Just when the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be an inevitability borne of this Republican Senate majority and the fast-approaching midterm elections, his nomination was thrown into disarray by the same thing that has been undoing male public figures of all stripes: allegations of sexual assault. Christine Blasey Ford, a college professor in California, told the Washington Post that at a party several decades ago, a teenage Kavanaugh pinned her down on a bed, groped her, and tried to remove her clothing. She said he was "stumbling" drunk, and that he covered her mouth with his hand when she screamed.

This development is the first real test of the #MeToo movement in which the accused stands on the precipice of achieving their professional goals, instead of having already reached them. Through her attorney, Ford has indicated that she is willing to testify about the incident before Congress. As reluctant statements of concern trickle out from the offices of a few Republican legislators, it seems likely that she'll do so in the days to come.

Fortunately for Kavanaugh, he still has the support of a cohort that is well-equipped to ignore evidence of a judicial nominee's sexual misconduct: the Republican Party. Many GOP senators issued indignant statements promising to stand by their man, and Trump's White House has no plans to pull the nomination. (Also, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the people who live to eliminate the right to choose are not particularly inclined to hear a woman complain about what a man did to her.) Meanwhile, the official response from Kavanaugh's camp is that the incident never happened, and that no incident like the incident ever happened, and that Ford is fabricating everything.

This aggressive, blanket-denial strategy feels like one crafted by men who believe that acknowledging anything—even the simple possibility that something could have happened 35 years ago that he does not remember—would be tantamount to accepting defeat. After weighing all the options, they have decided that it is better for the nominee to bluster and to call Ford a liar than it is for him to allow for the slightest possibility of nuance. It is about as cynical as politics gets.

For Democrats, the reasons to fight Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation were already legion: his anti-choice ideology, his history of using the law to promote a partisan agenda, his extremist views on executive power, and so on. This revelation presents an apolitical, values-neutral problem, though, and it is critical that his opponents make that distinction clear. Tacking Ford's story to the end of their laundry list does a disservice to her and to all survivors, because it allows bad-faith actors to portray the #MeToo movement as a political weapon that should be treated with skepticism. Trump sees this story as a craven stunt perpetrated by desperate Democrats, and conflating the grounds to oppose Kavanaugh's candidacy will make it hard to prove the president wrong.

Across the aisle, Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley and his colleagues are grappling with what was always the greatest potential pitfall of their decision to align themselves with Donald Trump: Even if one of his judicial nominees came with baggage that would be disqualifying under any other circumstances, the party had precious little margin for error. If they had more time, the surest path to a conservative Supreme Court would be to withdraw Kavanaugh's name and put up some other generic, Federalist Society-approved lawyer in his place. But with the midterms fast approaching and their monopoly on the appointment process in doubt, Republicans have no choice here but to bear down. They already embraced one credibly-accused sexual predator in the name of political expediency, after all. What's one more?

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