Werent really going to have an instore event this week but then we heard ruths book was coming out so we decided we had to have it. [applause] so thank you very much for bearing with us. I am Bradley Graham the cone are of politics and prose along with my wife lissa muscatine. Thank you so much for coming. We were very excited when we learned after last years clematis hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court that ruth marcus was writing a book on the subject because we knew that if anyone could deliver an indepth behindthescenes account of what happened and also put the whole drama into a grand and political context it would be roof. She hasnt disappointed. Her new look supreme ambition is fastpaced and makes for a really compelling read. In the acknowledge mens rev calls this a book shes been preparing to ride for her entire career and indeed she brought to it a wealth of knowledge and experience, educated in history at yale and harvard ruth went right into journalism after study and is spent at a 35 year career at the Washington Post closely observing how washington works in developing a wide network of sources. Think nearly all of whom are here tonight. [laughter] as a reporter or editor ruth was involved in the coverage of key institutions such as the white house, congress, the Justice Department and the Supreme Court and in 2003 she joined the Editorial Board where she has risen to a position of deputy editor. In 2006 she began writing a regular column and already next year was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in commentary. At that time the pulitzer judges cited quote her intelligence and commentary on a range of subjects using a voice that can be serious or playful and all that remains true to this day. As for the kavanaugh story many of us followed it on tv in the media very loosely but ruth and researching her book but conducted nearly 300 interviews and reveals much we didnt know about how Brett Kavanaughs nomination came about and pushed through the senate. Beyond details about about kavanaughs ascension and ruth places it in the larger context of a calculated three decades long conservative effort with control over the high court. That campaign is ruth describes ended up merging last year with kavanaughs own secure spot on the court. It was a joining of two supreme ambitions and what turned into a very messy but flawed confirmation process is disturbing and lasting consequences for cat amount and our country. As with any good columnist ruth who has known kavanaugh for years offers own informed opinion in tells us very clearly in the final pages of her book what she thinks of the courts newest justice and his confirmation. Her own judgment and very typical of ruth is very tough but also exceedingly fair. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming ruth marcus. [applause] c oh god good i can see over this. I was a little worried. Hi everybody. Thank you all so much for coming and thank you so much brad. Half of what i wanted to say and one of the things that i wanted to say was the story of being able to be here tonight. The book was published today and every authors ambition is to be at politics and prose to talk about her book and as it happened i ran into brad and was at an event not that long ago, maybe six weeks ago when it was decided at the last minute by my publisher that we were going to speed up publication to today, december 3. An actual true story of what happened was i told list of the book is being published december 3 and less is said to brad, brad ruths book is coming out december 3 and brad said oh while we dont do events in december. Licit turns to brad and said well now we do. [laughter] is that okay to tell . If you know was a no is it true story. And im so thrilled to be here and so thrilled to see my friends and family and colleagues and also unfamiliar faces whom i hope to have been readers and i hope will enjoy reading this book. I want to give a shoutout before i talk about my book to another author whose book is being published today, my friend tom rosenstiel. Rosenstiel, are you here . Okay hi. And if you are someone or know someone which you might if you are here tonight who is interested in how washington works, toms books do precisely that which is to talk about d. C. Behind the scenes except he is a little more gunfire. I was thinking about saying a little more but we will think about that. Toms first novel shining city was about getting a Supreme Court nominee so i would say maybe the Trump Administration had brought on protagonist peter raine that they may have saved themselves some trouble but they didnt and vetting seems to be a particular nonstrength of this administration so here i am. Supreme ambition is my first book but as brad said in his introduction its really the book ive been preparing to ride my whole life. The idea of writing it came to me very late in the confirmation process after that astonishing day that we all remember when blasey ford and Brett Kavanaugh testified about her allegations and the fbi was doing i would say to quickly concluding its investigation and judge kavanaugh seemed to be hurdling and in fact was hurtling toward confirmation. Ive been looking for the right book to ride for a few years now writing a book was on my bucket list and the kavanaugh confirmation exploded tonight tonight. Two things. One was heres a great behindthescenes story for all the fantastic reporting that my colleagues have proposed around