Here’s how it seems to be going down tomorrow. They are actually going to try to go for confirmation on schedule. No withdrawal, no three-day delay for FBI investigation of newly-revealed materials. Full steam ahead.
We have several people now with stories of Kav engaging in sexual assault, with varying degrees of witnesses, evidence that the stories were shared years ago (not just invented for this confirmation), sworn affidavits, and so on. And Kav perjuring himself at every opportunity doesn’t help his case. He couldn’t even manage a fluff interview on Fox without verifiably lying about his underage drinking.
They can’t turn any of that off, but they can increase the noise in an attempt to drown out the signal. Now suddenly at the last minute, in addition to these women with plausible stories, corroboration, and names, it looks like we suddenly have a new raft of even more sensational stories–but anonymous this time, with no paper trail, no names, no nothing, and trivial to simply deny. And two men have volunteered to the committee that they assaulted Dr. Ford instead of Kav (because not only could that mistaken identity thing be for real, but being assaulted by two guys makes it un-possible to be assaulted by a third…it’s a little-known medical fact, and, oh yeah, people jump up and confess to sexual assault all the time when they’re not even under suspicion). Presumably, the idea is to have the bulk of the hearing’s time devoted to unsubstantiated phantom assaults everyone knows didn’t happen, hoping that the other ones with witnesses and corroboration become less believable by association. Or maybe they’ll run out of time before they have the chance to discuss them at all.
It’s brutally cynical and transparent. And it can work because it doesn’t even have to convince a single person. It just allows the Senators to say with a straight face after-the-fact “Who could possibly have known four of the seventeen assaults discussed at the hearing were for real? Most of them seemed so farfetched, so we voted to confirm.” It also shows who’s driving this, and how desperately they want it–if more than one Republican Senator steps out of line and this vote fails, you can bet they’re getting primaried and worse. And it’s just bizarre–there are tons of extremely conservative justices who wouldn’t have any assaults in their background–the Senate just confirmed one last year for crying out loud. No, it’s not just any super-conservative judge Trump wants, because he could (and did) get that quite easily. It’s Kavanaugh in particular he wants, and he’s pulling out all the stops to make sure it happens, public opinion and midterms be damned.
I can’t see this strategy sitting at all well with Murkowski, so I think she’s a “No” vote at this point. But there’d have to be another, and I don’t think my second-choice candidate Flake will do it, so it squeaks by.