The list of things wrong with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s approach to the Kavanaugh allegations is long, but this pingponging back and forth between the GOP’s outside counsel and Democratic senators is bonkers. For those not watching, it’s making for a fragmented, disjointed, jarring hearing. It’s just another layer to the indefensible process that the majority cobbled together to try to minimize the risks to the Kavanaugh nomination.

Here’s a minor note on a day of major news. President Trump has no meeting with Rod Rosenstein listed on his schedule today. No big secret here. He said yesterday in his press conference that he might ask Rosenstein to postpone their meeting because of the big events on Capitol Hill. He also said he’d prefer to keep Rosenstein on and suggested he believed his denials of the details of The New York Times story that triggered this latest drama. Read More

We started our annual Prime membership drive a month ago with a really ambitious goal: 2,000 new subscribers, the kind of goal you’re afraid to set because you’re not going to make it. I think we’re going to make it. We’re now just 278 sign-ups short of that goal. This isn’t an arbitrary number. It’s key to TPM’s future. Ready to join us? Click here.

Spokesperson for the ‘Judicial Crisis Network’, Carrie Severino, the Federalist Society-linked campaign group that runs ads for right-wing judicial candidates, buckles on air in the face of the latest charges. It’s really must watch video.

We now have a flurry of different accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. They range from highly detailed accusations to one which is fragmentary even in the recollection of the alleged victim. But there’s something else that has grabbed my attention repeatedly in the last forty-eight hours. It is inherently difficult to reconstruct things that happened decades ago. But in the course of reacting to these different accusations, Kavanaugh has repeatedly lied in the present. If these allegations are true – and I believe they are – then Kavanaugh is lying in denying them. But it’s not even those lies which really jump out to me. Kavanaugh has told a series of other lies that are really clear cut and demonstrable. Read More

Read Brett Kavanaugh’s prepared testimony for round 2 of his confirmation hearing.

As I mentioned last night, there are some real questions worth asking about the political views of Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona prosecutor chosen by Judiciary Committee Republicans to do their questioning of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford. But judged entirely on its own, this is a truly bizarre decision, quite apart from all the obvious optics about hiring an outside person to avoid having the Committee Republican men question an alleged victim of sexual assault.

Mitchell is a prosecutor who specializes in child sexual abuse cases. Those cases require all sorts of specific knowledge and experience. That experience is at best ill-suited to this assignment. Blasey Ford is a fifty-something college professor. And in any case, this isn’t a trial. Read More

Florida is one of four states that permanently disenfranchises citizens with felony convictions. That means 1.4 million Floridians can’t vote, a number which disproportionately affects the state’s African-American population (by design). But a measure on the ballot on election day could change that. TPM’s Allegra Kirkland went to Florida to report this fourth installment of our 2018 series on Voting Rights and Democracy. It’s a must read about a critical issue. Read it here.

Earlier this evening, the Majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that their “female assistant” hired to asked their questions at the Thursday hearing with Judge Kavanaugh and Professor Blasey Ford would be a Maricopa County, Arizona sex crimes prosecutor named Rachel Mitchell.

It turns out one of the only at-length interviews Mitchell has ever done is with a publication put out by the far right ‘fundamental baptist’ organization Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International (FBFI), an organization closely tied to Bob Jones University and espousing a range of hyper-traditionalist views on gender, sexuality and sexual ethics. Read More

A brief note on Rod Rosenstein. Given all the fireworks there’s an inevitable tendency to see him as some sort of member of the anti-Trump resistance. This is not right. Rosenstein is a career Republican lawyer. He was part of the Starr investigation. He was there during Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony, sitting among his supporters and clearly a big supporter of his nomination. This is just what you’d expect in a high level Justice Department appointment under a Republican administration. One sign of his professionalism or reputation for integrity is that while he got his US Attorney appointment under Bush, he was retained under President Obama. The Obama DOJ did this more than other administrations. But if he were clearly a hack or a clear partisan he wouldn’t have been retained in 2009. When we think of Rosenstein we should think of him as someone who would really really really like to be a team player in every way possible. To his credit, he appears to have limits.