I missed the original headline—Vermont’s Only Black Female Lawmaker Withdraws Re-Election Bid After Racist Attacks— in August, but the other shoe has dropped. Angela Helm, reporting in It Ain’t Worth It: Only Black Woman in Vermont Statehouse Resigns After Sustained Racial Harassment for The Root, writes:

Only a month after announcing she would not be running for re-election due to ongoing racial intimidation, Ruqaiyah “Kiah” Morris, the only black woman in the Vermont House of Representatives, announced her immediate resignation on Tuesday.

In the short but sweet Facebook post, Morris explained that she originally planned to complete her term, which ran through 2019, but deferred to family matters, in addition to citing “continued harassment,” which she charges local police have not been responsive to.

“My husband is beginning the long physical journey of recovery following extensive open-heart surgery. We face continued harassment and seek legal remedies to the harm endured,” she wrote. “I step away now to focus on caring for and supporting my family during this time of transition and ensure our health, safety and well-being are prioritized.”

Yes, she’s dealing with serious family matters, but no one should ever be forced to resign a position because

Liam Stack, reporting in Black Female Lawmaker in Vermont Resigns After Racial Harassment for The New York Times, writes:

“There was vandalism within our home,” she said. “We found there were swastikas painted on the trees in the woods near where we live. We had home invasions.”

“It has come and gone and in different waves, but then it picked back up again and of course we are back in an election season so there’s always more,” she said.

But she declined to provide a timeline or detailed information about the events that led her to end her campaign and resign from office, saying she did not want “the glossy minutiae” of her case to distract from larger issues of systemic racism.

“I am having a really hard time with this line of questioning, and I apologize,” she said. “I feel very resistant to get into the details of what we are talking about.”

I did a quick search to see if either of Vermont’s senators—Bernie Sanders or Patrick Leahy—had stepped in on Morris’ behalf. Sanders issued this statement at the end of August:

“I was shocked and saddened to learn that Bennington Rep. Kiah Morris withdrew her candidacy for re-election after receiving racially charged threats. This is outrageous, not what Vermont is about, and must be thoroughly investigated. Kiah has been an excellent representative for the people of Bennington on so many issues, and has been a strong voice for equity and social justice in the Statehouse.

“In the state of Vermont, no elected official, candidate or person should be fearful of their safety because of the color of their skin or their point of view. This corrosion of political discourse is destructive to our democracy, and we cannot let it take hold.”

I found nothing from Leahy.

Surprise, even shock, ought to be the proper reaction here, and it might have been so two years ago, but we live in a different time engineered by people who are unhappy with the progress of our nation.

This is not just a Vermont story. I thought that I had blogged about the story of Ohio State Rep. Emilia Sykes at the beginning of the summer, but I must have lost post in the news cycle. National news is so bad that we miss the stories happening in our own states and communities.

From American Dissident: Noam Chomsky on the State of the Empire:

The world laughed at U.S. President Donald Trump at the United Nations, but the imperial declarations he issued are no laughing matter. Trump may come off as a buffoon, but his global agenda is consistent with the bipartisan empire machine that runs the United States. This week on Intercepted: Famed dissident Noam Chomsky breaks down the Trump presidency; the defeat of the U.S. in Afghanistan; what he believes is a just position on Syria’s civil war; and the agenda of Vladimir Putin and Russia. He also discusses the impact of big social media companies and explains why a life of resisting and fighting is worth it. Jeremy Scahill analyzes Trump’s U.N. speech and gives context to the seldom-discussed bipartisan support for much of Trump’s global agenda. Dallas hip-hop artist Bobby Sessions talks about police killings and this political moment. We also hear music from his new EP, “RVLTN (Chapter 1): The Divided States of AmeriKKKa.”

From Pod Save America:

Republicans respond to a second credible allegation of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh by accusing Democrats of a smear campaign, and The New York Times may have given Trump the excuse he’s been looking for to fire Rod Rosenstein. Then Lovett and Dan talk to The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich about politics, Paul Ryan, and his new book “Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times.”

Aziz Hamad suggested Pod Save America to me. Thanks Aziz.

