I came from a couple of small and disadvantaged towns that did not have some prefabricated assembly line of future leaders. The people who came from those places and who did, in fact, accomplish things did so because they sought to transcend geography or race or socio-economic status or family history. They had to. They needed to break the mold of their surroundings or their ancestry in order to do good things in life because falling into the common expectations and routines of their environment meant doing less than they aspired to do. 

Later, when I went to college and especially when I went to law school, I began to encounter Brett Kavanaugh types. The ones I met were angrier and jerkier than most because George Washington was their safety school and they were disappointing dad by not getting into Yale, but they were of that mold. A lot of them, actually, came from Bethesda and prep-school-laden suburbs like them.

I never heard of Brett Kavanaugh until recently, but I've spent my entire adult life thinking about guys like him. The ones for whom trying to transcend anything would be bad for them rather than good, because everything had been set up for them to succeed and they had better not fuck that up.

Most of them did succeed, of course, but almost all of them are boring, average and pathetic people, no matter their station, wealth or power. Pathetic because they never had to do a damn thing. Because they never once, in their entire lives, had to dream or to work particularly hard. Because they did not, in fact, ever consider the possibility of doing so.

Over at Jacobin today, Megan Day writes about Brett Kavanaugh, men like him and their sheer, mediocre banality. In doing so, she puts her finger directly on that which I've been feeling about guys like him my entire life. It's a feeling that is often claimed by others to be envy, but it's anything but. I feel sorry for these men. I feel sorry for those who have been handed everything in life and, thus, appreciate nothing.

​I feel sorry for men who never stop to think of how far they have come because, really, they never went anywhere. 

As an attorney with 11 years of trial experience, I found Christine Ford's testimony about her alleged attempted rape by Brett Kavanaugh to be convincing and compelling. Any lawyer with even half that experience would, if they were not being nakedly partisan, agree.

Contrary to what random people on the Internet will tell you, this is not a matter of everyone's opinion being of fair and equal weight. Experienced legal practitioners know that there are basic criteria for what makes a witness believable. Ford met virtually all of them. If a lawyer tells you otherwise, they are lying for partisan reasons. 

I'm less interested this morning in her credibility, however, and more interested in the credibility of Brett Kavanaugh. Based on yesterday's hearing that, likewise, should be pretty uncontroversial. He's a liar. He lied repeatedly about things big and small, both yesterday and while under oath several years ago. To wit: 
​

• During his 2004 confirmation hearings for a seat on the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh was asked about his role as a White House staffer in the effort to get judge William Pryor confirmed for a different appeals court seat. He lied about that;
• ​He lied about his involvement in and knowledge of the “Memogate” scandal of 2001-2003 in which two Republican staffers gained unauthorized access to the private computer files of six Democratic senators regarding judicial nominees;
• ​He almost certainly lied about his knowledge of the bad acts of his former boss and mentor, the disgraced judge Alex Kozinski, whose sexual harassment and the distribution of sexually-explicit material to his friends and employees was "legendary" among those who knew him or worked for him;
• During yesterday's hearing he testified that he did not watch Christine Ford's testimony. That was a lie. 
• ​He clearly lied about the meaning of the “Renate Alumni” reference in his high school yearbook, which was an act of crude slut-shaming he now laughably contends was benign;
• He likewise lied about crude slang also included in his high school yearbook, trying to make sexual innuendo that was more than questionable at the time and simply unacceptable in polite company now into something it clearly was not;
• He lied that a reference to throwing up during notoriously booze-filled high school trips to the beach was about eating spicy food when it was clearly about binge-drinking;
• ​He lied multiple times when he claimed that witnesses "refuted" Christine Ford's stories. One of those witnesses, in fact, says she believes Ford's allegations against Kavanaugh. He mischaracterized her testimony -- overstating it in misleading fashion -- in a way that, were this an actual trial, could quite possibly lead to perjury charges;
• He likewise lied when he claimed his high school friend Mark Judge offered an “affidavit under threat of perjury” to support his side of the story. Judge's statement was an unsworn one in a letter signed by his lawyer, consisting of no testimonial weight whatsoever. Judge, as I noted yesterday, has gone into hiding and Republicans refused to call him as a witness;
• Multiple senators questioned Kavanaugh about his drinking habits, both as a teenager and in the present, prompting awkward and telling exchanges, silences, dodges and deflections. It is plain to anyone with any familiarity with drinking and drinkers that he was lying about his history and experience with alcohol. 

