Fox News pundits analyzed Day One of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings by gushing over “nice guy” Kavanaugh, attacking Democrats for being “raucous” in their objections and ignoring the serious questions about Kavanaugh’s suitability as well as the Republican shenanigans designed to ram through his appointment.
The hearing’s opening remarks were delayed by nearly an hour and a half by Democrats’ fiery objections to the Republicans withholding of documents from Kavanaugh’s work during the George W. Bush administration and for independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr during the Clinton years. Less than 24 hours before the hearing, the White House released 42,000 pages of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committe and demanded they be kept confidential.
On top of the procedural issues, there are, of course, substantive questions about Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence, especially his belief that a sitting president should be exempt from criminal prosecution and investigation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Donald Trump that Kavanaugh’s lengthy paper trail would likely cause confirmation difficulties. Yet Trump chose Kavanaugh anyway. So what did the Republicans do? They’ve hidden much of it.
That's a banana republic level of corruption.
Yet, in assessing the situation, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Dana Perino, Martha MacCallum and Brit Hume didn’t seem to think any of that worth mentioning. No, they were too busy thinking about how Democrats were not polite enough to Great Guy Kavanaugh.
WALLACE: It has struck me that an awful lot of this has been quite personal and almost insulting in terms of what they have said about Brett Kavanaugh. They say he lied to the committee during an earlier judicial confirmation hearing about whether or not he was involved in the Bush administration and discussions of terrorism, and on and on. There’s been a kind of nasty tone.
FACT CHECK: There is evidence that Kavanaugh misled the Judiciary Committee during his 2006 confirmation hearing for appointment to the Court of Appeals, not merely about “discussions of terrorism” but about his awareness of the Bush administration’s terror-detainee policy. Not surprisingly, none of the other pundits pointed that out to viewers. So Wallace went on to gush about Kavanaugh’s ability to speak without “a single note.”
Perino and MacCallum apparently thought that Kavanaugh should be confirmed on the basis of being “a pretty good guy.”
PERINO: I think that when Brett Kavanaugh finally speaks, that the contrast between his demeanor, his judicial temperament, his ability to speak as a gentleman of Washington, D.C. but also a family man, as we’ve been talking about with his family there today, the contrast will be so stark and like when Roberts spoke or when Gorsuch finally had a chance to speak, the American people sort of were like, “seems like a pretty good guy to me.”
MACCALLUM: Yeah. … To a person, [Kavanaugh’s law clerks] talk about his personable nature, that he’s humble, that he’s charitable – they couldn’t have said enough nice things about him. …. You do see things in a certain way when you’re representing a president and advising a president and different from the way you rule when you’re a judge so he’s gonna have to have his nice-guy demeanor but also be firm on that, I would imagine.
Hume seemed to think that Kavanaugh’s “judicial temperament” was what qualified him. And, of course, that the Democrats’ “extremely aggressive approach” disqualified their criticism.
HUME: It strikes me that the tone’s been set here, Martha, by the Democrats, in the way they’re pursuing this and, in the way their questions which will undoubtedly be extremely aggressive, will approach him and he has an opportunity therefore by display of proper judicial temperament to be disarming to the national audience. And so, when you get down to it, you have to ask this question: has anything that Kavanaugh’s opponents have done today, advanced the cause of peeling off a couple of Republican senators? I really don’t think so and I think someone like [Sen.] Susan Collins, who is a person who cares about Senate decorum and its traditions and so forth, saw this circus that was staged there this morning – she’s not gonna look at that and say I’m gonna get on board with the Democrats. I can’t imagine that.
Wallace chalked up all of the Democratic behavior to politics – while overlooking the far-more potentially destructive political behavior of Trump and the Republicans in installing a guy likely to provide Trump with a Get Out Of Jail card while running roughshod over the vetting process.
“You can somehow tell the difference in the way different Democrats are approaching this by whether or not they face tough re-election fights in 2018. Add to that there are three members of this committee who potentially could be Democratic contenders for 2020, for the presidential race,” Wallace said. He was referring to Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar who, along with Senator Richard Blumenthal, started “the raucous opposition.”
Wallace deliberately diminished their opposition by saying those four senators were “trying to break this up, trying to somehow throw a wrench into the cogs of this machinery and there’s no question in my mind they were appealing to the active leftist, Democratic presidential base.”
Yet, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a sense of genuine unease on the panel about the ferocity of the Democratic resistance.
Watch the reaction below, from the September 4, 2018 coverage of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing.
Sadly, the Dems do not have any ability to stop this situation or even slow it down. Whether they are present or not, Chuck Grassley will ram this nomination through the committee and send it to the floor for a vote as fast as he can. When he does so, John Kyl will be standing ready to join the rest of the GOP in voting for Kavanaugh as a giant middle finger to the Democratic Party and the rest of America. And we will likely see at least a 51-49 vote. Kavanaugh could get a couple of Dems, if they cave on their principles, but I hope he doesn’t. The GOP will vote in lockstep, including Susan Collins, who has already announced she’s satisfied that Kavanaugh believes Roe v Wade is “settled law” – which is a totally meaningless phrase since all decisions are settled law until the Supreme Court overturns them. Collins just needed that olive branch, and when Kavanaugh votes as everyone knows he will, she’ll just say that he never told her he was going to rule like this and she’s shocked, shocked that there is gambling going on in this establishment.
I admire the Dems for showing some spirit today, but it’s sadly two years too late. They needed to be doing this in 2016, if they wanted to avoid this situation from happening. Because those 2-3 million Dems in the swing states chose to stay home when they were needed, we now have a situation where major damage has been done to all three branches of our government, and where our best option will only slow the damage for a couple of years until we get another chance for those Dems to learn their lesson and show up.