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Conservatives Really Want You To Remember Justice Breyer Got Arrested In College

The next conservative talking point is forming and it's laughable.

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Now that we’ve learned Brett Kavanaugh and NBA All-Guy-Who-Stood-There Chris Dudley were questioned by police after a college bar fight that sent a guy to the hospital, the diehards working overtime to salvage Kavanaugh’s toxic nomination have already settled on their excuse for this one. Did you know Stephen Breyer was arrested for underage drinking in college? It’s true! And this is like getting drunk and beating a guy because… look, Stephen Breyer was arrested!

It’s moments like this that one is forced to ask if the conservative movement is deeply confused or just deeply cynical that its followers will swallow any argument no matter how ill-conceived. Because this desperation ploy to forge some kind of “double standard” misses the relevant distinction between the two jurists. Specifically, Justice Breyer has never been accused of drunken sexual violence and then testified under oath that he never got drunk and hurt people.

Simply put, nobody cares about underage drinking, they care about sexual assault and, as a corollary, lying under oath and this police report casts a pall over Kavanaugh’s credibility on both counts. Some liberals on social media have questioned why this police report has never come up in all of Kavanaugh’s prior FBI background checks. Well, it’s because standing alone, this report is irrelevant. In the context of denying under oath any history of alcohol-fueled violence, it’s pretty serious.

Perhaps not as serious as trying to coordinate false statements to federal investigators, but serious nonetheless.

To the country’s peril, the conservative movement seems locked in a juvenile game of “if we can prove you did it too, it’s fine.” Ultimately, this is all understandable. Eroding faith in government fits the conservative vision, so making it all look like a “swamp” is actually a win for them. If you begin the game knowing that you don’t need to win, you just need to make everyone else lose, concocting double standards is a winning strategy. Al Franken lost his Senate seat for a picture joking about groping a woman just so Democrats could argue that maybe attempted rape is a bad thing when Brett Kavanaugh rolls into the chamber. That’s what it means to control a narrative.

It’s the same “double standard” gambit they’ve made in the Minnesota Attorney General race, where Republicans cry foul that Keith Ellison remains in the race despite domestic violence allegations. Except, the Democrats in Minnesota launched a thorough independent investigation where the accuser refused to turn over evidence. By contrast, the Senate Republicans tried to block the accuser from testifying, attempted to thwart an FBI investigation, and then put initial limitations to handcuff that investigation. “Believe all women” isn’t a demand to close the books once a woman speaks out, it’s an entreaty to take allegations seriously whenever they arise and not preemptively shunt women’s testimony off as “hysterical.”

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Again, is this confusing to the GOP or are they just cynical? Or worse, has the rank-and-file that used to fall for these cynical arguments in the 90s and 2000s become the forces behind the wheel today? The inmates may truly be running the asylum.

Kavanaugh Was Questioned by Police After Bar Fight in 1985 [NY Times]

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