Leave it to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) to keep it real. He put the kibosh on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D-NY) farfetched Green New Deal a few months ago. Now he's telling his fellow Democrats to "get real" and forget their dreams of impeaching Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh because, like AOC's implausible environmental plan, it ain't going to happen.
“We’ve got to get beyond this ‘impeachment is the answer to every problem,’" Durbin urged. "It’s not realistic. If that’s how we are identified in Congress, as the impeachment Congress, we run the risk that people will feel we’re ignoring the issues that mean a lot to them as families.”
Yet, that's the route several Democrats are going down after the release of The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, a new book by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly that attempts to give credence to a Kavanaugh accuser. Deborah Ramirez alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party when they were Yale classmates in the 1980s. But in telling her story, the book relies on anonymous or suspicious sources. And when the New York Times published a report about the book this week, they were forced to issue a massive correction.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell magnified some of the Times' missteps.
“The latest allegation was blasted out by a major newspaper despite the apparent lack of any corroborating evidence whatsoever," he said in a statement. "The reporting was so thin, the story ran not in the news section, but on the opinion page. In fact, they’ve already had to issue an enormous correction. The writers conveniently failed to note that the supposed victim herself declined to be interviewed. And several of her friends say she has no memory of any such thing happening."
The Times then spun a new web, since the first one unraveled.
When Democrats aren't demanding Kavanaugh's impeachment, they're obsessing over President Trump's. Asked why he wasn't pursuing Kavanaugh impeachment, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said that's because they're already too busy with Trump.
Again, moderate Democrats are warning party leadership about their priorities.
“We should be focusing on the kitchen table issues,” Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-NY) offered.
Durbin may not think impeachment is in Kavanaugh's future, but he does want to see more transparency in the investigation into the accusations against him.
My statement regarding the recent reporting around Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation process: pic.twitter.com/DsqC3ZEMHF
— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) September 16, 2019
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