Bob Heleringer

Opinion contributor

In the distinguished history of the United States Senate, there have nevertheless been some low points.

On May 22, 1856, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, using a walking cane, nearly beat to death Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner on the Senate floor after Sumner made a fiery speech attacking slavery. In May 1868, radical Republicans tried Democratic President Andrew Johnson on articles of impeachment. By a single vote, Johnson was acquitted and the country spared a precedent of presidents being removed from office over mere political differences. From April-June 1954, the Army-McCarthy hearings were held before a Senate “Subcommittee on Investigations” (and a rapt national television audience), a sort of denouement to a sorry period in our nation’s history when the lives and careers of innocent people were decimated on mere suspicions they belonged to “subversive” organizations.

To this desultory list must be added the mercifully concluded Senate hearings and debate on the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. Within minutes of the announcement by President Trump of his choice of Mr. Kavanaugh, a respected, conservative federal appeals court judge, to fill a vacancy left by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Senate minority leader, the estimable Charles Schumer, made an announcement of his own: “I will oppose the nomination with everything I’ve got.” Never let it be said that Sen. Schumer is a politician who doesn’t keep his campaign promises.

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In the debacle that followed, not even the most ardent liberal questioned the nominee’s glittering educational and public service background, a prototype for anyone who aspires to serve, for life, on America’s highest court. Brett Kavanaugh “meets the very highest standards of integrity, professional competence, and judicial temperament.” His judicial opinions are “invariably thoughtful and fair.” These accolades didn’t come from the Federalist Society, but from one Lisa Blatt, a self-described “liberal Democrat,” Hillary Clinton supporter, an “unapologetic defender of a woman’s right to choose,” and an accomplished attorney who has argued 35 cases before the Supreme Court. A committee of the American Bar Association, after an exhaustive review, certified Mr. Kavanaugh as “well-qualified,” “his integrity is absolutely unquestioned, he is what he seems, very decent, humble, and honest; he is the best, ... brilliant, fair, and open-minded.”

These sterling qualities meant nothing to all but one of the Democratic senators because Mr. Kavanaugh has never bowed down before the golden calf of the national Democratic Party: the infamous Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the exercise in “raw, judicial power” (Justice Byron White, dissenting) that legalized the killing of our unborn sisters and brothers. For that apostasy, Senate Democrats played their only remaining card: a letter from a California professor who said she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Kavanaugh when they were both high school students. Despite a request by the professor to keep her revelation confidential, instead it was held for strategic release and then leaked to the press almost certainly by a Democratic senator’s staff. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s worst nightmare was then realized, she became an expendable means to an end, a vehicle to defeat an otherwise superbly qualified judge’s ascension to the Supreme Court in a star chamber proceeding before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And not just defeat Mr. Kavanaugh, but to destroy him personally and professionally. A supplemental FBI background investigation failed to corroborate Dr. Ford’s accusation. Her best friend at the time, Ms. Leland Keyser, a purported witness, told the agents that questioned her that not only did she not recall the incident; she didn’t even know Brett Kavanaugh. Despite this finding, the bloodbath continued with other contrived, unsubstantiated charges of sexual misconduct by Mr. Kavanaugh during his college years.

It was finally up to Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins to cast the deciding vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. In a floor speech for the ages, recalling the eloquence of the giants of the Senate, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, this diminutive career public servant from Caribou, Maine, set out in painstaking detail the extensive research she had put into fulfilling her responsibilities as a senator to render “advice and consent” of an appointee to the highest court in the land. She concluded that this nominee’s “integrity, judicial temperament, and professional competence met the highest standard.” Sen. Collins is an anachronism; a moderate Republican in a time when that description is a contradiction in terms. When abortion rights advocate Susan Collins said Brett Kavanaugh belonged on the Supreme Court, it was game, set and match. Morally indignant, she called the Kavanaugh confirmation process “dysfunctional,” labeled a CrowdPac promise to stop raising money for a future opponent if she voted against Kavanaugh a “bribe,” and reminded America that “we must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”

In the end, it was Arizona’s Republican Sen. Jeff Flake who rendered a final, pathetic epitaph for a judicial confirmation that turned into a re-creation of the Bataan Death March. “Well, it’s not a perfect system, “he said. “But, it’s all we have.”

God help us.

Bob Heleringer is a Louisville attorney and Republican who served in Kentucky's House from the 33rd District from 1980 to 2002. He can be reached at helringr@bellsouth.net.