WASHINGTON — President Trump denounced Democratic efforts to block Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation as a cynical “con job” Tuesday and launched a dismissive attack on a second woman accusing the nominee of sexual misconduct in the 1980s, asserting she “has nothing.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell predicted Kavanaugh would win approval, despite the new allegations and uncertainty about how pivotal Republicans would vote in a roll call now expected early next week. Like much of America, lawmakers awaited a momentous Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday in which Kavanaugh and chief accuser Christine Blasey Ford are to testify, though not together.
“I will be glued to the television,” said Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine who has yet to declare her position on confirmation.
Hoping for no new surprises, the committee scheduled its own vote on Kavanaugh for Friday, and Republican leaders laid plans that could keep the full Senate in session over the weekend and produce a final showdown roll call soon after — close to the Oct. 1 start of the high court’s new term.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Republican chairman of the committee whose 11 GOP members are all male, said in a brief interview that his panel was hiring a female attorney who would ask Ford his party’s questions Thursday. He declined to name the attorney.
“We’re doing it strictly to depoliticize the whole operation, to offer Dr. Ford the professional environment she asked for,” Grassley said of Ford, now a 51-year-old psychology professor in Northern California.
Democrats weren’t buying that.
“My gut is they’re trying to avoid a panel of all white guys asking tone-deaf questions,” said Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware.
Hanging in the balance in the confirmation fight is Trump’s chance to swing the high court more firmly to the right for a generation. Despite McConnell’s forecast, Kavanaugh’s fate remains uncertain in a chamber where Republicans have a scant 51-49 majority.
While a few Republicans have also strongly challenged the credibility of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Trump’s words have been more biting. Last week, he lampooned Ford’s allegation that an inebriated Kavanaugh trapped her beneath him on a bed at a high school house party and tried to take her clothes off before she escaped. Surely she would have reported it to police if the encounter was “as bad as she says,” the president said.
“It’s a con game they’re playing,” he said Tuesday. “They’re really con artists. They don’t believe it themselves, OK?”