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing…

Racist Charged With Stabbing Black Man in Times Square Says It Was ‘Practice’ for Killing Interracial Couples

But First, Let Me Take a Racist Selfie: Detroit Police Officer Out of a Job After Snapchat Goes Viral

Don’t Let Hurricane Florence’s Aftermath Make Us Forget That Two Women Died Unnecessarily in Police Custody

A Man Called Police on a Black Candidate and her Family Campaigning in a White Neighborhood, Suspected Them of Buying Drugs

‘Shoot Them on Sight’: Stacey Abrams’ Campaign Harassed by White Nationalists; Republican Brian Kemp and Georgia Media Say Nothing

White College Admissions Counselors Don’t Want ‘Woke’ Black Students

Video: #BaggageClaimBecky Calls Police on Black Woman For Asking to Speak To a Manager

Police Issue Arrest Warrant for White Man Who Brandished Gun at 4 FAMU Students Attempting to Get on Elevator

Finally, here’s a Dulcé Sloan classic from last April…

Previously…

Don Black should never allowed his son Derek to go to college. Before today, the Blacks simply weren’t on my radar. I was ignorant of both father and son. Oh, I knew about Stromfront. I knew about David Duke. I knew about the Ku Klux Klan. But the specifics of this one family had simply never crossed my desk.

Black and Eli Saslow were on The Daily Show to promote their book: Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist.. I probably won’t read the book because I doubt I’ll find any enlightenment there, but I did want to go back and fill in the gaps in my education.

The first thing I did after watching Trevor Noah’s interview with Black and Saslow was to go back to 2016 and read Saslow’s preëlection Washington Post profile of Derek—The white flight of Derek Black—and Derek’s post-election New York Times op-ed: Why I Left White Nationalism.

Saslow’s piece begins with a secret meeting of held in Memphis in November,2008 where dozens of the world’s most prominent racists wanted to strategize for the years ahead. The 19-year-old Derek Black was a key speaker. Saslow continues:

[Black] was not only a leader of racial politics but also a product of them. His father, Don Black, had created Stormfront, the Internet’s first and largest white nationalist site, with 300,000 users and counting. His mother, Chloe, had once been married to David Duke, one of the country’s most infamous racial zealots, and Duke had become Derek’s godfather. They had raised Derek at the forefront of the movement, and some white nationalists had begun calling him “the heir.”

Now Derek spoke in Memphis about the future of their ideology. “The Republican Party has to be either demolished or taken over,” he said. “I’m kind of banking on the Republicans staking their claim as the white party.”

George Walker Bush was still president and President-elect Barack Hussein Obama was still flush from his victory, but the heir set the agenda that would bring us to 2016 and the election of Donald John Trump eight years later.

A few people in the audience started to clap, and then a few more began to whistle, and before long the whole group was applauding. “Our moment,” Derek said, because at least in this room there was consensus. They believed white nationalism was about to drive a political revolution. They believed, at least for the moment, that Derek would help lead it.

“Years from now, we will look back on this,” he said. “The great intellectual move to save white people started today.”

That alone is worth the forty-or-so minutes needed to read the profile, but there is much more there as well.

I next jumped to Derek’s piece which ledes:

I could easily have spent the night of Nov. 8 elated, surrounded by friends and family, thinking: “We did it. We rejected a multicultural and globalist society. We defied the elites, rejected political correctness, and made a statement millions of Americans have wanted to shout for decades.”

I’d be planning with other white nationalists what comes next, and assessing just how much influence our ideology would have on this administration. That’s who I was a few years ago.

Things look very different for me now. I am far away from the community that I grew up in, and that I once hoped could lead our country to a moment like this.

What happened over those eight years between the election of Obama and Trump?

Education outside the echo chamber happened. Derek lays out he got from 2008 to 2016 and describes how—depending upon whether you accept the view of his father or Derek’s own—attending a liberal college wrecked his life or opened his eyes. He writes:

Several years ago, I began attending a liberal college where my presence prompted huge controversy. Through many talks with devoted and diverse people there—people who chose to invite me into their dorms and conversations rather than ostracize me—I began to realize the damage I had done. Ever since, I have been trying to make up for it.

For a while after I left the white nationalist movement, I thought my upbringing made me exaggerate the likelihood of a larger political reaction to demographic change. Then Mr. Trump gave his Mexican “rapists” speech and I spent the rest of the election wondering how much my movement had set the stage for his. Now I see the anger I was raised with rocking the nation.

People have approached me looking for a way to change the minds of Trump voters, but I can’t offer any magic technique. That kind of persuasion happens in person-to-person interactions and it requires a lot of honest listening on both sides. For me, the conversations that led me to change my views started because I couldn’t understand why anyone would fear me. I thought I was only doing what was right and defending those I loved.

