What Happened In The Brett Kavanaugh Hearing

We should note that this was a much different hearing than with Anita Hill. Considering Mitchell’s time asking questions, I would assume female questioners had more time than male ones — way different than in 1991.

… and, maybe the public won’t follow in this level of detail, but the GOP’s “witnesses don’t remember/corroborate” argument is very much undermined by their unwillingness to call Judge to testify. Blumenthal is correct about that one.

But not much follow-up from Mitchell on that line of questioning, even after Ford gave a slightly weird response about her friend’s health.

Lawmakers are being asked for their opinions on the hearing during the lunch break. A sampling of the responses from Republican senators:

• Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito called Ford’s testimony “riveting.”
• Sen. Lindsey Graham found himself confronted by a woman who told him that she’d been raped. “I’m sorry. Tell the cops,” he said.
• Sen. Orrin Hatch called Ford an “attractive” witness, presumably referring to her performance under pressure, but social media outcry hit him for a tone deaf choice of words.

Finally a line of questioning that gets directly to the night of the alleged incident. It’s happening when there’s very little time left on the clock, however.

It’s worth noting that, unfortunately for Booker and Harris, you are not allowed to use footage of Senate proceedings in campaign ads.

If Ford’s charge of sexual assault against Kavanaugh is true, a majority of Americans (59 percent) said that he should not be confirmed to the Supreme Court, according to a recent NPR/Marist poll.

Harris didn’t even pretend to ask a question like Booker did. She got in a few good sound bites, though.

So this is the last five minutes.

Harris was the last Democrat with five minutes. Kennedy has five minutes that will go to Mitchell. I’m not sure if Feinstein or Grassley will talk anymore, but we are nearing the end of Ford’s time. I will be curious what Ford does after. Does she shake hands with the senators? Do interviews afterward? I feel like she has said everything she wanted to say and said it well, so I assume she will be done after this.

Another polling note: Even before this hearing, Kavanaugh had the lowest support for a Supreme Court nominee heading into a confirmation vote, according to Gallup polling dating back to 1987.

Supreme Court nominees who have polled as low as Kavanaugh, have not been successfully confirmed.

Harris, like almost all of her Democratic colleagues, has brought up the need for an FBI investigation.

Yeah, if speechifying during your five minutes tells us anything about who’s running for president, then it looks like Booker and Harris are running and Klobuchar isn’t.

Like Booker, Kamala Harris is doing absolutely nothing to dissuade people from the idea that she’s gonna run for president.

Just remember, going into this hearing, opinions on Kavanaugh were starkly divided across party lines, with Republicans largely in support of his confirmation and Democrats just as equally against it.

Here’s a look at other divisions in Kavanaugh’s net approval based on a recent Fox News poll.

Kamala Harris: “You are not on trial.”

Mitchell is asking the questions for Sen. Thom Tillis. One other Republican left: John Kennedy. So Mitchell has about five more minutes left.

Well, I guess maybe part of Cory Booker’s strategy was to give Ford a break from talking in between her sessions of questioning from Mitchell, but uh, that was also a nice little moment for him to grandstand.

Cory Booker is the ultimate “Actually, this is more of a comment than a question” guy.

I’m beginning to think that the strategy was for Mitchell to ask questions hoping to undermine Ford’s credibility, but also so Republican senators didn’t ask questions. Mitchell only has 10 minutes left — I feel like she has gotten very little accomplished.

Yes, I agree with you, Nate. Mitchell seems to be really trying to paint Ford as a partisan pawn in this. It’s sort of a weird morass to get into, and Mitchell’s questioning seems to be getting a bit more aggressive. Wonder if she had a powwow over the lunch break with the Republicans on the committee who told her to get tougher.

It’s still pretty strange to me that Mitchell isn’t asking more about the incident itself, and in particular, about the fact that other people Ford says were at the gathering don’t have a recollection of it.

Micah, our forecast doesn’t say why Democrats or Republicans are doing well, so it would be hard to identify causation just from movement in our model. I would look more toward the behavior of elites, like the GOP governors we mentioned earlier, or how senators vote on Kavanaugh’s actual confirmation, and what challengers are saying about whether they support his confirmation. That said, what elites think voters want to hear and what voters actually want to hear are not always the same thing.