Some of these matters may seem, in isolation, to be trivial. In context, however, they are anything but. The sort of person Brett Kavanaugh was as a high school student has direct bearing on the very serious and heinous act of which he is being accused and his lies about such matters -- his drinking, his attitude toward and treatment of women -- have a direct bearing on his credibility. That he would blatantly lie about such matters is damning and utterly destroys the credibility of his denials. While there is not enough evidence to bring criminal sexual assault charges against Kavanaugh, there is plenty of reason to believe he lied repeatedly in an effort to get out from under the accusations, suggesting that he did, in fact, do what Christine Ford said he did. 

Even short of that, however, his lies are disqualifying in and of themselves. He's a lawyer. He's a judge. He's poised to become one of the nine most powerful jurists in the nation. A single lie about even a trivial matter under oath would place any attorney's license in jeopardy and say damning things about his credibility and ethics as an attorney. Multiple lies from a man who wishes to serve on the Supreme Court are inexcusable and would, at any other time in out nation's history, ensure the failure of his nomination. 

Yet Kavanaugh will likely be confirmed. He will be confirmed because Republicans do not care that he lied. They do not care about anything other than a political victory and control of the Supreme Court and they will countenance perjury and, it seems very likely, attempted rape, in order to get it. 

I defy any person -- especially any lawyer -- to make a case for Brett Kavanaugh's credibility and fitness to be a Supreme Court justice in light of his lies and, yes, his perjury. I defy them to do it without reference to broad political talking points, ends-justify-the-means rationalizations and tu quoque reasoning. I do not think it can be done. At least not if one is being intellectually honest. Even the Republicans with whom I engage on social media and who, normally, will make an effort to argue that white is black until the position is no longer tenable are not even making the effort, likely because they know they cannot do so. 

You will likely get your Supreme Court justice, Republicans. But you are getting it at the price of your soul. And you are certainly getting it at the cost of my respect for you. Now and forever going forward. 

Most people will watch the Brett Kavanaugh hearing today in order to see whether Christine Ford or Kavanaugh is more believable as they testify about the alleged sexual assault that has led us here. As they weigh the witnesses' credibility, they should remember that they need not rely solely on the "he said, she said" aspects of all of this. 

Brett Kavanaugh's boyhood friend, Mark Judge, was named by Christine Ford as an eye-witness to the alleged sexual assault. If what Kavanaugh and all of his supporters says is true, and that it did not happen, Mark Judge should be able to DESTROY Christine Ford's testimony, corroborate Kavanaugh's testimony and end this definitively. He should be able to say "yes, I read what Dr. Ford said about this, but it is simply untrue. This never happened." It would constitute at least some -- perhaps a lot of -- corroboration for his denial. 

Instead, Judge literally went into hiding and the GOP is refusing to subpoena him. 

This is a farce. it is an instructive and illuminating farce, but the outcome is preordained. Republican Senators will listen to Christine Ford today, but they will not hesitate to confirm Brett Kavanaugh because they do not think that backing an attempted rapist is as bad as not getting their first choice confirmed to the Supreme Court before Election Day.

 
On Saturday the University of North Carolina football team will host the Pitt Panthers in their home opener, kicking off the Tar Heels’ 92nd season in Kenan Memorial Stadium in Chapel Hill. Almost none of the 40,000+ fans who will show up have any idea who the stadium is named after, and even those who think they do probably have it wrong. 

They've likely heard the name Kenan, as it is an extraordinarily prominent name in and around UNC. One of the university’s founders was a Kenan. The business school is named after a Kenan as is a charitable trust that endows dozens of professorships and distributes numerous grants benefitting literacy, the arts, science, technology, and secondary school education. A Kenan is currently on the Board of Trustees for the UNC School of the Arts.

Almost all things Kenan at UNC are named after chemist, industrialist and developer William Rand Kenan Jr., an 1894 UNC graduate who, after teaming up with his brother-in-law, the oil man Henry Flagler, built railroads and made a fortune developing Miami and the Florida coast. When he died in 1965 he bequeathed most of his $95 million fortune to his alma mater. Today the trust that bears his name is worth over $300 million.

