SEPTEMBER 28, 2018, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A5
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
US Senate is a factory of
suspicion and contempt
By MICHAEL GERSON
This is the cost when institutions
have lost public trust.
The United States Senate is sup-
posed to be a deliberative body, pro-
tected by extended terms from con-
tracting the political
fevers of the day. This role
assumes a certain level of
competence, collegiality
and goodwill among its
members.
None of which has
been displayed by the lead
Democrat on the Senate
Judiciary Committee, Di-
anne Feinstein. She knew about Chris-
tine Blasey Ford’s charges against Brett
Kavanaugh for nearly two months be-
fore they started leaking to the press.
This method of revelation—following
the end of the Kavanaugh hearings —
blindsided Feinstein’s colleagues, de-
nied the nominee a proper chance to
confront the accusation, and launched
an important public issue under a par-
tisan cloud.
So Feinstein is guilty of governing
malpractice and has encouraged suspi-
cion and contempt, especially among
conservatives, for the institution she
represents.
How about the Judiciary Com-
mittee more broadly? This is the place
where serious-minded investigations of
judicial qualifi cations (and disqualifi ca-
tions) are supposed to take place. The
committee has subpoena power and
a staff of investigators for a reason. It
should be the forum where matters
such as the charges against Kavanaugh
are considered. And Chairman Chuck
Grassley’s offer to hear committee tes-
timony by Ford, in public or private,
was not unreasonable.
But Democrats view the Republi-
can-controlled Judiciary Committee
as highly politicized -- and for an un-
derstandable reason. The most recent
Supreme Court nominee chosen by a
Democrat, Merrick Garland, was de-
feated and mistreated by delaying his
vote beyond President Obama’s term
in offi ce. There was no credible ex-
planation for doing this -- except that
the ideological stakes were high and
Republicans had the ability to impose
their will. It was a raw and effective ex-
ercise of power, but it had the cost of
leaving a bad partisan taste in senatorial
mouths.
Over the last few years Republi-
cans have demonstrated an undeni-
able ruthlessness in the Supreme Court
nomination process, encouraging pro-
gressive suspicion and contempt.
So how about the FBI? It, at least,
should be a respected, trusted arbiter in
American life. Why not take the job of
investigation away from elected repre-
sentatives and give it to career profes-
sionals?
But who could have possibly pre-
dicted the bureau’s reputational roller
coaster over the last few years? First, a
clownish intervention in the last days of
a presidential election that might have
helped elect Donald Trump. Then rev-
elations about politicized agents within
the FBI who hated Trump.
Then almost daily attacks
on the bureau by the presi-
dent of the United States,
who calls his trashing of the
FBI’s credibility “one of my
crowning achievements.”
The Democratic call for
FBI involvement was badly
mishandled. By withdraw-
ing Ford’s initial agreement to testify
before the Judiciary Committee and
insisting on a preliminary investiga-
tion by the FBI, Ford’s lawyers made
their strategy seem like a time-wasting
partisan maneuver. And we already
know how Senate Democrats would
overwhelmingly respond to an even-
tual FBI report. If the FBI fi nds strong
evidence implicating Kavanaugh in a
crime, Democrats will oppose him. If
there is a muddled mix of accusations
and memories, Democrats will oppose
him. If Kavanaugh is completely vindi-
cated, Democrats will oppose him.
Americans can be forgiven for
thinking that everything involved in
Supreme Court nominations -- all the
institutions, traditions, principles, pro-
cedures, solemn oaths and columned
buildings -- are merely a cover, a dis-
guise for the will to power. Where
there is no authority, all that remains is
a contest of power.
Out of all this, two things strike me
as clear.
First, as it stands, the facts are in
Kavanaugh’s favor. The charge against
him is vague, uncorroborated and
completely inconsistent with virtually
all other accounts of Kavanaugh’s char-
acter.
Second, an accusation of attempted
rape can’t be allowed to hang in the
air without a more serious investiga-
tion. In matters of such cruelty and
lasting damage, there is no exemption
for youth and inexperience. I would
no more want a Supreme Court jus-
tice who had attempted rape than I
would want a president who commit-
ted sexual assault. That is not too high
a standard.
