Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a conservative who is opposed to abortion and gay marriage, and has given some indication that he would vote to give the broadest approval of executive power if questions about a subpoena or about charging a sitting president came before the court. His would be the possible fifth vote, giving a majority, to overturn Roe vs. Wade, thus leaving it up to states to decide to completely outlaw abortions in their state.
Now I do not know whether he is guilty of the teenage assault, but everything I've heard and read about his accuser's account -- and how it has affected her through the years -- makes her a very credible accuser. She's asking for an FBI investigation; false accusers don't do that. I certainly agree that the FBI should re-open it's background check on Judge Kavanaugh in order to investigate this claim, even though it occurred more than three decades ago.
If he is innocent, as he says he is, then it is a smear of his good name -- and one would think he would like to have that cleared up by an investigation. If he is guilty, then senators should know this before they give him a life-time Supreme Court appointment.
His accuser says that, at a party, he pushed her into a bedroom and locked the door, threw her on the bed and jumped on top of her, grinding his body into hers. When she tried to scream and call for help, he firmly placed his hand over her mouth. It was only when his male friend, who was also in the room, jumped on top of both of them and they rolled off the bed that she was able to get away.
Now, here's why I tend to believe that Brett Kavanaugh was capable of behaving that way. Within the past year, a teenage girl who was pregnant as the result of a rape, as she explained, wanted to get an abortion. The problem was that she was one of the immigrant teens who were here in the U.S. and in custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. She had already gone through all the requirements for a minor, and had gotten the approval from a judge (not Kavanaugh), to have an abortion.
The head of this agency is staunchly opposed to abortion, and he has tried, in her case as well as others, to put up roadblocks to allowing this to happen, even when approved by a judge. That was the case with this girl.
This obstruction of the court-approved abortion was appealed to the Appeals Court on which Judge Kavanaugh sits. The final decision of this court of judges was to allow the abortion; but Kavanaugh wrote a stinging dissent., which also reflected his egregious, dismissive attitude toward the girl's plight.
In other words, he was opposed to allowing a teen age girl, pregnant from rape, to have an abortion. That is a position that I assume follows a deeply held belief by the judge. But is it what we want in the deciding vote on the Supreme Court, which already has four conservative justices who might vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade?
A letter writer to the New York Times, Victoria Hochberg, put it this way:
"A 17 -year-old boy, holding his hand tightly over the mouth of a 15-year-old girl to silence her protests, allegedly tried to rape her. If he had succeeded and she became pregnant, that boy's 53-year-old self, now a nominee to the Supreme Court, would today probably vote to prevent his 15-year-old victim from getting an abortion.
"Is this the country that American women must live in? Have we learned nothing? Have our leaders learned nothing?
"This man must not be allowed to rule on the bodies of women."
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Well said. Brett Kavanaugh looks like a mild and reasonable man -- just from seeing him in the televised hearings. But reports of his drunken, wild partying behavior in prep school are reinforced by the principles he seems to have formed in his adult life. That men have control over women's bodies.
I vote No on Kavanaugh for SCOTUS -- and not only because of this alleged attempted rape when he was 17.
Ralph
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