[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 164 (Wednesday, October 3, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6504-S6506]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NOMINATION OF BRETT KAVANAUGH
Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise to say in public today what I have
been discussing with many individual Nebraskans over the last 17 days
about the ``me too.'' movement, the important ``me too.'' movement,
about a nation that is accelerating our descent into tribalism and
about our continuing decline here in the Senate as a deliberative
body--or as a Nebraska woman put it a little more bluntly to me 2
nights ago: What the hell is happening in my country?
One part of the answer to her urgent question is that the Senate is
being swallowed whole by 24/7 cable news, and that inclination--that
temptation--probably just can't be reconciled with being a great
deliberative body. Doing reality TV and wrestling with big, hard,
complicated, long-term problems are just fundamentally different
things.
I am not here tonight to talk about the Supreme Court confirmation
votes that we will probably be taking this weekend. I am here to talk
about the nasty process we have been navigating over the past 86 days
and about the false choices some people are claiming stand before us
and about where we in the Senate will go next week, next month, and
next year after that vote.
I am not here to talk about how fundamentally broken the Senate
Judiciary Committee is or how absurd it is to think that the problems
in our committee structures are going to be solved by preening and
grandstanding Senators looking for sound bites, although both of those
things are obviously true.
No, I am here to talk tonight about the false choice that is being
repeated hour after hour after hour on television that this
confirmation vote about one vacant seat on the Supreme Court--in that
vote we are somehow going to be making a giant binary choice about the
much broader issue of whether we do or don't care about women. That is
simply not true. That is not what we are doing this weekend.
Fortunately, many Nebraskans the last 2 weekends when I have been
home have been much more nuanced than the kind of screaming we hear on
battling cable news channels.
A Supreme Court confirmation vote isn't a grand choice about whether
we love our daughters or whether we trust our sons. That is not the
choice before us. This is a consent decision about one person for one
seat.
Again, I am not here to talk tonight about the particular vote. There
is lots of lobbying going on around this body right now. I am not here
to talk about that particular vote. But I will say that I have spent
more than 150 hours at this point reviewing documents and in hearings
and consulting investigators and experts related to this confirmation.
Moreover, I will also say that although I have said many
complimentary things about Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his distinguished
record of 12 years of service on the DC Circuit Court, I will say that
I urged the President back in June and early July to make a different
choice before he announced this nomination. I urged him to nominate a
different individual. I urged the President to nominate a woman.
Part of my argument then was that the very important ``me too.''
movement was also very new and that this Senate is not at all well
prepared to handle potential allegations of sexual harassment and
assault that might have come forward, absent knowing a particular
nominee.
Let me be clear. There is some academic literature that suggests that
very few allegations of sexual assault in the broader culture are
fabricated. Or stated conversely, the hefty majority of allegations of
sexual assault in our broader culture are probably true.
But in politics, in this city, a place filled with politicians who
constantly believe that the end justifies the means, that situation
might well have been different, I argued in June. So in the interest of
cautious prudence, I urged a different path than the one that was
chosen. But so what?
Once the decision was made, once the President made his nomination,
that meant that the work the Senate needed to do was to evaluate the
specific evidence and claims about the specific individual who was on
the floor before us.
But we are being told now that our vote isn't about a specific
individual, a specific seat, or specific evidence; rather, we are being
told that the choice before us in this confirmation is a much broader
choice about whether we do or don't care about women.
If you turn on cable news or if you open up social media--and I
highly recommend against both of those things in times like this; for
the last 2\1/2\ weeks I have stayed clear almost entirely of those two
ugly places, and it is been good for my soul. But what you hear if you
turn on cable or if you look at social media is this: Pick a side. It
is good versus evil. Everything is immediate. Everything is certain.
There is no doubt. There is no gray. There are only tribes of Hatfields
and McCoys, Israelis and Palestinians--a world of generational hatred
without end. There is no listening, no understanding, no empathy, no
possibility that perhaps, just maybe in a broken world, violence, pain,
and shame are all too real. Perhaps trying to make angels and devils
out of your fellow countrymen and women is not the most useful way for
us to try to make sense of the world. Everything might not be black-
and-white simple.
We regularly seem--in this body and in the politicized culture that
we are trying to serve on cable news--to lack any awareness of the
possibility that maybe, just maybe, constant, instant certainty about
political battle lines might not be a good way to go forward. We might
be undermining rather than building a better world for our kids.
Well, I don't believe this is what most Americans want. I don't
believe most Americans are political addicts. I don't believe most
Americans trust us in this institution. I don't believe most Americans
want our political class to be our leaders right now. I don't believe
most Americans want to see each and every question, each and every
sphere of life, each and every institution across the land politicized.
