TRUMP’S FIGHTING SPIRIT GETS KAVANAUGH CONFIRMED

By Matthew Vadum —— Bio and Archives October 8, 2018

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After the dirtiest, nastiest Supreme Court confirmation battle in American history, President Trump’s pick, Brett Kavanaugh, was finally confirmed to the high court and sworn in as its ninth justice on the weekend, cementing for years what could be an ideologically conservative majority on the court. This means that in under two years in power President Trump has succeeded in putting two apparently originalist justices on the Supreme Court, a font of outrageous big-government activism where unelected black robed-politicians have for decades imposed unconstitutional left-wing monstrosities like Obamacare and so-called affirmative action on the American people, policies that voters have rejected at the polls.

In the rest of Trump’s time in office, more vacancies are likely on the court. Left-wingers Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are 85 and 80, respectively. If these liberals are replaced by conservatives, the effect on American jurisprudence, and on society itself, could be profound, even revolutionary. Of course, just because a Supreme Court justice is appointed by a Republican president, there is no guarantee that the lifetime appointee will act like a conservative while serving on the court. Chief Justice John Roberts (President George W. Bush, confirmed 2005) has been a great disappointment to conservatives, as have former Justices Anthony Kennedy (President Reagan, confirmed 1988), David Souter (President George H.W. Bush, confirmed 1990), John Paul Stevens (President Ford, confirmed 1975), and Sandra Day O’Connor (President Reagan, confirmed 1981). But a victory is a victory and getting a conservative like Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch last year, on the Supreme Court is no small achievement. Given the enormous leftist angst and apoplexy out there, it probably won’t be any easier next time President Trump nominates someone to the high court That said, President Trump deserves high praise.

As J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, writes at PJMedia, two factors pushed Kavanaugh across the finish line. First, there was Kavanaugh’s wise decision to fight “all of the false, outlandish accusations” against him. Second, there was President Trump’s speech Tuesday, October 2, in Southaven, Mississippi, in which he rehashed principal Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s ridiculous, impossible-to-believe testimony about the nominee’s alleged attempt to do some vague, unwanted, possibly sexual thing to her almost four decades ago at a party in high school that none of the witnesses she identified could corroborate. Trump said:

How did you get home? I don’t remember. How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don't know.

“You'd hardly know it at the time how this helped Kavanaugh,” Adams wrote. He continued:

Although a “cadre of advisers, confidants and lawmakers all urged him — implored him, really — not to personally attack the women who had accused” Kavanaugh of sexual assault, Trump “did it anyway.” The president “laid into Ford with the ruthlessness of an attack dog and the pacing of a stand-up comedian,” and the crowd “roared with laughter and applause.”

Establishment Republicans initially reacted with horror. But Trump’s 36-second off-script jeremiad proved a key turning point toward victory for the polarizing nominee, White House officials and Kavanaugh allies said, turbocharging momentum behind Kavanaugh just as his fate appeared most in doubt.

The confirmation vote itself went about as smoothly as it could have in the circumstances. Under siege by howling leftist mobs, the Senate’s presiding officer, Vice President Mike Pence, declared the nomination of Kavanaugh approved by a vote of 50 to 48 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time Saturday. Throughout the roll call vote in the Senate and in the debate preceding it, the visitors’ gallery erupted with screaming by protesters. Only one Democrat, the perpetually endangered Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a state President Trump carried in 2016 by 42 percentage points, voted to confirm Kavanaugh. Manchin also voted last year to confirm Gorsuch, Trump’s other nominee to the high court.

Two Republicans failed to vote to confirm Kavanaugh but only one of those senators had a good excuse. After it become clear that enough votes would be forthcoming to get the nominee confirmed, Steve Daines of Montana attended his daughter’s wedding in his home state. After a rambling speech explaining her position on the nomination, the cowardly RINO, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted “no” in the roll call but then announced at 3:53 p.m. Saturday on the Senate floor that she was withdrawing her “no” vote after noting that doing so would not change the outcome. On Friday morning Murkowski was the sole Republican to vote against a procedural motion to move forward with the confirmation vote. Daines and Manchin voted in favor of the motion. Alaska voters “will never forgive” Murkowski for voting against Kavanaugh, President Trump told the Washington Post. “I think she will never recover from this” and will be defeated in the GOP primary in 2022, Trump said. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) taunted Murkowski on Twitter. “Hey @LisaMurkowski — I can see 2022 from my house...” In the days leading up to the vote, leftist operatives, largely females, working for groups underwritten by billionaire speculator George Soros harassed and accosted Republican senators on Capitol Hill over Kavanaugh and the various scurrilous, uncorroborated allegations hurled at the nominee. When a woman screamed if Kavanaugh “would take a polygraph, this would all be over!” at Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the lawmaker fired back with a reference to a brutal, often lethal, medieval method used for detecting witches. “Why don’t we dunk him in the water and see if he floats?” Graham said. When a group of women taunted Orrin Hatch of Utah, asking aloud why he wasn’t “brave enough” to talk to her and her group, the senator waved his hand in the air. “Don’t you wave your hand at me,” the woman said. Hatch looked at her and said, “When you grow up, I’ll be glad to” talk to you. “How dare you talk to women that way,” one woman huffed. A backlash among GOP voters against the over-the-top tactics employed by leftists against Kavanaugh will come back to bite the Left in the posterior, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) predicted Friday. “I want to thank the mob, because they’ve done the one thing we were having trouble doing, which was energizing our base.” “The mob was not able to intimidate the Senate,” McConnell said. “We stood up to the mob.” President Trump piled on, ridiculing the out-of-control protesters and warning voters about supporting Democrats. “You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob[,]” the president wrote on Twitter. “Democrats have become too EXTREME and TOO DANGEROUS to govern. Republicans believe in the rule of law - not the rule of the mob. VOTE REPUBLICAN!” The messy fight over Brett Kavanaugh may yet help Republicans retain control of Congress in next month’s elections.