One U.S. Senate, in its currently polarized and paralyzed configuration, is bad enough. The choice and confirmation of Kavanaugh is a step toward replicating the flaws of one branch of government in another. The Court becomes a version of the Senate, across the street from the original model but with lifetime seats.

A rhetorical success of the pro-Kavanaugh side was to convert the debate about his suitability for this role into a “proof beyond reasonable doubt” criminal-trial standard concerning allegations of sexual misconduct.

Proof beyond reasonable doubt is the right standard for depriving someone of liberty. Bill Cosby’s jury was satisfied on those grounds, and O. J. Simpson’s was not. But that has never been the standard for choosing a university president, or a CEO, or a four-star general, or a future marriage partner, or a Nobel Prize winner, or a lifetime federal judge. With all their differences, the standard for these decisions is supposed to be: Is this the best person for the role?

I previously argued that, entirely apart from the allegations of sexual  misbehavior, Kavanaugh had proved himself the wrong person, in three ways:

• His explosive, angry, non-judicious temperament;
• His openly embraced partisan outlook;
• His record of demonstrable equivocations, evasions, and outright lies under oath. (Again, beyond discussions of Deborah Ramirez or Christine Blasey Ford.)

That I, personally, think this doesn’t matter. But it is significant that:

• 2,400 law professors do;
• As does a former dean of Kavanaugh’s oft-mentioned alma mater, the Yale Law School (“For as long as Kavanaugh sits on the court, he will remain a symbol of partisan anger, a haunting reminder that behind the smiling face of judicial benevolence lies the force of an urgent will to power”);
• As does a former Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens;
• As does The Washington Post’s editorial page, which had supported every Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork, including Clarence Thomas;
• As does Ben Wittes, a close friend of Kavanaugh’s, who had supported him before the hearings;
• As, implicitly, does Kavanaugh’s champion, current White House counsel Don McGahn, who according to The New York Times said that an extended investigation of Kavanaugh could be “potentially disastrous” for Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
• And as do many people who have known him through his life.

A sample from the Post’s editorial:

Finally, Mr. Kavanaugh raised questions about his candor that, while each on its own is not disqualifying, are worrying in the context of his demand that Ms. Ford and his other accusers be dismissed and disbelieved. These include his role in the nomination of controversial judge Charles Pickering while working for Mr. Bush, his knowledge of the origin of materials stolen from Democratic Senate staff between 2001 and 2003, and his lawyerly obfuscations about his high school and college years….

And what of Mr. Kavanaugh’s political philosophy?… We would not have opposed Mr. Kavanaugh on that basis, just as we did not think GOP senators should have voted against Sonia Sotomayor because they did not like her views. Rather, the reason not to vote for Mr. Kavanaugh is that senators have not been given sufficient information to consider him — and that he has given them ample evidence to believe he is unsuited for the job. The country deserves better.

And from the Politico essay by Robert Post, former dean of Yale Law School:

Each and every Republican who votes for Kavanaugh, therefore, effectively announces that they care more about controlling the Supreme Court than they do about the legitimacy of the court itself. There will be hell to pay ...

Judge Kavanaugh cannot have it both ways. He cannot gain confirmation by unleashing partisan fury while simultaneously claiming that he possesses a judicial and impartial temperament.

But now he will take his seat, much as Trump assumed his powers. Matthew Yglesias has argued that this change will be good in hastening a demythicized view of the Court as just another version of the Senate, a thoroughly partisan and politicized body. And Clarence Thomas, at least, may have the comfort of no longer being the person who reached the court by the narrowest confirmation-vote margin (52 to 48 for Thomas), and no longer having the greatest personal cloud hanging over him. Who knows how the other pluses and minuses will net out.

But Trump has changed our view of who could end up in his office, and what the restrictions are. So will Kavanaugh, about the Supreme Court.

Thirty-one days to go.

Even two exceptions illustrate the rule. One was Clarence Thomas’s angry outburst at his 1991 hearing about a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” in addressing allegations of sexist misbehavior. That was memorable because in the annals of judicial nominees it was so rare. And the circumstances of his nomination were strikingly different from Kavanaugh’s, given Thomas’s background as the child of a poor black family in the segregated South. (Thomas was finally confirmed on a 52-48 vote—which seems narrow until you remember that Democrats then had a 10-seat margin in the Senate. If bloc voting had been the norm, he presumably would have gone down, 45-55.)