The football stadium is not named after William Rand Kenan Jr., however. Rather, at his request, and following a generous donation, it was named after his parents, William Rand Kenan Sr. and Mary Hargrave Kenan. It is they, according to a plaque affixed to a freestanding monument inside the stadium, who Kenan Memorial Stadium is intended to memorialize and continues to memorialize to this day.

Most fans entering Kenan Stadium probably don’t pay much attention to the plaque and, as a result, don’t know the first thing about William Rand Kenan Sr. Even if they did read it, though, they would not learn the most notable thing about him.

William Rand Kenan Sr. was the commander of a white supremacist paramilitary force which massacred scores of black residents of Wilmington, North Carolina on a single, bloody day in 1898.

For nearly a century the events which took place in Wilmington on November 10, 1898 were known as “The Wilmington Race Riot.” That very name, however, was a lie intended to obscure what really happened.

Long portrayed as a violent uprising of black instigators put down by heroic and noble white citizens fighting for law and order, it was, in fact, a massacre. It was simultaneously a coup d’etat in which a white militia, led by a former Confederate officer and a white supremacist named Alfred Moore Waddell, killed black residents in the streets and in their homes, chased even more out of town, burned black-owned businesses to the ground and overthrew the local government, led by blacks and their white Republican allies in a coalition born of the briefly-ascendent Fusion Movement, which had just been legitimately elected.

History has tended to portray the massacre as spontaneous. It was anything but. It was preceded by months of racial and political tensions, stoked by red shirt-wearing white supremacist Democrats who were aggrieved that in Wilmington, then North Carolina’s largest city, a Fusion government sought to protect the gains freed blacks had earned during Reconstruction. ​On election day in 1898 the red shirts attempted to steal ballots and drive black voters away from polling places. Those efforts failed and the black-Republican coalition held power.

​That night a group of over 450 white men met at the courthouse and signed a so-called “White Declaration of Independence” which specifically called for the repeal of black voting rights and the banishment of black political and business leaders from the town. The following morning signatories to the Declaration burned the offices of the Wilmington Daily Record, — the town’s black-owned newspaper — to the ground and threatened its publisher with lynching. The massacre, planned out in advance and undertaken with deliberation, had begun.

History has likewise portrayed the violence in Wilmington that day as being carried out by an unruly mob. This is also a lie. The massacre was an organized paramilitary action in which the Wilmington Light Infantry, a state militia unit which had just returned from duty in the Spanish–American War, spread out over the city, taking it over street by street, killing black citizens in the process.

The most intimidating — and the most deadly — component of the Wilmington Light Infantry was was its machine gun squad, which commanded a rapid-firing Colt gun mounted on a horse-drawn wagon. The gun, capable of firing 420 .23 caliber rounds a minute, was not property of the United States Army or the state militia. Rather, it was purchased by local businessmen who, according to contemporary accounts,  believed that the gun would “intimidate into quietude” those who saw the weapon and “overawe Negroes.” The machine gun squad was likewise itself not a military force. It was led by a Civil War veteran and local businessmen named William Rand Kenan Sr., with other local business owners under his command.

The bloodshed began when foot soldiers shot and killed blacks who had gathered on the street following the burning of the Daily Record’s offices. The massacre grew much deadlier when Kenan’s machine gun wagon crossed the Fourth Street Bridge into the predominantly black part of Wilmington known as Brooklyn. Its first fusillade came in response to what witnesses claimed to be sniper fire, though no sniper was ever found. According to eye-witnesses, the gun’s volley killed 25 blacks in a matter of seconds. Later, as Kenan’s machine gun squad proceeded past an area known as Manhattan Park, it was witnessed firing into a house where three black residents were killed. The gun was later used to threaten black churches into opening their doors to be searched for weapons whites believed blacks to be stockpiling and individuals white leaders deemed to be dangerous or subversive. No weapons were found but many black residents were marched out of hiding. Some were thrown in jail. Some were never seen again.

