Kavanaugh’s Former Yale ‘Drinking Buddies’ Ask Senate to Vote ‘No”

The longer the delay in Brett Kavanaugh’s approval by the Senate, the more people who come out against him.

For example, several former “drinking buddies” of Kavanaugh at Yale University are now calling for the Senate to vote against his confirmation because of his lie.

Three Yale classmates of Kavanaugh’s- Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes and Elizabeth Swisher – wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post on Thursday expressing their opinions about the Supreme Court nominee. They said they decided to go public with their opinions because they believed Kavanaugh was being dishonest. They referred to dishonest statements from Kavanaugh during his Fox News interview and also during his sworn testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

“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 wrote in the op-ed. “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.”

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The opinion piece also makes clear that the three former classmates did not make the decision to go public easily. Instead, they said that they had “disrupted” their own lives by coming forward to discuss Kavanaugh’s excessive drinking in college.

“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 wrote. They then said that they believe telling the truth is a “moral obligation for our nation’s leaders.”

“No one should be able to lie their way onto the Supreme Court,” they said, before adding that they believe “that Brett neither tells” the truth nor is an embodiment of courage.

“For this reason, we believe that Brett Kavanaugh should not sit on the nation’s highest court,” they wrote.

Yesterday’s piece in the Post came one week after Kavanaugh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has fiercely denied all accusations against him, and yesterday the FBI delivered a supplemental background report to Senate leadership.

Kavanaugh said during his testimony that while he “likes beer,” he never has blacked out from drinking.

In addition to Ludington, Brookes and Swisher, Jamie Roche, who shared a dorm with Kavanaugh at Yale, also said on Wednesday that Kavanaugh “baldly” lied under oath about his drinking habits.

Breaking 30 years of tradition, the editors of the Washington Post on Thursday wrote that the Senate should vote “no” on Kavanaugh’s confirmation also. In addition, retired Republican Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said that after his performance at the hearing, Brett Kavanaugh is no longer qualified to be on the Supreme Court.

The Senate is scheduled to take a “cloture” vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination on Friday, and if that passes then a full Senate vote to confirm Kavanaugh could happen as early as Saturday. Four Republican senators have not yet said they would vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Leo Vidal

I am a lifelong Democrat with a passion for social justice and progressive issues. I have degrees in writing, economics and law from the University of Iowa.