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Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley has been forced to postpone a vote scheduled for Thursday on Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination because Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake finally made himself useful by demanding the committee examine the allegations by Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh attacked her when they were in high school. Grassley has scheduled a hearing for Monday in response, reportedly with just two witnesses: Kavanaugh and Ford. Except that he didn't bother to contact Ford before he scheduled it.
If you think this was just some mistake by Grassley, or a mere oversight, think again. He's setting a narrative, which he made abundantly clear Tuesday morning in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. That Ford hasn't yet been able to commit to that date, Grassley says, "kind of raises the question, do they want to come to the public hearing or not."
Fellow Republican and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham piped up to prove yet again with proof that he buried anything resembling his principles with his good friend John McCain. "She can come if she likes, but if she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to," Graham said on Fox News, proving that they're only asking her to testify because they have to—not because they care about what happened to her.
Republicans don't want a real public hearing, and Grassley and Trump have proved it by not directing an actual investigation into the matter by the FBI. As California Sen. Dianne Feinstein says, "it's impossible to take this process seriously." She points out that Grassley has invited just two witnesses, compared to the 22 witnesses at the Anita Hill hearing in 1991, which took three days. "What about other witnesses like Kavanaugh's friend Mark Judge," the alleged accomplice in that attack. "What about individuals who were previously told about this incident? What about experts who can speak to the effects of this kind of trauma on a victim?"
None of that matters to Republicans. Grassley is merely going through the motions, and doing so in as politicized a manner as he possibly can. If getting to the truth was at issue at all here, Kavanaugh's nomination would already be history because of his serial perjuries.