As the morning wore on, Kenan’s forces and other units of the Wilmington Light Infantry conducted house-to-house searches, intimidating residences into compliance, arresting blacks by the dozens and shooting those who gave even the slightest hint that they might resist. Some blacks who were specifically identified as influential in the community were hunted down and killed. As shots rang out, hundreds of black men, women and children fled town, some permanently, some to take shelter in nearby cemeteries and swamps until the violence subsided. By sundown, buildings in Wilmington’s black neighborhoods were pockmarked with bullet holes and anywhere from 60 to as many as 300 blacks had been killed. The exact number is lost to history due to white leaders’ hasty burial of bodies in mass graves and due to black witnesses either having fled town or having been intimidated into silence.

The next morning white leaders, with the backing of the Wilmington Light Infantry, forced the Republican Mayor, the board of aldermen, and the police chief to resign at gunpoint after which they and black leaders which had not been killed or who had not fled were marched to the train station and forced to leave the state under armed guard. That same day Alfred Moore Waddell — the white supremacist leader who orchestrated the events which led to the massacre — was named mayor, an office he would hold until 1905. The coup d’etat completed.

Within a year of the massacre the North Carolina legislature — determined to prevent blacks from holding political power like they did for a time in Wilmington — passed a new constitution which made it close to impossible for blacks to register to vote and imposed poll taxes and literacy tests that effectively disfranchised black voters completely. Nearly every other southern state would model laws on these North Carolina statutes. The “Solid South” of the Jim Crow era was secured and would remain in place, officially, until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Unofficially, efforts to discourage blacks from voting continue to this day. 

William Rand Kenan Sr. was hailed as a hero for his role in the massacre. The white-owned Wilmington Messenger newspaper lauded the Wilmington Light Infantry and Kenan personally, writing “[i]n the Revolutionary War, in the Civil War and in this race war, a Kenan was the bravest of the brave.” A few weeks after the massacre it was reported that Kenan held a massive barbecue for all of those who participated, after which the assembled men gave Kenan a vote of thanks for his service in the massacre. In February 1903 Kenan was named to the University of North Carolina's Board of Trustees. He died two months later. 

​For the next several decades the Wilmington Massacre was invariably branded a "riot," "insurrection," "rebellion," "revolution," or "conflict," necessitated by an unlawful uprising of black aggressors, with the violence of it all dramatically downplayed, distorted or cast as unavoidable. A typical example of this can be seen in Incidents by the Way, the 1958 memoir of William Rand Kenan Jr., the UNC benefactor, who wrote of his father’s actions thusly:

It is highly unlikely that any of the thousands of football fans who come to Kenan Stadium each fall or any of the dozens of young men who play for the Tar Heels — a great many of whom are black — are aware of the infamy of the stadium’s namesake. Indeed, even those most familiar with the university and its connection to the Kenans know little if anything about it.

“The Kenans are an enormously generous family of benefactors to the University of North Carolina. Everybody knows that,” UNC history professor Harry Watson told me when I interviewed him recently. “The average undergraduate would say ‘oh, yeah, the Kenans, they’re a pretty important family who have given us a lot of money’ but the biographical details are not likely well known as even that,” Watson said. “Kenan Sr.’s role in the violence of 1898 is not widely known at all.”

“There are probably a couple of people on campus who know,” said UNC history Professor William Sturkey, who specializes in the history of Jim Crow and the New South. “I think a lot of people would be quite shocked. It’s just something that’s been buried and forgotten.”

It’s not the first thing that has been buried and forgotten about the history of the Kenans.

A plaque on Kenan Memorial Stadium refers to the Kenan family's wealth as coming from “chemicals, power, railroads and hotels.” That is true so far as William Rand Kenan Jr.’s adult fortune was concerned, but the Kenans were already wealthy thanks to plantation slavery. Indeed, according to an 1850 slave census, the Kenan family owned 49 people, including 23 people aged 10 or under. This would be the household in which William Rand Kenan Sr., who manned the gun in Wilmington and for whom the stadium was named, was raised.

Last February Sturkey, a member of the school’s Faculty Athletics Committee, introduced a motion recommending that the athletic department take steps to place a new plaque on the stadium to note the family’s slaveholding past. His intention was not to cast the Kenans in a bad light — he did not know about Kenan Sr.’s role in Wilmington at the time — nor was it his intention, as so many people are accused of doing when such matters arise, to “erase history.” To the contrary, Sturkey said, it was the history of the slaves owned by the Kenans that was erased. As a historian, Sturkey said, he just wanted the full story to be told.

