Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, this is the first time I have come to the floor to speak on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh since the events of the last several weeks. I want to say this at the outset in the most dispassionate way I can: I have come to the conclusion Brett Kavanaugh is perhaps the most dangerous nominee for the Supreme Court in my lifetime, and I am going to vote no tomorrow when the cloture vote comes before this Senate.

Let me be clear. I had decided to vote no before his confirmation hearing, before the allegations of sexual assault were levied against him, before his second confirmation hearing, before the FBI refreshed its background check investigation. That doesn't mean I wasn't willing to do my due diligence; it is simply that his judicial record, which I became familiar with as he was becoming known as one of the finalists for this selection, was enough for me to decide he wouldn't rule fairly on the questions before the Court that affect the millions of people I represent in Connecticut.

Every year, I take a walk across my State. It takes about 5 days. It is about 120 miles, give or take. It is a chance for me to conduct a weeklong running focus group where I get to talk to hundreds of voters who aren't plugged into politics on a daily basis. The people I meet at gas stations and auto body shops and folks who are out walking their dog in the morning are part of the 98 percent of Americans who don't watch Sean Hannity or Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow. Yet they have strong opinions about what is happening in this country just like everybody else, and I am glad they share them with me.

For the last 2 years, since President Trump took office, the No. 1 topic people talk to me about during the walk is healthcare. People in Connecticut are scared about what they see as a coordinated effort that is underway in Washington to take away their insurance coverage and the protections for people in my State who have preexisting conditions.

Folks in Connecticut don't think the Affordable Care Act is perfect. They want us to work on making it better, but they don't want us to end it without a plan for what is going to come next. They were glad when the repeal plan was defeated last year. Now they are worried that President Trump is trying to use the courts to get done what he couldn't get done in the people's branch of government, the legislative branch.

Brett Kavanaugh was vetted by two conservative political groups whose chief legislative priority is repealing the Affordable Care Act come hell or high water. The head of one of those groups said on television it really didn't matter to him which of the names on the list Trump picked because they all shared their group's priorities. Trump himself told the American public he would never pick a judge like John Roberts, who voted to uphold the major parts of the Affordable Care Act.

Kavanaugh, in his judicial writing, has been hostile to the Affordable Care Act. Frankly, I will take the President's word for it. He picked Brett Kavanaugh to help him unwind judicially a law he couldn't unwind legislatively, and that will have huge consequences on folks in my State who need insurance coverage for things like cancer, addiction, or mental illness.

While Kavanaugh hasn't said a lot specifically on the ACA, his views on choice are pretty well known. As a lawyer in the Bush White House, Kavanaugh went out of his way to note that Roe v. Wade isn't settled law, that it would take just five Supreme Court Justices to get rid of it.

As a circuit court judge, he denied access to an abortion for a young immigrant girl, even though she met the legal criteria to receive the procedure. He uses rhetoric and terminology that is right out of the anti-choice dictionary when talking about reproductive healthcare. He talks about abortion on demand. He called birth control an abortion- inducing drug.

Kavanaugh, no doubt about it, is going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Any Senators who have convinced themselves otherwise are living in a fantasy world.

The people I represent in Connecticut don't want the Supreme Court of the United States telling them what they can and cannot do with their bodies. The judicial doctrine of privacy comes from a Connecticut case, Griswold v. Connecticut, brought by a pioneering civil rights lawyer in New Haven. In my State, we prefer judges to stay out of our private business.

Finally, when I am walking across the State of Connecticut, I am talking an awful lot about the issue of gun violence. It is not just the murder of 20 little first graders in Sandy Hook that still hangs heavy over Connecticut; it is the murders in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, and the suicides all over our State continue unabated.

Listen, it is not as though everybody I meet when I am walking across the State agrees with me on what we should do. When I walk east to west, I spend half of my time in Eastern Connecticut--a part of the State where people still love their guns, and I get into lots of spirited arguments about assault weapons and gun permits. What there is relative agreement on is that it is our choice on how we should regulate guns.