I think the “Hamilton” cast modeled well one way to make that same connection when they appealed to Vice President-elect Mike Pence from the stage: “We, sir—we—are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us.” Afterward, the actor Brandon Victor Dixon explained, “I hope he thinks of us every time he has to deal with an issue or talk about a bill or present anything.” I’m sure Mr. Pence believes his policies are just. But now he has heard from individuals who are worried about those policies. That might open him to new conversations.

Yes, they might. But not with Vice President Pence (the No. 1 impediment to any serious discussion—via impeachment or the 25th Amendment—of President Trump). Dreck offered a description of his own path forward, one I’m sure is front-and-center in the book. He wrote:

I never would have begun my own conversations without first experiencing clear and passionate outrage to what I believed from those I interacted with. Now is the time for me to pass on that outrage by clearly and unremittingly denouncing the people who used a wave of white anger to take the White House.

[C]learly and unremittingly denouncing the people who used a wave of white anger to take the White House begins for all of us when we enter the voting booth on 6 November.

I wondered in a religious/philosophical wilderness from nearly 30 years before I became an atheist. The more I read and studied—across many traditions—the more I surmised that any calls to higher powers were just the work of bullshit artists seeking a leg up. Calls to ourselves, that broad umbrella we call Philosophy, however, rang true for me.

The moment when the light first flickered on for me was 1971 when, as a high school sophomore I first read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (I still have my Bantam Books paperback edition.

I’ve since learned that other writers—like Charles Johnson, a writer I have only lately discovered and come to admire—were touched by Hesse’s works. At 15 the book pulled back the curtain on a vista that I had no knowledge or even conception of. I never looked back.

That is why I am surprised by Julian Baggini’s long-read in The Guardian. I would have thought that a professional philosopher would have long ago experienced my teenage revelation, but, better late than never.

Baggini, in About time: why western philosophy can only teach us so much, writes:

Yet, for all the varied and rich philosophical traditions across the world, the western philosophy I have studied for more than 30 years – based entirely on canonical western texts – is presented as the universal philosophy, the ultimate inquiry into human understanding. Comparative philosophy – study in two or more philosophical traditions – is left almost entirely to people working in anthropology or cultural studies. This abdication of interest assumes that comparative philosophy might help us to understand the intellectual cultures of India, China or the Muslim world, but not the human condition.

This has become something of an embarrassment for me. Until a few years ago, I knew virtually nothing about anything other than western philosophy, a tradition that stretches from the ancient Greeks to the great universities of Europe and the US. Yet, if you look at my PhD certificate or the names of the university departments where I studied, there is only one, unqualified, word: philosophy. Recently and belatedly, I have been exploring the great classical philosophies of the rest of the world, travelling across continents to encounter them first-hand. It has been the most rewarding intellectual journey of my life.

My philosophical journey has convinced me that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand others. Getting to know others requires avoiding the twin dangers of overestimating either how much we have in common or how much divides us. Our shared humanity and the perennial problems of life mean that we can always learn from and identify with the thoughts and practices of others, no matter how alien they might at first appear. At the same time, differences in ways of thinking can be both deep and subtle. If we assume too readily that we can see things from others’ points of view, we end up seeing them from merely a variation of our own.

That last bit, learning to see others’ points of view as merely variations of our own is the most vital human learning experience.

Go read the rest of Baggini’s piece and learn.

Clearing my email inbox this morning I realized that I had passed over quite a few of Andrew Marlton’s First Dog On The Moon cartoons from Down Under. I regret the omission and present the most recent (above) with links (oldest to newest) to those I missed.

Resignation syndrome: a true story
Senator Ian the Climate Denialist Potato draws a line in the sand
Peter Dutton almost became prime minister. But wait! It could still happen!
Destroying democracy is a doddle compared to Book Week
It’s time to name the PM with sobriquologist First Dog on the Moon
The aurora alarms went off! We piled in the ute with Roy and Beyonce!
How can we solve Australia’s threatened species crisis? With baking!
What’s the go with the au pairs? You can’t handle the truth!Down at the Bureau of Social Mediarology it is the morning after a week of storms
Furious rantings of a disenfranchised seabird. This week: lobbyists and finally
The Foreclaws children get a tour of the St Hubris School for Precocious Youngsters

*And a multi-billion dollar timesuck…

As Kristoffer Kristofferson famously wrote—and Janis Joplin even more famously (and beautifully) sang—Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.* I am fond of telling people who whine about their bosses or their jobs that no one should ever take a job they can’t afford to walk away from.

