Sunday School 9/30/18

Press Secretary Sarah Sanders stopped in to visit with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday; Lindsey Graham and Mazie Hirono checked in on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and John Dickerson had an interesting round table on CBS' Face the Nation. Let's start with Sanders.

After talking at length about the current state of the Kavanaugh nomination, where nothing new was disclosed and Sanders stuck with the Trump line, Wallace moved to a 'lightning round' of questions for her.

On the looming Trump/Rosenstein meeting, she's not sure when it will happen, nor that there's only the one issue on the table, that Rosenstein allegedly threatened to tape the president and to potentially invoke the 25th amendment. She "wouldn't be surprised" if other topics came up, she said, and couldn't speak to whether or not Rosenstein would keep his job.

The next question was about money, and the short-term spending bill the president signed on Friday; the bill funds Homeland Security until 12/7 without any new money for the border wall. If Congress doesn't pass additional funding, Wallace wondered if Trump would shut down the government.

We'll have to wait and see what happens. But the president is committed to making sure we build a wall and getting funding for it. And if I know anything about Donald Trump, he ultimately get what he's fighting for, and that will be the wall.

Finally, he asked about the three weeks it's been since Sanders last held a formal White House press room briefing. She didn't say they'd get rid of the briefings completely, but she pointed out that Trump does more Q&A than any other president did, and that

I always think that if you can hear directly from the president and the press has a chance to ask the president questions directly, that's infinitely better than talking to me. 

From Stephanopoulos's conversations, we didn't learn anything new from Hirono, but these comments from Graham seemed new.

So the FBI will do a supplemental investigation. Them I'm going to call for an investigation of what happened in this committee - who betrayed Dr. Ford's trust, who in Feinstein's office recommended Katz as a lawyer, why did Ms. Ford not know that the committee was willing to go to California, who released the anonymous letter given to the committee by Cory Gardner.  We're going to do a wholesale full-scale investigation of what I think was a despicable process to deter it from happening again.

From Dickerson's round table conversation, here's what Molly Ball offered:

And the emotional outpouring that you saw all across the country, people calling in to their -- their members of Congress, people watching transfixed on screens all across the country, this hearing, it was a really wrenching and emotional occasion for America. And I think it's one that we're going to look back on as a cultural touchstone for years to come. In political terms we are going into a midterm election where had this never occurred, it was already an election about women's anger and women's voices and a female-driven backlash to all of the cultural and political currents of the day...it's almost absurdly fitting that this should be the sort of final political controversy for this year's election.

I'll close with John Dickerson's comments on this mess.

The arena added to the anguish. The world's greatest deliberative body handled society's toughest questions with the nuance of a freight train. Partisanship shattered the dish that is supposed to cool the hot cup. At the end of this drama there will be no winners. And yet, calls to sexual assault hotlines have increased two hundred percent since Ford's testimony. Senators on both sides and even president Trump deemed (Ford) credible. It is now the default in America that accusers must be treated seriously and respectfully. Now, only the willfully ignorant don't know why women don't report abuse.

This means my daughter will live in a better world that her mother, who like thousands of others was inspired to explain why she didn't report last week, a collective act that transformed what had been a wound into a walking stick. There is more anguish to come from this drama, but the culture has changed. A week of public anguish will mean less private anguish in the future. 

For those of you who, like John Dickerson's wife, and me, and tens of thousands of other women, didn't report their abuse, I wish you strength, whether you keep or share your secret, and peace.

See you around campus.