If you, like me, consider all calls for civility bullshit, you wouldn't have to ask that question.
All the interrupting, all the shouting, all the impugning of the integrity of a man who presents himself as a thoroughly good person....
Senate Democrats tore into President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday, painting Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as a narrow-minded partisan as the opening day of his confirmation hearings verged on pandemonium. Dozens of screaming protesters were hauled out of the hearing room in handcuffs.
That's Sheryl Gail Stolberg and Adam Liptak in the NYT.
The verbal brawl began moments after the hearings began.... [T]he hearings were dominated by Democratic theatrics and crackling protests. For more than an hour at the outset, irate Democrats and a frustrated Mr. Grassley parried back and forth.... Protesters, most of them women, shouted down senators; by day’s end, Capitol Police said a total of 70 people had been arrested, including nine outside the room....
Stolberg and Liptak do reference the calls for civility at the McCain events:
The session... gave Americans their first extended glimpse of Judge Kavanaugh, 53, who... talked about going to ball games with his father and coaching his daughter in basketball, drawing bipartisan smiles when he gave a shoutout to each member of the team.
But that was about the extent of the comity; just days after members of the Senate had gathered together in a bipartisan show of civility at the funeral of Senator John McCain, the crowded hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building seethed with antipathy....
A
show of civility. That's all it was. Nice to have the truth smack us in the face so abruptly, lest we get starry eyed. I wonder if the Senate Democrats debated about whether jettisoning civility so soon after conspicuously bullshitting about it would be too egregiously hypocritical. Whatever. If they did, they decided it was worth the risk.
The
first person to interrupt and breach decorum was Kamala Harris. And:
Republicans countered that Democrats were harping on access to documents because they could not quibble with Judge Kavanaugh’s qualifications. And they took digs at their Democratic colleagues on the judiciary panel, several of whom — Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala D. Harris of California — are weighing presidential runs.
Plainly, Harris, Klobuchar, and Booker don't think civility is how you get elected. And that's my "civility bullshit" theory: "civility" is what you say to con your opponents into standing down. Not something you impose on yourself.
This makes me think of the old feminist slogan, "Well-behaved women seldom make history." Here's
the original context for that saying, from a scholarly article by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:
Cotton Mather called them “The Hidden Ones.” They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all.
I'm not a proponent of civility. I'm a proponent of calling bullshit on calls for civility, which intimidate and inhibit some but not all of us. And that's not because I like rudeness. It's because I like fairness.
***
Interesting correction at the bottom of the article:
An earlier version of this article misstated the proportion of documents from Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s time in the White House Counsel’s Office that have been made available to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee was given 445,000 of 663,000 total documents, which is a portion but not a small portion of the total.
पोस्ट्स
