Replaying Clarence Thomas, With A Twist

It looks like we are going to have a replay of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, 27 years on. The White House has made clear that it has no intention of pulling Kavanaugh’s confirmation after the woman who has accused him of attempted rape stepped forward. And Kavanaugh himself is doubling down on his innocence, this morning tweeting “This is a completely false allegation. I have never done anything like what the accuser describes.” It’s not quite as dramatic as Thomas’ “high-tech lynching” but just as forceful.

As with Thomas, there is a fair amount of circumstantial information supporting the accuser’s claim. Anita Hill’s accusation was backed up by at least three other women who had similar experiences of sexual harassment by Thomas. In this case, according to Ford, there is one witness to the attack, Mark Judge, a friend and prep school classmate of Kavanaugh’s at the time. But Judge may not be the best witness for Kavanaugh, having admitted to being a black-out drunk at prep school and having written a thinly-veiled novel about it in which a drunken “Bart O’Kavanaugh” was said to have puked in someone’s car. And Kavanaugh certainly hasn’t helped his own credibility with his blatant obfuscations and lies during the hearings.

So, like the Thomas hearings, this will come down to a he said/she said moment. And the White House is betting that they can bully their way through this like they did with Thomas. But this time, perhaps, the votes of a bunch of old white men may not be enough to get Kavanaugh confirmed. If the Democrats hold firm, and that’s a big if, it will really be up to two Republican women, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, to determine Kavanaugh’s fate. In this #MeToo era, the pressure on them will be enormous. But simply the fact that it will actually be women who make this critical decision is an improvement over where we were in 1981.