Sen. Susan Collins Says She Doesn’t Believe Kavanaugh Was Ford’s Attacker

He denied the allegations, but almost all Senate Democrats voted against his confirmation.

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court puts him on the nation’s highest tribunal – but at the bottom of its ritualist pecking order.

“This is one of the reasons I chose him is because there is no one with a squeaky clean past like Brett Kavanaugh”.

“A vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh”, McConnell continued, is a vote about the Senate itself, where “the facts matter” and the “politics of personal destruction do not win the day”.

Collins said Saturday that crowdsourced funding targeting her was tantamount to “a bribe, or extortion”.

Trump has been holding rallies across the country as he tries to boost Republican turnout in November’s midterm elections, which will determine which party will control the House and Senate during the second half of Trump’s term. “These things always blow over”, he told a news conference.

The justices themselves made a quiet show of solidarity.

Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a replacement for retiring justice Anthony Kennedy was controversial from the start – but the initial focus was exclusively on the conservative views held by the married father of two. Mr Kavanaugh would actually only need a 50-50 vote, as that would force a tie-breaker in his favour from Vice-President Mike Pence.

Supreme Court judges are appointed for life and the 53-year-old Kavanaugh can potentially keep his position for decades. Yet Kavanaugh is joining under a cloud.

Before the vote, party leaders gave a final plea for their case. Protesters mobbed the east steps of the Capitol before police could clear them, and dozens of demonstrators were arrested.

Diane Russell, a Democratic activist, said Collins voted to “betray ME women and ME survivors” by ignoring their stories.

And it has prompted several assault survivors to take up the protest banner.

Ford testified at a Judicial Committee hearing that Kavanaugh had pushed her on to a bed and choked her while trying to take off her clothes during a 1982 party and she feared she was going to the killed before managing to escape.

The vote to elect him to the highest court in the USA was delayed by a week when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to investigate the claims against him.

Believes presidents should be protected from criminal investigations and civil lawsuits: As NPR reported in July, after he was part of the Starr investigation during the Clinton administration, Kavanaugh came to believe that, during their time in office, presidents should be protected from criminal investigations, as well as civil lawsuits.

He added that he thinks the week-long delay as the FBI investigated sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh was something positive. Democrats dismissed the truncated report as insufficient.

Murkowski ultimately withdrew herself from the final tally as a gesture of goodwill toward her Republican colleague, Sen.

The one exception is Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. “These are highly principled people”, Verrilli says, “and Roe is incompatible with their most deeply held views about how you ought to understand and interpret the Constitution”. One Republican, Steve Daines of Montana, did not vote because he was not present for family reasons.

As the Senate tried to recover from its charged atmosphere, Murkowski’s move offered a moment of civility.

Allegations of sexual assault raised during senate confirmation hearings dominated headlines and divided the US.

As the court’s newest and therefore most junior associate justice – confirmed 50-48 Saturday in the closest margin in more than a century – Kavanaugh will bear some of the minor indignities that accompany the role. “I don’t know if this is a case of mistaken identity”.

Republican Roger Allison, Butterfield’s 1st Congressional District opponent in next month’s general election, had not publicly reacted to the Kavanaugh vote Saturday afternoon. White House Counsel Don McGahn, who helped salvage Kavanaugh’s nomination as it teetered, sat in the front row of the visitors’ gallery for the vote with deputy White House press secretary Raj Shah.