by CHQ Staff
Conservative may assume that the not so “presidential” aspirations of Democratic Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California turned Thursday’s confirmation hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh into a circus, with Harris and Booker vying for the role of chief clown, but it was an important moment in Democratic politics.
Booker began the morning by announcing “I’m breaking Senate rules. This is my only chance to have a Spartacus moment. I’m willing to get kicked out of the Senate over this,” before claiming to release publicly “committee confidential” memos related to Kavanaugh’s time at the Bush White House.
The only problem for those of us who would like to see Booker out of the Senate is that the material had already been cleared for release to the media, so charges leading to Booker’s expulsion from the Senate would not hold up.
What’s more, reading through the material reveals that Kavanaugh came out strongly against racial or ethnic profiling in the George W. Bush administration’s post-9/11 airport security screening and law enforcement policies generally.
FOX News reporter Shannon Bream later tweeted that Fox was told by Committee staffers that Sen. Booker knew BEFORE he made these statements that the documents in question had already been cleared for release.
Garrett Ventry, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley’s senior communications aide, later tweeted, “Last night, Senators Leahy, Coons, Blumenthal and Booker requested that certain ‘committee confidential’ documents be made public for use during the hearing for Judge Kavanaugh.”
Ventry added: “Chairman Grassley went to bat for them, and worked with the Justice Department and office of former President Bush to waive the relevant statutory restrictions on those documents. Those restrictions were waived before 4:00 AM this morning and made ready for release.”
And: “In short, Sen. Booker made a scene this morning about committee confidential docs that Chairman Grassley helped make public prior to the hearing today.”
Senator Harris for her part bored in on one of the most important shibboleths of Democratic politics, female identity.
As Far Left website ThinkProgress.org reported, “Judge Brett Kavanaugh appeared dumbfounded when he was asked by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) whether he knows of any laws that give the government the power to control male bodies.”
“Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Harris asked.
After a long pause and a bizarre back-and-forth in which Kavanaugh asked for a more specific question and then claimed he thought Harris was “asking about medical procedures that are unique to men,” the judge eventually admitted that he could not think of any laws governing the male body.
As clownish as Booker was, and as bizarre as Senator Harris’ question about laws governing male bodies was, Harris passed from clown to villain during her time in spotlight.
As National Review contributor Jonathan S. Tobin put it:
Although Senator Mazie Hirono matched her for sheer hostility, with a prosecutorial style that seemed more in place at a Stalinist show trial than at a confirmation hearing, among the 2020 contenders Harris was the toughest questioner of the trio. And by deliberately insinuating that Kavanaugh was somehow connected to the Trump administration’s efforts to defend itself against the Russia-collusion probe led by Robert Mueller, Harris not only gained the kind of publicity that is fundraising gold for a potential candidate, she also made it clear that she would stop at nothing in her efforts to smear opponents. If Democrats are looking for someone who is willing to be ruthless enough to take on President Trump even if that means engaging in gutter politics — and that seems to be exactly what their base is longing for — then Harris’s approach may give her the boost she needs to fuel interest in her presidential prospects.
As Tobin analyzed the hearing: Kamala Harris’ snide and disrespectful prosecutorial tone, made her the winner of the first day of the Kavanaugh primary.
Over the course of the long journey to 2020, the Kavanaugh hearings were just one small step toward the Democratic presidential nomination and Booker and Harris, while they often looked like clowns to conservatives, put on the show that the new Far Left Democratic Party’s primary voters crave.
