Brett Kavanaugh case takes us back to high school

It must feel ironic for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be judged now by the standards that he once tried to apply in the toughest way possible to another alleged offender, then-President Bill Clinton.

Now it is Kavanaugh who faces allegations of sexual misconduct, which in his case would amount to attempted rape. I sympathize with any middle-aged person who is called to account for something he or she did in high school, a period that drives most of us at least a little crazy.

Believe me, that's why so many apologies come out at class reunions decades later.

But even in high school, we should know the difference between horsing around and criminal sexual assault. That's one reason these charges against Kavanaugh, on the verge of his possible lifetime appointment, need to be taken seriously, even though the process he faces is explicitly political, not judicial.

It takes place in congressional hearings, not courtrooms, which means the central standard of guidance boils down to "What's going to get me the most votes and lose the fewest?"

Which makes me wonder what's going on in Kavanaugh's head now that his career has taken him from being a tough prosecutor of President Clinton to a strong defender of himself.

I am reminded of the old and often-repeated (especially by me) saying: A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. Or, as the late Tom Wolfe put it, a liberal is just a conservative who's been arrested.

That might describe Kavanaugh now, although he probably has not moved left by much. He was not quite 30 years old in 1994 when Kenneth Starr was named independent counsel to investigate "Whitewater," a bad land deal that would morph into a probe of Clinton's extramarital affair with an intern in the Oval Office.

Starr enlisted Kavanaugh to join his legal team, which wrote what would be known as the Starr Report. Kavanaugh in 1998 memorably suggested a series of tough, sexually explicit questions for Clinton to answer about his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky.

"The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is ... abhorrent to me," Kavanaugh wrote in the two-page memo that was sent to Starr and his staff attorneys on Aug. 15, 1998, two days before Clinton testified to a grand jury via video feed from the White House. "It may not be our job to impose sanctions on him, but it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear -- piece by painful piece."

Kavanaugh's no-holds-barred pursuit of Clinton, which was denounced by Democrats as part of a partisan witch hunt by congressional Republicans, sounds painfully ironic now that Kavanaugh's own nomination to the Supreme Court is threatened by a charge of sexual misconduct.

His nomination was zipping along on what appeared to be a fast track to a confirmation vote this week before Christine Blasey Ford blew into the picture. Now a research psychologist at Palo Alto University in California, she went public with her identity and charges in a Washington Post interview Sunday.

During a house party in the early 1980s when they were in high school in suburban Washington, she said, a drunken Kavanaugh had pinned her on a bed, groped her and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming as he tried to remove her clothing. "I thought he might inadvertently kill me," the Post quoted her as saying. She escaped, she said, when a close Kavanaugh friend drunkenly fell on top of both of them.

Kavanaugh vigorously denied the allegations, and President Donald Trump stood by him in remarks that were notably missing even a hint of his usual bluster. Even his critique of the other party sounded unusually subdued. "I wish the Democrats could have done this a lot sooner because they had this information for many months," Trump told reporters at the White House. "And they shouldn't have waited until literally the last days. They should have done it a lot sooner."

That would have been nice. But even a little knowledge of the bruising that Anita Hill went through in 1991 in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, who eventually was confirmed to the Supreme Court anyway, should explain why Ford, like Hill, might have been more than a little reluctant to come forward.

At least, thanks partly to Hill, and later movements like #MeToo, allegations of sexual misconduct have earned more respect. With pivotal midterm elections looming, it might not seem like a fair time to hold sensitive Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

But then, political accountability appears to be what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they left judicial appointment to a political process.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)