Here’s who decides Brett Kavanaugh’s fate now

| 10:44 pm EDT September 18, 2018
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After the Republicans blinked by delaying the Brett Kavanaugh vote and inviting his accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford to testify against him, she took control tonight by demanding that the FBI investigate the matter before she testifies. That’s set off a series of Senate GOP responses that have been all over the map. But the people speaking tonight won’t be the ones who decide whether Kavanaugh ends up on the Supreme Court, off the Supreme Court, and/or in prison. So who will?

Orrin Hatch, the cretin who demonized Anita Hill a generation ago, and who has spent the past few days demonizing Ford, has already rushed out a defiant statement in response. But while Hatch does have a good deal of informal influence over his fellow Republicans, he’ll have no say in what the party does next. Chuck Grassley, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released a much weaker statement which didn’t even bother to make the explicit threat of holding a vote without Ford testifying first. But Grassley won’t be the one to make the decision either.

As Palmer Report pointed out a few days ago, the eleven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee aren’t going to want to advance the Kavanaugh nomination to the full Senate if it’s going to die there – because then they’d be the ones with the scandal hung around their necks. So who’s going to decide whether this is nomination going to survive the full Senate vote? Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and possibly a few others who could potentially vote “no” – just as it always has.

So even as we see various public statements tonight from people who were always going to vote for Brett Kavanaugh anyway, party leaders like Grassley and Mitch McConnell are surely reaching out to people like Collins and Murkowski right now, to find out what they want to happen next. If Collins and Murkowski side with Ford’s demand that the FBI investigate before she testifies, then Kavanaugh will have to decide if he wants to risk going to prison, or if he wants to simply drop out.