Stage set Washington. Object: adulterating power. The arm of government: the judiciary. That particular group of high ranking paladins remains up in the air as US Supreme Court appointee Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh floats around in a stage of grinding limbo, as sexual allegations made start to bite. This purgatorial state promises to resolve itself next week.
Palo Alto professor of psychology Christine Blasey Ford insists that Kavanaugh and another Georgetown Prep student, Mark Judge, locked her in a room during a party held in 1982. What followed was what was termed an “attempted rape”, with Kavanaugh allegedly making a vain effort to remove Ford’s clothes.
That Kavanaugh has survived this long in the Me Too age as a nominee of one of the most influential bodies of US governance is a fair indicator that Trumpland has done much to disrupt a certain sensibility. That sensibility might be hypocritical, but it is a disruption no less. Trump, for his part, has also aided his nominee’s cause by withholding some hundred thousand documents of the judge’s records from the Bush White House on presidential privilege grounds.
This show has been given a blood rushing boost, with the parties drawing battlelines in what promises to be a squalid spectacle. Whether it is those who back Ford, or the judge himself, the parties are jousting over grounds of fairness and how best to confront the allegations. The Democrats insist that the process cannot go…