“[Slaves’] presence and their lives were omitted. And not just omitted, but intentionally omitted.” Sturkey said. He said that, via his motion, he was suggesting that the Faculty Athletics Committee ask the athletic department to “take steps to recognize the existence of these people whose lives were so crucial to compiling the wealth which built the university . . . it was about simply telling the truth and not misleading people.”

Sturkey’s motion was unanimously passed but it has not been acted upon and the athletic department has given no reason why it has not done so. Not that the athletic department would be the first department which has chosen to ignore the slaveholding history of the Kenans. Over at the Kenan-Flagler Business school website there there appears a timeline of the Kenan family's history. It conspicuously jumps from 1793 to the 1880s, with no mention whatsoever of what the Kenan family was doing, and how it was making its money, during the intervening years.

“Kenan is a name that’s all over our campus, but in terms of how we’ve approached history, we’ve let the greatest benefactors tell their own history,” Sturkey said. “But by doing that, of course, we’ve allowed them to have the complete say in what that history is.”

​Based on recent events at UNC, it would appear that, if the Kenans and the university continue to insist upon complete say in how history is told, they will do so at their peril.

Like so many other places in the south, North Carolina is no stranger to the ongoing controversy surrounding memorials and monuments of the Confederate and Jim Crow eras. It is unique, however, in not only its opposition to doing much if anything about them, but in its affirmative protection of such monuments.

For 105 years, a statue called “Silent Sam” sat on a prominent quad on UNC’s campus, facing the main street which passes the university. While ostensibly intended to commemorate the Civil War and its fallen soldiers, Silent Sam, like so many other Confederate monuments erected in the late 19th and early 20th century, was in fact a monument to the Jim Crow Era. If there was any doubt of this, one need only read the speech given by industrialist, philanthropist, and white supremacist Julian Carr at Silent Sam’s dedication ceremony in 1913.

Carr, who advocated for taking voting rights away from blacks and who referred to the Wilmington Massacre as “a grand and glorious event” after it occurred, did not mince words on the afternoon Silent Sam was dedicated. He talked openly, and with no small amount of pride, about how Confederate soldiers saved “the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South,” adding, “to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise God.” He added that, in the days after the end of the Civil War he had, on the very spot where the statue now stood, “horse-whipped” a “negro wench” for speaking disrespectfully to a white woman. Given how it was spoken of at its very dedication, there is no question that the statue was not intended to memorialize fallen soldiers but, instead, to stand as a monument to white supremacy.

Silent Sam had been a source of controversy for years, but in the wake of 2017’s Unite the Right march in Charlottesville which, among other things, cast more light on Confederate and Jim Crow-era monuments, protests had increased significantly. The university listened to protesters’ arguments but claimed it could do nothing about Silent Sam because its hands were legally tied.

And, to a very large degree, they were. By both a university bylaw adopted in 2015  and by a state law passed in 2015 which prohibit the renaming or buildings and removal or relocation of monuments under all but the most narrow of circumstances. Given the timing of the passage of these laws and the events which inspired their adoption, they were, without question, aimed at heading off protests of monuments to the Confederacy and Jim Crow before they began. Absent those laws, the sign makers would be pretty busy: UNC has no fewer than 30 buildings named after figures tied to white supremacy.

Not that those laws are the only thing motivating UNC officials and donors. Some seem quite eager to protect monuments to the Confederacy and Jim Crow on their own terms.

Last month a series of emails were leaked and published in which one member of the UNC Board of Trustees called for cameras with night vision to be installed around Silent Sam in order to protect it and called protesters “criminals” and “entitled wimps” who should be arrested as a deterrence measure. In another email the university’s Vice Chancellor referred to university leadership’s interest in “preserving a piece of our history,” and defending the statue from “outside parties” who may protest it. Wealthy donors threatened to withhold six-figure contributions to UNC if Silent Sam was removed, with one calling protestors “spoiled intellectuals.” Whether it was because of that direct pressure and the interests of UNC officials in protecting the statue, or whether it was because university bylaws and the state law prevented them from taking action, in early August the UNC Board of Governors announced it had no plans to remove Silent Sam.

