As angry protesters swamped Capitol Hill on the eve of a crunch vote Friday to advance the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the judge made a highly unusual plea to defend his impartiality.
The opinion piece by Judge Kavanaugh appeared in The Wall Street Journal hours after Republicans confidently declared that a supplemental week-long FBI investigation found nothing to corroborate sexual assault allegations against President Donald Trump’s court pick.
Opposition Democrats assailed the FBI probe as an incomplete vetting constrained by a White House determined to push through the lifetime appointment of the conservative 53-year-old judge.
Thursday marked a day of high drama and public outrage on Capitol Hill, and furor over Kavanaugh’s nomination is dominating the runup to next month’s midterm elections in which control of Congress by Trump’s Republican Party is at stake.
In the op-ed piece Kavanaugh defended his performance during last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing at which he denied the allegations, made at the same hearing, of a California university professor.
That teacher, Christine Blasey Ford, said he drunkenly groped her and attempted to rape her when they were teenagers attending a party decades ago.
In his testimony, Kavanaugh complained about “a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election.”
But his Journal piece, headlined “I am an independent, impartial judge,” appeared aimed squarely at Republicans on the fence who have expressed concerns about his temperament and partisan attacks during the hearing.
“I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said, Kavanaugh wrote, arguing he was “forceful and passionate” in denying the allegations against him.
“I do not decide cases based on personal or policy preferences,” he added, saying the country’s top court “must never be viewed as a partisan institution.”
The self-defense came too late for John Paul Stevens, a retired Supreme Court justice who on Thursday said he once believed Kavanaugh to be a fine judge.
“But I think that his performance during the hearings caused me to change my mind,” Stevens said in Florida.