Tucker Carlson: Kavanaugh chaos — If you’re a Republican, you may be wondering why should I bother to vote?
By Tucker Carlson | Fox News
It’s worth considering what we’ve learned from the debate over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. This feels like a turning point, something entirely new in the life of this country.
We certainly had bitter and partisan debates over judicial nominations before, a lot of them. Robert Bork in ’87, Clarence Thomas, four years later, there are many others.
Shortly after being re-elected President in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt tried to take over the entire judicial branch of government — packing the court with extra Democrats so he could impose his program on Congress by force. Thankfully, FDR failed in that.
But the point is a lot of this is not new. Politics has always intruded on our justice system. Congress confirms the nominees, so it’s inherently political, always has been. Yet, some of this we have not seen before. It’s entirely new.
Never in our lifetimes have sitting members of Congress attacked our justice system as they now are. Lawmakers haven’t mocked the idea of due process or called for the collective punishment of American citizens or declared that the burden of proof is on the accused rather than the accuser.
All of that is happening right now in Washington and more.
It’s not just Brett Kavanaugh who’s under assault. Elected officials have announced they no longer believe in our Western understanding of justice. There’s no precedent for that here. It’s stunning.
You should pay close attention to what’s happening because it could affect all of us. The shift began late last week with these remarks from Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono:
“I just want to say to the men in this country, “Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change. Not only do women, like Dr. Ford, who bravely comes forward, need to be heard, but they need to be believed.”
So, there you have it. All men are guilty not because they’ve been proved guilty but because they are men. They are inherently guilty, by their nature. All women must be believed not because we can show they’re telling the truth but because they are female.
Evidence is irrelevant in both cases. All that matters is DNA. All of us are condemned or redeemed at birth and there’s nothing any of us can do to change that. It’s baked in the cake. That’s what she said.
No living U.S. senator has ever said anything like that in public. Yet, none of Hirono’s Democratic colleagues recoiled or even scolded her or suggested she was wrong. They seem to agree with what she said.
Hirono herself did not issue an apology or a clarification. She kept going. Here she is from over the weekend while talking with CNN’s Jake Tapper:
JAKE TAPPER, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, ANCHOR, THE LEAD WITH JAKE
TAPPER, CNN: Doesn’t Kavanaugh have the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America?
HIRONO: I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.
Well give her credit for directness. According to Senator Hirono, Brett Kavanaugh is not protected by the United States Constitution. He does not enjoy the presumption of innocence. Kavanaugh is guilty because his opponents say he is guilty. That is Senator Hirono’s position. She’s proud of it. She’s become a folk hero on the left for saying that.
Watch her say it again on Monday.
HALLIE MARIE JACKSON, CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, NBC NEWS, ANCHOR,
MSNBC: Can you clarify what you meant? Do you believe Judge Kavanaugh doesdeserve a presumption of innocence or not?
HIRONO: Look, we’re not in a court of law. We’re actually in a Court ofCredibility at this point. And without having the — the FBI report or some semblance of trying to get corroboration, we are left with the credibility of the two witnesses.
Oh, a Court of Credibility. Now, Senator Hirono didn’t explain exactly what a Court of Credibility is, though you can be sure you wouldn’t ever want to be tried in one, though at this rate, sorry, you may be.
If the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to Brett Kavanaugh, it probably doesn’t apply to you either. It all depends on what Mazie Hirono thinks of your political views. If she agrees with you, you’ll be fine. If not, you won’t be fine.
Keep in mind that once you’ve been accused in this new Court of Credibility, you’re responsible for proving yourself innocent. It’s your job to un-convict yourself. If that sounds like a mirror image of our actual justice system, you’re right. It is.
For more than a 1,000 years, the burden of proof in the West has fallen on the accuser. In our country, that would be the government. If they say you did it they have to prove that you did it. But, not anymore.
Here’s Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut on Monday morning explaining how the new system works:
“We have a constitutional duty to get to the bottom of these allegations. They are serious, and credible. And now, the person with the most knowledge about them, namely, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, has a responsibility to come forward with evidence to rebut them.”
Got that? We accuse you of a felony. Your job is to show you’re innocent. You’re a sex criminal, prove you’re not.
Senator Blumenthal went to Yale Law School. Did he learn that concept in his classes there?
Probably not.
It’s a new idea but it’s also a very old idea. It was common during the medieval period where the accused also had a “responsibility” to come forward with evidence to rebut the charges against them. Heretics who survived torture sometimes got declared innocent. Hurray.
But there’s a flip side to the new system. Because the accused are guilty by definition, the accuser suddenly have no responsibility to make credible claims. And we’re seeing that principle in action too.
We covered the story all last week. Five nights in a row we said that we are giving Christine Ford every benefit of every doubt, and we did that.
But let’s be honest now. Not many of her claims would hold up in an actual court, the one governed by the justice system we thought we had until about 10 days ago when Mazie Hirono informed us otherwise.
When did this alleged assault take place? Ford can’t say. When did it happen? She doesn’t know. Where are the witnesses to this? Well there aren’t any. The few people Ford has named deny it happened. When was this first reported to authorities? Well it never really was.
The story came out in stages. It was a recovered memory, apparently summoned by a psychotherapist 30 years after the fact. And even then, it was another six years before Ford named Brett Kavanaugh specifically at exactly the point he was being nominated for the Supreme Court.
