Summary: Hearing is on for Thursday. There will be a floor vote.
I’ll answer that after I hear what Avenatti has. If he has proof of Kavanaugh and cronies drugging and gang-raping women, then this will likely get turned over to prosecutors in Connecticut.
The accusations by Ford are beyond the statute of limitations, so worst case he’ll be known as a rapey guy, no matter how much evidence comes out (though at least he probably will no longer be a judge).
Why would we be interested? Is he being more morally disgraceful than usual? Like, being suuuuper fucking rapey?
Update: No accuser has come forward in Montgomery County, MD
https://www.wsj.com/articles/kavanaugh-confirmation-process-encounters-more-uncertainty-1537798999
You seem convinced Avenatti is going to “deliver”. Do you expect him to release significant evidence prior to Thursday?
This one.
GOP is prepared for war on this then?
McConnell did say something along the lines of, “There will be a vote. Up or down. The American people deserve that.”
Fuck that guy.
I do.
LOL, I thought that’s what you wanted for SCOTUS nominees.
ETA: The quote, from C-SPAN’s closed captioning:
Yes.
Do I? I certainly don’t feel that way. He’s backed up his shit before. And there’s a huge incentive for him to be able to back his shit up now, if he’s hoping to run for president. But I don’t know what he has.
I do know that Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker, that multiple women have accused him of sexually assaulting them, that he belonged to a fraternity that sat outside a women’s center chanting “no means yeas and yes means anal.” Which implies to me that Avenatti’s claims are plausible. So I hope he has something, and I’ll be pissed if he doesn’t.
Yes (though I am not a fortune teller).
The vote is nice. Having it before the FBI has had an opportunity to investigate the multiple credible sexual assault claims is pretty shitty.
The FBI has had “an opportunity”. They declined.
Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that I don’t think what she alleges to have happened to her is all that serious. During the days of my own youth such occurrences during drunken parties was fairly commonplace, and the reaction of the girls involved was usually that the guy was just a drunken asshole and then they forgot about it.
You do raise an interesting point though, which is that Ford may have felt shame for having put herself in the position where such an attack could occur. She was underage, in a swim suit, at a party where alcohol was flowing, there was no adult supervision, and with boys who were known to become sexually aggressive when drinking. I can certainly see how she would feel a certain sense of responsibility for what happened to her (though I doubt anyone here will profess the same), and that she was probably also fear of her parents finding out.
So to that degree, I will accept that your point is well taken.
First, she did not ‘flee’ to California to escape the memories of what happened that night. I know this because she remained in the town and at the school she was attending when the attack occurred for two to three years afterward. She then moved to North Carolina to obtain her bachelor’s degree. So now we’re up to six or seven years after the fact before she is alleged to have found it necessary to flee 3,000 miles to California to escape the memory of that night.
The nonsense about her wearing blue jeans and surfing is obviously intended to show that she was finally able to relax, throw off the binds (and apparently the clothing preferences) of her former prep school environment in Maryland, and at long last wrest some enjoyment from life.
In other words, it was a ridiculously clumsy and tortured attempt at creating a deliberately false impression, which was that she was so uptight and haunted that she fled to the West Coast immediately after high school to seek refuge from her memories of that night, when the reality is that she still lived at or near home for some six or seven years afterward and then merely moved to California to continue her education, as countless people have done before and since.
Further update: New York Times passed on the Ramirez story as irresponsible to print. The New Yorker did not find corroboration, that’s why their article was titled “Dems are investigating…”
It’s possible that I’ve mixed up you with another poster who expressed more certainty about Avenatti. If so, apologies. Either way, I thank you, both for your (in my view) fairly reasonable approach to Avenatti’s rumored evidence and for the (relatively, for this thread at least) polite way you’ve expressed it.
Maybe they were still feeling a little gunshy after their big expose on curtains.
That is what I want after the senate has had a chance to review the nominee in full.
Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, is a little more fluid in what he believes the American people deserve.
I don’t get the point of announcing this. Why can’t they just go through the formalities of hearing Ford on Thursday and then determine whether to move to a floor vote? In secret, they could have everything pre-determined and still have the same result as being public about it would, except without the bad optics.
There are several things that have made the Republicans look terrible in all of this, but what takes the cake is their false sense of urgency. Even if I had no opinion one way or the other about Kav’s qualifications or character, their dogged commitment to rushing him through would be a concern for me. They are acting like a pack of panicked hyenas.