There is a growing sense that the Democratic Media Smear Machine Complex has finally overreached with the latest unsubstantiated smear against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Far from demoralizing Republicans our getting Kavanaugh to withdraw, instead it’s stiffened senate spines and galvanized Republican voters heading into midterms.
Describing earlier calls with other conservative leaders, [Family Research Council president Tony] Perkins said there is growing dissatisfaction with the manner in which the GOP has treated the accusations, while cautioning that in his own view McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley have handled the situation as best they could.
“There’s a sense that the Republicans have bent over backwards to accommodate only to be kicked in the process,” he told TheDCNF.
Elsewhere in the interview, Perkins warned that Republican lawmakers would pay an electoral price in the November election should Kavanaugh’s nomination fail. (RELATED: Kavanaugh Addresses His Encounter With Parkland Dad In Written Supplement To Testimony)
“Conservatives want the Republicans to fight for this,” he said. “This is what the election in 2016 was about and that’s what I believe the midterm election will be about as well.”
Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, detected similar enthusiasm in her own conversations with conservative groups and Kavanaugh allies following the appearance of the Ramirez allegations.
“Conservatives have been galvanized by the coordinated smears of the Democrats and especially outraged at the publication of discredited allegations.”
Not only has it galvanized conservatives in general, but some who were resolutely #NeverTrump in 2016 are now falling in line:
The last-minute ambush validates key assumptions of Trump’s supporters that fueled his rise and buttress him in office, no matter how rocky the ride has been or will become. At least three key premises have been underlined by tawdry events of the last couple of weeks.
First, that good character is no defense. If you are John McCain, who genuinely tried to do the right thing and carefully cultivated a relationship with the media over decades, they will still call you a racist when you run against Barack Obama.
If you are Mitt Romney, an exceptionally earnest and decent man, they will make you into a heartless and despicable vulture capitalist, also for the offense of campaigning against Obama.
If you are Brett Kavanaugh, a respected member of the legal establishment who doesn’t have a flyspeck on his record across decades of public service in Washington, they will come up with dubious accusations of wrongdoing from decades ago when you were a teenager.
Second, that the media is an unremitting political and cultural adversary. In the Kavanaugh controversy, the press has been wholly on the other side, presuming his guilt and valorizing his accusers and their supporters, including Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, whose most famous contribution to the debate was telling men to “shut up.” The advocacy isn’t limited to cable networks or the Twitter feeds of journalists. It reaches all the way up the food chain.
The New Yorker, which imagines itself an upholder of the finest standards of American journalism, which sports a refined monocle-wearing dandy as its mascot, which was once edited by that famous paragon of editorial care, William Shawn, happily published a new accusation against Kavanaugh even though the accuser herself had doubts about it (she only became convinced of it after days of consideration and talks with her lawyer).
The New York Times passed on the story when it couldn’t find any first-hand corroboration of it. The New Yorker didn’t allow that to become an obstacle.
Third, that politics isn’t just rough-and-tumble; it’s red in tooth and claw. Process and norms are nice, but they go out the window as soon as something important is at stake, like a potential fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Senate Democrats may delicately talk about the importance of norms and civility on Sunday shows, but watch how they act. They sat on an accusation throughout an extensive process of vetting and questioning a nominee, then declared it dispositive evidence against his confirmation when it leaked at the 11th hour. They delayed a hearing with Christine Blasey Ford long enough to allow time for the second accuser to be persuaded to come forward.
All of this plays into Trump’s support. Surely, a reason that the president appealed to many Republicans in the first place, despite his extravagant personal failings, was that they had decided that virtuous men would get smeared and chewed up by the opposition’s meat grinder, so why be a stickler for standards?
Widespread disgust over the sheer nastiness of Democratic tactics may be (along with a booming economy) why Republicans have passed Democrats in generic favorability polls, the GOP’s highest ratings since 2010, a year that was not notably kind to Democrats at the ballot box.
Republican lawmakers have a stark choice: confirm Kavanaugh or get slaughtered out in November:
The rubber is about to meet the road for Senate Republicans. They have a simple choice: they can vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, thereby ending the baseless and unsubstantiated Democrat- and media-fueled smear campaign against him, or they can kiss House and Senate majorities goodbye for the next decade, if not longer.
In case the election of one Donald J. Trump was not enough to compel the D.C. Republican establishment swamp creatures to wipe the muck from their eyes and see what’s happening with their own constituents, Republican voters have had enough of feckless do-nothings whose careers consist of little more than not doing everything they promised to do.
Give us the House, the Senate, and the White House, they said, and we’ll repeal Obamacare. Give us power across the major elected branches, and we’ll secure the border, they promised. With a Republican president in the White House and a Republican majority in the Senate, we’ll confirm the most conservative Supreme Court nominees you can imagine, they claimed.
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Republican lawmakers have to understand that their voters have zero patience for their excuses for not doing what they promised. It’s why they elected Trump in the first place. Republican senators failed to repeal Obamacare after promising to do so for years. That was strike one. They’ve steadfastly refused to secure the border, let alone build a barrier along the most porous sections of the nation’s border with Mexico. That was strike two.
A refusal to vote to confirm Kavanaugh in the face of a blatantly obvious Democrat smear campaign, orchestrated in concert with a compliant and obscenely partisan national media, will be strike three, and there will be no more at-bats. I have spent a career working in and covering politics, and I have never witnessed the kind of anger among rank-and-file GOP voters generated from a combination of the unsubstantiated Democrat attacks on Kavanaugh and the flaccid response of emasculated Republicans.
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If Kavanaugh is not safe from reputation- and career-destroying smears, no one is. Not you. Not your husband. Not your son, father, or brother. If they can destroy Kavanaugh, they can do it to anyone you love and trust, regardless of any mountains of facts or evidence to the contrary.
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if GOP lawmakers show that they do have a spine and are no longer willing to let the other side get away with reputation murder, they might actually keep both their House and Senate majorities in November. As Trump has shown, even discouraged Republican voters are willing to stand behind somebody who’s willing to stand up for them.
Even the famously calm/embalmed majority leader Mitch McConnell was showing signs of irritation at the sheer dishonest on display from Democrats
I have never seen Mitch McConnell this riled up. He is finally feeling the same anger and the same passion that his constituents have been feeling for years. There may yet be hope for the @GOP . They need more reinforcements tho. Vote Red in November.
— Oak-town ☢ Unfiltered [ Activated] (@hrtablaze) September 26, 2018
Early on it looked like McConnell was letting Democrats walk all over him by bending over backwards to accommodate their “witnesses” and ever-changing demands. Now it appears he may just have been playing possum while Democrats reeled out enough rope to hang themselves.
Tags: 2018 Election, Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats, Mitch McConnell, Republicans, Rich Lowry, Sean Davis, Supreme Court