Grassley Provided The Smoking Evidence That He Knew Kavanaugh Was Vulnerable To A Charge of Sexual Abuse

Since the Republican-fascist judge-making machine of Trump+McConnell+Grassley have hidden the largest part of Brett Kavanaugh's record from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the public, we are forced to form our judgment out of other things, and that is entirely their own fault and Brett Kavanaugh's.

The latest piece of what we're left with, a woman who apparently said he assaulted her when he was a teenager shouldn't have been needed to defeat his nomination to the Supreme Court, the little we have of his public record, especially public speeches and rulings he's made should have been enough to have the phony "moderate" Republicans a firm "nay" when the vote is called.  But they're as much a part of the Republican-fascist judge-making machine as anyone else in the Senate.

So, what are we to make of the phenomenon of this accusation, I don't know.  Unlike when Anita Hill was dragged into the public view and she did the responsible thing in light of that exposure, give evidence to a hostile, sexist and dishonorable Senate Judiciary Committee of old, biased men, we aren't likely to have the chance to judge it on that evidence, so tested.

I think the most telling bit of evidence we do have was pointed to by Charles Pierce yesterday and it came right from Chuck Grassley.

Senator Chuck Grassley—who has stayed too long at the fair—and the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee released a letter from 65 women who allege that they knew Kavanaugh in high school and that he was at all times a perfect gentleman. This was enormously stupid on Grassley's part.

I, for example, went to an all-boys Catholic high school, just as Kavanaugh did. I can say with perfect honesty that I didn't know 65 girls while I was in high school, let alone 65 who would know me enough to vouch for my gentlemanliness four decades later. And I am supposed to believe that Grassley and his staff mustered these women in the past two days? That dog slumbers on the porch and will not hunt. The Republicans on the committee knew, and they knew there might be some substance behind it, and they had a rapid-response document ready to go. And...

I doubt that any man in the country could have a letter signed by 65 women they knew decades before attesting to their "gentlemanliness" pulled out of the hat on that short notice,  the speed with which Grassley produced it is, actually, the evidence that it was suspected such a letter might be needed and it is doubtful that they would have gone to the bother of assembling one in the time such a letter would take to assemble unless they knew it would likely be needed.

The evidence that Grassley provided in the form of that letter leads me to think that there is more than one woman who might have evidence pertinent to this issue that is not in Kavanaugh's favor and that there is every reason in the world to think that the Republicans are ready, this time with foreknowledge, to put a second likely sexual abuser on the Supreme Court.   They have one in the White House, he nominated this one, so it's clear that "me too" is a dead letter in the Republican Senate as it is in the Trump regime.   Collins and Murkowski, Flake and Sasse, all of them are in on it.  The evidence of that is that none of them have called for a pause to the process and demanded that the full record be made available to the Senate.   We are all complicit if we let them and the media that will try to cover for them get away with it another time.