No One Asked Me But… (October 10, 2018)

By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… Running the risk of being label an “old white man” intent on bullying a female sexual assault victim, I will comment on the Brett Kavanaugh appointment to the Supreme Court. As I write this column, the Senate is taking a trial vote to see how the confirmation will go on Saturday. By the time this column is printed, Kavanaugh will be confirmed or denied a position on the court.

Senator Diane Feinstein released a document on the last day of the Senate Confirmation hearings that she had withheld from the Senate committee for over a month. It was the Democrat’s last-ditch effort to delay the confirmation vote until after the elections in November in hopes that the Democrats would take control of the Senate and have enough votes to stop the Kavanaugh appointment.

Do not mistake this move as a concern for what happened or did not happen at some teenage drinking party thirty-five years ago. Senator Feinstein is not concerned about Dr. Ford’s psychological health; she is merely looking at her as a political pawn in the game of Washington politics.

The Republican senators, once again showing their reluctance to play political hardball, brought in a female sexual assault prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, from Arizona to question Dr. Ford. Senator Grassley, a Republican and head of the committee stated he “hired Mitchell to spared the Republican committee members, all males, from appearing as bullies interrogating a lone female witness unaccustomed to a hardball politics.”

I am sorry Senator, but that is the job you were elected to do, and if the public perceived you as such for asking the simple questions that prosecutor Mitchell asked, so be it.

The prosecutor presented her report and concluded no “reasonable prosecutor would go forward with this case.” She further stated that the case “did not meet the preponderance of the evidence standard.”
Mitchell noted that Ford failed to offer a date as to when the incident occurred. Ford could not say where the incident happened and had no recollection as to how she got to the party or how she got home. The three witnesses Ford said could corroborate her story could not do so or actually refuted her claim. Two other students Ford named also stipulated under oath that they did not recall the incident.

As the Democrats saw their sexual assault case against Kavanaugh fall apart, they turned to the issue of under-age drinking. However, these accusations were also a problem. Originally the claim was made that the drunken assault happened when Kavanaugh was eighteen and Ford was fifteen. At the time of the alleged incident eighteen was the legal drinking age in Maryland. Kavanaugh was born in 1965 and if the incident happened when he was eighteen it would have happened in 1983. Maryland raised the drinking age to twenty-one in 1984.

That was no problem for the Democrats, they merely amended the ages to seventeen and fourteen respectively which now means that both were involved in underage drinking as Ford recalled that she had one beer on that evening thirty-five years ago.

I personally do not feel it is unfair to question the validity of an accuser who cannot remember when the alleged incident occurred, where it occurred, how they got to the site of the incident or how they got home. This is especially true when the people she identified as being able to corroborate her accusations would not do so. She can, however, remember with 100 percent surety that she had one beer; and a boy she did not know before the incident, nor had any contact with after, was Brett Kavanaugh.

You need to understand I have no knowledge of how good or how bad Brett Kavanaugh is as a person or a judge, I merely find it dangerous to destroy an individual with unsubstantiated claims.

I would also state this is not unusual in American history. As early as the 1600’s, nineteen people in New England were hung and one was pressed to death as witches on the hearsay of teenage girls and neighbors. In the 1920’s, there was the Red Scare when Americans with communist leanings were deported.

During World War II, 31,275 people were placed in concentration camps throughout the United States: 16,849 Japanese only because they were Japanese, 10,905 Germans, 52 Hungarians, 5 Bulgarians, 25 Romanians and 161 listed as others. The Germans for the most part were interred based on accusations of neighbors. There were no hearings, no trials, and no defense allowed. Many of these were American born citizens.

In the 1950’s, it was once again communism that led to unsubstantiated accusation that destroyed people’s lives.

Since the 1960’s, racism has become the tool of those who would discredit an opponent. Today sexual misconduct has joined racism as the taint that will destroy people without proof. One needs to merely make a statement, and to challenge that statement paints one as a supporter of racism or sexual misconduct.

In the Kavanaugh case when confronted with the lack of evidence, Democrat Senator Swalwell stated that it did not matter if it could be proven as “This wasn’t a trial; it was a job interview.”

The tragedy of the Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court appointment is not what happened or did not happen at a teenage drinking party 35 years ago. The real tragedy is what has happened to the Supreme Court over the years. While there has always been a political element involved in the Court, since the 1940’s politics has been the overriding issue in all major court decisions.

As the Supreme Court has become the most powerful branch of the American government, the real voices of the American people have given way to the political biases of nine un-elected officials who hold office for life.

The elected officials serving in Congress may make a law, if they can quit bickering with each other long enough to do so. The President may sign the law into effect. But the Supreme Court will now rule whether or not the law can stand.

The original idea of the founding fathers was that the Supreme Court would be the weakest of the three branches having only the power to decide if the law had been followed, not if the law was Constitutional.

Thought of the week… Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
– Charles Krauthammer