Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, it seems like light years ago, but it was July 9 when President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to be the next Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. I want to recap to refresh everybody's memory of what has happened since July 9 and explain briefly why I will be voting for Judge Kavanaugh to be the next Associate Justice on the Supreme Court.

Most importantly, I want to make one point emphatically clear. The Senate should not be intimidated under the circus-like atmosphere that has unfortunately surrounded this entire confirmation process. We should not be intimidated, and we should not be complicit in the orchestrated attempt to assassinate one man's character and destroy his career and to further delay this confirmation vote.

When Judge Kavanaugh was nominated, it quickly became clear that we were dealing with somebody who was well qualified and well respected. He served for 12 years on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. He was well known for his expertise and his talent and his experience. Former colleagues and judges said that. Lawyers who argued before him at the DC Circuit Court said that. His former law clerks said that. Legal scholars, including those who did not share his views on the law, said that as well.

What happened? I think opponents of this nomination knew they couldn't beat his nomination the old-fashioned way--on the merits--so they decided to throw in the kitchen sink. First came the trash talking. There are claims that supporters of Judge Kavanaugh's nomination would somehow be complicit with evil. That was a U.S. Senator who said that. Another said his confirmation could spell the destruction of the Constitution itself.

These are apocalyptic words and rhetoric. Most Americans can spot wild untruths and petty shaming when they see it. So that didn't work very well. Opponents had to move on to round 2.

They then argued that Judge Kavanaugh could not be fair and impartial on the bench because of his views on executive power or because of his experience in working on the terrorist detention policy following the attacks that devastated this country on September 11, 2001, when he worked at the White House. Thankfully, the fact checkers did their due diligence and spotted errors with each of these arguments. So opponents of the nomination moved on.

Next came the great paper chase--the insistence that more and more documents needed to be produced, including those that had traditionally been held back because of executive privilege, because these were not documents that Brett Kavanaugh owned. These were documents held by either the National Archives or the George W. Bush Library. Yet it is important to note that more documents about Judge Kavanaugh were produced for him than for all of the other past Supreme Court Justices combined--more paper on Judge Kavanaugh than all of the other Supreme Court Justices combined. Once again, that argument eventually ran out of gas.

Fourth, came the normally scheduled confirmation hearings, which Judge Kavanaugh sailed through with flying colors. Opponents couldn't lay a finger on him, but that is when things began to take a darker turn. I am talking about the accusations that our Democratic colleagues sat on for a month before seeing them leaked into the press, contrary to Dr. Ford's wishes and against her consent. These allegations, of course, regarded alleged high school misconduct on the part of Judge Kavanaugh, but the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee didn't share that with the FBI for 6 weeks or more and didn't share it with bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, who were responsible for supplementing the investigation of the FBI and the background investigation. The ranking member didn't share it with the committee itself during a closed-door session during which sensitive material would not be made public and where Dr. Ford's identity, consistent with her request, could have remained confidential, as well, while that allegation was investigated. Of course, Judge Kavanaugh himself was never told of the allegation until sometime after his initial hearing.

Now, that includes when our friend and colleague, the senior Senator from California, met one-on-one with Brett Kavanaugh. Don't you think, if somebody had a question about an allegation being made against the nominee, that would be the perfect time to confront the nominee and say: I have this allegation. What do you have to say about it? But she said nothing.

By that point, we know she had already spoken to Dr. Ford. We know she had already recommended partisan lawyers to represent her. We knew there had been arrangements by her lawyers to conduct a polygraph examination. This is all during the time when the senior Senator from California had assured Dr. Ford that her name would be kept out of the press and out of the public limelight.

Once she was sent to these partisan lawyers, they were preparing for battle. They got a polygraph examination, plans were being made and hatched, but the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who sat on these allegations for 6 weeks, said nothing, including hiding the allegations from the very man whose name in the next few days would be tarnished when the full fury of our Democratic colleagues' wrath was unleashed.

These accusations are very serious. They are crimes. Judge Kavanaugh has been accused of multiple crimes.

I have said earlier that I wanted Dr. Ford to be treated the same way my own daughters or my wife or my mother would be treated in similar circumstances. That is the sort of respect we owe any person making a serious allegation like this, but while we were doing everything we could to treat Dr. Ford with the dignity and respect she deserves, our Democratic colleagues did her a huge disservice, not only to her but any other woman across the country who believes they have been a victim of a sexual assault. I say that because of the way they handled Dr. Ford's accusations and hid them along the way.