There is, of course, more than a little hubris in that maxim because people often find themselves in places where they must endure suffering to survive or ensure the survival of those they love, but, for myself, I have done my best to structure my needs so that I maintain my freedom in the best way I am able.

One of the credos in My Quotes To Live By comes from one of my personal heroes, Clarence Darrow:

“I can say with perfect honesty that I have never knowingly catered to anyone’s ideas, and I have expressed what was within me, regardless of consequences.” Clarence Darrow’s credo as expressed to Abram Adelman. Clarence Darrow for the Defense, p. 171.

That was where my mind went when reading of Spinoza’s reflection on fame.

Meanwhile, the happiness of [men who sought pleasure, riches or fame] was at the whims of others anyway—it compels its votaries, [Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza] said of his successful peers, to order their lives according to the opinions of their fellow men, shunning what they usually shun and seeking what they usually seek. p. 59

From Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide To Being Free by Damon Young

This is why I am so troubled about polls reporting that what teenagers most want to be when they grow up is to be famous. There is nothing wrong with being rich or famous (or both), but when seeking riches and fame becomes a purpose in and of itself, we suffer.

*Bobby McGee is preceded by an a Hasidic tale—I can’t immediately find the source, but I may have read it in Elie Wiesel’s Souls On Fire—of a down-on-his-luck rabbi who is found dancing naked in the rain after his clothes are stolen in the mikveh. When asked why he is dancing, the rabbi replies that he is happy because he has nothing left to lose.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.Damon Young,Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide To Being Free

Yesterday, I wrote…

President Donald John Trump is his own worst enemy and has thrown gasoline on his dumpster-fire of an administration by turning what ought to have been a political walk in the park into a raging inferno by allowing his advisors and the right-wing judicial machine to put Brett Michael Kavanaugh in the national spotlight as his replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy.

Next week will either be a political disaster for President Trump or 10 white men who sit on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.

The story of Mark Gauvreau Judge threatens to eclipse that of Dr. Susan Christine Blasey Ford. I know that the White House doesn’t give a shit, but how the fuck did White House counsel Don McGahn, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, miss the Kavanaugh bud who wrote: Wasted: Tales of a Genx Drunk?

Peter Maas, writing in Mark Judge’s Memoir About Brett Kavanaugh’s High School Portrays a Culture of Aggression and Excessive Drinking for The Intercept, drills down on the life of the Georgetown Prep student.

Not long after Mark Judge graduated from Catholic University, he attended the rehearsal dinner for a close friend’s wedding in Washington, D.C. The dinner was in a private room above an Irish bar, and as soon as Judge arrived, he downed a shot of bourbon — and another and another.

The next thing he knew, it was the morning and he was in a friend’s house. He woke up in his disheveled suit from the night before. His head ached, and he could barely open his eyes.

“I had blacked out again,” Judge recalled in a memoir about his troubled youth. “I didn’t remember anything after doing the shots.”

He asked his friend, Denny, what had happened.

“You put on quite a show,” Denny said. “After doing all those shots, you tried to get up on the table and started taking your clothes off, but Shane and I pulled you down. You also tried to make it with one of the bridesmaids.”

Judge was surprised.

“I tried to make it with a bridesmaid?” he said. “Please tell me I didn’t hurt her.”

Denny reassured Judge that he hadn’t harmed the bridesmaid, though he had made a “serious lunge” at her and started kissing her toes. His friends had pulled him off and got him out of the bar and took him to Denny’s home a few blocks away.

This passage from Judge’s long-forgotten memoir is newly relevant in light of the accusation that Judge was in the room when Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh assaulted Christine Blasey Ford in 1982, when she was 15 years old. Kavanaugh and Judge were about 17 years old at the time, classmates at the all-boys Georgetown Preparatory School. Ford, now a professor in clinical psychology in California, has accused Kavanaugh of drunkenly locking her in a room at a house party and trying to tear off her clothes while holding his hand over her mouth as she screamed in protest. According to Ford, a drunken Judge was also in the room, watching and laughing. Kavanaugh has denied the accusation, and so has Judge, who stated in a letter that “I have no memory of the alleged incident. … I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”

When the witnesses are claiming that they don’t recall the party or Dr. Ford or Kavanaugh or Judge, they may be truthful, but all the denials and losses of memory are sounding more and more like they’re taking a page from the United States Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III playbook.