Mitchell taking Sen. Crapo’s time, and begins again with the polygraph. Ford’s lawyers interrupt to say, “Let’s put an end to this misery” about the polygraph questioning. They state that they have paid for the cost of the polygraph. Mitchell’s questions about the polygraph continue.

If they confirm Kavanaugh after this hearing — or maybe I say despite this hearing — then you’d presumably see an effect pretty fast, although it could fade some by election day. If they don’t confirm him and it’s kind of a mess, that’s a little harder to answer.

Nate, If this hearing and the whole Kavanaugh process does have an effect on the midterms, how long would that take to show up in our forecasts? And Nathaniel, are there indicators other that our forecast that you would look to either way?

Hirono asked Grassley directly if any of the GOP senators will be asking questions. I was curious about this, too. It sounds like Grassley said none of the Republicans are asking Ford questions. Hirono, who is known for making pretty strong, and sometimes pretty partisan statements, also slammed Mitchell for her questions.

By my count, 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats left. So 30 minutes at least. Three Democrats who will be interesting to watch: Sens. Hirono, Booker, and Harris.

Well, Mazie Hirono going guns blazing in her statement about “the Republicans’ prosecutor.”

If the tweet below becomes the GOP strategy, I don’t really get it. One risk you face if you direct the entire ire of the Republican base at Collins and Murkowski is that they’ll defect and join the Democratic caucus or, in Collins’s case, choose not to run for re-election in 2020. Collins and Murkowski have supported the GOP agenda most of the time — if not quite as often as Trump might like — and they’re pretty valuable to have in your coalition.

I’m watching CNN and their analysts are pretty unified in saying this is going poorly for the Republicans. I tend to agree. That said, Kavanaugh will get the last word (at least in this setting). Plus, he’s savvy and has shown the ability in the past to be, well, whatever the polite term is for “saying misleading things to get what he wants done.” I think he will likely raise some doubts about what Ford said.

Will the outcome of the Kavanaugh hearings make a difference in the midterm elections? Well, a recent Pew Research poll found that “Supreme Court appointment” now tops the list of issues that voters say are important to their vote, outranking healthcare, economy and gun policy. It’s hard to say if this will die down, but for now it looks like it’s at the top of voters’ minds.

Democrats seem more fired up about the outcome of the supreme court nomination than Republicans. Eighty-one percent of Democrats and 72 percent of Republicans say the supreme court nomination is “very important” to their vote in 2018 in a Pew Research poll. That marks a shift from a year ago when Republicans were more likely than Democrats to think of supreme court nominations as very important to their midterm votes.

Most of the senators who have prominent roles on the judiciary committee don’t face a lot of electoral pressure this year — but Dianne Feinstein is a partial exception, as under California’s top-2 voting system, she’s facing off against another Democrat, Kevin de Leon. The polling there has tightened a bit, enough that the “polls-only” Lite version of our model gives de Leon a 1 in 10 chance of pulling off the upset. Our Classic model, which accounts for Feinstein’s huge margin of victory over de Leon in the June primary, is much more skeptical, however.

Stepping back just for a second to take in the jurisprudential landscape: If Kavanaugh, or someone ideologically similar to him, is confirmed, George W. Bush-appointee Chief Justice John Roberts would likely become the Supreme Court’s median voter, with four liberals to his left and four conservatives to his right, replacing the longtime (and now retired) “swing voter” Justice Anthony Kennedy. That would represent a dramatic pivot of the court to the right, akin to when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor occupied the median position two decades ago. Graphically, that pivot would look something like this:

It would be pretty ironic if a scenario like the one Nathaniel described unfolds, and Amy Coney Barrett ends up being the nominee. On the plus side for Republicans: She seems very likely to be scandal-free. And it’s possible that she could end up being a more reliable vote for the court’s conservative bloc, at least on social issues. According to one widely used measure of judicial ideology, Barrett appears less conservative than Kavanaugh. But that’s based on factors related to the nomination process, not judicial decisions. And some conservatives have expressed concerns that Kavanaugh, like Chief Justice Roberts, might moderate his rulings in an effort to preserve the court’s legitimacy.