The other exception came during Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. Obama criticized the recent Citizens United ruling—and Samuel Alito, one of the five Justices who made a majority in that case, frowned and seemed to mouth No, no from the audience. Alito’s “outburst” was notable enough that it was discussed for days.

Kavanaugh’s demeanor was as difficult to place on this scale of past judicial demeanor as Donald Trump’s rally-speech mode would be, when compared to the bearing of Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes. In addressing the senators on the Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh was angry, disrespectful, self-pitying, boastful, and thin-skinned.

It would not have been in Amy Klobuchar’s nature to respond to Kavanaugh’s “have you had a blackout?” challenge with something like the following, but she would have been wholly within her rights had she done so:

Let me remind you, Judge Kavanaugh, that you are addressing members of the United States Senate, who have been elected by our constituents to assess your fitness for the lifetime position of trust that you aspire to hold.

Did he have reason to be angry? Probably so. But we choose combat leaders, surgeons, airline pilots, teachers, and others precisely for their grace under pressure, their ability to master their emotions. Judges, too.

(2) Partisanship. Modern nominees are of course faking it when they say that they would bring no preconceptions, and a perfectly open mind, to the cases that would come before them. Of course they have leanings. Why else would the lists of likely choices for a Democratic president be different from those for a Republican president?

But the very act of faking it—John Roberts’s claim that he would “just call balls and strikes”—demonstrates respect for the idea that justice should be above politics. Compare that with Brett Kavanaugh’s statement this week:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades…

And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.

For an elaboration of why “what goes around, comes around” is the last thing you want to hear from a prospective justice, of any party, see this Twitter thread from David Franklin, a law professor and experienced Supreme Court litigator.

Again an exception proving the rule: By her own admission, Ruth Bader Ginsburg erred badly in criticizing then-candidate Trump during the summer of 2016. Within a few days she apologized, saying “My recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them. Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.” She acknowledged the norms by saying she was sorry to have violated them.

(3) Unnecessary lies. All politicians lie. All human beings do, too. But most politicians, like most people, stick with useful lies. Lies when the truth would be embarrassing or costly. Lies to get out of a jam. And lies when you think you won’t be caught. Richard Nixon usually told the truth when he didn’t have a reason not to. So did Bill Clinton, and LBJ. So do most of the rest of us—because, to emphasize the point, for most people it’s embarrassing to be caught in a lie.

For Donald Trump, the dynamic is different. He doesn’t care if everyone knows he’s not telling the truth. I laid out some of the evidence soon after the election, here. Daniel Dale, of the Toronto Star, has indefatigably chronicled Trump’s thousands of immediately obvious lies in his “Trump Checks” feature. Tiny example: during the campaign, Trump complained about the dates for debates with Hillary Clinton. In giving his reasons, Trump said that the NFL had sent him a letter asking to change the dates, because they conflicted with scheduled games on TV. Almost instantly, the NFL denied it had sent any such letter. Trump moved on, unfazed. He didn’t—doesn’t—care.

The surprise of Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony is that he, too, appears not to care. Tiny example: Kavanaugh said, again and again and again, that his high-school beer drinking had been legal, because he was 18, and the drinking age in Maryland was 18 at the time. Except neither of those things is true. He was 17 during the summer in question—he was born in February, 1965, and Christine Blasey Ford is talking about the summer of 1982—and in any case the drinking age in Maryland at the time was 21. These are not complicated or gray-zone facts.

(Mild complication: While Kavanaugh was still 16, Maryland’s drinking age was 18. Then, soon after he turned 17, the Maryland legislature raised the legal age to 21, as you can read here. But at no point in Kavanaugh’s high school career was he of legal drinking age in Maryland.)

Any high school student who likes beer knows exactly what the drinking age is. Kavanaugh knew then, and now. He just plain lies about it. And he seems not to care.

This lie stands out because his claim is so easy to disprove. So too with boof and ralph (“I’m known to have a weak stomach”). But Kavanaugh showed the same Trump-like lack of concern in a number of other, more policy-related assertions.

