‘Men Are Trash’ vs. ‘I Stand With Brett’: Wild scene at the Capitol. By Ben Schreckinger.
Outside the Dirsken Senate Office building on Thursday morning, Cameron Mixon, a 22-year-old Georgetown Law School student was sporting a tee-shirt with the slogan: “Men Are Trash.”
“I love your shirt!” one woman told Mixon. “It’s amazing,” another agreed. By 9:30 a.m., Mixon said, about 20 people had asked to take photos next to her. …
“Kava-No!” shouted the protesters who marched Thursday morning from the steps of the Supreme Court to the Dirksen Senate office building, where the target of their ire would soon face a kind of political trial. ““We believe Anita Hill! We believe Christine Ford!” …
Ford’s supporters saw not a circus but a tragic forum for an alleged sexual assault survivor to tell her story. …
Kavanaugh’s opening statement, an angry and defiant rebuttal of Ford’s accusation, drew gasps and exasperated responses from the gallery.
When he named “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” as a motive for the accusations against him, the gallery erupted with outbursts of “What?” and “Oh my god” and “seriously?”
Kavanaugh’s warning to Democrats that “What goes around comes around” drew another “Oh my god.” And when he choked up after invoking his 10-year-old daughter, one spectator cried out: “Come on.”
From there, spectators in the gallery began to greet various Kavanaugh answers with derisive laughter. …
In a hallway during a break in Ford’s testimony, one woman confronted Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the judiciary committee, and told him that she “was raped 13 years ago” and asked whether he believed her. “You needed to go to the cops. Go to the cops,” Graham said. …
Another group of protesters marched silently through the building. Some had had black tape affixed over their mouths and others held up their hands. One middle-aged woman had written, “I did not tell” in red marker on her right palm and, “I was 15” on her left palm. …
Others had come to depict Kavanaugh as the real victim. In a park near the Dirksen building, a crowd of the conservative judge’s supporters gathered for a rally. A group of young people leaving the park said they were students at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania. The students, who declined to provide their names, said many of them were members of their school’s College Republicans group. They had left campus last night at 10 p.m. and arrived in Washington at 3 a.m. on a bus paid for, they said, by the American Conservative Union.