As a writer I am always fascinated with the primary instruments in my toolbox: words. I love how they look, how they sound, even how they feel, but most of all I love discovering where they come from and where they have taken us. This morning, Michael Harriot, writing in The Root’s Clapback Mailbag: Wypipology 101 for The Root, schooled me on Cracker.

I’m not sure how often you read the Clapback Mailbag, but I can assure you that Anne is not a racist. In fact, she is so not racist that she uses the term “Saltine Americans” as a term of endearment. She had no idea it was originally used to describe white people who beat slaves as “whip crackers.”

Harriot’s understanding is correct, but the etymology goes even further back, the 1590s. NPR’s Gene Demby, in The Secret History Of The Word ‘Cracker’, reports:

[I]t turns out cracker’s roots go back even further than the 17th century. All the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least.

“The meaning of the word has changed a lot over the last four centuries,” said Dana Ste. Claire, a Florida historian and anthropologist who studies, er, crackers. (He literally wrote the book on them.)

Ste. Claire pointed me to King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker—a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator.

What craker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?

“It’s a beautiful quote, but it was a character trait that was used to describe a group of Celtic immigrants—Scots-Irish people who came to the Americas who were running from political circumstances in the old world,” Ste. Claire said. Those Scots-Irish folks started settling the Carolinas, and later moved deeper South and into Florida and Georgia.

Every word has a story and my awe of the English American language knows no bounds.

Then there’s this exchange between Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase…

President Donald John Trump is his own worst enemy and has thrown gasoline on his dumpster-fire of an administration by turning what ought to have been a political walk in the park into a raging inferno by allowing his advisors and the right-wing judicial machine to put Brett Michael Kavanaugh in the national spotlight as his replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy.

Next week will either be a political disaster for President Trump or 10 white men who sit on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. We will hear from Dr. Susan Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh; but not, so far, from the single witness to Ford’s allegations: Mark Judge.

Michael Stern, writing in Why isn’t Mark Judge testifying about Kavanaugh? He is an alleged witness for The Guardian, asks the question the country wants answered:

In my early career, as a state prosecutor outside of Detroit, I dreaded handling sexual assault cases. After my first 10 cases, the ache in my stomach would come like clockwork as I sat down to open a sexual assault file for the first time. Evidence in sexual assault cases is often thin and trying to bring justice to a victim in a case with thin evidence is a prosecutor’s worst nightmare.

“He said/she said” has become part of the lexicon of language used to discuss sexual assault cases for a reason. A significant number of sexual assaults occur with just two people in the room, the perpetrator and the victim. But, that’s not what occurred in the allegation of sexual assault made by Christine Blasey Ford against supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In a recent interview, Ford claimed that Mark Judge, a close friend of Kavanaugh’s, was an eyewitness to the sexual assault. According to Dr Ford, Mark Judge observed the assault and drunkenly jumped on top of Kavanaugh while he was assaulting her, giving Ford the opportunity to escape.

To a prosecutor, learning of a third-party eyewitness to an alleged sexual assault is a boon. Apparently, this additional evidence has had the opposite effect on the Senate judiciary committee.

Why is Judge’s testimony so dangerous? Doesn’t Judge understand that what happens at Georgetown Prep stay’s at Georgetown Prep? Uh, no.

There is a sleight of hand that has allowed Grassley to turn a blind eye to this pivotal piece of evidence. Mark Judge sent a letter to Grassley’s committee saying he had “no memory” of the incident Ford disclosed. Judge also said he never saw Kavanaugh “act in the manner Dr Ford describes”. Other Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham, have fallen in line behind Grassley, saying that there is “no reason” to call Ford to testify because they already know what he will say–exactly what he said in his letter.

But wait. If Mark Judge’s letter to the judiciary committee is sufficient to make its Republican members accept the contents of the letter at face value, why don’t they do the same for the letter Ford sent to ranking committee member Diane Feinstein? The answer simple: Republican members of the judiciary committee want to believe Judge, not Ford.

This is not 1991, gentlemen.

Mike McIntyre interviewed Sarah Koenig yesterday on The Sound Of Ideas (start at timemark 19:08). Sam Allard at Scene has his own take on episodes One and Two.