Question:

Answer:

In a quick search I haven’t found a lot about situation-specific flying fears. But I did find a typology of fear of flying, based on surveys of more than 400 people who had sought treatment for that fear. (An action that already puts them at a higher level of fear than, say, myself — someone who really hates being on planes but isn’t affected enough by that fear to go see a psychologist.) And from that study, it seems like it is pretty normal to be really afraid of flying — and do it anyway. At least sometimes.

Of the people in this study, 83 percent of men and 90 percent of women experienced severe anxiety to outright panic at the thought of flying. Yet the vast majority had flown in the past two years. Twenty-three percent had flown in the past year — about the same percent as those who had avoided flying for a decade. The same study shows that fear of flying interacts with (and can be exacerbated by) other kinds of fears and anxieties. Basically, this suggests it’s just not that weird to force yourself on to a plane to go on vacation, and feel a lot more apprehensive about getting on a plane to go do something you’re terrified of — like testify before Congress.

Chad, I think that could be true. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past Mitch McConnell to engineer something like so: Put on a firm public face in favor of Kavanaugh to appease Trump and the GOP base, but then let him fail spectacularly in a floor vote, allowing people like Dean Heller (the most vulnerable Republican up this year) to vote against him and shore up their credentials with women and independents. Then Trump nominates a scandal-free nominee and that person is fast-tracked through.

Radical q: With primaries over and Kavanaugh’s popularity already dropping, do vulnerable GOP senators WANT to cast a no vote, as a way to shore themselves against charges of sexism?

President Trump has postponed the meeting he was supposed to have with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein today, according to The Washington Post. There has been some reporting that Rosenstein is not long for his job in the Department of Justice and as the person overseeing Robert Mueller’s investigation into interference in the 2016 election. But for now, only one major news event at a time.

Mitchell has been lingering on possible inconsistencies in Dr. Ford’s statements, Chad. Insofar as this is about undermining Dr. Ford’s credibility, that’s worth noting. And Mitchell is questioning her in a way that doesn’t seem aggressive or accusatory. It seems likely that the Republican senators would have appeared much more confrontational, if they had been asking the questions.

Reporters in the hallway just asked Sen. Amy Klobuchar why Republicans deferred their time to Mitchell. She didn’t really respond to the question, but instead took the opportunity to praise Ford.

I might even go a half-step further than Nate: From where I’m sitting, Mitchell’s rather prosecutorial questions and Ford’s thoughtful and considered answers have only served to bolster Ford’s testimony. Another side-effect, though, of this format (intended or not and beneficial or not) is that we almost never see the Republican committee members’ faces on TV.

Some very preliminary evidence it’s hurting Kavanaugh’s chances:

I hate to be cynical, but it sure looks like Mitchell was brought in not to use her expertise in sexual crimes, but to be a friendly, female face in casting Ford as a liar. Mitchell’s resume and title make it a bit harder to say she was just hired because she is a woman, but the last several rounds of questioning have been basically like a regular attorney trying to raise doubts about a witness.

So, we still have a half hour or so of testimony left, judging by how many senators still need to speak. What are your takeaways from that most recent block of questioning and testimony? Can anyone make the affirmative case for Mitchell’s line of questioning being effective?

Senate is in a break now from the hearing. This is normal. Grassley said it’d be 30 minutes or so.

Democrats and Republicans have very different opinions about sexual harassment and women who report it. In 2016, the Voter Study Group asked respondents their opinion about some of these issues, and stark differences emerge.

61 percent of Republicans surveyed agree that “When women demand equality these days, they are actually seeking special favors” and half agree that “Women who complain about harassment often cause more problems than they solve.”

These responses suggest that even when party identity isn’t salient, Republicans are more skeptical of allegations of harassment or sexual misconduct. And in the context of a SCOTUS nominee by a Republican president, these differences may be even larger.

I assume the goal is to figure out who paid for the polygraph, etc., and to find some way to suggest that Ford was put up to this by the Democrats.