Yesterday, we reviewed some of the “sky-is-falling” rhetoric that has characterized the Left’s tirade against the Kavanaugh nomination. Today, we’ll step gingerly into the muck that abortion-rights supporters have stirred up against Kavanaugh.
Amanda Marcotte, a “politics writer” for Salon.com, was kind enough to regurgitate most of these swamp gas talking points in one place for the convenience of readers who, like her, prefer to believe that all of President Trump’s possible Supreme Court nominees were “equally committed to the belief that wealthy white men are the only real citizens and the rest of the country’s human rights are up for grabs.”
“It’s true that Kavanaugh tries to write arguments and opinions that sound like a judge rather than an Infowars blogger. That should not lull anyone into mistaking him for anything but a militant right-wing jurist,” Marcotte says. Kavanaugh is just the latest proof of the “authoritarian project of dismantling democracy and ending reproductive rights,” she writes.
And leading abortion advocate NARAL penned this gem, calling out the nominee for – wait for it – his first name:
NARAL’s assertion that Kavanaugh is some misogynist frat boy like John Belushi’s Bluto Blutarsky in Animal House is, itself – can we say it? – sexist. The charge answers itself and says more about the source than it does about the target. But in case there’s any doubt, here’s an opinion authored by Yale dean Amy Chua, who declares that Kavanaugh is “a mentor to women,” and that she “can’t think of a better judge for my own daughter’s clerkship” than Kavanaugh. In fact, Judge Kavanaugh has hired slightly more women than men as clerks, and eighteen of his former female clerks penned a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging his confirmation. Some misogynism.
So who is Brett Kavanaugh, after all? A man who is known to his clerks as a fanatic for accuracy in sourcing and for polished writing, often working through many drafts of opinions, yet still finds time to volunteer for Catholic charities and coach his daughter’s basketball teams.
The bottom line is, as the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Ed Whelan observed recently, “the Democrats really have no ammunition.” Kavanaugh’s mud-slinging critics should remember that launching unfounded attacks on a person’s character is itself immoral, and the defense that “it’s just politics” is lame and unacceptable.