That’s not our analysis of the case. It’s the position of Ford’s lawyer[s], nearly all of whom double as Democratic Party activists and operatives and some of whom defended Bill Clinton from far graver sexual assault claims when he was accused.
That doesn’t mean Ford is lying but it does raise legitimate questions so does a lot of her behavior.
Last week, for example, Ford told senators she couldn’t come to Washington to testify because she’s afraid to fly on airplanes.
This fear, she explained, is a direct result of being groped over her clothes by Brett Kavanaugh back in high school in the 80s. As one of her friends told The Washington Post, airplane’s cabins remind Ford of the trauma, theyare “the ultimate closed space” where you cannot get away.
But wait, is this true? Ford has relatives on the East Coast. According to published accounts, she’s been here recently. Did she drive back and forth to California every time she visited? We don’t know.
Then last week the New York Times reported that Ford did graduate work at the University of Hawaii. That’s on an island thousands of miles in the Pacific. How exactly did she get there?
Could it be possible that Ford is claiming she can’t fly in order to delay the proceedings long enough that Brett Kavanaugh can’t be confirmed? There might be something the committee could ask her if she shows up on Thursday as she says she will.
They probably won’t ask her though. That would be victim-shaming. She’s a woman. She’s telling the truth no matter what she says.
Even when things she says turn out to be not true they are still true by definition.
Watch former Michigan Governor, Jennifer Granholm, explain this principle.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN: –Kavanaugh, Judge, Smith and her friend, Leland — Leland Keyser, have all said they don’t remember anything like this ever happened. And Leland Keyser, who says she believes Ford, says that she doesn’t even remember ever being at a party where Kavanaugh was present.
JENNIFER GRANHOLM, FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL, FORMER GOVERNOR, MICHIGAN:
Right. And — and that actually corroborates Ford’s story which is that she was so horrified by this that she kind of snuck out or slunk out of this apartment in — in a way that no one would know what happened because she was so utterly mortified.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Are you following this at home? See if you can track the reasoning here. When you’re corroborating witnesses can’t corroborate your story that when you say they can corroborate your story has still been corroborated maybe even more so.
Those are the new rules here in the Court of Credibility. T
hey’re certainly the rules Washington is applying to the new story that The New Yorker magazine dropped Sunday night. In it, one of Kavanaugh’s classmates at Yale says that during a drunken party on campus Kavanaugh once wagged his genitals in her face.
Well that sounds awful and damning. But wait, here’s the magazine’s description of those claims.
“In her initials (ph) conversations with The New Yorker, the accuser was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party.”
So it turns out she didn’t actually remember what happened. None of the people she says were in the room remember it happening either. Yet after talking to her lawyer for a week, she suddenly remembers it.
That’s enough for CNN, guilty as charged, string him up!
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEFFREY ROSS TOOBIN, LEGAL ANALYST, CNN AND THE NEW YORKER: Are they all lies? Perhaps, but, you know, it certainly has the ring of truth to me.
The idea that it’s all made up seems sort of preposterous at this point.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, it has the ring of truth. Oh, perfect, that’s enough, let’s hang him.
This is a bad joke, this whole thing. That’s clear at this point and everybody knows it on both sides. What’s amazing is that Republicans, for some reason, are still playing along.
Last week, Senate Republicans declared in effect that all allegations against Brett Kavanaugh must be heard no matter how frivolous or obviously fraudulent they are. Senate Republicans are the ones who made the Court of Credibility possible in this country.
Shouldn’t surprise anyone The New Yorker ran this piece. How many more pieces like it are coming? As many as it takes, no question about that.
We can’t control the Senate Republicans, obviously. They exist in their own world. But we can remind them what is at stake here.
If Brett Kavanaughwho’s a mainstream judge, a moderate, really, a man who’s literally married to George W. Bush’s assistant can’t get confirmed to Supreme Court then no Republican can get confirmed to the Supreme Court, even with a Republican Congress ever.
But it’s worse than that. There’s a mid-term election just weeks from now. If you’re a Republican, you may be wondering why should I bother to vote. You backed Trump two years ago, your brother-in-law from Brooklyn mocked you for it, so did a lot of other people but you did it anyway.
Why? Because you wanted secure borders. You wanted an end to ObamaCare and you wanted non-crazy people on the Supreme Court of the United States.
You didn’t get the first two. You’re starting to realize you probably never will get them.
But the Supreme Court? That ought to be easy. And yet somehow we’re all discovering it’s not easy. Why is that? Well there’s a really simple reason. Republicans in the Senate don’t really care about you. If they did care about you, they would protect you.
That’s what you do for people you care about, you protect them. If the Republicans cared, they would protect you from the foreign invasion our immigration system has become. They’d protect your children from the torrent of mandatory propaganda they face in schools that are bankrupting you.
They’d protect your privacy and your freedom of speech, freedom of worship from the tech monopolies that seek to crush all of those things. And they’d protect Brett Kavanaugh from the obvious smears that are destroying his family and his life.
But they won’t protect him. And they won’t protect him for the same reasons they won’t protect you. Because it’s hard and embarrassing or because they just don’t feel like it.
This could be a socialist country in a few years. It’s moving that way. A lot of us would like to be protected from that.
Our representatives don’t seem to notice.
Good luck in November, gentlemen.