Here is where Judge Kavanaugh's views get outside of the mainstream. His testimony before the Judiciary Committee suggests that he is a Second Amendment radical, believing almost all restrictions on gun ownership are likely unconstitutional. Here is a for instance: He stated in his testimony, as long as a weapon is in regular commercial use, it can never ever be banned. That is a recipe for disaster because all you need then is a very short period of legalization of automatic weapons, followed by a few years of robust commercial sales, and then that gun has permanent constitutional protection forever. That is absurd, but that is Brett Kavanaugh's view on the Second Amendment.

What I am saying is this. I didn't need the tragic drama of the last few weeks to know how I felt about Brett Kavanaugh serving on the Supreme Court. I was an early ``no'' vote, and I don't apologize for coming to that conclusion months ago. Yet that doesn't mean I am not entitled to have a strong opinion on what has played out before the eyes of America during the month of September, and it doesn't mean I don't have the right to make the argument here that for those in the Senate who weren't as sure as I was, what happened in the last 30 days should be dispositive on the future of this nomination.

I said at the outset, I thought Brett Kavanaugh is the most dangerous nominee to the Court in my lifetime. That opinion is one I arrived at only after hearing his testimony before the committee last week.

I think it is really important for Senators to understand the Pandora's box they are opening by voting yes, endorsing his performance, his demeanor, and what I argue is maybe most important: his bias.

Let me say first, I don't believe any Democrat should defend the way in which Christine Blasey Ford's allegations were brought to light. I don't know who leaked the contents of that letter. I think it is fair to guess it was somebody who didn't want Brett Kavanaugh confirmed. Dr. Ford should have controlled her story or at least the ranking member of the committee to whom she entrusted it should have controlled that story. The timing of its release just sucked. Something that explosive, that serious, shouldn't be shoved into debate at the very last minute.

Here is the thing. The way in which the substance is revealed does not change the substance. Yet it may give you reason to be angry about the way in which it was made known. It may make you suspicious of the motivations of the person who did it, but the method doesn't alter the substance. The substance is Dr. Ford's very credible account of a sexual assault carried out against her by somebody who wants to be on the Supreme Court.

Let me be clear. There is no reason not to believe Dr. Ford. Plenty of Republicans admitted to this after she came before the committee. She disclosed the incident well before Kavanaugh was nominated. She was composed, credible, and thoughtful in her testimony. Why on Earth would she put herself and her family through this horror if not because she is telling the truth?

Though I believed Dr. Ford, you frankly don't even have to be sure she is telling the truth to decide the risk of nominating someone with these kinds of serious charges swirling around them is an unnecessary burden for this body or the judicial system to bear. If there is a chance he did these things, just move on to the next eligible conservative candidate.

These charges bother me greatly. What truly shook me about Kavanaugh's testimony and the speeches many of my Republican colleagues have delivered on this floor since is the idea proffered by Judge Kavanaugh that these charges are simply a result of a Clinton-connected liberal conspiracy theory.

Let me read for you what he actually said last Thursday.

When I did at least okay enough at the hearing that it looked like I might actually get confirmed, a new tactic was needed. Some of you were lying in wait and had it ready.

He then went on to allege:

The whole 2-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 had been stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons.

Come on. Listen, I am telling you that I don't like how this information was released to the press. I am not trying to be a blind partisan here, but to believe and then to publicly claim that this is some larger organized effort by Democrats who purposefully held back this allegation until the last minute is to reveal to America your true political bias.

There was no conspiracy. There was no orchestrated smear campaign. Listen, if that was our MO, why didn't we use it on Neil Gorsuch, when there was even more anger on our side because that was the seat that should have been Merrick Garland's. Why didn't we use fake allegations of sexual misconduct against the President's Cabinet nominees, who engendered much more grassroots anger in early 2017 than Brett Kavanaugh did in the summer and fall of 2018?

It just doesn't make sense because it is made up. There are zero facts behind it, and for a nominee to the Supreme Court to believe such a far-fetched story and then to angrily warn Democrats that ``what goes around comes around,'' is one of the most astonishing unveilings of political bias that I have ever witnessed from a nominee asking for the support of the Senate. That has serious long-term consequences for us as a republic, because it used to matter that in the midst of all of our political heated debates here, there were at least nine people in America whom Americans could credibly believe didn't care about our usually petty political partisan fights. There were nine people that Americans could believe were above it all.