​If UNC officials thought that would be the end of the matter, they were sorely mistaken. In the wake of the decision to take no action, protests intensified. On the evening of August 20 — the night before the fall semester began — hundreds of protesters gathered around the statue, threw ropes around it and, in less than ten seconds, brought Silent Sam crashing to the ground. What was left of Silent Sam was taken to a university warehouse in the back of a dump truck. His fate is as of yet unknown, but at the moment the University seems intent on re-erecting the Jim Crow relic.

While a statue can be toppled, a 60,000-seat football stadium cannot be razed by a few hundred protesters. Unlike what has happened with troublesomely-named buildings and monuments at Duke University, the University of California at Berkeley and what will soon happen at Stanford University, it cannot be removed or renamed, at least without the sort of political and legal action which no one in a position to do so seems at all willing to undertake. Which leaves UNC -- which did not return a call or email seeking comment --  in a precarious position. Indeed, the university would seem to have only two choices.

The first choice would be to acknowledge the role of William Rand Kenan Sr. in the  Wilmington Massacre and to find a way, via additional plaques or interpretive materials, to tell the full history of that dark chapter of the Kenan family. In so doing it might, as Professor Sturkey suggested, begin to recognize the totality of the history upon which UNC was built and begin to remember those who have been intentionally erased from that history. Given the Silent Sam pushback and based on how even a modest motion to amend the misleading historical plaque about the Kenan family at the stadium was already ignored, it seems unlikely that the university would do such a thing.

Which would leave the only alternative: to do nothing. To continue to bury the history of its stadium’s namesake and his role in one of the darkest atrocities of the Jim Crow era, thereby allowing the largest and most prominent building on campus to memorialize a man who should, by all rights, stand in infamy.

Will the university do nothing? Better yet, will the people who toppled Silent Sam and those who supported them stand idly by if it does?
​


Special thanks to LeRae Umfleet, author of A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot (2009), published by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, which served as an important source for this article

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is nearing confirmation to become the next Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. As you likely know by now, he has also been accused of sexual assault when he was in high school. The story of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, can be read in The Washington Post. 

The short version: during a drunken high school party, Kavanaugh allegedly caught her in a room, held her down and attempted to take her clothes off in what was likely an effort to have sex with her. An effort which would've been rape, because Blasey Ford did not consent. Indeed, she claims that she tried to fight off Kavanaugh and tried to scream, but that he placed his hand over her mouth to prevent her from doing so. Thankfully, however, she managed to escape in part due to Kavanaugh's drunken state and the drunken state of one of his friends who was also in the room. The incident has traumatized Blasey Ford for years, she says, and she suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. Kavanaugh and the other man who was allegedly in the room at the time deny the accusations completely. 

Now that Blasey Ford's story is out, you will hear a few things, over and over again, from Republicans and those who want him to be confirmed: 
​

• "He denies it"
• "It was a long time ago"; and
• "There were no criminal charges."

Those things are all true. But they also don't matter when a lawyer or a judge is involved. The bar is nowhere near that low.

All lawyers, before being admitted to the bar, are subject to a test of "character and fitness." This involves background checks and interviews. If you do not pass your "character and fitness" test, you are not admitted to the practice of law.

The thing about the character and fitness test is that it specifically deals with stuff that happened a long time ago, before you were a lawyer. It often deals with stuff that never resulted in criminal charges. It does not matter if you denied, because the test is your candor. Indeed, someone who has been arrested and has gone to jail and has done their time, has atoned and is frank about it all has a BETTER chance of being admitted to the bar than someone who wasn't charged with anything but offers sketchy denials when asked about a given incident that had otherwise gone un-investigated.

(It's probably also worth noting that a history of financial irresponsibility is a relevant subject of inquiry and that getting into non-criminal financial trouble in such a way that raises questions about your judgment can also keep you from getting your law license. That could also be relevant for Kavanaugh too, but we'll let that go for the time being)

The key to all of this is that the test -- contrary to what Republicans will say for the next few days -- is not "his word against hers" or how long ago it was or whether there was anything criminal that arose from it. It's about his character. It's about his candor. It's about his integrity.

That's a high bar, not a low one. And it's that high a bar SIMPLY TO GET YOUR LAW LICENSE. Now think about how high that bar should be to get, literally, the highest possible legal job in existence: Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Non-lawyers may think it's silly or overstating things, but lawyers know: if bar examiner had been made aware of these allegations when Kavanaugh graduated law school, he would have, at the very least, been subject to greater investigation on the matter. Depending on how he answered those questions -- if he was evasive or incomplete in his answers, even if he stuck to his denial -- he may have had his license withheld. People have had that happen to them for far less. 

