A campaign to impeach President Trump has gotten a big boost from the controversy surrounding new Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Need to Impeach, the campaign sponsored by billionaire Tom Steyer, got 10,882 signatures on its petition to remove Trump last Wednesday, just before it became clear that Kavanaugh had enough votes to be confirmed by the Senate.
More than 5.97 million people have signed the petition since it was started last year.
The petition was averaging 3,000 signatures a day, but saw a major upswing last week because of the campaign’s anti-Kavanaugh ads, said Kevin Mack, Need to Impeach’s lead strategist, in Newsweek.
The group put more than 200 anti-Kavanaugh ads on social media. Kavanaugh was accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford during a drunken party when they were high-school students. It led to an emotional day of Senate testimony from Ford and Kavanaugh, in which the prospective justice condemned “the left” and called the allegations revenge for Hillary Clinton’s presidential defeat, which had many questioning Kavanaugh’s temperamental suitability for the court.
Kavanaugh had previously run into controversy during his confirmation hearings for telling apparent untruths under oath about his drinking habits and whether he received material stolen from Democratic senators during his tenure as White House counsel. As a judge, Kavanaugh wrote that a president should be immune from investigation, leading some to suspect that Trump picked Kavanaugh to absolve himself from the expanding Russia inquiry.
“We saw him mislead the Committee multiple times during his testimony, and we know he’s committed to ruling that President Trump is above accountability. We cannot allow him to join … our nation’s highest court,” said one social-media ad by Steyer. The Democratic donor spent more than $210,000 on ads opposing Kavanaugh.
“Our basic message is that Kavanaugh perjured himself,” Mack said. “He misled senators about his background, and this is just an outgrowth of what we see in Donald Trump’s America: that people think it’s OK to lie to achieve whatever goals they want to achieve.”
Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate on Saturday, 50-48.