the cabin on nomination. Its a great worry about whats going on behind the scenes here and the second which i will talk about more is that this is a story that is bigger than Brett Kavanaugh. So story about the court and a three decade long conservative effort to find. Lisa control over the courts which is what was achieved with the kavanaugh confirmation. So i hope when you read the book that you will decide that ive achieved both of those goals that i have taken you behindthescenes and that i have told the larger story. There are couple of behindthescenes moments in so many delicious ones. There is the moment and im not digging this one up, senator Dianne Feinstein, senator Chuck Grassley the Ranking Member and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee and their two top aides are gathered in a bathroom of the Senate Judiciary committee answering. Senator feinstein and senator grassley asked the aide to go get the upgrades as she could tell them the first time about it before allegations. I have a picture in my iphone. I think i tweeted it the other day at the bathroom which looks like a faculty bathroom in a high school, maybe in a middle school and that is the place where history was made. The moment when one of my favorite moments not very long after that when White House Counsel Don Mcgahn is dealing with the aftermath of the Christine Blasey ford testimony net short time period between when she testified and the Brett Kavanaugh took the stand. Everybody thinks at that point that Brett Kavanaughs nomination is sunk to the president of the United States tried to call in mcgahn andy calls him and called cement don mcgahn as you can imagine is ignoring phonecalls from his lawsuit happens to be the most important person on the planet. Finally don mcgahns deputies reaches him and says the president is trying to get you. You need to talk to amend don mcgahn is not taking calls because hes convinced correctly or not that the president is prepared to pull the nomination he does want to hear it so he tells Andy Donaldson i dont talk to quitters. Im really looking forward to having President Trump read that one when he reads the book which i think he did because he tweeted the other day that was not only badly written but he typed this twice badly received. [laughter] which rhymes with something. And donald trump wasnt the only president who was having a hard time getting his phonecalls through in the midst of the kavanaugh craziness. Theres a magnificat scene the day after the hearing when senator jeff flake decides at the very last minute that hes going to want and need in order to secure his vote and fbi investigation and its like the scene in the Marx Brothers movie where everybody is crowded into the state room. Every senator and every staffer associate with the Judiciary Committee is crowded into this anteroom and flake and senator coons from delaware has been trying to get them to agree to the fbi as dictation are huddled together in a phonebooth trying to reach the fbi director and somebody comes through with the phone saying president bush is trying to reach senator flake. President bush is trying to reach senator flake. Brett kavanaugh was his biggest hurdle when he was trying to be chosen as a Supreme Court nominee buddy turned into the biggest advocate. Senator flake said he was too busy to talk to president bush but he didnt call him a quitter so thats a good thing. In that same scene we have senator ben says her sing into the anteroom angry at senator sheldon whitehouse, democrat from rhode island over some information at the thought senator whitehouse was peddling that he thought was at first to judge kavanaugh and he said where sheldon . I want to fight that guy. Its like a crowded Marx Brothers seen in a high school gymnasium. So we are here and i probably wouldnt have written this book had it not been for the uproar over the Christine Blasey ford nomination and except for those of you that are members of my immediate family or a book group that ive been part of for 30 years you wouldnt be here either if it wasnt for Christine Blasey ford but ive want to talk about in many ways theres a lot of people like me in this room who have lived this along with me. The story of the kavanaugh confirmation is digger and in many ways more important than the showdown that transfixed us all in the fall of 2018. I wanted to tell the story about what happened behind the scenes but i did want to spend some time in the book talking about the larger History History and the broader implications of the kavanaugh battle. If you would indulge me and go to talk about a few chapters of my life that intersect with that history and give you a sense of what led up to the kavanaugh confirmation. The first is sent by the way they were something i wanted to point out because i have one huge reporting failure in this book that i need to confess to. Like me Brett Kavanaugh was a history major at yale college and every history major at yale college has to ride a senior thesis. I could not for the life of me figure out even though i spent a lot of time trying to report on it with a thesis was about so if youre looking for criticism of the book he spent all that time and couldnt figure when he wrote his senior thesis on but turning the time i was in law school progressives really ruled the Legal Academy and in fact they still do. The notion of interpreting the constitution according to the original intent of the framers was this wacky outlier