Now we are on the verge of perhaps sending someone to the Supreme Court who called Democrats ``embarrassments'' and who warned his political opponents menacingly that we will reap what we sow. I don't really know what that means, but I am sure that I know that I don't want a nominee to the Supreme Court saying anything like that.

Now, the fight over the Kennedy seat was going to be controversial and contentious. There is no way around that, but it didn't need to go down like this. It didn't need to divide this country. It didn't need to marginalize victims and to politicize the Supreme Court, like this nomination has.

Add to the conspiratorial beliefs the hatred that was oozing from him toward Democrats that day and the likelihood that this nominee was also lying over and over about, at the very least, relatively small things for which he had really little reason not to tell the truth.

I am sorry. I know this sounds trivial, talking about things like a devil's triangle or boofing, but is it really not too much to ask, to expect that a nominee for the most important court in the world tell you the truth even about the small embarrassing stuff?

Even if you don't believe Dr. Ford, I just don't know why you would want to put somebody on the Supreme Court who has a habit of fibbing. This is the Supreme Court.

So I guess, for me, it comes down to this question, which I think is a really, really important one: Why did Republicans stick with Brett Kavanaugh, given all of this, when Republicans could have just sent him back to the President and brought before this body another really conservative judge who would have regularly sided with the right side of the Court?

This process isn't a trial. It is a job interview. Not a single one of us would hire someone into our office if credible allegations like this were attached to that person or if they conducted themselves in an in-person interview the way that Brett Kavanaugh did on Thursday. Seriously, think of that. Not a single Senator would willingly hire a person with these questions surrounding him or her, but we are here with a vote pending in a matter of hours.

Now, I just came from that secure briefing room where I was force-fed a half-baked FBI investigation that I was told I had to read and digest in no more than an hour. It was humiliating. I felt like I was 9 years old.

But that humiliation was sort of the capstone for me on explaining why we are still moving forward on Brett Kavanaugh. At least it helped me to fill out the details of my theory of the case, and I will end here.

Listen, I get it that it is really hard to be a Republican today, and I mean that sincerely. The things that the Republican Party used to stand for have been obliterated by this President. The Grand Old Party has become the party of Trump. There is only a thread of unifying ideology left between this administration and congressional Republicans. Republicans are much more so organized now around a kind of cult of personality. I know that many of my Republican colleagues are really uncomfortable about this.

Without this unifying set of ideas that can bind together the President and congressional Republicans, I fear that you are using this nomination to cling to the one thing left that you can agree on, and that is the methodical complete domination of your political opponents. On social media they call it ``owning the libs,'' because why else would you stick with this nominee other than just because you want to shove down the throats of Democrats this deeply flawed nominee? Why else would you try to railroad through his nomination without a background check, and then, when you are forced to do one, humiliate us all by giving us 60 minutes to review what turned out to be a product that raises more questions than it answered?

I wish the answer was that you all think that Brett Kavanaugh is worth it. He is just that important a jurist, that serious a thinker to do whatever it takes to get him on the Court, but I don't think that is what Republicans believe. So we are left searching for the real reason why we are having a vote tomorrow.

I don't hate my Republican colleagues. I don't have any interest in dominating them or getting my way just to get my way, and I wish I could explain this process, especially over the last few weeks, through any other prism than the desire by Republican leadership to simply bury Democrats into the ground.

I hate the way this has played out. I hate the lateness of the revelation. I hate the rush job of an investigation. I hate the inability to recognize that none of us, Democrats or Republicans, are obligated to stand by a nominee that has real questions about his history and his impartiality just because the President likes him.

This is not right. None of this is right, and the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, filled with hatred toward Democrats and our allies, surrounded by legitimate questions about his fitness for office, is totally unnecessary, even to try to accomplish the political aims of my Republican friends in the majority. In the end, most importantly, the way in which this has been done is deeply, deeply hurtful to the unity of our great Nation.

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