This post was updated on September 16 at 5:56 p.m. ET
I worked for a president who was arrested for driving under the influence at age 30. One of the most admired and successful governors of our times was arrested as a college student for industrial-scale drug possession. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke is inspiring liberal voters across the country despite fleeing the scene, at age 26, of a drunk-driving accident that could have left many people dead.
Democracy can be a forgiving system, especially when politicians honestly acknowledge their misconduct. But with a Senate-confirmed position, the job of deciding whether misconduct is forgivable falls not to the voters, but to the voters’ representatives—and in this instance to a particularly unrepresentative set of representatives at that.
What the Kavanaugh sexual-assault allegation means
The Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee is all men. However keen their intuitive sympathy, however intimately connected they may be to the women in their lives, isn’t one side of the alleged situation involving Supreme Court-nominee Brett Kavanaugh likely to be more legible to them than the other?
Politico quoted the answer of a lawyer "close to the White House” about whether the nomination would now be withdrawn:
No way, not even a hint of it. If anything, it’s the opposite. If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.
Right?