GOP senator: Trump should refuse to take no for an answer on Kavanaugh

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s poll numbers were already pathetically low before his confirmation process started — and before he was credibly accused of trying to rape a girl when he was in high school.

His support has continued to plummet, and he’s the least-supported Supreme Court nominee in modern history.

But none of that matters to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). He is so committed to seeing the unpopular and incredibly problematic Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court that he thinks Trump should refuse to nominate anyone else, even if the Senate votes no.

“Here’s what I would tell the president. I would appeal the verdict of the Senate to the ballot box,” Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity Monday night. “This good man should not be destroyed.”

Graham has complained before that failing to give Kavanaugh a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land would “ruin” Kavanaugh’s life. Kavanaugh has echoed that entitled sentiment, insisting in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that failing to confirm him would harm the country and “dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service.”

As allegations about Kavanaugh continue to emerge, some Republican senators — namely Arizona’s Jeff Flake, Maine’s Susan Collins, and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski — have hinted that they might not be comfortable voting for him.

To Graham, however, their no votes would be unacceptable. And if they vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Trump should refuse to take their no for an answer.

“I would renominate him,” Graham told Hannity.

Then Graham laid out a ridiculous fantasy in which voters in certain states — notably, not the states of Republican senators who would vote no — would have an opportunity to overrule the Senate to force Kavanaugh onto the court.

“I would take this case to the American people,” Graham said, “and I’d ask voters in Indiana and Missouri and North Dakota, and other places where Trump won, saying who he would nominate if he got to be president, and see if voters want to appeal the verdict of their senators.”

Of course the Constitution allows for no such thing. The Senate, not the American public, votes on Supreme Court nominees. Otherwise, President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland would be a Supreme Court justice today.

But even in Graham’s utterly ridiculous scenario, the numbers are not on his side.

A new Quinnipiac poll shows that 48 percent of voters say Kavanaugh should not be confirmed, compared with 42 percent who say he should. And those numbers keep getting worse for Kavanaugh as more allegations and questions about his credibility emerge.

The truth is that Kavanaugh is a toxic Supreme Court nominee. He’s been caught lying dozens of times. He has been accused of extremely serious crimes. And in his belligerent meltdown before the Senate last week, he proved that he lacks the temperament and judgment to sit on the court. That’s according to his own standards of what makes a “good judge.”

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have repeatedly demonstrated that they do not take sexual assault seriously and that even if the accusations against Kavanaugh are true, they do not think that should keep him off the court.

Now Graham is suggesting that Trump, who is himself an admitted sexual predator, should refuse to take no for an answer. And that right there is the whole problem.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.