Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday drew a bright line between Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s bid for the Supreme Court and increasingly aggressive protesters against his nomination.
Anti-Kavanaugh demonstrators in recent days have publicly accosted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) before a Senate Committee on the Judiciary meeting and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at a restaurant.
The Washington Times quoted McConnell (pictured above) as saying the Senate leader will press ahead with a vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination to the high court.
“We’ll not be intimidated by these people. There’s no chance in the world they’re going to scare us from doing our duty,” he said.
McConnell himself has also been targeted. Protesters confronted him as he was walking to catch a flight at an airport on Tuesday. He and his wife, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, were also accosted in September while leaving a restaurant.
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Left-wing protesters, moreover, attacked Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen while she and her husband were having dinner at a restaurant in the District of Columbia in September.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other officials appointed by President Donald Trump have come in for harassment as they dined in restaurants.
A recording posted on Twitter shows McConnell ignoring the protesters as an aide tries to clear his path.
“Am I being assaulted right now?” one woman said.
Said another woman: “Why are you putting your hands on her?”
As McConnell was riding an escalator, the first protester took one last verbal shot.
“Sen. McConnell, do you always turn your back on women like this?” she asked.
Kavanaugh, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for nearly 13 years, has been under fire since three women alleged that he sexually molested them in the early 1980s at high school and college parties. He has denied all of the accusations.
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Left-wing activists, meanwhile, have adopted a strategy of by any means necessary to block the Kavanaugh nomination outright — or at least delay it past the midterm elections in November — in the hope Democrats will regain control of the Senate.
McConnell has vowed a vote later this week.
In some cases, Democratic officials have encouraged those tactics. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) in June told people at a rally that if they see a Cabinet official, they should “create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
The tactics encouraged by Waters and practiced by anti-Kavanaugh protesters recall those advocated by far-left community organizer Saul Alinsky in his book “Rules for Radicals.” Former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are both Alinsky disciples.
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