Nathan J. Robinson has an extremely detailed analysis of Kavanaugh’s response to Christine Blasey Ford’s account, here. (Its headline is, “How We Know Kavanaugh Is Lying.”) Soon after Kavanaugh’s nomination was announced, and long before the sexual-assault claims, Democratic senators Dick Durbin and Patrick Leahy said that Kavanaugh had misled them (“perilously close to being lied to”) about his role in the Bush administration’s torture policies, back during his D.C. Circuit confirmation hearings back in 2006.

Lisa Graves, who had been a Judiciary Committee staffer for Leahy, wrote in Slate that newly released emails and documents established that Kavanaugh had lied about his Bush White House role back at the 2006 hearings. The details are complicated, but she concludes:

Newly released emails show that while he was working to move through President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees in the early 2000s, Kavanaugh received confidential memos, letters, and talking points of Democratic staffers stolen by GOP Senate aide Manuel Miranda. That includes research and talking points Miranda stole from the Senate server after I had written them for the Senate Judiciary Committee as the chief counsel for nominations for the minority.

Receiving those memos and letters alone is not an impeachable offense.

No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it….

[H]e lied.

Under oath.

And he did so repeatedly.

I have my own hypothesis, based on life experience and observation, about the reasons for the temperamental display we saw from Kavanaugh. (It’s related to Megan Garber’s.)  But that’s just hypothesis for now; I don’t know if it’s true. I also don’t know, nor does anyone, how the vote on Kavanaugh will ultimately go.

But from behind the veil of ignorance separating us from the future, one thing about the Kavanaugh nomination is clear. Donald Trump changed all previous understandings of what would be acceptable, or disqualifying, in a presidential candidate. And with his displays involving temperament, partisanship, and disdain for veracity, Brett Kavanaugh is doing the same about candidates for the most powerful court in the land.

*To connect this UN theme with the subject of a dispatch yesterday: I happen to know about the occasional springtime schedule because I was working on a UN speech for the then-recently sworn in Jimmy Carter in March, 1977, on the night before Deb’s and my first son, Tom, was born.

This is the same son Tom whose own family news, the arrival of a third daughter, is noted here. More on Tom’s UN-speech background here.

For every celebrity who endures a damaging, false, perhaps fantasized or perhaps malicious sex-related accusation, there appear to be a whole lot more who got away, for years, with long-term patterns of abuse, despite complaints and warning signs. They succeeded in bottling up, tamping down, and generally escaping accountability, mainly because their positions of power meant that their victims didn’t speak up, or were not listened to.

The modern history of pedophile priests is again an extreme case, but it illustrates the pattern I’m describing: that it’s costly, damaging, embarrassing or shameful, and in other ways arduous for someone who has suffered from sexual abuse to speak up against a public figure. Therefore, I realize looking back, I have learned more and more to give the benefit of the doubt to women and men willing to go through the pain of reporting their claims. (I have been thinking frequently of the movie Spotlight, which of course doesn’t directly apply in this case but is about a related power dynamic.)

I am careful to say “benefit of the doubt,” and not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” as would apply in a criminal proceeding. No one should be assumed guilty without a full process like the one Bill Cosby has just gone through, which starts with the presumption of legal innocence.

But of course Brett Kavanaugh is not on criminal trial; he’s being vetted to see whether he deserves one of the most powerful, least accountable, and most temperament-and-fairness-dependent positions in the U.S. government. I have no idea of the underlying truth of any of the complaints about Kavanaugh. But based on what I’ve seen play out over the decades, I feel that at a minimum they should be fully explored and checked out. How can there be any reasonable objection to having the FBI question the witnesses, and take statements from all involved, under oath?

(2) The maximalist defense. Based on transcripts of the interview Fox News did of Kavanaugh and his wife Ashley, I was going to lay out a big explanation of why it is so striking that Kavanaugh is answering his critics with absolute denials.

George W. Bush used to say, “When I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid.” Kavanaugh is not giving himself any such out. He is not referring to embarrassing misunderstandings, or mistakes of immature judgment, or possible vagaries of memory, or decisions he badly rues in retrospect. He is saying that he was literally virginal in high school and college. He has never done anything like this. He is absolutely not this kind of person. He would not ever treat women in this way. The charges are All. Absolutely. False. Every. One. Of. Them.