idea. Wasnt something that anyone took particularly seriously. It was sometime in my first or second year of law school that abandoned conservatives who were at this beleaguered minority on Law School Campuses got together at yale and they had a conference for something they call the Federalist Society which was obviously going nowhere and was never going to grow to be influential and was just a way to make themselves feel good because they had such a crazy notion on how to interpret the constitution. It didnt quite turn out that way. The Federalist Society grew from this band of as i say wonky and beleaguered conservatives to become a kind of Employment Agency for conservative lawyers especially when republican president s were in office and increasingly the vetting agency for getting these on the federal bench and it became helper for that helpful for one years later a gale Law School Student named Brett Kavanaugh and surely after he came to the post in 1987 was the First Episode but its still a very raw episode. I wrote about the excruciatingly the First Episode in the judicial nomination was Ronald Reagans nomination of robert ward where right cat, now serves. One of the main arguments about the debate was whether or not he could could take an nominees phraseology into account in deciding whether he or she and of or she end of course there was only when she on the court at the time should be confirmed but something that might sound quite it was viewed as a mark remarkable departure from the usual safe atmosphere the confirmation proceedings when an outside group called the peoples of the american way released an advertisement narrated by actor gregory peck that attacked work. Of course today multimillion dollar Advertising Campaigns have become the norm in judicial confirmations. Barr was defeated and this was the third about him six republicans voted against confirming him two democrats voted in favor and thats a defection from the party that are all unimaginable today. And the bork defeat in many ways led us directly to judge kavanaugh. After judge bork was defeated and some people in this room remember the next nominee was judge ginsburg who was defeated for the poignant idea that it was improper to smoke marijuana with your students when you are teacher at harvard law school. This was huge news because we remember it and the number three choice was a man who was a judge on the federal Appeals Court in california named Anthony Kennedy for whom of course Brett Kavanaugh later clerked and whose retirement paved the way for kavanaughs nomination. Had it not been judge borks defeat and candidate selection and with the possible we wouldnt have kavanaugh today. The bork defeat was and never get moment for the conservative movement to this was their chance to secure a solid conservative on the court so was a much less conservative court and the core we have today in the court that Justice Kennedy left in 2018. Conservatives vowed from that moment that was not going to happen again. The Federalist Society and its Vice President began to assemble the architecture, financial architecture to make certain that wasnt going to happen and the gregory peck adds for people and the american way were overtaken at this humongous and instant advertising campaign. Fastforward to the second precursor to the cat not hearings i live through. In fact full disclosure is how i met my husband. He was in a to a democratic senator on the Judiciary Committee and i was covering it for the Washington Post and no we didnt start dating until afterwards. But there was a lot of talk of sex in the interim. This was a different kind of confirmation battle, as i say not about ideology but about sex and the issue if theres anybody in the room who doesnt remember it or wasnt even born yet the issue was whether thomas when he was the head of the eeoc or earlier when he was in the visual and Education Department had made inappropriate sexual comments to anita hill who was a lawyer on the staff that this was the episode that was different from an eerie precursor to the Kavanaugh Hearing. It was different from them because the Judiciary Committee was then entirely male and as much as these male senators said they understood Sexual Harassment was a rob lion they really didnt. They just didnt get it. They couldnt fathom how anita hill was alleging what anita hill was alleging and if it was true and how she could not come forward with her allegations and they couldnt imagine how she would travel with him to a different position when he went to the eeoc. It was different a number of ways and one was the nature of allegations and another is the volcanic anger that we saw from Justice Thomas and then almost identically except with the element removed from Justice Kavanaugh. That leads us to the next chapter that rings as altogether which is impeachment. Not the dash impeachment but the clinton went wanted thats how i met kavanaugh. He was a smart young lawyer working for ken starr. I was less young writer whose legal analyses of the star report ends up in the impeachment proceedings and the star moment was another one of those real turning point for Brett Kavanaugh. Law school his friends had this understanding that he was a guy that was conservative and probably republican but he wasnt a standout conservative on the campus. In fact he was a first year law student that fall when the bork nomination was being debate debated and no one could remember him discussing a view on that. After