Amy McGrath flip-flops on Kavanaugh vote — in 1 day – POLITICO

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Amy McGrath flip-flopped on supporting Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the span of several hours Wednesday.

McGrath, who announced a challenge to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week, tweeted that she would have opposed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination several hours after she told a local newspaper she probably would have supported him.

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“I was asked earlier today about Judge Brett Kavanaugh and I answered based upon his qualifications to be on the Supreme Court. But upon further reflection and further understanding of his record, I would have voted no,” McGrath tweeted Wednesday evening.

Later she added: “I know I disappointed many today with my initial answer on how I would have voted on Brett Kavanaugh. I will make mistakes and always own up to them. The priority is defeating Mitch McConnell.”

Those tweets came several hours after The Courier-Journal of Louisville published an interview with McGrath in which she said she had concerns about Kavanaugh but likely would have ultimately supported him.

She said in the interview she was “very concerned about Judge Kavanaugh, what I felt like were the far-right stances that he had” but that “there was nothing in his record that I think would disqualify him in any way.”

The newspaper asked McGrath about the allegation from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school. Ford aired the allegation in detail during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last year, and Kavanaugh vehemently denied it in front of the same Senate panel. McGrath said she found Ford’s testimony “credible” but that “given the amount of time that lapsed in between and from a judicial standpoint, I don’t think it would really disqualify him.”

“You know, I think that with Judge Kavanaugh, yeah, I probably would have voted for him,” she said.

McGrath’s initial support for Kavanaugh on Wednesday was at odds with some of her criticisms during her 2018 House campaign. Last July, prior to the allegations against him, she posted that she had concerns about Kavanaugh, and that while he was likely to be confirmed, “we are starkly reminded, again, that elections have consequences, and this consequence will be with us for an entire generation.” In October, she posted the day before the final Kavanaugh vote: “Elections matter.”

McConnell has previously called the Kavanaugh nomination the “single most important thing I’ve been involved in in my career” and the confirmation of the justice is likely to be central to McConnell’s reelection campaign next year.

McGrath’s reversal came just 36 hours into her nascent candidacy against McConnell. In her first 24 hours as a candidate, her campaign raised a whopping $2.5 million, it said earlier Wednesday — almost as much as the $3 million McConnell raised in the entire second quarter of this year.