As an argumentative stance, this is obviously risky, since an absolute claim can be undone by even a single proven counter-example. It’s odd because it’s a mismatch with the ample evidence of serious drinking as part of the young Brett Kavanaugh’s reputation — self-described in his speeches until recently, and by his high-school and college associations. (“He was a notably heavy drinker, even  by the standards of that time, and he became aggressive and belligerent when he was very drunk,” James Roche, his freshman roommate at Yale, said this weekend in a statement.)

Also, the stance of complete purity is either inconsistent with, or a creepy complement to, the very aggressively sex-related line of questioning that the 30-something young lawyer Kavanaugh proposed that prosecutor Kenneth Starr ask the incumbent president, Bill Clinton. (Eg: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?” That was one of a series of  questions Kavanaugh proposed, and Starr had the judgment not to pursue.)

But it turns out that I don’t even need to get that whole explanation started. This morning Caitlin Flanagan published a very powerful and insightful long essay on exactly these themes. It is here, and rather than quoting any of it, I’ll suggest that you read it forthwith, and carefully.

To the best of my knowledge (will gladly update if there are corrections), here are the Republican senators who have clearly called for an FBI investigation of the allegations and the evidence:

Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, is not yet on that list, because she has given only oblique indications of support. According to NBC, she said on Tuesday morning of an FBI investigation: “It would sure clear up all the questions, wouldn’t it?” She could answer her own question by saying that she won’t vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination until there has been an investigation. As a member of the Republicans’ wafer-thin 51-49 majority in the Senate, she has enormous power to change the outcome here, if she chooses to exercise it. The same is true of every other Republican.)

Forty-two days to go.

Of the many questions the episode raises, let me quickly mention just two.

1) Who else was in on this? Anyone following the Kavanaugh-confirmation controversy over the past week would have noticed previews, rumbles,  speculation, and excitement among conservative voices about upcoming news that would remove the sexual-assault cloud from Kavanaugh.

For instance, on Tuesday of this week Kathleen Parker ran a column in the Washington Post with the headline “Is there a Kavanaugh doppelganger?”, which was the hypothesis that Ed Whelan laid out.  A number of Republican senators and TV pundits said that Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser, might be “mixed up” about the event itself or which young men were involved. And, as Brian Beutler noted, about an hour before Whelan began his dispatches, Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review posted:

Nearly all of the conservative establishment, to its credit, reacted in horror once they saw what Whelan was actually posting. (An exception was Fox and Friends, which on Friday morning, about an hour before Whelan retracted his tweets, was enthusiastically promoting his theory to Fox viewers.) But beforehand many of its members seemed hopeful about a big, new scoop that was about to appear.  (Update: in Vox, Zack Beauchamp asks similar questions about whether anyone other than Whelan was involved in hatching the “doppelganger” theory.)

A Democratic figure who has been involved in confirmation battles has suggested, via email, the kinds of questions that senators (and journalists) should be asking of Whelan and others, including some for Kavanaugh when he next testifies:

• Did anyone help Whelan compile the extremely detailed personal information he used, in his attempt to identify and blame a specific Georgetown Prep student? Did he really do this all himself?
• How did Whelan get the idea that there could have been a similar-looking classmate? How did the whole narrative of “mistaken identity” originate in the first place?
• Who Googled the floor plan of the house from a real-estate website, so that it could be used as evidence of the classmate’s alleged guilt? Or determined the home addresses of other students from 35 years ago, in order to place them on a map (as part of an argument about who lived close enough, or too far away, to be involved)?
• How did Whelan get the picture, from Kavanaugh's Georgetown Prep yearbook, that he used to ID his other suspect?
• What did Kavanaugh know, and when did he know it?

Here is a sample of the “forensic” postings that have now disappeared:

2) Who else might be tweeting on this subject?  In particular, Donald Trump, who weighed in on Friday morning:

It is painful to need to point this out, in response to the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States, but: the FBI could not have been involved in this case 35 years ago. The crime, if there was one, would have been under Maryland state law. The call would have gone to the Montgomery County Police. (The FBI, a federal agency—that’s what the F stands for!— is being invoked now because a nominee is being vetted for a lifetime-tenure federal job, and being considered by members of the U.S. Senate.)