[[Page S6505]]
I think most Americans are a lot more like my wife, who called me
last week from Nebraska sobbing after both opening statements on
Thursday. What we saw and heard during last Thursday's eight
grotesquely public hours were two different families hurting badly--two
families. The Ford family and the Kavanaugh family, both of them homes
with children, have been the recipients of constant death threats, and
for what? For one seat on the Supreme Court? We know this isn't about
that when people are threatening death. This is about tribe.
One of the two families can't let their girls go out alone now. The
other family has been forced to move from their home. In both Northern
California and suburban Maryland, there are extra folks being hired in
the important work of protection and security detail, a part of our
economy that we don't want to grow and that is indisputably growing in
our time. This isn't right.
We saw people having to grapple with the brokenness and the
sinfulness of a fallen world. But they were not just grappling with it.
They were grappling with the nastiness East of Eden in realtime on
television as a kind of politainment art.
No one really thinks that our body politic is going to get any
healthier by giving more oxygen to the one-man clown show that is
Michael Avenatti. But do you know what? Not being down with the circus
is not the same thing as being indifferent to the complexities of the
``me too.'' movement. I believe we have a widespread legacy of sexual
assault in this country. I believe we don't have much of a shared
sexual ethic right now, and we haven't for quite some time, and I think
that horrible stuff has happened and continues to happen.
I have wept with the victims of sexual assault, and I believe the
advocacy groups' data that between one-fifth and one-third of American
women have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. Given
that most women have many other important women in their lives--a mom,
and a daughter, sisters, and a couple of close friends--it means the
overwhelming majority of American women have been deeply affected,
deeply hurt by the tragedy of sexual violence.
I have had two dear, dear friends who have been raped, and it is an
act from the pit of hell. People, men and women, are created in the
image of God--Imago Dei, we say in Christianity. Sexuality is a deep
and precious gift. It is an intimacy; it is a oneness that is to be
shared and given--never taken. Sex is big, not small, and you don't get
to decide it for someone else.
The ``me too.'' movement is a complicated movement, but it has been a
very good thing. Far too often, many girls and women have been told
that they are meat. They have been told this in word and in deed--that
they are parts to be consumed rather than God's children to be
cherished and respected and partnered with.
Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic, one of the most profound writers on
sexuality in our time, wrote recently about a horrible experience she
endured during her senior year of high school on Long Island. She was
the victim of an attempted date rape, and she contemplated suicide in
its aftermath. She struggled in school, and she doubted her worth and
value.
After she struggled against this boy trying to violently force
himself on her for many scary minutes, he finally gave up and just
decided to restart the car. They drove away from that deserted beach in
silence.
Listen to her words. She writes:
I told no one. In my mind, this was not an example of male
aggression used against a girl to extract sex from her. In my
mind, this was an example of how undesirable I was. This was
proof that I was not the kind of girl you took to parties, or
the kind of girl you wanted to get to know. I was the kind of
girl you took to a deserted parking lot and tried to make
give you sex. Telling someone would not be revealing what he
had done; it would be revealing how deserving I was of that
kind of treatment.
Hear what she is saying here. This precious young girl was hearing in
her sexual assault that there must be something wrong with her, that
she is the kind of girl only worth being groped. She is not worth being
taken to dinner or engaged in conversation as if she has a mind. If
that doesn't make you cry, there is something wrong with you.
And now-adult Mrs. Flanagan continues:
My depression quickly escalated to a point where, if I had
been evaluated by a psychiatrist, I would probably have been
institutionalized as a danger to myself. I had plans for how
I was going to kill myself. I managed to make a few friends,
who introduced me to acid, which was no help with the
depression. I sat in classes in a blank state except for
English. (``To the girl about whom I will someday say, `I
knew her when,' '' my English teacher wrote in that yearbook,
words that stunned me when I first read them, and that I have
never forgotten.)
What a blessing to have had that kind of teacher, someone who
proclaimed to Flanagan her dignity and her worth, who shouted meaning
into her soul.
Our culture has been living through an epidemic of sexual assaults,
and these attacks on girls' worth, on women's worth, need to be
grappled with. They need a reckoning. What we are dealing with here is
horrible physically, but it is more than that. What we are dealing
with--we are dealing with something that has a spiritual level as well.
My view is that the ``me too.'' movement is going to make some
mistakes. It is going to have some excesses. But overall, it has been
an important and a needed development. A whole lot of brave women have
stepped forward, and they have exposed their abusers who have been some
of the most powerful men in Hollywood and media and corporate America
and elsewhere. These women did this at unthinkable professional and
personal risk. They deserve our respect. They also deserve not to have
their progress co-opted by the cynics who run this town. Their stories
are not fodder for fundraising emails. The ``me too.'' movement doesn't
belong to the left or the right; the ``me too.'' movement belongs to
the women who have found in it an inspiration to step forward and
confront the people who hurt them.
