Kavanaugh Can Join Thomas.

[Angrboda]

It's obvious what the Republican strategy is here. Grassley and Republicans want to limit testimony to Kavanaugh and his accuser so that after having orchestrated a situation in which he-said she-said is the only possible result, they can use that as justification for dismissing the allegations and voting for Kavanaugh. It's as transparent as it is despiccable. It's just another way of pre-judging Christine Blasey Ford's allegations and coming to the conclusion you'd already arrived at independent of the facts.

Why isn't Judge willing to testify? If I were Kavanaugh's friend, and I had exculpatory testimony to offer, I would. Some friend.

Smyth's reluctance to testify is somewhat more understandable. But the committee should subpoena both of them. That the committee is not only not pursuing additional witnesses, but is explicitly excluding them, is a disgrace.

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-- Another important perspective: “Black children are 18 more times likely to be tried as adults than are white children,” Vanessa Williams reports. “It is a statistic that Phillip Atiba Goff, a social psychologist who studies racial disparities in the criminal justice system, would like to be included in the [Kavanaugh] debate … Some … have asked if it’s fair to judge him as an adult for something that he is accused of having done when he would have been 17 years old. This kind of consideration is rarely extended to black boys, said Goff. He authored a 2014 study that found that black boys ‘are seen as more culpable for their actions (i.e. less innocent) within a criminal justice context’ than white boys, and ‘are actually misperceived as older relative to peers of other races.’”

(Washington Post)