September 16, 2018

Here’s What Needs to Happen in the Brett Kavanaugh Case

Senators Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein need to invite Christine Blasey Ford to testify before the Judiciary Committee. They also need to ask the FBI to investigate Ford's allegations to find out if they're credible.Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

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If Brett Kavanaugh had driven home from a party drunk and killed someone when he was 17, I wouldn’t consider that disqualifying for his nomination to the Supreme Court. High government service shouldn’t be limited to people who led perfect lives even as teenagers. If he had cleaned up his act and acted responsibly ever since, he’d be a perfectly fine candidate.

The same might be true of the actual sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh, but there’s a key difference: his continued denial that anything happened. This isn’t something that’s decades in the past, it’s something he’s doing today.

So before Kavanaugh’s nomination can move forward, several things need to happen:

  • The Judiciary Committee should invite Christine Blasey Ford to testify.
  • The FBI needs to conduct an investigation to find out—or at least get a better sense of—whether this was an isolated bad act or if Kavanaugh acted this way repeatedly.
  • Kavanaugh needs to acknowledge what he did and apologize to Ford.

Depending on how this goes, it might be enough to clear Kavanaugh’s way—at least for senators who were going to vote for him anyway.¹ But it might not. The only way to find out is to take Ford’s allegations seriously and look into them.

Needless to say, all of this is based on my view that Ford’s story sounds quite credible and Kavanaugh is probably lying about it. If the FBI investigation suggests this isn’t the case, then obviously Kavanaugh has nothing to acknowledge and there’s no further impediment to confirming his nomination.

¹It goes without saying that I’d vote against Kavanaugh regardless. There are several reasons for this, but the most important is that he seems to have a pretty uncomfortable habit of lying under oath.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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