Peggy Noonan on the Kavanaugh Confirmation

And now, for your delectation, a few words from Peggy Noonan… on the Kavanaugh confirmation process. Assuming that you want to call it a process: it was more like political histrionics.

First, on the question of senatorial decorum:

The Senate showed a decline in public standards of decorum. A significant number of senators no longer even pretend to have class or imitate fairness. The screaming from the first seconds of the first hearings, the coordinated interruptions, the insistent rudeness and accusatory tones—none of it looked like the workings of the ordered democracy that has been the envy of the world.

I know, many have called out the clownish Democratic senators. But, once more will not hurt.

Also, Noonan raises the important point… often made on this blog and elsewhere… that a woman redeemed the situation. Sen. Susan Collins exercised her rational faculties and shed some light into the darkness of unreason and irrational rants:

It was a woman who redeemed the situation, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In her remarks announcing her vote, she showed a wholly unusual respect for the American people, and for the Senate itself, by actually explaining her thinking. Under intense pressure, her remarks were not about her emotions. She weighed the evidence, in contrast, say, to Sen. Cory Booker, who attempted to derail the hearings from the start and along the way compared himself to Spartacus. Though Spartacus was a hero, not a malignant buffoon….

Ms. Collins said she has been “alarmed and disturbed” by those who suggest that unless Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination was rejected, the Senate would somehow be condoning sexual assault: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The atmosphere surrounding the nomination has been “politically charged” and reached “fever pitch” even before the Ford and other charges. It has been challenging to separate fact from fiction. But a decision must be made. Judge Kavanaugh’s record has been called one of “an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband, and father.” Her hope is he “will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our judiciary and our highest court is restored.”

Well said, by Collins and Noonan.