And Senator Kamala Harris said, "Be sure about your answer, sir."

You know, if I didn't know that this whole thing is a rigged wheel, if I didn't know that all the wheels had been greased years ago, I'd think Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court was making a brief stop in Harriet Miersville on its way to G. Harold Carswelltown. Now into his second day of testimony, he was flummoxed and floundering. He was nowhere near as slick as was Neil Gorsuch, whose thickly armored arrogance carried him past his obvious partisan bona fides. However, Kavanaugh is under a great deal more pressure than was Gorsuch.

Gorsuch was merely the penultimate step in the long march toward what would be an all-but-permanent conservative majority on there Supreme Court. Kavanaugh, as everybody knows, but pretends not to know, is the whole ballgame. He's probably the only reason that many Republicans have put up with the maniac in the White House. He's probably the reason that the now-famous Anonymous op-ed writer in The New York Times decided to be Anonymous instead of being a mensch and going over the side under his/her own name.

Tom Williams Getty Images

That's a lot of pressure on a guy with what seems to be a terribly erratic memory, and who looked very much as though he thought Senator Harris might melt him with a glare right there in the chair. She was after him on how much of a bag job his nomination was, and she was basing her questions on "committee/confidential" documents that he knows she has, but that she is forbidden from using in her interrogation. (More on this fictitious bit of Senate hocus-pocus in a minute.) She knew and he knew she knew and there was flopsweat on every syllable.

HARRIS: "You've been speaking for almost eight hours to this committee about all sorts of things you remember. How can you not remember whether or not you had a conversation about Robert Mueller or his investigation with anyone at that law firm?"

KAVANAUGH: "I'm not remembering, but I'm happy to be refreshed or if you want to tell me who you're thinking of."

HARRIS: "I think you are thinking of someone, and you don't want to tell us."

We now move to Thursday morning, when all hell broke loose. The "committee/confidential" documents started to leak. A story in The New York Times based on some of those documents cited one of them that seemed to completely demolish Kavanaugh's tap-dancing on Roe v. Wade.

Zach Gibson Getty Images

Judge Kavanaugh was considering a draft opinion piece that supporters of one of Mr. Bush’s conservative appeals court nominees hoped they could persuade anti-abortion women to submit under their names. It stated that “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land.” Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

Asked about this quote by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Kavanaugh caviled about who "legal scholars" were, and he went back to his original gambit about how Roe and its progeny are precedent-on-precedent, which he said was "quite important," but which, obviously, is not an answer to what Feinstein asked.

Other leaked documents made it clear that, in his service in the Bush White House, on issues from privacy to whether or not native Hawaiians could be treated like other native peoples, Kavanaugh functioned as the political activist that he was for his entire career before he was elevated to the bench. More significantly, the leaked documents showed that Kavanaugh was far more involved in the failed nomination of Charles Pickering, Jr. than he led the committee to believe in 2006, when he was nominated to the seat on the federal appeals court that he now holds.

And yet another showed him as designing for other nominees the very game plan he is obviously following in these hearings:

“She should not talk about her views on specific policy or legal issues,” he wrote. “She should say that she has a commitment to follow Supreme Court precedent, that she understands and appreciates the role of a circuit judge, that she will adhere to statutory text, that she has no ideological agenda.”

This confrontation escalated when Senators Cory Booker and Maizie Hirono told the committee that they intended to release other "committee/confidential" documents, including one allegedly dealing with racial profiling. Booker's announcement prompted an extended hooley in which John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, threatened Booker with disciplinary action up to and including expulsion from the Senate.

"Bring it," Booker replied, and his Democratic colleagues took his back. Richard Durbin of Illinois pronounced himself fed up with the farce of having Bill Burck, a former Bush administration lawyer who numbers among his clients Reince Priebus, Don McGahn, and Steve Bannon (!), decide which documents can be released publicly. He told Booker:

"I concur with what you're doing. Let's jump into this pit together. If there's going to be some retribution against [Booker], I want to be part of this process!"

As I said, if I didn't know this whole thing wasn't a monumental bag job, I'd think Brett Kavanaugh was in a lot of trouble.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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