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Senator Mazie Hirono thinks Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is not telling the truth about the sexual assault he allegedly committed as a teenager. She thinks he wasn’t telling the truth to the Judiciary Committee when he claimed not to remember any sexual misconduct by a judge he clerked for who was forced to resign last year after allegations from more than a dozen women.


And the Hawaii Democrat says that if she gets to question Kavanaugh in another hearing, she’s going to tell him that the revelations over the weekend—when Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her at a high-school party in the early ’80s—now make her doubt what the nominee said under oath two weeks ago even more.

“It somewhat stretches credulity, let’s put it that way,” said Hirono in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “I think he didn’t want to lie about it, so one way you get through that is saying, ‘I don’t remember.’”

If Kavanaugh’s nomination fizzles and President Donald Trump has to name a replacement, Hirono says he better find someone whom she considers less of a conservative ideologue, or else prepare for Senate Democrats—especially if they win a majority in November’s elections—to keep the court seat vacant until after the 2020 election.

“I think we’ve had those kinds of vacancies before, and we certainly had over a one-year vacancy with Merrick Garland,” said Hirono. “So the world does not come to an end because we don’t fill all of the nominees.”

Hirono is short. She is quiet. She’s not much of a tweeter. She’s not running for president. She doesn’t have an outsize personality in a chamber bursting with them—her hobbies include making her own paper and folding origami cranes. She does pottery, too, but says she lacks the patience to use a wheel.

Yet the unassuming senator has become Democrats’ firmest pillar of resistance on judicial nominations, refusing to vote for cloture for any Trump nominee and asking every man who appears before her at a committee hearing whether he has engaged in physical or verbal sexual assault as a legal adult. Nominees “can lie,” Hirono said, explaining why she’s made that her standard question, “but they better hope that nobody that they did this to will come forward.”



Click here to subscribe and hear the full podcast, including Hirono on the future she sees for the stalled sexual harassment bill in the Senate and why she doesn’t like using a pottery wheel.

“Legal adult” is the phrase Hirono used when she asked Kavanaugh the question two weeks ago. She says her wording was carefully chosen because juvenile records often remain sealed. And though Kavanaugh answered no, and the incident is alleged to have happened when he was 17, she’s not ready to write it off.

“Seventeen is not exactly a baby, either. These are serious allegations. She has a very credible story. I believe her. And now we have to do more than say, ‘Well, look at the timing!’ and ‘Well, it’s all politically motivated!’” Hirono said. “This has to be taken seriously.”

Seriously, to Hirono, means another hearing on top of the one now scheduled for Monday, when Kavanaugh and Ford are both expected to testify. In a letter put together to rebut the allegations, 65 women who knew Kavanaugh when he was in high school vouched for his character. “I think we probably need to question 65 people, ‘How well did they know him?’” Hirono said.

Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Texas Sen. John Cornyn and others who doubt the Kavanaugh allegation and complain about its timing are revealing more about their own “lack of understanding of how difficult it is to come forward with a story like this,” Hirono said.

Hirono "combines a sense of dignity with a sense of badassery,” said Brian Fallon, executive director of We Demand Justice, an outside group formed earlier this year to buttress Democrats on judicial nominations. “At a time when other Democrats have not shown any sense of urgency, she has consistently understood the stakes of what Trump’s takeover of the courts will mean.”

On the wall in the center of her office in the Hart Building, Hirono keeps her naturalization certificate (she also points out proudly a printed-out picture of her sitting with Garland two years ago when he came in for the meetings Democrats held in a futile effort to pressure Republicans). She is the only immigrant in the Senate, having left Japan as a child to get away from a father who gambled away their money and beat her mother. She arrived in Hawaii without knowing English and having made the trek in a ship’s steerage. She is the only senator to grow up poor enough to remember what it’s like not to know where the next meal is coming from. She was the first Asian-American woman in the Senate and is the only Buddhist ever to serve in the chamber.

She says she tells her staff that everything she does now, at 70, sitting on the Senate floor, is because of who she was at 8, arriving on that boat.

“There are people getting screwed in our country every single second, minute, hour of the day. And if by our work, we can decrease that number, we’ll make a difference; we’ll be doing our jobs. And if I didn’t have the kind of background that I had—with a single mother who was just so focused on what she needed to do—I would not be sitting here today,” Hirono said.

She sent herself to law school, got elected to the state House of Representatives in 1980 and started working her way up. She became acquainted with sexual harassment from her male colleagues.

She remembers one fellow state legislator who repeatedly made noises at her. “Finally, I turn around and I said, ‘I don’t respond to that.’ And he said, ‘What do you respond to?’ I said, ‘Try Mazie,’” she said.

Or there was the man who groped her in a stadium. “I’m just minding my own business and some guy comes and touches me,” she said.

That was then, Hirono said—before #MeToo. That won’t be now, even if the hearings don’t stop Kavanaugh from getting confirmed.

Hirono laughs at the idea that Kavanaugh fits John Roberts’ famous formulation of a judge as a baseball umpire who simply calls balls and strikes.

“Nooooooo,” she said. “He knows where he needs to be, and he gets there.”

Stopping him still seems unlikely, for all the Democratic action, she acknowledged. But that wasn’t the point of taking an aggressive posture at the Kavanaugh hearings.

“What we accomplish is letting the American people know that I framed this as part of a concerted effort on the part of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation to pack our courts. And they’ve been doing this for decades now, preparing the way, and they now have a willing president who is going to pick names off their list,” Hirono said. “So the American public needs to know that court-packing is going on. … And I hope to enable everybody to connect the dots. That they better be voting at the state legislative level and the governorships for people who are going to provide the kind of protections that maybe they will no longer be able to expect from the Supreme Court.”

Hirono won’t criticize Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, for sitting on the letter about the Ford allegations for weeks. She won’t criticize other Democrats for taking a more reserved approach that hews to old Senate decorum.

“I don’t bang them over the head about some of the things that I do,” Hirono said. “I figure they have to figure it out for themselves.”