And this is, of course, apart from the countless barriers of shame, privacy, despair, pain, lack of evidence, skepticism of police reaction, and fear of family reaction, that leave so many assaults unreported.

A prominent conservative figure backtracks. The most prominent GOP figure plows ahead. 46 days to go.

• Why this was deranged-seeming. I don’t know how long this Twitter stream will survive, before cooler heads delete it. (Six hours after its publication, it’s still visible, starting here. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have made screen-captures of the successive messages, for when the original disappears.) But it resembles the most fevered scenes of A Beautiful Mind in arraying “evidence” to show that Brett Kavanaugh could not have been at the notorious high school party—and that another person, whom Whelan specifically names, would have been the real attempted-rapist.
    
  Maps to show where the various high-schoolers involved in the case lived; architectural drawings of what Whelan believes must have been the scene of the attempted crime; Zillow-based photos of the interior of this house; high school yearbook photos and current shots likening the appearance of Kavanaugh and the “real” malefactor; a range of other crackpot forensic evidence—this and more  is what the messages painstakingly laid out. The sequence ended with a Pontius Pilate-style disclaimer that maybe the non-Kavanaugh person was not really guilty, but the preceding messages said: Stop blaming the future Supreme Court justice! Focus on this other guy. (Christine Ford herself quickly replied, according to the Washington Post: “I knew them both … There is zero chance that I would confuse them.”)
    

• Why this mattered for the Republican establishment. The author, Edward Whelan, is very far from a fringe figure. As Josh Marshall explains here, in a post written in a tone of shock, and with the headline “This Is Nuts”:
  
  “I’m really not sure quite how to capture what just happened. But a major, major player in the conservative/Federalist Society legal establishment in DC just posted a lengthy Twitter thread in which he accuses another alum of Kavanaugh’s high school of assaulting Professor Blasey Ford.”
  
  To similar effect, Brian Beutler, of Crooked Media, wrote:
  “To be clear, Ed Whelan is the conservative movement's go-to guy for judicial fights—to run down Democratic nominees and defend Republican ones. The claim that Republican officialdom had no advanced knowledge of his stunt tonight, which he'd previewed for days, is a joke.”
  
  Whelan is the director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; a one-time Supreme Court clerk for Antonin Scalia;  reportedly a friend of Kavanaugh’s; and overall a significant figure within the conservative establishment. None of the members of that establishment, by the way, stepped up this evening to defend Whelan’s version of events. Which leads to…
     
• Why this might matter for Brett Kavanaugh. As many commentators pointed out this evening, a natural question for (Democratic) senators to ask, when Kavanaugh comes back before them, is: Did you know about any of this?  The Naval War College professor Tom Nichols put it this way:

One more note for the day: Donald Trump gave one of his patented rally speeches this evening in Las Vegas. As best I can tell from press reports (including the brilliant real-time lie-reporting from Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star), Trump did not mention that less than one year ago the deadliest gun massacre in American history took place in that city.

47 days to go.

An increasing source of atmospheric methane is simple leakage, from the natural-gas (mainly methane) wells that have become an increasing source of North America’s energy supply. From both a business and an environmental perspective, these leaks are sheer waste and inefficiency, in addition to being destructive.

To reduce the volume of escaping methane, the Obama administration proposed a series of anti-leak standards and rules. On taking office, Trump and his team — Scott Pruitt at EPA, Ryan Zinke at Interior, Rick Perry at Energy — said they would delay implementation of the anti-leak rules, or ignore or suspend them. Again they lost a series of court cases.  (A federal judge in California said the new policy was “untethered to evidence.”)

This week, in a parallel to the Flores changes, the administration announced that it would just undo the methane policy with its own set of new rules. You can see the details, from the estimable science writer Marianne Lavelle, here.  Another clarifying piece is here.  

After this revelation, Al Gore replied via Tweet:

This one too will be challenged in the courts.

(3) Cancer. Any president is head of the executive branch, and thus structurally the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States.

