Dr. Christine Blasey Ford delivers compelling testimony, as the GOP and their hired prosecutor go off the rails
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford took center stage today during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, as she testified about her attempted rape allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Not only did Ford come across as compelling, composed, and credible, the GOP’s strategy against her quickly turned into a self defeating farce.
Dr. Ford sounded human and relatable while very clearly spelling out the details of what she remembered of the incident in question. The various Democratic Senators on the committee used their allotted time to alternate between allowing Ford to tell her story, and spelling out the ways in which the Republicans have acted in bad faith with regard to this hearing. Whenever the Republican Senators had their time, they yielded it, as expected, to career prosector Rachel Mitchell from Arizona. Whatever the GOP’s goal was supposed to have been with her, the results can’t have been what they were looking for.
Mitchell kept trying to find any way possible to trip up Dr. Ford, or get her to contradict herself, or to paint her as non-credible. But after Mitchell couldn’t get Ford to crack with her initial round of volleys, she then began grasping at increasingly thin straws. Mitchell tried to suggest that Ford’s story couldn’t be believed because she hired a lawyer. Then she tried to make a big deal out of the fact that Ford flew to Washington to testify, despite having a stated fear of flying. The longer it went on, the more absurd it became.
The trouble was that Mitchell was doing what a trial attorney typically does to a witness in front of a jury: seek to create the slimmest margin of reasonable doubt, so that even if the jurors are only 99% certain Dr. Ford is telling the truth, they won’t vote to convict. But in this format, there is no jury, because this isn’t a criminal trial; it’s a trial in the court of public opinion. The GOP was so eager to hastily bring in a woman to handle the questioning for reasons of optics, it failed to consider that a prosecutor was the worst possible choice.
Then there was Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, who managed to interrupt and/or insult just about every woman who dared to open her mouth during the hearing – including the woman he hired to do his job for him today. The hearing is far from over, but thus far Christine Blasey Ford is coming off as well as possible, and the GOP is making every mistake in the book.
