Susan Collins said that she wouldn't vote for Kavanaugh unless the hearings were reopened and Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Judiciary Committee. But that's not good enough. The repeat of the Anita Hill episode with a slightly different cast of Republican inquisitors is no better than no hearing on the topic. Doing that next Monday without a through background investigation as the Republican's flying monkeys attack Christine Blasey Ford, intimidate her, force her and her family out of their home, and in full view of any potential corroborating witnesses who could back her up because she told them what happened when it happened is to do what was done by a few male Republican Senators to Anita Hill magnified by the Republican troll-boys of the internet. Not to mention those financed by Putin.
Unless Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski demand a thorough and effective investigation to go along with the show-trial that such a hearing will be, they are asking for something worse than no hearing at all. Without such a thorough investigation, the hearing would be a sham giving Collins and Murkowski a lame excuse for voting to put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. Allowing her to be subjected to what the Republicans on that committee and outside of it as providing them with cover would be an act of shame that they should never be allowed to hide behind.
Watching the old footage of Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch lying about and attacking Anita Hill and hearing Hatch and other Republicans on the putrid Judciary Committee, more putrid under Chuck Grassley than it was under the better but disgustingly cowardly Joe Biden, I not only think that Christine Blasey Ford's requirement that the FBI conduct an investigation, interview witnesses, into Brett Kavanaugh's assault and attempted rape of her is not only reasonable as self-defense, it is among the best possible protections of the nominations process. Given what the hearing turned into those decades ago, allowing the Republicans to turn it into a "he-said-she-said" spectacle in which Republicans would be free to life about and attack and speculate on everything they have been, allowing them to do that would be worse than no hearing at all. And don't forget that they'll have FOX and the FOX-lite of CNN's "balanced" amplification of every one of the lies told, media amplification of the attack was certainly part of what they did to Anita Hill.
It is glaringly obvious from the conduct of these hearings, as it was the Republicans' conduct at the public grilling of Anita Hill all those years ago, that they don't want their nominees to be fully tested before they are put on the Supreme Court to cast the entirely predictable votes that they're being put there to cast. They want to install someone who will vote Republican-corporatist, the more shamelessly Republican-corporatist, with racist and sexist thrown in to satisfy those factions of the party, the better. Brett Kavanaugh is nothing other than shameless about filling their order.
Hatch, Grassley and the entire Republican membership of that committee, the entire Republican caucus in the Senate don't care if they're putting a liar, a perjurer, a partisan hack who has no shame about changing his most basic opinions depending on which party holds power, they're certainly indifferent as to whether their nominated legal goon is someone who tried to rape at least one girl when he was in high school. They maintain a president in the White House who has bragged, on tape, about assaulting women, who has no respect for women, who is a 72 year old version of a pre-fratboy prep-school creep.
What Christine Blasey Ford and her attorney are demanding as a condition for her testimony is thoroughly responsible, and not just for her and her families safety, for the very existence of democracy in the United States.
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