Susan Collins: I Want An Angry Partisan Credibly Accused of Attempted Rape to Overrule Roe v. Wade
By 
Susan Collins has announced that credible sexual assault accusations, repeated lying under oath, naked partisanship, and opposition to a woman’s fundamental reproductive freedom should not disqualify someone from the Supreme Court, making Kavanaugh’s confirmation inevitable. Her speech announcing this, appropriately, is revoltingly smarmy and dishonest, ludicrously presenting him as a nonpartisan moderate. But putting Kavanaugh on the Court will totally solve the dysfunctional confirmation process, though!”
And let us not forget Mr. Jeff Flake. I would have assumed that John McCain’s record for fawning media coverage: actions that merit positive coverage for an Arizona senator would be permanently unbreakable, but he did it. He’s not fit to clean Heidi Heitkamp’s bathroom.
Whatever remained of the separation of powers within uniform Republican control of government melted away in the fracas over Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Senate Republicans abdicated their duty to oversee nominations by refusing to call the only witness to Ford’s allegations, Kavanaugh’s classmate Mark Judge, to testify publicly. The White House severely curtailed the FBI inquiry, making it unlikely to turn up evidence that Kavanaugh had lied under oath about his drinking or high-school behavior, despite one public report after another that showed his testimony to be false. The successful Trump administration effort to limit the investigation into Kavanaugh demonstrated that the stated commitments of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Chris Wray to resist political pressure in their enforcement of the law will crumble under sustained pressure. With his ascension to the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh will be able to make good on the threat of partisan vengeance he made in his testimony.
[…]
But the questions about Kavanaugh’s drinking in high school only became relevant after Ford’s allegation and Kavanaugh’s blanket insistence that he had never drunk to the point of blacking out. One after another, former classmates attested to Kavanaugh’s habit of drinking to excess, raising doubts about the credibility of that blanket denial. They understood, as Kavanaugh did, that acknowledging that he may have blacked out would lend credence to Ford’s allegation. More and more evidence emerged that Kavanaugh misled the Senate about childish references to sex and booze in his yearbook, suggesting that, if necessary, Kavanaugh would lie under oath in order to take his place as a justice.
But even if one believed that Ford and Ramirez were lying, that Kavanaugh’s youthful drinking was irrelevant, and that he had not misled the Senate deliberately or otherwise, Kavanaugh showed himself unfit for the federal bench when he declared, “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit” by “left wing groups” in an act of “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” and warned that “what goes around comes around.” Kavanaugh himself said in 2015 that a judge must not be a “political partisan” and that judges must make decisions “impartially and dispassionately based on the law and not based on your emotions.” By the most generous of standards, Kavanaugh has disqualified himself on both counts.
Kavanaugh’s suffering, even if entirely undeserved, does not entitle him to an appointment to the Supreme Court. That frame of understanding has it entirely backwards: It is the American people who are entitled to independent, impartial adjudication of the law, an obligation Kavanaugh has shown himself unfit to fulfill.
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, Kavanaugh insisted that he was an “independent, impartial judge,” writing, “I was very emotional last Thursday, more so than I have ever been. I might have been too emotional at times. I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said.” That this non-apology was issued from the pages of the most prominent right-wing op-ed page in the country is no coincidence.
Kavanaugh’s charge that he was the victim of a left-wing conspiracy, and his threat of revenge, were in his prepared remarks; they were not a spontaneous emotional outburst. If Kavanaugh cannot even pretend to make a commitment to nonpartisanship without misrepresenting his own actions, his word is absolutely worthless. It is less than worthless. It is a winking performance of insincerity for a conservative audience that is in on the joke.