Against that backdrop, it is not at partisan to say that the allegations against Kavanaugh should, at the very least, result in far more inquiry and questioning of him. It should also go without saying that, if he sticks to what are starting to become less-than-satisfying or less-than-illuminating denials, he shouldn't be confirmed.

It's not partisan to say this because the standards to which all lawyers are held are directly invoked here. It is a matter for his chosen profession which, the reputation of lawyers notwithstanding, demands high moral and ethical character of its practitioners.

To become the next Justice of the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh should be obligated to show that he has cleared that considerable bar. 

This story was originally written for Bloomberg BusinessWeek over the summer. Instead of running it they turned it into a highly-truncated cartoon thing that, being honest, was pretty darn clever and probably more appropriate for the subject matter than a 3,000-word story.

Still, I'd like to have the words I wrote for it all preserved someplace, so here they are. 

 
​On March 11, 2015, an anonymous tip was texted to the Franklin County Kentucky Sheriff’s Department that Gilbert “Toby” Curtsinger, a longtime employee of the Buffalo Trace distillery had some stolen barrels of bourbon on his property. A search warrant was executed and deputies drove out to Curtsinger’s house on a winding country road west of Frankfort. Stolen bourbon is not unusual in bourbon country, but Franklin County Sheriff Pat Melton believed that this tip was about something more than your typical bootlegger. He believed that it might be leading him to the Pappy Van Winkle Bandit.

If you’re even a casual consumer of bourbon, chances are you’ve heard of Pappy Van Winkle. It’s the rarest of the many varieties of bourbon made by the Buffalo Trace Distillery and, indeed, the rarest bourbon variety of them all. Pappy, as it is known colloquially, is extraordinarily hard to find. Just 8,000 barrels are produced each year, compared to the millions of barrels of mass market brands like Jim Beam or its Tennessee cousin, Jack Daniel’s. Bar patrons pay upwards of $100 for a single pour. Aficionados who are lucky enough to win lotteries for the privilege of buying it at retail snap up bottles for as much as $300. Those not so fortunate, but who still want the stuff, routinely pay thousands for a bottle on the black market.

​On October 15, 2013 Buffalo Trace reported that a little over 200 bottles of Pappy, with a market value of around $26,000, had gone missing. Sheriff Melton characterized it as a “heist,” and characterized the stolen product as “The Mac Daddy” of bourbon. The theft made international headlines, with bourbon enthusiasts inside and outside of the industry speculating about who did it, marveling at the audaciousness of it all and, perhaps, wondering if the theft made it more or less likely that they themselves could get their hands on a bottle. When that tip came in, pointing a finger at a man who had inside access to the place where Pappy was born, Sheriff Melton believed he was about to crack the bourbon crime of the century.

A drug company CEO raised the price of an antibiotic 400%. He justified it by saying the following:​

Hunter S. Thompson had long since lost his fastball by 9/11. Within three and a half years he'd be dead. But what he wrote on 9/12/01 -- like so much of what he wrote when the stakes were truly high -- was dead on the fucking money. 

​When Donald Trump became a credible political figure in the run-up to the 2016 election a lot of Republicans tried to distance themselves from him. For months the line was that he wasn't really a Republican. He didn't believe in Republican principles and policies, so he couldn't be. Some Republicans I know even claimed he was actually a Democrat conducting some sort of false flag operation or something. Imagine. 

Their opposition to Trump was ineffective, of course.  Trump won the Republican nomination and won the presidency. Almost immediately thereafter basically every single Republican official and the vast majority of the Republican Party gave Trump their full support in every way that truly matters. Oh, they claim they oppose him, but they don't in any practical or concrete way.

In reality, they have chosen to ride the Trump tiger to get the tax cuts, deregulation and activist conservative judges they wanted, while doing whatever they could to protect the GOP brand in the process. They disclaim responsibility for Trump's worst excesses -- his corruption, his recklessness and, in many cases, his evil -- but that disclaimer of responsibility has been wholly unconvincing. It amounts to little more than superficially turning up their nose at Trump's worst excesses while, simultaneously, doing absolutely nothing to rein him in or to exercise oversight, all the while pushing back against anyone who suggested they actually should. 

