The Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings yesterday on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, Democrats on the committee wasted no time in throwing civility and decorum out the window.

Chairman Charles Grassely was barely able to say “Good morning” before Democrats began interrupting him with demands to suspend the hearing. And they weren’t the only ones. Multiple left-wing protestors, many from the Women’s March, stood up in the audience and attempted to shout down the hearing.

One of them was Muslim supremacist, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, Louis Farrakhan-supporting bigot Linda Sarsour. Enough said.

Yesterday’s hearing was so bad that Mrs. Kavanaugh rushed her two young daughters out of the hearing room because they were both visibly upset by what left-wing activists on the committee and in the audience were screaming about their father.

The tone was set weeks ago when Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) suggested that a vote for Kavanaugh is a vote for evil. But so-called “progressives” and their liberal Senate allies plotted this “chaos strategy” over the weekend. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) called them out for it by reading a tweet from an NBC reporter about the weekend conference call.

This spectacle is taking place not because there is anything in Kavanaugh’s record that indicates ethical lapses, legal problems or criminal conduct. His scholarship and intellectual abilities are beyond dispute.

Sadly, the hearings became a free-for-all because he is a constitutionalist and an originalist. All that means is that when a dispute comes before the court, Judge Kavanaugh looks for what the Constitution requires. And he is committed to what the Founding Fathers told us the Constitution meant to them.

The Left fears that if Kavanaugh replaces Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose views sometimes seemed to depend on what he ate the night before, we might have a slim majority of five originalists on the Supreme Court.

This would totally frustrate a key left-wing strategy, which has been used for decades to impose by judicial fiat what the Left could not win at the ballot box or through the legislative process. For example, banning school prayer, abortion-on-demand, and the redefinition of marriage.

The Left is only one vote away from erasing the Second Amendment right of an individual to own a firearm to protect himself and his family. And it is only one vote away from gutting the First Amendment and redefining it to mean freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion.

Going Forward

Assuming we get to serious questioning, Kavanaugh’s opposition on the committee will do its best to force him to say how he would vote on a series of high-profile issues. He should refuse to indulge them, as every nominee has done in recent memory. Stating in advance how he would rule would likely require him to recuse himself for having prejudged the issues.

They will ask him if he believes that Roe v. Wade is “settled law.” I expect he will use phrases many Supreme Court nominees have used to suggest that the Court decided Roe and it has been reaffirmed several times, so in that sense it is settled law.

Of course, when an abortion case comes before the Supreme Court the justices will give some weight to precedent. But the justices also get to look at the facts again in view of new information.

One final thought: Many in the media, on the Left, and even some in the Republican establishment used Sen John McCain’s funeral to bemoan the loss of bipartisanship in America. While not using his name, they seemed to suggest that it was Donald Trump’s fault.

Donald Trump did not set the tone of the Robert Bork hearings.

Donald Trump did not set the tone of the Clarence Thomas hearings.

And Donald Trump is not responsible for what the Left is doing today as it attempts once again to smear and defeat a perfectly well-qualified nominee to the Supreme Court.

What we saw in the hearing yesterday is the face of the modern Left/resistance movement — an alliance of elected leftists engaged in demagoguery from their seats on the committee, while the leftist mob disrupted the hearing from the audience.

It is clear what the intention is — to make Americans watching at home (and tuning in for the first time) feel that there must be something horrible about the nominee that so many senators and average citizens are moved to this level of anger and dismay.

Again, I can’t help but observe that this comes after a weekend when the entire Washington establishment was praising the bipartisanship of John McCain. I guarantee there were people at the funeral service who were also on that weekend call, plotting these disgusting tactics.

About That Funeral…

I was deeply disappointed to see the way Sen. McCain’s funeral service at the National Cathedral was exploited. Multiple speakers apparently felt comfortable using the funeral to take shots at President Trump. Of course, the Bush and Clinton dynasties, both defeated by Trump, were well represented at the service.

It seems the only person who didn’t try to exploit the funeral for political purposes was Donald Trump.

He lowered the flags according to protocol and tradition. He provided Air Force Two to transport the senator’s body from Arizona to Washington, DC. He called Sen. Lindsey Graham to praise him for his remarks on the Senate floor about his old friend McCain. But all that went unremarked as the DC establishment buried one of its own.

In related news, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announced that he is appointing former Sen. Jon Kyl to fill McCain’s seat until a special election is held in 2020. Kyl is a solid pro-life conservative.

Nike & Kaepernick

If you woke up this morning to the smell of burning rubber, it was probably Nike shoes going up in flames. The company just selected Colin Kaepernick to be the face of its 30th anniversary “Just Do It” Campaign.

I guess “Just Do it” just became “Just Blew It.”

I suppose Nike knows its market. Polls have found that the younger generation is among the least patriotic in history. But Kaepernick hasn’t played football in two years and his career ended in controversy.

But it got worse for Nike when two prominent people with their own huge followings quickly supported Nike and Kaepernick – former CIA Director John Brennan and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It’s a grim day for any American corporation when a Trump-hating Obama lackey like Brennan and the America-hating, anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad both commend your choice of a flag-disrespecting, cop-hating, Castro-loving spokesman.

Celebrating America’s Workers

For the first time in years, many Americans had a reason to celebrate Labor Day. Our economy is growing and more Americans are working again! America’s unmatched wealth is the product not just of the financial acumen of its investors and businessmen but also of the toil and know-how of its blue-collar workers.

Read more in my latest opinion piece at the Washington Examiner.