The word circus is getting a lot of play in the media as a description of the first day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. This is an insult to circuses everywhere. Their goal is to provide entertainment, while the goal of left-wing activists attending the hearings yesterday was to create chaos.
As reported here, many of the protesters in the gallery of the Senate chamber were paid cash money to create a ruckus, which is bad enough, but today we know that the Democratic senators themselves took part in a coordinated plan to subvert the hearings.
From CBS News:
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CBS News’ Nancy Cordes reports that a source familiar with the discussions confirms that Sen. Schumer held a conference call with Judiciary Committee democrats [sic] over the Labor Day weekend to discuss the strategy they are now deploying in a coordinated manner, interrupting the start of the hearing to call — one after the other — for a delay in the proceedings until senators get all the Kavanaugh documents they want and have time to read them.
NBC confirmed this in a tweet, which Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.) cited on the floor of the Senate in order to call the plot to the attention of his Senate colleagues and viewers of the televised event:
I’m reviewing a tweet by NBC that said ‘Democrats plotted coordinated protest strategy over the holiday weekend all agreed to disrupt and protest the hearing, sources tell me.’ And, subsequent, ‘Dem leader Chuck Schumer led a phone call, and committee members are executing now.’ So, I just want to be clear: none of the members on this committee participated in that phone call or that strategy before the documents were released yesterday? Are you suggesting that this allegation is false?
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged that such a phone call took place but attempted to his justify the strategy on the grounds that “many issues were raised” during the phone conference, including concerns echoed on the floor yesterday, that senators had not had a chance to review all the documents received. But that was not all that was not all that was discussed. It was during this highly unorthodox phone call that Democratic senators discussed how they could be the most disruptive. According to Politico, they even considered staging a mass walkout.
What is perhaps most reprehensible about the behavior of some of the chief instigators yesterday, which included Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), is that these people have already announced their attention to vote thumbs-down on Kavanaugh. Whose minds were they attempting to change via their crass antics? Certainly not the Republicans, who already hold enough votes to confirm Kavanaugh.
