The NPR Politics Podcast - Kavanaugh Has The Votes To Be Confirmed To The Supreme Court

Episode Date: October 6, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court cleared a key procedural hurdle in the Senate on Friday, and his confirmation now seems all but certain. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, and political reporter Tim Mak. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Brett Kavanaugh is going to be on the United States Supreme Court. We're going to talk about that and an extraordinary Friday at the U.S. Capitol. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. So it's pretty clear, by the slimmest of margins, Brett Kavanaugh is headed to the Supreme Court. Kelsey, walk us through when that became crystal clear on Friday.

It became crystal clear within a matter of minutes when Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, announced on the Senate floor after more than 40 minutes of talking that she was going to be supporting Kavanaugh. And then just a few minutes later, Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, announced that he would also be supporting Kavanaugh. And then just a few minutes later, Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, announced that he would also be supporting Kavanaugh. And that brought us to very clearly locked in yes votes. And we're going to circle back to Collins in a moment. But 51-49 is how that key cloture vote had played out earlier Friday. At the time, we thought there was still a chance that people could change their mind.

But Kelsey, was that really a clear moment where it was like, OK, this looks like it's probably going to happen? It did look that way. There was a few moments where we were chasing around senators. Tim and I were standing in different hallways, different parts of the Capitol, trying to find people like Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican of Arizona, and Collins, who we mentioned, and Manchin, to see if they were going to stick with their votes. Flake was a little bit cryptic. We didn't really know what was going to happen. And then Collins went and had lunch with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And he came out saying that he felt pretty good about things. And from there, it seemed like we were heading in a direction where the 51 votes were going to quickly come into place. Ayesha, do you have a sense if the president ever really wavered in his support for Brett

Kavanaugh through this really tense process? His messages on Kavanaugh had been mixed to a certain extent. It did seem like at points maybe he was trying to give himself a bit of an out. You know, he would say, I think that Kavanaugh is a great man. He's outstanding, but I could be convinced of anything. So but I think ultimately, once Kavanaugh gave that statement at the hearing, at the second hearing, and was just so forceful and, you know, came out against the Clintons and all that, that was Trump's language. So I think with that, I think he really sold himself to President Trump. We were up here in the Capitol throughout the day kind of wondering what was going on in the

White House. Were they talking to you guys much about it? Did you hear much from them about what they were expecting today? I think that most of them were saying that they think they felt like things were going in the right direction. And that's what they had been saying for a while, that they were cautiously optimistic, but they didn't want to get out ahead of this. Obviously, things have gone, you know, very things that have changed very easily with this. But I think they had felt for a while that things were going in the right direction. Tim, Friday was a really tense day on Capitol Hill. It's been a really tense week on Capitol Hill. Since Jeff Flake negotiated this delay, this one-week delay in which the FBI would reopen an investigation into Brett Kavanaugh's background, there's been a lot of questions about who could eventually get to a yes on Brett Kavanaugh.

We found the answer on Friday, but the fact is that there's been a lot of uncertainty and a lot of demonstrations here on Capitol Hill and a lot of lobbying on both sides of this issue. Taking a step back, President Trump now has put two picks on the Supreme Court and has replaced a swing vote with a reliable conservative. This is a big deal for President Trump. He often says people tell him the Supreme Court is one of the most important things that a president can do. And so he has been able to deliver two conservatives, strong conservatives to the Supreme Court. And now and this was a very difficult process for this White House helping to get him through the finish line. But they pulled it off. And for once, even though President Trump did insert himself in some ways, especially when it came to some of Kavanaugh's

accusers, for the most part, this was really all about the Senate and about Kavanaugh and not about Trump, which is made this a different type of crisis that the White House had to work through. All right. And we need to have a long conversation about Susan Collins. The main Republican was the deciding vote on Kavanaugh. She gave a floor speech with a run up and with the drama that made LeBron James decision from a while back look like a declarative, straightforward statement. We're going to talk all about that after a quick break. On the latest Planet Money, a special report inside the business of asylum. We go inside an underground network of professional story writers, coaches and scammers

