, because of what Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his 1983 senior yearbook.

Majority Whip John Cornyn walked out of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school saying he “found no reason to find her not credible.”

But by Thursday’s end, her word will be put up against Kavanaugh’s, who has denied the accusation. The third person Ford says was involved is conservative writer Mark Judge. Judge, one of Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep classmates who Ford said egged Kavanaugh on during the alleged assault, will not be asked to testify.

Christine Blasey Ford faced the Senate Judiciary Committee and the American public Thursday to share her story about an alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Most people got their first direct look at Ford, and the overwhelming consensus, from right, left, and center alike, was that she was a credible and compelling witness.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) described Christine Blasey Ford as an “attractive” witness to reporters, after watching the professor deliver emotional testimony and answer questions Thursday morning about her allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than 30 years ago, when they were both in high school.

“I don’t think she’s uncredible,” Hatch told reporters, when asked about Ford. “I think she [is] an attractive, good witness.”

In the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, many troubling elements in his high school and college circles have been detailed: a culture of toxic masculinity — including allegations of rape — a degradation of women as sexual targets, and a seeming lack of oversight, from private or public figures.

But there’s one other thing that’s consistently come up: alcohol.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, for one, sounds like he understands why women don’t always come forward with allegations of sexual assault.

The conservative network’s elder statesman revealed on Thursday, shortly before Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate about her alleged assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when both were in high school, that the controversy prompted Wallace’s own daughters to share stories “about things that happened to them in high school.”

Christine Blasey Ford has repeatedly said that she thinks it’s her civic duty to speak out about the sexual assault allegations she’s brought against Brett Kavanaugh. In powerful opening remarks at Thursday’s Senate hearing, the weight of what that means for the California professor became evident.

Ford grew emotional quickly as she spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee and recalled Kavanaugh forcing himself on her when she was in high school, attempting to remove her clothing, and covering her mouth when she tried to scream. Kavanaugh has unequivocally denied these allegations.

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee came up with a solution to the optics problem of an all-male panel questioning a woman about her sexual assault claims: They hired a woman to do it for them.

But it might have backfired.

In 1991, Anita Hill testified before an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee. At the time, there were only two women in the US Senate. Now there are 22.

As Christine Blasey Ford, the Palo Alto University professor who alleges that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school, testifies before the committee, there is a lesson that some things don’t change.

Forty-eight percent of white evangelicals say that embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed even if the allegations of sexual assault against him are true.

Marist asked 1,000 respondents from September 22 to 24 whether they would support Kavanaugh if the allegations by Christine Blasey Ford, who says Kavanaugh assaulted her at a high school party decades ago, were found to be true.