In an Oval Office interview with John Solomon and Buck Sexton of The Hill, which went online on Tuesday, the chief law-enforcement officer of the land referred to the FBI as “truly a cancer” and said this about how he should have treated its staffers even before he took office:

“If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries,” Trump said. [Note: Trump held no public office at that time.] “I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don’t want that guy. Or at least fired him the first day on the job. ...

Trump said he had not read the documents he ordered declassified [emphasis added: back story here] but said he expected to show they would prove the FBI case started as a political “hoax.”...

Asked what he thought the outcome of his long-running fight with the FBI, the president said: “I hope to be able put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to ... expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.

***

A freer hand to detain children. Removing controls on environmentally hyper-destructive sheer waste. Working around court rulings toward both those ends — while denouncing the law enforcement structure he is supposed to “take care” to defend.

These things happened while the Kavanaugh case was commanding the news. To the best of my knowledge, the list of Republican senators who have noticed or objected to any of it is this familiar group:

48 days to go.

“We write to express profound alarm at President Donald Trump’s decision on September 17, 2018 to intervene in an ongoing law enforcement investigation that may implicate the President himself or those around him,” the four Democrats said in their letter. (They are: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Ranking Senate member of the intelligence committee Mark Warner; and Ranking House member of the intelligence committee Adam Schiff. The four Republicans, who did not sign on, are: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell; House Speaker Paul Ryan; Senate intelligence chairman Richard Burr; and House intelligence chairman (sigh) Devin Nunes.) The letter added:

“The action he has taken… is a brazen abuse of power. Any decision by your offices to share this material with the President or his lawyers will violate longstanding Department of Justice policies, as well as assurances you have provided to us.”

So let’s note for the long-term record: no previous president has done this; no minority-party “Gang of Four” has previously had to complain in such impassioned tones; and no majority-party “Gang of the Missing Four” has as distinctly averted its eyes.

Possible leaks of classified material were a huge theme in the past presidential campaign. The winning candidate has now ordained a leak dwarfing anything contemplated back then. (Update: see more from Natasha Bertrand here.)

***

(2) Refugees. One of the glories of the United States, idealistically and in practical terms, is that it has opened its doors to those persecuted or endangered in their homelands. As my wife, Deb, and I discussed at length in our book, once they arrive, refugees are on average more entrepreneurial, more education-minded, and more law-abiding than the populace as a whole.

One of the stains on America’s record is when it has turned its back and closed its doors to those persecuted or endangered. Of course the MS St. Louis is the most notorious example, but every day there are similar cases.

There are limits to even America’s absorptive capacity, but every president in the modern era has set them higher than Donald Trump has now done. (You can see the historical patterns here. Two recent Atlantic posts go into the trends too, here and here.)

• After the warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia, Jimmy Carter substantially raised refugee admissions, to well above 100,000 per year, and large numbers arrived as well early in Ronald Reagan’s term.
• Through the first Bush era and the Clinton years, refugees from the former Soviet Union and the Balkans increased, and average annual levels were between 75,000 and 100,000.
• Refugee ceilings fell immediately after the 9/11 attacks, but then rose through the George W. Bush and Obama eras, averaging around 75,000 annually. To put it in perspective: this is roughly 1/4500^th of the existing U.S. population — a significant absolute number in international terms, but not among the leaders proportional to either population or GDP.
• Donald Trump has now set the coming year’s ceiling at 30,000—a one-third cut from last year’s 45,000, and the lowest level since before Ronald Reagan’s time.

I won’t make any more of the moral or practical argument in favor of refugee admission at the moment. Instead I’ll point you to this report by Deb about how refugees have helped invigorate the town of Erie, Pennsylvania. (Plus this.) And I’ll point you to an interactive Esri map, which you can find here, which dramatizes how the flow of refugees into the United States has changed in recent years; where they have arrived; and how many of them (and from where) have settled in any given town, including yours.

Noted for the record, as Jews in America and worldwide are beginning the Yom Kippur fast, and with 49 days to go until the midterm elections.