We know Dr. Ford requested confidentiality, but our Democratic colleagues deprived her of that against her will. Her letter alleging misconduct on the part of Judge Kavanaugh was leaked to the press along the way, which is the way this sort of character assassination begins-- anonymous reports to the press.

We know Dr. Ford is struggling to come to grips with difficult moments in her past, but eventually she summoned the courage to share her story. What she didn't fully appreciate is, she was simultaneously being used and deployed as a political weapon, a last-minute timebomb that was designed to destroy one man's reputation and blow up the confirmation process once and for all.

I would say to our colleagues across the aisle who claim to be acting in Dr. Ford's best interest: It sure doesn't look like it to me. We did everything we could, under the awful circumstances presented to us by our Democratic colleagues, to show respect for Dr. Ford and to accommodate her wishes for safety and privacy. The Judiciary Committee wanted to do what was best for her when it offered a bipartisan team of investigators to go to California and give her an opportunity to tell her story to them out of the limelight, with the TV cameras off, respectfully and privately.

One of the suspicious circumstances surrounding this whole event, the very lawyers the ranking member sent her to, these partisan lawyers, apparently didn't even tell Dr. Ford this option was available to her. That is what Dr. Ford said at the hearing.

We also brought in an experienced sexual assault investigator and lawyer from Arizona to help us elicit the facts of her claim. Throughout the hearing, we listened and tried to learn from what Dr. Ford was telling us. We took Dr. Ford's statements seriously.

Then it was Judge Kavanaugh's turn. Some of our colleagues now feign concern about Judge Kavanaugh's judicial temperament because of the way he forcefully defended himself at the hearing where he had been accused of multiple crimes and accused of lying under oath.

We know what Judge Kavanaugh's temperament is like on the bench because he spent 12 years on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. That is why the American Bar Association gave him their very highest rating, not only for his experience but for his temperament as well. They interviewed hundreds of lawyers and people who had knowledge of Judge Kavanaugh's expertise and his temperament, and they all said it was deserving of the highest rating the American Bar Association could give.

I wonder how any of us would feel if we were accused of a crime we didn't commit and were forced into the public limelight to defend our good name and our honor and our reputation and to protect our family against the threats that were being made against them. I would be angry. I would do everything possible to push back against the false accusations, and that is what Judge Kavanaugh did. Along the way, he again offered his denial of any of the allegations of Dr. Ford under penalty of felony.

So the question is, How do we decide? Because we are going to be voting starting tomorrow on this nomination. Isn't it somebody's word against another's? Don't we either have to believe everything that one says or another? Do we know whom to trust, whose word to accept, when allegations are made about something that allegedly happened 35 years ago with gaps in the story, inconsistencies?

Well, I think the first thing we have to do is put these questions into the proper context, but here is the bottom line: This is not a case of he said, she said. It is a case of she said, they said. In other words, the allegations made by Dr. Ford are not confirmed or corroborated by any of the other people she said were present that day. One of those people she said was present was Leland Keyser, a female friend, one of her closest friends, who said not only does she not remember being involved in anything like this, she said she never even met Brett Kavanaugh.

This is not about believing women or believing men. That is a false choice. It is not about having to choose between a man and a woman when it comes to allegations of sexual assault. It is not about being for the #MeToo movement or against it because who, after all, could be against it--women coming forward and telling their story when they believe they have been assaulted.

No, what this is about is looking at the specific relevant evidence in this case in the proper framework. That evidence goes well beyond the impassioned and unequivocal denial by Judge Kavanaugh.

In this case, as I said, there were three eyewitnesses Dr. Ford said could confirm her story, and all of them directly refuted her story.

What is more, nothing like this ever came up in the context of six previous FBI background investigations conducted by the FBI during Judge Kavanaugh's long and very public career.

We have been told the FBI, during the course of these now seven background investigations, including the supplemental background investigation, has talked to 150 witnesses about Judge Kavanaugh. Don't you think somebody, somewhere, sometime would corroborate what Dr. Ford said if there were such a person?

We know these claims conflict with the accounts of many women who said they have known this nominee to behave honorably not only in high school and college toward them but the countless other women who have known and interacted with Judge Kavanaugh since. It just seems simply out of character for the Brett Kavanaugh we have come to know as a result of these hearings and these investigations.

Finally, the timing of these allegations seem awfully calculated and unusual, even politically motivated, and compound that with the fact that our Democratic colleagues chose not to act on the opportunity to investigate them either through the Judiciary Committee staff or the FBI when it was much more appropriate to do so.

Well, those are the facts I believe we should consider, and that is the evidence that suggested Judge Kavanaugh is telling the truth.