The assertion by Albert Camus below gave me pause when I first read it. The idea of ending my own life has never entered my mind except as an intellectual exercise considering an act I could not fathom. Why that is true I do not know. I can only point to my core understanding that my reality, my understanding of the world, is unique and that what Camus thinks of as a universal is only a conditional for me. He wrote.

…[I]n a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death. p. 6

From The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

I can only think that Camus’ life was joyless and one of intermittent, if not constant. misery. I do not mean to discount his reality in any way. His reality is his reality. I can only lament that this was so and rejoice in my own.

As a writer, however, I have to wonder to what extent his reality informed and allowed his ability to write what he did. There is an old saw that artists have to suffer for their art. Perhaps that is true and I have known writers who did suffer. I have even known writers who lamented their general lack of suffering and who went so far as to seek suffering to better fuel their writing.

Maybe the world as seen from the bottom of despair does better inform art.

Or maybe we like those artists who suffer because we can secretly think to ourselves: at least I didn’t have to go through that.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

This is the kind of Heartland Democrat I grew up with.

I remember the shameful performance of the Senate Judiciary Committee—especially that of the committee’s chairman Senator Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (D-Md.)—in 1991 during the confirmation hearings for now most-senior justice and Supreme Court Justice-For-Life Clarence Thomas when they addressed the accusations of Anita Hill.

Twenty-seven years later we might hope the sitting committee would have changed. In one way it has. In 1991 there were no women on the committee. Today, there are four women: Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein (D-Calif.), Amy Jean Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Mazie Keiko Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Kamala Devi Harris (D-Calif.). In another, it hasn’t. Three senators, two Republicans and one Democrat—Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy, (D-Vt.)—served on both committees.

The primary focus of the 1991 hearings was Anita Faye Hill, university professor of social policy, law, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. She had worked for Clarence Thomas while he was at the Department of Education and the EEOC. Now, in 2018, no one is better qualified to speak on the confirmation hearings of Brett Michael Kavanaugh. In her opinion piece in the New York Times—How to Get the Kavanaugh Hearings Right—Hill begins:

There is no way to redo 1991, but there are ways to do better.

The facts underlying Christine Blasey Ford’s claim of being sexually assaulted by a young Brett Kavanaugh will continue to be revealed as confirmation proceedings unfold. Yet it’s impossible to miss the parallels between the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing of 2018 and the 1991 confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1991, the Senate Judiciary Committee had an opportunity to demonstrate its appreciation for both the seriousness of sexual harassment claims and the need for public confidence in the character of a nominee to the Supreme Court. It failed on both counts.

As that same committee, on which sit some of the same members as nearly three decades ago, now moves forward with the Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings, the integrity of the court, the country’s commitment to addressing sexual violence as a matter of public interest, and the lives of the two principal witnesses who will be testifying hang in the balance.

Hill, and the three still-sitting senators, well remember what happened in 1991 and ought to be the people to school the committee in 2018. Hill, at least has some constructive suggestions.

Here are some basic ground rules the committee should follow:

Refrain from pitting the public interest in confronting sexual harassment against the need for a fair confirmation hearing. Our interest in the integrity of the Supreme Court and in eliminating sexual misconduct, especially in our public institutions, are entirely compatible. Both are aimed at making sure that our judicial system operates with legitimacy.

Select a neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct cases that will investigate the incident in question and present its findings to the committee. Outcomes in such investigations are more reliable and less likely to be perceived as tainted by partisanship. Senators must then rely on the investigators’ conclusions, along with advice from experts, to frame the questions they ask Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Again, the senators’ fact-finding roles must guide their behavior. The investigators’ report should frame the hearing, not politics or myths about sexual assault.

Do not rush these hearings. Doing so would not only signal that sexual assault accusations are not important — hastily appraising this situation would very likely lead to facts being overlooked that are necessary for the Senate and the public to evaluate. That the committee plans to hold a hearing this coming Monday is discouraging. Simply put, a week’s preparation is not enough time for meaningful inquiry into very serious charges.

Finally, refer to Christine Blasey Ford by her name. She was once anonymous, but no longer is. Dr. Blasey is not simply “Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser.” Dr. Blasey is a human being with a life of her own. She deserves the respect of being addressed and treated as a whole person.

This is not a do-over moment, this is a do-right moment.