A longtime friend of Brett Kavanaugh's described why he wouldn't vote to confirm the Supreme Court nominee if he were a senator — and it has as much to do with his testimony as it does Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's.
"This is an article I never imagined myself writing, that I never wanted to write, that I wish I could not write," Lawfare Blog editor-in-chief Ben Wittes wrote in a column for The Atlantic.
In spite of liking Kavanaugh and having defended his character and "taken a fair bit of heat for doing so," Wittes wrote that the nominee's performance is disqualifying.
"The Brett Kavanaugh who showed up to Thursday’s hearing is a man I have never met," he wrote, "whom I have never even caught a glimpse of in 20 years of knowing the person who showed up to the first hearing."
Whereas the nominee was always "a consummate professional" in all of their work-related interactions, his appearance in the televised hearing last week was entirely new to Wittes.
"The allegations against him shocked me very deeply, but not quite so deeply as did his presentation," he noted. "It was not just an angry and aggressive version of the person I have known. It seemed like a different person altogether."
That personal "cognitive dissonance" matters less, Wittes continued, than the difference between the "raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial" partisanship Kavanaugh displayed at the hearing and the impartial jurist he once appeared to be.
"Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable pro-choice woman would feel like her position could get a fair shake before a Justice Kavanaugh?" he mused. "Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable Democrat, or a reasonable liberal of any kind, would after that performance consider him a fair arbiter in, say, a case about partisan gerrymandering, voter identification, or anything else with a strong partisan valence?"
Wittes went on to note that although there were "holes" in Dr. Ford's testimony, she is so "wholly credible" that "not even Kavanaugh and his supporters contend that she is lying or making up the incident in question, merely that she is mistaken as to his involvement in it."
"On the other side of the ledger is Kavanaugh’s testimony," he wrote after explicating Ford's credibility, "and here we cannot be quite so confident that the witness was being candid."
"My point is not that his confirmation in any sense turns on how much Kavanaugh drank or whether he and his friends made misogynistic jokes as teenagers," Wittes concluded. "But his testimony doesn’t have the ring of truth either. And lack of candor in a witness in one area raises questions about the integrity of that witness’s testimony in other areas."
Read the entire editorial via The Atlantic.
