James Roche, freshman room-mate to Brett Kavanaugh: he was “frequently unusually drunk. . .belligerent and mean”… and other sources indicate, he may have joined friends to get girls drunk, then gang-rape them.

There is abundant evidence that Judge Brett Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker in high school and college.  He even admitted to drinking “a few beers” but denied ever blacking out.  Given the number of lies and misleading statements he made during his regular confirmation hearings, we are bound to be skeptical of his veracity in this matter, when it could disqualify him from the Supreme Court.  He made misleading statements about his activities while working as a lawyer and legal justifier for the policies of the second Bush administration, where torture was legally justified, and indefinite detention at Guantanamo was touted.

If it were not for the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene, inmates at Guantanamo would not even have the right to bring habeas corpus appeals.  In fact, that decision was hotly contested by the then-minority conservatives, and the appellate court has seen fit to ignore it recently, resulting in more time in legal and carceral limbo.  One prisoner has been there for sixteen years, almost since the prison was first opened, yet there is no evidence that he participated in any terrorist acts directly.

Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court would mean a conservative majority despite the timely death of its leading light, Antonin Scalia.  Justice Scalia was a dependable conservative who could be relied upon to twist the facts in evidence or even adduce additional notional “facts” to justify his illiberable rulings.  If the previous president, Barack Obama, had been allowed to nominate a judge to the court as regular procedure dictated in the eleven months remaining in his term, it is possible that we would not be having this discussion.

Justice Gorsuch is not as extreme as Scalia was, but he is equally dependable as a conservative.  Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions are likely to be equally one-sided.  He has all the conservative qualifications needed except one: his character as an adolescent and as a legal adult in college has been whitewashed.  Those who shepherded his nomination knew that he had a history of heavy drinking, but they glossed over it.

It is entirely possible that he believed that he was telling the truth when he claimed, in an interview on Monday, to have been a virgin in high school and college (he is a devout Catholic, like most of the rest of the Supreme Court.) His history of frequent alcohol overuse at that time makes his memories of events that occurred while he was intoxicated highly suspect.  The second and third of the women to come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct are also vulnerable to memory lapses because they admit that they were drinking when they were assaulted.  However, the memory of something terrible that happened to you when you were drunk, even thirty or forty years ago, is surely burned deeply into your brain.  A routine “flashing” or a casual sexual assault could easily be forgotten by the one who committed that crime while drunk.

So it is entirely possible that both Kavanaugh and his accusers sincerely believe they are right.  If so, why does not Kavanaugh demand a polygraph test or a thorough investigation?  Is he merely caught up in the president’s rush to confirmation, or is he afraid of what might come out in an FBI probe?  He may well be aware that investigators will quickly come up with strong evidence that his peer group engaged in parties in which they would get a girl drunk and then serially rape her on several occasions, both in high school and in college.  Their notion of “consent” most likely extended to cover a female who was too drunk to resist, so there was nothing to feel guilty about.  Even if he has no memory of participating in such rape parties personally, he is fully aware that his friends were doing it on a regular basis, and the stench of that revelation would end his bid for the high court.