The counterarguments offered by our Democratic colleagues are not compelling, and I think deep down they realize it. That is why they keep changing their position, moving the goalpost, as you have heard. That is why they have finally resorted to talking about alleged ice- throwing incidents in college. Man, that is disqualifying, they say, apparently, or let's look at his high school yearbook. I would stipulate that teenage boys--well, I was one once. We are not that smart when we are teenage boys, and the dumb things that people say and do, I think, as the judge said, are cringeworthy sometimes.

Then we have seen conspiracy theories spun up involving his calendar from 1982. Now, I admit it is a little odd, I think, for anybody to have kept a daily calendar and still have it at age 53, but Judge Kavanaugh said that is what his dad did, and it was a combination calendar and diary. So it tells us some of what he was doing at the time we are concerned with.

I would suggest this whole enterprise has gotten so far afield from a search for the truth and become just a relentless, unhinged attempt to defeat the nomination, and in the process, chew up and spit out the reputation of a good man.

We know this play has been telegraphed. Our friends across the aisle made known their opposition would be equal parts merciless and relentless months ago when the minority leader said he was going to oppose Judge Kavanaugh's nomination with everything he has--everything.

Well, apparently ``everything'' includes last-minute, uncorroborated accusations made almost 40 years ago. ``Everything'' involves refusing to participate in the normal committee process, walking out of hearings, breaking the rules. It involves making loud, baiting statements designed to incite people. It includes seeing some of our colleagues get hangers sent to their offices, chasing Senators and their spouses from restaurants or through airports, not to mention delays and obstructions at every step along the way.

Here is what I really think needs to be understood: Our colleagues across the aisle claim to be looking out for the victim. They claim to be on the side of empathy, but there is nothing empathetic about the cruelty they have shown Judge Kavanaugh, his wife, and their children. There is nothing empathetic about presuming that somebody is guilty without evidence, and there is nothing consistent about our colleagues who forget many of their standard refrains about our criminal justice system convicting too many people when the evidence is thin.

Some commentators have called this our Atticus Finch moment, recalling the famous novel ``To Kill a Mockingbird'' by Harper Lee. We all remember that Atticus Finch was a lawyer who did not believe that a mere accusation was synonymous with guilt. He represented an unpopular person who many people presumed was guilty of a heinous crime because of his race and his race alone. We could learn from Atticus Finch now, during this time when there has been such a vicious and unrelenting attack on the integrity and good name of this nominee.

What I find the most distressing is that our colleagues who have engaged in this relentless and vicious attack express no remorse over violating Dr. Ford's wishes regarding confidentiality. They make no act of contrition about thrusting her into the spotlight and using her for partisan purposes or for recommending partisan lawyers to shepherd her along and withholding information from the Judiciary Committee and the FBI for weeks on end.

I have spent much of my career in elected office fighting to make sure that victims of sexual assault and domestic violence and human trafficking are never ignored, but at the same time, I will never apologize for 1 second for believing in the constitutional presumption of innocence and due process of law--one of the bedrock principles of our justice system, and that is because those principles are grounded in basic fairness and fair play. The spirit of that principle and the concept of due process applies to Judge Kavanaugh just as much as it does to any defendant taking a stand in any courtroom across this country. He has, in fact, been accused of a crime--multiple crimes.

I believe we will remember last week's hearings for years to come, and I am sure history will ultimately judge all of us, but in the meantime, we need to act. We have had more than enough time to evaluate this nominee. The Senate must do its job, and we will not be intimidated. This is about the principles we stand up for and defend-- yes, sometimes even when it is unpopular.

This vote that we will have beginning tomorrow is about upholding long-established constitutional principles and creating the right precedent, not establishing the wrong one. Can you imagine, if this orchestrated smear campaign and relentless effort to destroy this nominee is successful, what kind of precedent that would set in the future? Woe be to all of us and shame on all of us if we allow that to happen.

This vote is about validating years of public service and decades of honorable conduct. It is not about forgetting everything that a person has done, all that he is, and all that he has worked for at the drop of a hat based on unproven allegations. It is not about shifting with the turbulent political whims. It is about what is just, and not just what is popular in some circles.

The FBI has submitted its supplemental background investigation. Democrats and Republicans are in the process of being briefed on that. Having been briefed, I can tell you this: Nothing new. No witness can confirm any allegation against Judge Kavanaugh. As I said, Judge Kavanaugh has been investigated seven times now by the FBI through background investigations where they have talked to 150 witnesses.

It is time to vote. I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting Judge Kavanaugh's nomination starting with the cloture motion we will vote on tomorrow morning.

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