Thank-You to the Courageous, Courteous GOP and its Senators Grassley and McConnell for a Job Well and Honorably Done

WE HAVE CLOTURE. The vote on Friday was 51-49 to end debate on the confirmation to the Supreme Court of Judge Brett Kavanaugh and proceed to a final vote in the Senate on Saturday evening. The White House now believes it has the votes to confirm Kavanaugh. • A cloture vote is a procedural vote and does not always reflect the final vote on the issue being brought to the Senate floor. In this case, three of the four key undecided Senators voting "yes" to advance the nomination -- Republican Senators Susan Collins, R-Maine, Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, voted for cloture in order to move forward to the Senate floor. Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, voted "no." To confirm Judge Kavanaugh, Republicans can't afford more than one defection if all Democrats decide to vote against confirmation. Collins has now announce her decision to vote for confirmarion in a speech on the Senate floor on Friday. Flake later said he intends to vote "yes" to confirm Judge Kavanaugh "unless something big changes." And, there is Senator Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, who is attending his daughter's wedding in Montana on Saturday, but said he would return to cast the decisive vote if needed. • • • THE CONFIRMATION PROCESS. Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination has been caught up in controversy after Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, ranking Democrat on the reviewing Senate Judiciary Committee, released a letter that she had held in secret for almost two months while the Committee debated the confirmation and heard form Kavanaugh himself. The letter was written by a woman who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her 36 years ago whenthey were both teenagers. Christine Blasey Ford's allegation resulted in an additional Judiciary Committee hearing last week where both Ford and Kavanaugh testified. Democrats said the allegations were credible and deserved a full investigation, while Republicans accused Democrats of using uncorroborated allegations to scuttle or delay the nomination. The accusations led to President Trump to order an additional FBI investigation -- the 7th for Judge kavnaaugh because of his long history of government service. Republicans who have seen the FBI report say the FBI has produced no credible corroboration of the allegations. • • • THE DEMOCRAT PROTEST. Democrat leaders in Congress, starting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, announced on the day President Trump nominated Judge Kavanaugh that he would do all in his power to prevent his confirmation. Protesters flooded the Capitol in the days ahead of the vote, and clashed with Republican lawmakers in an effort to sway their votes. Anti-Trump Arizona GOP Senator Jeff Flake demanded the limited FBI investigation last week after being cornered in an elevator by screaming protesters moments before a Senate Judiciary Committee vote to recommend Kavanaugh’s nomination. Other Republicans later pushed back against protesters. Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, told protesters chasing him to “grow up” while Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina responded to one protester’s call for Kavanaugh to take a polygraph test, asking : “Maybe we can dunk him in water and see if he floats?” After the Judiciary Committee vote last Thursday to release Kavanaugh's name to the full Senate for confirmation with a week delay to allow for the 7th FBI review demanded by Senator Flake and Democrat Senator Coons of Delaware, protesters once again yelled at Republican Senators as they walked through the Senate building. One Republican House member had his office door kicked in. Senator Ted Cruz and his wife were accosted and driven from a restaurant last week becuase Cruz has said he will vote to confirm. And, in the most nonsensical protest of all, several hundred women protested outside the Supreme Court building on thursday -- nonsensical because the Supreme Court is the only branch of the federal govenrment that has no role in the confirmation process for Supreme Court justices. • Before the cloture vote on Friday, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, urged the Senate to say “no to mob rule.” He also attacked Democrats for their treatment of Kavanaugh, describing it as “nothing short of monstrous. The conduct of left-wing dark money groups and allies in this body have shamed us all. The fix was in from the very beginning.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, said the vote was "a pivotal day for us here in the Senate. The ideals of justice that have served our nation for so long are on display," he said, calling the last two weeks a "disgraceful spectacle." • But, Senate Minority Leader Schumer paint Kavananugh as a justice who would swing the Court deeply to the right, calling Kavanaugh's views “deeply at odds with the progress America has made in the last century of jurisprudence and at odds with what most Americans believe.” Senator Feinstein, on the Senate floor before the vote, raised concerns that Kavanaugh would vote to overturn Roe v Wade -- the 1973 decision that found a constitutional right to abortion -- and was extreme on gun rights. In what cna only be described as a highly cynical remark, Feinstein raised concerns about Judge Kavanaugh's emotional defense in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he had angrily turned on Democrats for their treatment of the sexual assault allegations against him. Seantor Feinstein said : “This behavior revealed a hostility and belligerence unbecoming of someone seeking to be elevated to the Supreme Court." • Judge Kavanaugh defended his behavior in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal late Thursday, in which he expressed some regret for his fiery attack on Democrats and reminded America of the reasons for it : "I hope everyone can understand that I was there as a son, husband and dad. I testified with five people foremost in my mind: my mom, my dad, my wife, and most of all my daughters." • • • DEAR READERS, we do not yet know if Judge Kavanaugh will be confirmed, although it seems highly likely now that GOP Senators Collins and Flake are on board. But, we now know one thing. Every Republican, every conservative, and indeed every American, can be proud of the way in which the Republican majority in the Senate managed the circus that the Kavanaugh confirmation became. • The Democrats used tactics unheard of in American political history to try to stop the confirmation -- muck-raking exaggerations, lies, threats, name-calling, and physical intimidation. Democrat leaders permitted and did not speak out against the paid hearing room and street violence that was used in their Party's name. They made a mockery of the constitutional confirmation process by engaging in the underhanded use of evidence in their possession and by ignoring the Senate's rules of order. And, in losing what was a lost battle from the beginning, all they did was forever degrade themselves and the Democrat Party for the entire nation to see. • The Senate Republican leaders stood their ground without shouting, without threatening, without lying, without physical intimidation. They followed the constitutional process and Senate rules when even their own GOP supporters were calling on them to get down in the mud and deal with the hooligan Democrats on their own terms -- the violent and obstructionist terms they understand. • In his Farewell address, President Washington talked about political factionalism : “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.” • In 1838 in his Lyceum Address, long before he became the President who had to preside over the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln understood : "There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law." • And, while President Reagan was most often concerned with the threat to the world of Marxist Communism, his remarks strike a chord this week, as we watch one more time the Constitution and its advocates defeat the mob and its penchant for violence : "There are no easy answers but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right." • Whatever the final Kavanaugh confirmation vote is, we Americans owe a debt of gratitude to the courageous Republican Party, and to its Senate leaders, Chuck Grassley and Mitch McConnell, for a job well and honorably done.