https://www.city-journal.org/due-process-for-brett-kavanaugh-16192.html
Nobody in the United States Senate knows whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers are telling the truth. And yet, quite a few of its members—all Democrats—have already decided that they are telling the truth. Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, for example, have declared that they believe the allegations of Professor Christine Blasey Ford, though she has yet to testify. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii insists that Ford “needs to be believed,” and that men need to “just shut up and step up.”
Oddly enough, the same Democratic politicians who seem to have made up their minds about the matter are the very ones calling for a “full investigation” into Ford’s accusations, as well as those of Kavanaugh’s former Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez. This should set off alarms for anyone concerned about the old-fashioned notion of due process—that is, the procedural fairness that Anglo-American law guarantees to those accused of crimes.
The hallmark of due process is the presumption of innocence. Imagine a judge who announces—before the trial even begins—that he thinks that the accused is lying. Defense counsel would rightly demand that the judge recuse himself. But no recusal has been offered by those senators who would sit in judgment on the Supreme Court nominee.
Because every defendant is presumed innocent, due process also requires that one’s accusers bear the burden of proof. Today, however, this tradition has been turned on its head, with politicians and commentators on the left asserting that the burden is on Kavanaugh—and any other man accused of sexual misconduct—to disprove the accusations against them. Blumenthal, for example, tweets that Kavanaugh has “a responsibility to come forward with evidence to rebut” Ramirez’s accusations of sexual assault. Anita Hill, the law school professor who accused Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings, has argued that Kavanaugh bears the burden of disproving Ford’s allegations.