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Listen, nearly everything you need to know about the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris can be summed up by 19 words she uttered at the 2018 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
“Can you think of any laws,” she asked the nominee, “that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”
“Um,” Kavanaugh replied, furrowing his brow. “I am happy to answer a more specific question, but — ”
“Male versus female,” Harris offered, smiling, and when Kavanaugh still expressed confusion, she repeated her 19-word question: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”
Kavanaugh responded, “I am not thinking of any right now.”
Shortly thereafter, Harris’s questioning moved on to other topics, but that moment is what the women in my life spent the rest of the day talking about. It was obvious that Kavanaugh was not planning to reveal his professional opinion on the legality of abortion, so Harris had instead gone straight to the heart of the matter.
Laws related to reproductive health care only impact female bodies. Overturning Roe v. Wade would primarily hurt women. The health and personal choices of women were monitored, restricted and regulated by the government in ways that men could not begin to imagine — in a way that Kavanaugh himself had clearly not begun to imagine, considering how long it took him to grasp Harris’s question. And if he would not articulate a position, then she would at least make him articulate the injustice.
Yeah, he would go on to secure the seat on the bench. And four years later he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But at least Kamala Harris made it clear that she was going into this goat rodeo with her eyes wide open.
In the early hours since President Biden announced on Sunday that he would be endorsing Harris as the Democratic nominee, everyone and their MSNBC-loving nana seems to have an opinion on how Harris should campaign. Should she remind the voting public that she was a former prosecutor who would know exactly what to do with a felon like Donald Trump? Should she go full coconuts and lean into the memes? Within hours of Biden’s announcement, the pop star Charli XCX posted on X that “Kamala is brat,” which refers to — you know what, just Google it, and trust that it’s the kind of approval seal that will turn out more 20-something votes than a whole army of endorsements from Nancy Pelosi.
The answer is, probably, all of the above. Harris is going to need a powerhouse coalition that includes church ladies and hard-working stepmoms as well as Fire Island gays. But the version of Harris that always struck me as the most authentic and the most reassuring was the one we were introduced to in 2018, when Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick turned up on Capitol Hill with the confidence of an altar boy who’d never before had to account for some missing Communion wine.
On the second day of his confirmation hearings, Kamala pressed Kavanaugh to share whether he thought that Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that essentially legalized same-sex marriage, had been “correctly decided.” When he would not answer, she reframed the question: “You have said that Brown v. Board of Education was one of the greatest moments in the court’s history,” she told Kavanaugh. “Do you believe that Obergefell was also one of those moments?”
Note how the second version of the question is slightly different than the first. She is no longer simply asking for the opinion of a legal scholar. She is also asking for the opinion of a human. Civil rights protection had been expanded to gay couples — and how did that make him feel? If he’d been willing to share vocal support for one kind of equality, why not the other? What were his values, and how were they going to inform his work on the court? (Kavanaugh responded to her question not by sharing his own opinion but by quoting someone else, which Harris noted.)
Later, the confirmation process took an unexpected turn, following Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh had attempted to assault her when they both were teens. The truth of those allegations proved impossible to litigate in the context of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The alleged events were decades old. But in the middle of that hearing, Harris asked Kavanaugh — whose defense somehow involved a global conspiracy and “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” — what outwardly appeared to be a softball: “Do you agree that it is possible for men to both be friends with some women and treat other women badly?”
It was a philosophical question more than a legal one, but man if it didn’t encapsulate everything that feminists had been trying to point out: that people were complicated. That powerful men might have hired female law clerks and coached girls basketball, as Kavanaugh did, but that didn’t mean we should assume they couldn’t have also abused women. That it was possible for good men to do bad things, and until we understood that, we weren’t going to get anywhere as a country.
I was riveted by those hearings at the time, and the fact that they happened six long years ago is why I’m refreshing your memory now. It’s worth going back to watch them. Kamala the prosecutor is present there, and, to a lesser extent, so is Kamala the meme.
But the most compelling version of Kamala is that of a savvy practitioner at the top of her game, asking the right questions even when the answers never arrived. Clear-eyed. Laser-focused. Take no prisoners. Accept no B.S.
