Throughout this process, I have left room in my predictions for some random event to lead to Kavanaugh's downfall. "Brett" was an entitled, drunken asshole who could very well have left video evidence or so many witnesses and contemporaneous documentation to some heinous act that even a useless, worthless "dupeshit" like Susan Collins couldn't ignore it. My uncertainty here has been based on the possibility of another shoe dropping, but I have been quite confident in my assessments that, short of some shoe-drop, "Brett" would get confirmed. I have been baffled at the extent to which others have thought that Collins, Murkowski or Flake would really vote against him based on the evidence available. We did need to leave open the possibility of more coming out, given the rate at which new things kept coming out, but Kavanaugh's confirmation was pretty much a done deal without something coming out far beyond what we had seen. It is worth a post explaining why, and how I came to this method of analysis.
First, what would it have taken? I have been relatively consistent here. A videotape of an assault might, repeat, might have done it. Multiple eye witness testimonies with contemporaneous accounts, such as journal entries, campus police reports, etc., might have done it. However, as long as the primary assault itself could be reduced to a he-said-she-said dispute, there was never a serious chance of "Brett" losing the vote. Never. I truly don't get why people thought that Ford's assault would bring down "Brett."
Why not? The Republican Party controls the Senate. Donald Trump is the head of the Republican Party. He is the single most dishonest human being on the planet. He lies more than anyone ever recorded. He is also a rapist. A serial rapist. There is not one, single member of the Republican Party, at the elected level, who is willing to confront him on any of this, and that's before we get into any of his other crimes. At best, Republican officials think that lying and rape are minor sins, to be ignored in the service of political expedience. At worst, and this is true for most of the party at the elected level, they don't think of them as sins at all. Go watch all of those clips of Trump supporters saying that "Brett's" behavior is just what all teenage boys do. This is the Republican Party. The President is a pathological liar, and a rapist, with no one in the party willing to confront him on any of it.
Why the hell did anyone think there was the slightest chance that anyone in the Senate Republican caucus would truly care about lying or rape from one of his Supreme Court nominees?
I don't get it. I honestly don't get it. This was not an expectation that made substantive sense. Not when you look at the party of Donald Trump. Lying and rape? No big deal to any of them, or they'd do something about the President of the United States.
This leads me to the three main Senators on the GOP side who have gotten attention: Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski and... excuse me while I grit my teeth, against the advice of my dentist... Susan Collins.
Jeff Flake has always been an obvious, Donald Trump-level con man. I've seen through his shit all along. The probability of him voting against "Brett" was always a precise, mathematical zero. There could be videotape of the rape itself, and he'd vote to confirm. It'd be a Rodney King kind of thing. There was videotape of the cops beating the shit out of him, and the cops skated. Too old a reference? How about Tamir Rice? Local boy. I do mean boy, as in, child. Not the racist trope of calling African-American men, "boy." Videotape doesn't matter if you are dead-set on acquittal. He'd claim she led them on, invited it, or something else despicably misogynistic. Jeff Flake is the guy who likes to pretend that he is the last one left in the Republican Party with honor, but in order to have that title, you actually have to do something. He never has. Not once. It was obvious all along that he never would. He has a record, and that record is as the guy who is all talk. He's a fraud.
Next, Murkowski. I give her credit for being the one member of the GOP who actually seemed to take this seriously. Here's the problem. She couldn't stop "Bart" on her own. With 51 GOP Senators, if she had voted no, she likely would have been the only no vote, and while she is the only member of the GOP with a real set of balls (let's have fun with turning the metaphor around on misogynists), and she can hold that seat even after losing a primary (she did it in 2010!), there's a why-bother factor. With sufficient evidence (videotape?), she might have been able to pull Collins away from the dark side, but short of what I mentioned above, there was no point in being the lone no-vote.
And finally, Susan Collins. I really have not the tiniest shred of respect for this woman. When she claimed that Roe was her litmus test, she set a trap for her idiot self. There was no way Trump could nominate anyone who wouldn't overturn Roe, and no way for her to back out, so she just trapped herself in her own obvious stupidity, and let that "settled law" bullshit stand as a phony promise not to overturn Roe. Collins is a moron. And the more she dug her heels in, the dumber she looked in her increasing attachment and support for "Bart." At least Flake is just a conservative supporting a conservative. Collins is stupid, and her dug-in heels just made it harder and harder for her to deal with the rape allegations because she was so dug-in on her bullshit, hypocritical support for him. She trapped herself, and rather than using the rape allegation to extricate herself from the trap, she just dug further in. The basic problem with Collins has always been that her reputation is just not deserved. She is an easy to manipulate pawn for people like McConnell. She's not smart, she has no principles, and her shining example of standing up to the GOP was the healthcare vote that she undid by voting for a tax bill that included "skinny repeal" as a provision. And she cast that vote because of a promise from McConnell to move legislation on cost-sharing subsidies, which was so obviously empty that the only way to explain it was that... Susan Collins is stupid. Anyone looking for intelligence or moral courage from Collins was bound to be disappointed. Every sign she has given was a sign of support for "Brett," and she is an easy mark for people like McConnell.
Was there anything that could have convinced Collins? I really don't know. She might have talked herself into voting for "Brett" even if there were video. The problem was that statement, way back at the beginning, that Roe was a litmus test for her. It was so obviously not a promise she could keep that she trapped herself. It was a stupid promise to make, and everything that followed for her was the result of that. She let herself get duped into supporting Kavanaugh in the dumbest way possible in order to pretend that she was keeping her promise but not just throwing in with the Democrats, and then she just slept in the bed she made. It wasn't about evidence anymore. It was about sleeping in that bed, which, as I type, sounds really creepy and wrong, but, whatever. Collins was never going to approach this with good faith.
Nobody except maybe Murkowski had any intention of doing so, and Murkowski wasn't enough to swing the vote. That's why this was, not quite a done deal, but done so long as nothing like a video came out. If there had been video of an assault, multiple contemporaneous accounts written down of some other assault, or something like that, then maybe Collins could have had enough evidence pounded into her useless skull to get her to recognize a rapist when she saw one, but...
… if she could do that, she wouldn't still support Donald Trump.