Kavanaugh will likely be confirmed. Democrats are irrelevant. From a Republican perspective, there are two kinds of incentives for assessing Kavanaugh and his guilt or innocence-- political incentives and cognitive incentives. The political incentives are obvious. First, they want a conservative Justice, and Kavanaugh is conservative. I've ranted enough about the theater of confirmation hearings, and bullshit of doctrines of constitutional interpretation, and all of that nonsense. Supreme Court Justices are ideologically-motivated politicians in stupid costumes, who dress up their ideology in the trappings of terminology so obscure that you need separate libraries on every campus just to translate their bullshit from legalese to plain, fucking English and figure out exactly what method they used to obscure their liberalism or conservatism, because that's all they're doing. The attitudinal model, people.
But wait, you say. Or rather, I say. If the Senate... forced its will on Trump, so to speak, wouldn't the GOP just demand a non-rapist conservative? Surely such things exist, right? (Hey, it was all consensual with Larry "Wide Stance" Craig! Adults too! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your next Supreme Court Justice, and the closest thing the GOP has to anyone practicing healthy, affirmative consent!) Well, no. It won't work that way. There are other political incentives. Specifically, the horrific, unthinkable, unbearable pain of a Trump tweet.
You see, the reason Trump has to... force... Kavanaugh on the Senate, the GOP and the country, is that he cannot bear rejection. And we, as a society, must understand how badly rejection hurts Donald, around whom the known universe revolves. That gives him the absolute right to force his will on anyone and anything to fulfill his needs. His need for Brett Kavanaugh. (Maybe some of that is the executive power thing, and maybe some of that is bro power, but who can really say at this point?) So, Trump has the right to force his choices on anyone. His weapon of choice is the tweet, which is the object of abject terror for all Republican legislators. Their fear of a Trump tweet will keep them from even considering objecting to Kavanaugh. That weapon he holds, as he forces his will on the GOP Senate, will ensure that even if there are further revelations about Kavanaugh, they'll confirm him. (One of these days, I shall attempt to write with some subtlety. That day is not today. I don't like these people.)
Remember, national Republican figures couldn't even bring themselves to oppose Roy child-fuckin' Moore. Even Richard Shelby didn't vote for Doug Jones. If Roy Moore was acceptable to these people, what makes you think that they'll turn on Kavanaugh with weaker evidence against him?
They all knew Roy Moore was guilty, but they couldn't bring themselves to support Doug Jones. Difficult-to-assess allegations against Kavanaugh will do absolutely nothing to these people. Yes, I am clearly writing as though Kavanaugh were guilty with my club-you-over-the-head, cringe-inducing metaphors, but... I'll get to that. After all, I kind of live in a permanent state of cringe these days, and I'm just trying to share.
Anyway, that's just the set of political incentives. Now, let's address the cognitive incentives. Nobody wants to vote to confirm a rapist. OK, Donald Trump does. That dude loves rapists, but he's a sociopath. Different category. Most Senators aren't actually sociopaths. There is a difference between being a bad person and being a sociopath. Antisocial personality disorder is a thing, and it isn't just being an asshole. A group of geese is called a gaggle. A group of lions is called a pride. A group of assholes is called a Senate. Yes, they're assholes, but a sociopath is a different creature altogether. Donald Trump is a straight-up sociopath. Most politicians, vile though they may be, aren't actual DSM-diagnosable sociopaths, the way Trump is. So, voting to confirm a rapist to the Supreme Court would be cognitively troubling. Nobody wants to think of themselves as the villains. So, people disregard information that puts themselves in a bad light. The easiest thing to do, for the GOP Senators then, is to tell themselves that the allegations against Kavanaugh aren't credible because they can't be verified, came up just at the last minute from an anonymous source, and so forth. Reject the claims, confirm Kavanaugh because he seems like such a nice guy.
Look, I've ranted in many contexts about how you can't tell who the monsters are by how nice and polite they seem on the surface, but that's a little thing called "reason," and most people suck at that. They pick a side, and rationalize it. For all you know, this dude is fuckin' Cosby, and that debt isn't from baseball. It's from buying the drugs he used on the women, and then paying them off. Is that particular story bullshit? Almost certainly, but my point about Cosby is that you can't tell from his surface demeanor. If, however, you have cognitive and political incentives to side with the guy, you will.
And finally, let's circle around to Susan Collins, about whom I have written plenty in the context of Brett Kavanaugh. Collins promised, repeatedly, that she wouldn't vote for anyone who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. I have called bullshit on that promise, called Collins a "dupeshit" for intentionally letting herself get duped by Kavanaugh and this process, and called Brett Kavanaugh a craven liar for his duplicitousness in how he approaches the issue. How will Collins vote? Here's the current betting at PredictIt. 83 cents on the dollar says she votes yes, as of this morning. I'd say that sounds low, but let's go with it. Why? Collins doesn't care. She wants to vote yes. She let herself get duped by Kavanaugh's "settled law" line of shit because she wanted to vote for him, and she was looking for a reason. If she was looking for a reason to vote yes, then why does anyone think she will be swayed by an anonymous letter about something from high school that cannot be investigated by the FBI because of the statute of limitations? Collins clearly wants to vote yes, and has wanted to do so all along. It is difficult to explain something to a Senator when her avoidance of a Trump tweet depends upon her not understanding it. I don't think that's the exact quote, but I think it went something like that. If not, it should have. Collins votes yes.
Did Kavanaugh do it? I'm a Bayesian statistician at heart. I begin with the probability that a rape accusation is false, as a baseline. I'd like to update that probability, but I can't. You can't assess these things by surface personality. Remember Cosby. And investigating here would be really hard. All I know here is my Bayesian prior. Most accusations are true. So, for the purposes of a blog post, in my general state of disgust, I'm willing to write cringe-inducing metaphors based on my Bayesian prior.
I also have a high degree of confidence that Kavanaugh will be confirmed, meaning that one of Trump's SCOTUS picks will be a definite plagiarist (Gorsuch), and the other a probable rapist, given my Bayesian prior. Awesome. Look up the etymology of that word please. I am using it for a reason.
Keep in mind, though, that were Kavanaugh to be rejected on the basis of this letter, that would mean that any SCOTUS nominee could be defeated with an anonymous letter. False rape accusations are very rare. My default is to believe the accusations based on my Bayesian priors, but acting as though all accusations are true without the capacity to verify them could turn into trouble. Every time someone in a position of power is accused of rape or other misconduct, they try to avoid the consequences of their actions by telling horror stories of some slippery slope. Bullshit, but if an anonymous letter really could defeat a SCOTUS nominee, that would be problematic.
Of course, the Democrats aren't calling for that. They are calling for a pause and investigation. Ain't no slippery slope in that. This is really hard to investigate, though, and given the time and circumstances, this doesn't go anywhere. Kavanaugh gets confirmed. It's as simple as that. Awesome, in an... older meaning of the term.