This week Republicans' performative -- and only performative -- opposition to Donald Trump reached new depths. 

On Tuesday, excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book revealed that White House officials remove papers and letters from Trump's desk so that he does not see them and, on some occasions, even go so far as to countermand Trump's orders.  Yesterday the New York Times ran an op-ed from an anonymous Trump administration official who claimed to be actively working to “frustrate” President Trump’s “worst inclinations,” saying “[w]e believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” ​

While some have lauded this anonymous person for their bravery or are happy that someone is working to destabilize and undermine an administration they loathe, there is nothing to be happy about in all of this and there is no bravery present in this anonymous person's words or acts. Quite the opposite in fact. What they are doing -- assuming they are telling the truth -- is both terrible for our country and cowardly in the extreme. 

If, as the op-ed writer implies, one thinks Trump is literally unfit to govern, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and the procedures it specifies for taking power away from an incapacitated president is how you remedy that. If, rather than doing that, you simply work behind the scene to thwart an incapacitated president's will, you are committing something akin to an administrative coup. You are undermining democratic legitimacy. I hate Trump and every single thing he stands for, but I believe democratic legitimacy and governing by duly-elected public officials matters more than just about anything. Just as we should not have had Woodrow Wilson's wife running the country after he had a stroke or Ronald Reagan's cabinet executing their own plans when, as some have suggested, he began to suffer from the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, we cannot stand idly by while anonymous appointees make their own decisions about how America should be governed. 

My suspicion, however, is that our anonymous op-ed writer does not believe that Trump is actually incapacitated or unfit for office. Rather, I believe they simply are looking to provide cover for themselves and other Republicans by distancing themselves from Trump. They're setting themselves up so that, later, when Trump finally and definitively crashes and burns, they can walk away from the wreckage without taking any responsibility for it whatsoever. "Hey, we were never really with him, so we cannot be held responsible for our complicity in his reign of incompetent terror now. Vote GOP in 2022!" 

All of which is utter bullshit, of course. For the past two years Republicans have stood idly by, and in some cases have been wholly complicit, as Trump has disgraced America and the office of the presidency. They've done so to get rich, to get their taxes cut and to get the conservative judges and the other goodies they've long wanted. The alpha and omega of their true displeasure with Trump is the degree to which he has hampered the electoral prospects of other Republicans. They deny this, but their actions speak louder than their words. There are a host of ways in which Republicans could have worked to curb Trump's excesses and police his crimes, but they have undertaken none of them. I suspect that they believe doing so might imperil their access to more riches and more tax cuts. When it came time to choose between the health of the republic and their particular political goals, they chose the latter. 

Which brings us back to our anonymous op-ed writer. If this person truly believes that their first duty is to our country and if they truly believe that Trump is a threat to the Republic -- and if, as is likely, Trump could not, ultimately be removed from office as unfit -- they should resign in very loud, very public protest. They should work against Trump and the danger to the republic they claim he poses. They should subordinate their comparatively insignificant desires for more tax cuts, more deregulation and even more conservative judges to the good of the nation, which they themselves claim is at risk. 

They won't do that, though, because they want to have it both ways. They want to continue to get all of those policy goodies that having Donald Trump in office has given them while not taking any responsibility or political heat for the damage he is doing. They want to cover their asses, skate away from the consequences and, later, when they get their inevitable book deal or start collecting fat checks on the lecture circuit, to claim that they were, in reality, on the side of the angels all along. 

We should not and must not allow that to happen. 

As a friend observed to me this morning, when Trump is finally out of office -- be he voted out or forced out in ignominy -- we must never forget that, when faced with an amoral, unethical danger as president -- a threat to the republic, to use their own words -- Republicans grabbed as much money and power as they could and did nothing to stop him apart from offer empty words. We must remember that they are complicit and that their claims to be in opposition to Trump -- present since he burst on the political scene -- are phony and that their actions and, more notably, their inaction, of the past two years inextricably link them with Donald Trump. They should be similarly shamed. 

Our anonymous op-ed writer is not a hero of the resistance. He's a collaborator looking to distance himself from his crimes. Treat him as such, both now and when his identity is inevitably revealed.