I am on record saying that Repub-
licans should go the extra mile to ex-
amine the Ford accusation. But not an
extra marathon. Of all our institutions,
the FBI retains some shred of moral
standing. It should be instructed by
the president to conduct an investiga-
tion, in a limited amount of time, with
a narrow remit: to see if there are any
other witnesses or contemporaneous
evidence that would make Ford’s claim
seem likely. If not, Kavanaugh should
be quickly confi rmed.
guest
column
(Washington Post Writers Group)
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Demos forget rights of the accused
By DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s
ranking Democrat, Sen. Dianne Fein-
stein of California, like others in her
party, apparently has forgotten that in
America, the burden of proof falls on
an accuser, not the accused.
Thus Feinstein played a starring role
in her party’s efforts to slime the repu-
tation of Brett Kavanaugh, an eminent-
ly qualifi ed jurist nominated by Presi-
dent Donald Trump to fi ll a vacancy on
the Supreme Court.
On Sept. 13, Feinstein
released a statement about
an anonymous accuser’s
unspecifi ed
“informa-
tion” on the judge, which
the senator said she re-
ferred to federal authori-
ties. Feinstein released the
statement without even
asking Kavanaugh about the charges.
Feinstein had plenty of time to ask.
On July 30, college professor Christine
Blasey Ford wrote a letter to the sena-
tor in which she asserted that a drunk-
en Kavanaugh—then a high school
student—“physically and sexually as-
saulted” her “in the early 1980s.” The
then-17-year-old Kavanaugh groped
the then-15-year-old Ford, tried to
pull off her clothes, and put a hand
over her mouth, Ford wrote, before she
got away.
Ford provided little detail as to the
time—or even year—or the place. Her
corroboration was limited essentially to
notes taken by a therapist when Ford
fi rst revealed the story in 2012.
The Democrat from California
maintains that she could not mention
the allegation to Kavanaugh without
violating Ford’s request for confi den-
tiality. Feinstein apparently never in-
formed Ford that accused individuals
have a right to face their accusers.
Instead leaks about the Ford letter,
presumably by Democrats affi liated
with the Senate committee, revealed
the allegation which led Ford to break
her silence. Senate Judiciary Commit-
tee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa,
has since invited Ford and Kavanaugh
to address his committee on Monday.
Kavanaugh accepted the invitation;
Ford has said she wants the FBI to fi rst
investigate the alleged incident before
she testifi es.
I tend to believe women who ac-
cuse men of sexual misconduct, be-
cause these types of episodes
happen all the time unfortu-
nately. When I fi rst heard the
accusation, I thought it was
very possible a drunken teen-
age boy forced himself on a
vulnerable teenage girl, who
fortunately got away.
But Kavanaugh denies
Ford’s charge, the witness
Ford named refutes her claim, and the
pendulum has swung too far on these
stories.
Kavanaugh has led a good life. He’s
been a good boss, husband and fa-
ther to the women around him, who
enthusiastically vouch for him. He’s
passed six investigations by the FBI.
One person’s unsubstantiated accu-
sation, waged decades after the alleged
event and at a politically sensitive mo-
ment, should not be enough to topple
him.
On Twitter, conservatives have ham-
mered Democrats for their hypocrisy
on sexual harassment and misconduct.
Feinstein voted against convicting
an impeached Bill Clinton, who was
accused of much worse as an adult.
Democrats also have hit the mute but-
ton after Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.,
won his party’s primary in a bid to be-
come Minnesota attorney general after
allegations that he battered a former
girlfriend.
They were adults who held public
offi ce at the time of the accusations,
other
voices
yet Democrats are holding them to a
lower standard than they have set for
a teenager.
But hypocrisy isn’t the big problem
here. The horror lies in the obscene
toxicity behind the left’s rush to bury
Kavanaugh.