gaming the asylum system and how the FBI cracked down. That's on the latest Planet Money. And we're back. Let's start by just listening to Susan Collins for a moment. I have begun my floor remarks explaining my decision with a recognition of the solemn nature and the importance of the occasion. You listen to this speech, 40 plus minutes, point by point, a sales pitch for Brett Kavanaugh in terms of his background, his judicial philosophy. Judge Kavanaugh has received rave reviews for his 12 year track record as a judge, including for his judicial temperament. Really discounting Christine Blasey Ford and other accusations. The four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events of that evening gathering

where she says the assault occurred. Even though Collins said that she wasn't trying to do that and she spoke in support of Me Too, hard to listen to this speech and think that Susan Collins really ever was undecided. It's hard to disagree with you on that, though. I'm told she was talking to constituents and, you know, she was really was really mulling this over over the past several weeks. And she went out of her way to say how many times she had met with him, how many hours she had spent talking to people about this. I think the first part of her speech was a little bit of selling how hard it was for her to make the decision. And then she transitioned to a closing argument for Kavanaugh as not the partisan he was made out to be.

And I think that that was the vast majority of what her speech was, was explaining that Senate gallery, she went on to say that she was disappointed that this wasn't a solemn consideration of a Supreme Court nominee, but a gutter-level political campaign. And from there, it was pretty clear from the start that she was building up her reasoning for voting yes. A couple things jumped out to me. Firstly, she said she was really persuaded to support Kavanaugh, actually, after some of the allegations that were brought forward by lot with Merrick Garland. You remember Merrick Garland, the Obama nominee who never got a hearing in the Senate. Those two things really jumped out at me. And actually, the whole speech, if you read 80, 90 percent of it on its own, you could almost imagine Mitch McConnell delivering a speech like that.

To me, it was how long the speech was, how in-depth it was. It didn't seem like this was like, oh, well, I guess I'll vote yes, but I'm very reluctant. This was a full throated endorsement of him. And then when you talk about the way that she talked about Christine Blasey Ford, she said that she believed that something happened to her. But nevertheless, she felt like it hadn't been corroborated. And so it was a way that I think that she was trying to thread this needle to say that we believe women, they should be heard. But she still raised questions about it. Well, let's step back and talk about what we think that could mean for the midterms, because you're right. Collins says Me Too is real.

It matters. It's long overdue. But then she pokes so many holes in what Ford said and says this is not a criminal trial, but there's basic fairness. And if you want to take allegations seriously, they should at least meet a threshold of more likely than not, indicating Ford's testimony was on the or not side.

Well, I think this kind of lands on something that I've been hearing from Republicans for several days. And we even heard Jeff Flake kind of articulate this a little bit as he was doing his tour of bipartisanship with Chris Coons of Delaware earlier this week. The fact of the matter is, these Republicans are saying that they are conservatives, that the judicial philosophy and the, you know, the entire background of Kavanaugh fits with their political beliefs. So there's that one bucket of this conversation. But then there's something separate happening here that is not specifically political that has to do with the

Me Too movement with the allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct. And they had to find a way to separate the two and make a vote about their political beliefs, because at the end of the day, they think their political beliefs are what is going to carry them through future elections. So Collins is getting the most attention here, but there was another swing vote who's in an even more precarious political situation, and that's Joe Manchin, Democrat on the ballot in deep red West Virginia. He ends up being the only Democrat supporting Brett Kavanaugh. What do we make of that? Well, he is running for re-election in a state the president won, right? And we know he is vulnerable. But he said in a statement that he promised his constituents that he would look seriously at Kavanaugh's record and cast his vote based on the facts he had before me and what's best for West Virginia.

He said that he had serious reservations about the vote, given the accusations against Kavanaugh and his temperament, the partisanship that Democrats have talked about quite a bit in his second appearance. But he found him to be a qualified jurist, And he said he thinks it'll follow the Constitution. Now, Manchin has a lot to think about here. West Virginia is one of the most conservative, most Trump-supporting states in the entire country. And he is running against a credible challenger. And he has a very good chance of, you know, being in a very tight race. And this decision may have a lot to do with those politics. And Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana were in that exact same position of running for re-election in a state that Trump won by a lot. They all voted for Neil Gorsuch last year.

