When you’re the last in the lineup of many senators to speak in the nationally televised hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and you know many viewers will have turned off the proceedings when your turn arrives, you find a way to jump the line, especially if you are running for president. That’s what California’s junior senator Kamala Harris did at the Kavanaugh hearing, interrupting seconds into the opening remarks of the committee chairman, Charles Grassley.
Harris’s motion to delay the proceedings was not her idea alone. Many other senior Democratic senators would make the same request. But Harris did it first and early because if she waited her turn all those other senators would have spoken before her and the viewers wouldn’t have given much notice to the California presidential aspirant.
Harris’s move will serve her well with her base and certainly won’t hurt her with the majority of California voters. But how will such disruptive grandstanding play with those voters who are not so passionate anti-Trump?
Many in the country are tired of the lack of civility in the public debate that they witnessed at the hearings with protestors yelling from the gallery and being removed by capitol police. However, Harris’s move is unlikely to hurt her on that point since she is hoping to run against the boorish, Incivility-in-Chief, Donald Trump.
Which begs the question: will the 2020 presidential election offer a candidate who is not a disrupter or an interrupter? A third candidate—an independent, or a Republican challenger to the president—will have a pool of voters to draw from, although probably not enough to gain the White House on his or her own.
But that third candidate could certainly affect the outcome of the election much as a Ross Perot did in 1992 and Ralph Nader did in 2000.