Hey Brett Kavanaugh: Try This Out Thursday

If U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh wants to make a splash at the high-stakes U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday, he should take a page out of Clarence Thomas’s playbook and not even watch his accuser testify.

Kavanaugh has told all of us that not only did he not sexually assault Christine Blasey Ford, but that he never had any physical interaction with her. If that’s the case, there’s nothing for him to rebut. Whatever Ford says on Thursday that is relevant will be, in Kavanaugh’s account, wholly untrue. That means there’s no reason to go point by point through it.

Imagine if he greets his Democratic questioners something along the lines of how a previously accused nominee did almost 27 years ago.

Thomas, now a Supreme Court justice, astonished a Senate questioner during that long-ago Senate hearing in October 1991 when he was accused of sexual harassment by former colleague Anita Hill.

Thomas’s appearance is best remembered for his reference to a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks, who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.”

But there’s another part of his testimony under oath that Judge Brett Kavanaugh might emulate.

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