Twenty-four hours ago, it was news that, at last, one Republican senator had the daring to say: Hold on, what’s the rush with this vote, let’s hear the evidence against Kavanaugh and his response. That was Jeff Flake, of Arizona. Then another, Bob Corker of Tennessee, joined him—and by Monday evening, it had become the conventional view.

That is not good news for Kavanaugh, whose best prospect for success was that 51 Republicans would hold together as a bloc to get him through, fast. This would also make it tough for red-state Democrats facing hard reelection races—like Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri—to cast what they know would be a meaningless vote against him.

Every day that passes between now and a Senate vote is a step backward for Kavanaugh.

• It’s one more day for audiences to see reruns of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s brutalizing treatment of Anita Hill back in 1991—all men on the committee at that time, all white, all mercilessly hectoring Hill. Arlen Specter was the worst of them, followed by Orrin Hatch (who is still in the Senate, at age 84) and the committee’s then-chairman, Joe Biden, and its current chairman, Chuck Grassley (at 85). If you were too young to see these in real time, or even if you think you remember them, I strongly recommend paying attention when they’re shown on cable. Anita Hill’s composure is unbelievable, and the senators’ smug callousness is … hard to describe.
• It’s one more day for witnesses, stories, documents, emails, and complications of every sort to arise. What about, once again, the nominee’s big credit-card debts, and their sudden disappearance? What about his speech with constant (joking) allusions to binge and black-out drinking?
• It’s one more day for the most gimlet-eyed political calculators to think: Do we need the stress? Is this fight going to be worth it? If time is no longer on our side, does it make sense just to watch things go wrong, rather than trying a different approach? With a less controversial, more conservative, ideally younger judge—and maybe a woman!

The most gimlet-eyed of all is, of course, Mitch McConnell, who let it be known back in July that he thought that Kavanaugh carried needless personal and political baggage. “Mr. McConnell made clear in multiple phone calls with Mr. Trump … that the lengthy paper trail of another top contender, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, would pose difficulties for his confirmation,” the New York Times said in its story 10 weeks ago. “Mr. McConnell is concerned about the volume of the documents that Judge Kavanaugh has created … as well as in his roles as White House staff secretary under President George W. Bush and assistant to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton.”

By cutting its losses with Harriet Miers 13 years ago, the Bush White House ended up with an apparently much more conservative replacement: Samuel Alito. Why—the Republican gimlet tribe will ask—should we keep beating ourselves up with these Kavanaugh hearings, when there are so many other choices we could make?

Those are the calculations that would apply—in usual times.

Under usual circumstances, this evening’s time capsule would say: Things look bad for Brett Kavanaugh.

But in these circumstances? Who knows. We’ll see.

Fifty days to go.

***

Here’s the full-frame version of the KAL cartoon:

The only argument for a rush, then, is brute-force political power. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to get this vote done now, because he thinks he can. This is of course the same McConnell who refused to have the Senate even consider a nomination that Barack Obama made 10 months before he left office. But 52 days before the next election, McConnell is applying the pressure to get the vote done now:

Now, while the Republicans have a 51-49 Senate majority. (Which, whatever happens in the midterms, they should in any case have through the end of the year.) Now, before any more documents or complications might come out. Now, before accusations of lying-under-oath from senior senators can be explored or adjudicated. Now.

As I’ve mentioned many times in this space, McConnell—and, beyond him, Donald Trump—can get away with what they are doing because not even one member of their razor-thin Republican majority has been willing to stand up to them.

This evening, at least for this moment, one of them has. Respect to Senator Flake.

And I have to amend my list of Republicans willing to stand up for principles and procedure. It would now read:

1. Jeff Flake

***

UPDATE. Via Politico I see that Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee, who like Flake is not running for re-election, has now said that the vote should be postponed.

Good for Senator Corker.

The list could read:

1. Jeff Flake
2. Bob Corker

***

September 17 update, 12:00 noon:  Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, has just called for both Kavanaugh and Ford to testify under oath before the Judiciary committee.

And for a trip down memory lane, here is the preceding item, #70 in the series:

This one was about a warning from a career CIA official that Donald Trump was acting as, at best, an “unwitting agent” of Russian state interests.

That was ten weeks before the 2016 election. These things were knowable, and known, at the time. They’re even clearer now.