You will not be seeing any dramatic, thumbs-down moment from the senator occupying John McCain's former seat.
McCain, you may recall, stunned the country last year by walking into the Senate and voting no with his hand, thumb down, on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Now Sen. Jon Kyl is occupying the office of McCain, who died in August, but Kyl is showing little of the departed senator's lust for life in the public eye. A reporter for the Hill, Alexander Bolton, reported that a fed-up Kyl told protesters in the Senate office building Wednesday: "Would you leave me alone?"
Protesters are one thing; the people of Arizona are another.
Until Thursday afternoon, Kyl had brushed us all aside during his month in office, virtually disappearing after taking the oath of office. For weeks no one was answering the phones at his office. His new spokeswoman did not answer for six days a handful of questions I asked them about Kavanaugh's nomination. They included questions about any compensation he may have received for acting as a Kavanaugh's shepherd in the Senate and what he might have learned, in that role, about any sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh.
Finally, Thursday, Kyl showed up in public, on the floor of the Senate, and explained in a half-hour speech, why he continues to support Kavanaugh's nomination. In doing so, he answered a couple of my questions about his work helping Kavanaugh's nomination.
"My assistance to Judge Kavanaguh was on my own time, free of charge," he said.
"At no time during my work with Judge Kavanaugh did any allegation of impropriety arise," he added. "Some have asked me questions about this. I hope this satisfies their inquiries."
He went on to praise Kavanaugh's judicial record and ask colleagues to judge his "judicial temperament," which came into question during Thursday's angry and disrespectful testimony, on his 12 years in the D.C. circuit court.
Kyl's speech did answer most of my questions. Most notably, he still supports Kavanaugh 100 percent. But I still have some niggling doubts about Kyl's lobbyist work in the months and years before he became a U.S. Senator again, as well as his commitment to Arizonans.
In his Arizona's Politics blog, Phoenix-area attorney Paul Weich noted that Kyl's firm had been paid more than $200,000 to lobby on behalf of Neil Gorsuch's 2017 Supreme Court nomination. Kyl and colleagues worked in part for the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative group also pouring money now into supporting Kavanaugh's nomination.
And in a disclosure form for the second quarter of 2017, the firm acknowledged doing paid lobbying work to "prepare for possible additional Supreme Court vacancy."
Thursday's speech helped. But by Kyl's behavior in office up to that time, he seemed not to have mentally left the more comfortable confines of his lobbying work.
He's in a different seat now, recently McCain's, and ought to act more like it. He represents us now, even if it ends up being just a four-month reprise of his previous senatorial career.
