Civics Versus Partisanhip at Kavanaugh-Ford Hearing



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The real subject of afternoon exchanges as part of the Kavanaugh-Ford audience was partisanship. Rachel Mitchell's questions, every five minutes, were speculative, but they were clearly designed to check if Christine Blasey Ford had worked with the Democrats. Mitchell wanted to know who paid Ford's polygraph. She asked who paid her lawyers and who recommended them. Mitchell polled several times to see if Ford had received strategic advice on how to handle his story. Aside from the little revelation that one of the two lawyers had been recommended by Dianne Feinstein's office, there was nothing.

Ford's Democratic allies returned to a point she had made at the beginning of her testimony – that she had first sent her story to her MP Anna Eshoo, when the name of Brett Kavanaugh appeared on a list of potential candidates for the Supreme Court. . Her initial hope, she said, was that her story might mean that another conservative would be named, a person who would not have assaulted her. In interrogation, Ford explained that she had originally looked for Eshoo, rather than journalists, because she felt a "civic" obligation. The argument in the Judiciary Committee concerns Ford's motivation. Partisanship, suggest Republicans. Civics, Ford responded.

That unassuming civism is more possible is perhaps the most pressing American debate of the Trump era, a debate that takes place in the lives of ordinary people and separates them from their family and friends. But it's also, for the moment, a public relations hurdle for Republicans, who – if the wrong defense of identity does not take – seem to be trying to persuade Americans that Ford's testimony can not be distinguished from a partisan effort to defeat President Trump candidate. In the hallway outside the courtroom, Republican senators were already hitting that note. Democrats' questions, said John Cornyn, "have hit me more politically. President Trump, during his press conference at the UN on Wednesday evening, insisted energetically that the allegations against Kavanaugh were part of a "con" democratic. The president said, "Schumer and his friends are all laughing, how they have cheated on you. When, in her opening statement, Ford said, "I am not the pawn of anyone," she argued that her experience was more important than partisan politics. he. The Republicans, at the end of his testimony, had trouble getting up the cage.

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