So I guess we'll see which one of them took the better track when it comes to the pure politics of it and the results in the midterms in a few weeks. Well, Heitkamp made a kind of slightly different argument when she explained her no vote. She said that she worried about the message that it would send to women and girls. And she said that she does worry about a partisanship that she saw in his statements. And to be fair, she is facing a really, really tough race. And a lot of recent polls are showing her slipping far behind. And I've talked to a lot of people who know her pretty well who said that this was a gut moment for her.

But Manchin, one thing that stood out to me is that he didn't confirm that he was going to vote yes on the final vote for confirmation until Collins made her statement so it's right after it was just like he had to make sure that that was going to go that way because I guess there was a question or you know outsiders are questioning whether he would have wanted to be uh the the deciding vote the 50th vote uh if he didn't have Collins to cover him but it's always easier to be the second person over the

line. Yes. So as soon as she did it, he came out with a statement. I want to comment for a second about the national politics of all this. I mean, as you look across the Kavanaugh confirmation process, what you saw was a divided conservative movement. There were never Trumpers and there were pro-Trumpers, kind of all rally behind one candidate and one cause for the first time in a long time. And you saw a lot of unity amongst folks who were just really glad to get back to their tribe, if you know what I'm saying, like that there were never Trumpers just eager to push forward on this issue. People like Eric Erickson, who have historically opposed Donald Trump,

saying we have to get Kavanaugh confirmed to the Supreme Court. That enthusiasm has really, in the last week, we saw in an NPR poll that it really translated to some enthusiasm amongst the Republican base. And I'd be really curious to know whether that fades a little bit now that Brett Kavanaugh looks like he's going to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. Something really remarkable here is that Kavanaugh's nomination came almost one year to the day from those initial articles about Harvey Weinstein that really kicked off the Me Too movement. And the big question that I have is, what's the lasting impact of this? Last week, this day-long gut-wrenching testimony. Now seen this as the culmination of a year-long national conversation about how we take allegations seriously or not? who supported Kavanaugh, kind of have kind of and Collins seemed to argue he'll get on the court and everyone will kind of come together and everything will be better. And I just I don't think that we see any evidence of that. I think that the divisions in this country seem to be real and seem to be hardening.

Not, you know, I don't see him getting confirmed. And all of these people who have been so passionate, who've been protesting, who've been talking about the sexual assaults that they've been through, I don't see that just fading away. It seems like it would make people even more passionate. If we're talking about the energy that might come off of this event, you can already feel it. Immediately after Joe Manchin announced his support for Brett Kavanaugh, he went outside and was confronted by a number of demonstrators who shouted him down as he tried to explain his vote. And then I made my decision, and I gave my reasons for my decision. Ours went out.

So, Kelsey, you and I cover Congress. This has just been such a weird process. I mean, it started off thinking, wow, this is going to be this epic clash over the key swing vote. Then it became over the summer, it seemed like kind of a dud in terms of political interest and a done deal. And then we spent the last month watching this visceral personal fight play out on national television and radio. I mean, what do you think you're going to take away from all of this? I am going to be really watching the way senators recover from this, if they recover from this, because it's very likely that they're going to leave town fairly shortly here to go finish campaigning for the midterms. It's only, gosh, just a little bit more than a month away. And

once they leave, they're going to go back into an even more partisan environment where they're running for re-election or supporting other people running for re-election. And then they have to come back here and keep the government open and have a fight about President Trump's demand for a wall on the border with Mexico. And I'm just going to be watching to see if the Senate is just a different place now. Are they able to recover from fighting so bitterly? And are they able to cut deals that are necessary to do the basics of governing? Or does this continue to be just a toxic political environment? Yeah. And for me, it's all of that. Plus,

what's the effect on the Supreme Court? Several senators in their closing speeches pointed out that there's more institutional trust in the Supreme Court than any other institution. And all of that's fading fast as well. So if we're finally formally viewing the Supreme Court as just as partisan and tribal as everything else, where does that leave us? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think that the only way we're going to find an answer is just to wait. All right. That's it for today. Brett Kavanaugh likely headed to the Supreme Court. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Tim Meck, political reporter. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.