Speaking to reporters early on Wednesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “did not mince words” about the impact that now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation battle provided during these fall midterm elections, as Fox News put it in a piece today.
McConnell on Wednesday said it gave Republicans a much-needed “adrenaline shot” in their Senate races.
McConnell acknowledged that the party had been worried about a lack of intensity — until voters became energized over the way the sexual assault allegations lodged against Kavanaugh at the last minute were handled in the late summer and in September by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and in particular, by the Democratic members of that committee.
“The Kavanaugh fight certainly provided that [an adrenaline shot],” McConnell said on Wednesday morning.
As is well known by now, a number of women came forward during the Kavanaugh confirmation process to accuse the Washington, D.C.-based judge of sexual misconduct against them.
He vehemently denied all charges, and as a result of the allegations, he appeared for an additional time before the Senate Judiciary Committee and answered scores of hours of questions behind the scenes as well.
During the newly added hearings, accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a California psychologist, claimed that Kavanaugh had sexually mistreated her decades ago when they were teenagers at a Maryland house party.
She claimed he threw her on a bed in one of the bedrooms and tried to rip her clothes off.
She also testified she was “100 percent” sure that it was he who assaulted her.
Both publicly and privately, Kavanaugh denied all of the allegations against him.
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In addition, a supplemental FBI review could not support those charges — there was no corroboration whatsoever.
Republicans accused Democrats of treating the nominee unfairly, as Fox News noted — as the Democrats accused Republicans of rushing the investigations into Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior.
Very recently, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released a report claiming the committee found no evidence whatsoever to support the claims against Kavanaugh.
Not only that, the report mentioned that one of the women who claimed Kavanaugh had raped her admitted ultimately that she had made the entire thing up — and that she had never even met Kavanaugh.
The woman is based in Kentucky.
It did not escape notice that the single Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court — Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — won re-election on Tuesday in the midterms.
McConnell mentioned this during his remarks on Wednesday.
Several other Democrats running for office in battleground states who opposed the Kavanaugh nomination had been projected to lose, “though it’s unclear whether their vote against the Supreme Court justice was a deciding factor,” said Fox News.
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Those senators included: Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, and Florida’s Bill Nelson – though Nelson has not conceded and that race may be heading for a recount.
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