When Trump picked Kavanaugh
to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy,
Senate Democrats had not gotten over
the GOP Senate’s decision to block
President Barack Obama’s Supreme
Court nominee, Merrick Garland. The
Republicans, Democrats complained,
wouldn’t even give Garland a hearing.
Garland never was going to win
confi rmation from a GOP-controlled
Senate -- not when a presidential elec-
tion scheduled within the year could
produce a president who would keep
the conservative 5-4 majority from
swinging in the other direction.
But Senate Democrats could not
let go of the resentment they felt at
the GOP’s refusal to hold a hearing
for Garland. Before she voted against
Trump’s fi rst Supreme Court pick, Neil
Gorsuch, Feinstein told MSNBC, “The
humiliation it caused a very good man
resounds with all of us still.”
Humiliation? Please. The
Republicans spared Garland a hearing
for a job he wasn’t going to get at the
time. Now the Democrats are looking
for payback by engineering an unfair
hearing for Kavanaugh. They are so de-
termined to lash out at Kavanaugh that
they’re dredging up dirt from his high
school years.
If the left can’t smear an
eminently qualifi ed jurist on the basis
of his judicial record, they’ll destroy
his reputation. So if he makes it onto
the big bench, he’ll have a stain on his
name likely to haunt every decision he
writes until his dying day.
(Creators Syndicate)
The price of football is too high
It’s fall again! Time for football
games and cheering for your team.
Heck, football’s become so popular
even females are playing the game, at
least as kickers, while possibly no one
would be surprised to learn that fe-
males are in the game as quarterbacks
and pass catchers.
There is a dark side to our country’s
perennially-watched grid iron game.
But hold on a moment!
Is it really in danger of
seeing its end? Sci-
ence argues it is. As we
know, football is a sport
in which those simply
watching the game are
entertained as men turn
one another’s brains into
the consistency of over-
ly-boiled rolled oats.
What’s been discovered by scien-
tifi c research is that, in spite of all the
protective gear, especially the designed
and re-designed head gear, repeated
hard impacts that are part and parcel
of the game do permanent damage to
the human brain. These impacts result
in chronic traumatic encephalopathy
(CTE). In fact, a recent profi le study
of over 100 brains of former football
players indicated signs of CTE while
the longer they had played, the worse
the brain damage.
Although the study wasn’t random,
it does indicate that the risk is high.
There are the far too many sad stories
of former players who spent their years
of retirement in a kind of fog from
neurological breakdown to crippled
mental capacity.
Initially, the theory was that CTE
results from repeated concussions that
led the NFL to encourage less hard hits
and promote a new concussion proto-
col to monitor the damage. But ex-
perience with the matter has disclosed
that the permanent damage is not the
concussions; rather, it is the routine by
the hundreds of constant poundings to
the heads of players and the obvious
fact that these are the way the game
is played.
A lot of moms and dads who de-
vote time to reading up on the latest
information available to American
parents have decided to
direct their kids to sports
less head-impacting than
football. The result is that
football has more and more
often become the province
of poorer kids and minori-
ties who, generally speak-
ing, see the sport as a means
to get out of poverty even
though constant head trau-
mas bring high risk.
Obviously, there are excessive
amounts of really big money in foot-
ball at the university and professional
gene
h.
mcintyre
levels, resulting in extraordinary efforts
by vested interests to protect it from
its critics. As a result, we already see
the old Phillip Morris strategy at work
where when cigarette makers realized
that stop smoking programs would cut
profi ts, they went overseas. What’s un-
derway now is a search far and wide
into other places in the world where
health concerns are brushed off and
life spans are already short.
My wife and I would not allow our
kids to play football, period. We argue
strenuously against it for our grandkids,
too. I’ll readily admit that I’ve been
a fan of a favorite team or two. But,
knowing what happens to the heads
of those who play, I’ve mainly weaned
myself from watching and thereby not
supporting the ever-growing crowd of
people who ultimately sacrifi ce their
lives to perpetual murkiness, mental
incapacity and premature death.
(Gene H. McIntyre shares his opin-
ion frequently in the Keizetimes.)