Supreme Court nominee Steve Dallas

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called late Sunday for a delay in further consideration of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh after a second woman accused him of sexual misconduct.

“I am writing to request an immediate postponement of any further proceedings related to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh,” Feinstein (Calif.) wrote in a letter to Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the committee’s chairman.

Her letter came after the New Yorker magazine reported that Deborah Ramirez, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale University, said he exposed himself at a party when they were both first-year students.

Ramirez, who told the magazine that they both had been drinking at the time of the incident, acknowledged some gaps in her memory but said she remembered another student shouting Kavanaugh’s name.

I’m not sure how you prove this. I’m not sure how the FBI gets involved. I’m pretty sure this is going to be used by the bad-faith right as an example of either how Democrats are making things up to derail Kavanaugh, how they are taking boys-will-be-boys behavior and shrilly excoriating and emasculating it, how #MeToo has gone too far, or all three. Probably all three.

But. Regardless of if this is provable or not, it certainly rings true. It certainly fits a pattern of obnoxious frattish behavior where the point has been to humiliate women, and where sex is a weapon of the powerful. It has been a hallmark of Kavanaugh’s whole career, this leering juvenilia, and he’s brought it to every stage of Republican politics. His questions to Bill Clinton, designed to humiliate, are also created to evoke snickering titillation. Vagina!

This is how he’s matriculated through Republican politics until he was given a seat on a powerful bench specifically so that he could one day be on the Supreme Court, to carry water for a movement that has paved a path for his essential mediocrity. He’s a rich kid who has bullied women his whole life, and will continue to do so with his rulings, stripping them and other non-rich/white people of their rights. He’ll do so gleefully. It’s like Paul Ryan talking about taking away the social safety net “around the keg”. It’s 80’s era Reaganite frat-heads conspiring to use a fake morality to justify theft and power.

That’s the heart of the movement: it’s not just a boot stamping down on the human neck, forever. It’s making you lick that boot while a bunch of popped-collar trust fund bros hoot and snigger in the background, cocks out, and now finally headed toward completion.