I have two daughters, and, God forbid, in the event that something
ever happened to one of them, I want them to feel like they could come
forward knowing that their accusations will be taken seriously, that
they wouldn't be dismissed or vilified for speaking up, that they
wouldn't be ashamed or blamed.
We all know that the President cannot lead us through this time. We
know that he is dispositionally unable to restrain his impulse to
divide us. His mockery of Dr. Ford last night in Mississippi was wrong,
but it doesn't really surprise anyone. That is who he is.
Similarly, it was wrong last week when he said that ``if the attack
on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately
filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities.'' It is wrong when people
insinuate that a woman bears blame for her sexual assault because she
was drunk. This reinforces the stereotypes that have caused millions of
women to bury their experiences of abuse and assault for decades. This
kind of repugnant nonsense creates excuses for abusers. Just because a
woman drinks or even if she drinks too much does not make her body or
her sexuality any less her own, and I don't want anyone telling those
poisonous lies to my daughters.
I also have a son, and in the event that, God forbid, he is accused
of a crime, I hope that he is presumed innocent and that he is
permitted to exercise his right to defend himself. I think there are a
whole lot of parents out there who think the same thing. I don't just
think this; I know this because I have taken the calls from Nebraska
moms who say just this. We want this not because of our politics; we
want this because we believe that girls and boys, women and men,
daughters and sons are created with dignity and worth.
This is not about choosing between believing our daughters and
protecting our sons. That choice is false. But do you know what my
constituents back in Nebraska told me this weekend they think this is
now about? They think it is about us. They think it is about all of us
in this town being addicted to the circus. They don't think very many
of us are interested in truth; they think we are interested in
political instrumentality. They think we are interested in exploiting
differences and divisions in America because we are addicted to short-
term power in a city that isn't worthy of much respect.
[[Page S6506]]
In closing, let me read one more note from another Nebraska woman
this week. This actually came in last Friday.
I was angry at yesterday's hearing--angry that something as
important as a conversation about the victimization of a
woman at the hands of a man became just another move in a
game of partisan chess. But I'm also deeply troubled.
Troubled that the painful memories shared by Dr. Ford in that
hearing. Troubled by the painful memories it evoked in women
across our country who have suffered sexual violence.
Troubled by the fact that this violence comes at the hands of
men. I'm deeply saddened by this violence committed at the
hands of men. I just can't comprehend it. I weep for our sons
and daughters that it exists in our fallen world.
To those victims for whom yesterday's hearing brought fresh
pain, I am so sorry that a political circus opened these
wounds anew. Sorry that this abomination of humanity was ever
experienced at all.
She continues:
Senator, I want you to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, but
I also worry that vote might be heard as a reflection on the
validity of other women's experience. I worry that pundits
are going to tell women that. I am tired of women's stories
just being used for politicians' ends. I'm tired of women
being used and discarded. Women's pain isn't supposed to be a
political football.
She is obviously right.
The ``me too.'' movement doesn't belong to politicians. The ``me
too.'' movement has elevated our consciousness and awareness of sexual
assault and sexual violence against women. We must not give back the
important ground gained in this movement by authorizing this media
circus to stand in for generations of stories of tragic pain. And no
matter how much cable news screams this, it would be an egregious
offense against the cause of women to call this one up-our-down vote a
proxy for the validation and validity of claims of sexual violence. We
can do better than that, and we must do better if we are actually going
to care about women and if we are going to serve our constituents in
this body.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, this evening, the Senate will receive
the results of the FBI supplemental background investigation of Judge
Brett Kavanaugh.
This is now the seventh time the FBI has looked into Judge
Kavanaugh's background, and this information comes on top of what has
already been one of the most thorough and exhaustive Senate reviews of
any Supreme Court nominee in the entire history of our country: Five
days of public hearings, 65 private meetings with Senators, more than
1,200 responses to written questions from Members, more than 500,000
pages of documents were reviewed--the most produced for any Supreme
Court nomination in our history--and the 300-plus opinions Judge
Kavanaugh has issued during his 12 years on the DC Circuit.
And now, Senators will have the evidence collected by this additional
background investigation for their consideration as well.
Members will have the opportunity to review investigators' records,
and as is the standard procedure, designated Judiciary Committee staff
members with the required clearances will be authorized to brief
Members.
There will be plenty of time for Members to review and be briefed on
the supplemental material before a Friday cloture vote. So I am filing
cloture on Judge Kavanaugh's nomination this evening so the process can
move forward, as I indicated earlier this week.
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, what is the pending business?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to be an
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
____________________