Even Brett Kavanaugh's Yale Drinking Buddies Think He's Unfit For The Bench
In powerful op-ed, Brett Kavanaugh’s Yale drinking buddies say he shouldn’t be confirmed
While all signs currently point to the sad fact that cowardly, greedy, Republican Senators will soon appoint the woefully unfit Brett Kavanaugh to a position on the Supreme Court, a group of the nominee’s Yale drinking buddies have come together in a last-ditch effort to (hopefully) stop him from being confirmed.
As it turns out, even this overgrown frat boy’s closest college pals don’t think he has any business holding a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the land. The trio, Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes, and Elizabeth Swisher attended Yale University from 1983 to 1987 with Kavanaugh. As such, they had a front-row seat to his partying behavior, which they claim he mischaracterized during questioning before the Senate last week. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, they explain exactly why — and pull exactly zero punches.
“We each asserted that Brett lied to the Senate by stating, under oath, that he never drank to the point of forgetting what he was doing,” they write. “We said, unequivocally, that each of us, on numerous occasions, had seen Brett stumbling drunk to the point that it would be impossible for him to state with any degree of certainty that he remembered everything that he did when drunk.”
Ludington, Brookes, and Swisher explain that they decided separately to speak out about Kavanaugh’s honesty “or lack thereof.” “In each of our cases, it was his public statements during a Fox News TV interview and his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that prompted us to speak out,” they write.
Since sharing the information about Kavanaugh’s drunken college days, they’ve come under fire for trying to “ruin” the judge’s life because of his past behavior. That’s simply not the case. “In fact, none of us condemned Brett for his frequent drunkenness. We drank too much in college as well,” they said. “It is true that Brett acknowledged he sometimes drank ‘too many beers.’ But he also stated that he never drank to the point of blacking out.”
Which is exactly why they’re speaking out — that’s a lie. But coming forward with the truth in this way has come at a high cost.
“By coming forward, each of us has disrupted our own lives and those of our families. As well as navigating the intense media interest, including having news vans and reporters set up in front of the home of one of us, we have received large amounts of hate mail, including threats of violence. We have lost friendships. The work servers of one of us were hacked,” they share.
Their lives have been upended, but they felt they had no choice. “None of this is what we wanted, but we felt it our civic duty to speak the truth and say that Brett lied under oath while seeking to become a Supreme Court justice,” they write. “That is our one and only message, but it is a significant one.”
For Kavanaugh’s fellow Yale alumni, it’s not just the serious allegations of sexual assault from three different women that should stop him from being appointed to the bench. It’s his total lack of honesty and integrity. “No one should be able to lie their way onto the Supreme Court. Honesty is the glue that holds together a society of laws. Lies are the solvent that dissolves those bonds,” they write.
The trio ends on a powerful note.
“All of us went to Yale, whose motto is ‘Lux et Veritas’ (Light and Truth). Brett also belonged to a Yale senior secret society called Truth and Courage. We believe that Brett neither tells the former nor embodies the latter. For this reason, we believe that Brett Kavanaugh should not sit on the nation’s highest court.”
We can only hope those in power are listening.
