ways a self-healing organism and it has a way of shaping the people who sit on it, even if they have that long federalist background or whatever it is. i think the man to watch is john roberts. he cares deeply about the supreme court as an institution, and i think we should watch very closely the moves that he makes as this new court takes shape. >> tries to heal it. >> and i think some of us might be surprised. he could end up actually becoming the anthony kennedy of his own court. >> i like that optimism. my thanks to maura gay, the reverend al sharpton. "mtp daily" starts right now. hello, chuck. >> hello, nicolle. if it's friday, judge kavanaugh is set to become justice kavanaugh. good evening. i am chuck todd here in washington. welcome to "mtp daily."

it's been a day of breaking news and broken politics. at this hour, judge kavanaugh has the votes to win confirmation to the supreme court, 51-49 by our counting. you are looking live at the senate which is now running out the clock on debate ahead of tomorrow's confirmation vote sometime saturday afternoon. it was on that floor just a short time ago that republican senator susan collins of maine with kavanaugh's nomination hanging in the balance delivered a lengthy speech, ultimately concluding that she would support his nomination despite the allegations against him. >> in evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. when passions are most inflamed, that fairness is most in jeopardy.

i do not believe that these charges can fairly prevent judge kavanaugh from serving on the court. i will vote to confirm judge kavanaugh. thank you, mr. president. >> moments later, the final undecided vote, democratic senator joe manchin, announced his support for kavanaugh. protesters shame and shame on you as he spoke to reporters. >> i'm very much concerned basically with the sexual abuse that people have had to endure and very much concerned that we have to do something as a country. i had to deal with the facts i had in front of me. >> senator, do you think there is still a place in the democratic party for you after this? >> i'm just a west virginian. >> shame on you! shame on you! shame on you! >> of course the drama did not stop there on capitol hill.

kavanaugh's confirmation was anything but a sure thing earlier today. a key republican swing vote, lisa murkowski, declared her opposition to kavanaugh's nomination. she described it as a dramatic and torturous spur of the decision which she said is much bigger than kavanaugh, the individual. so what happens now? we've heard from a few senators expressing hope that tomorrow's vote will break the partisan fever in washington but there are signs things could get a whole lot worse before they get better. in the daily 202 news letter, this foreshadows a wild lame duck session and crazy series of government fights. we could see civil wars in both parties and bombshells in the russia investigation. so folks in this bare knuckles partisan environment, what an mates both parties is a sentiment that kavanaugh expressed last week. what goes around comes around. i'm joined by tonight's panel.

steve kornacki, author of "the red and the blue, the 1990s and the birth of political tribalism." i would say that's timely. also with me is sara fagan, and howard fineman is also an nbc news analyst. howard, i'm going to let you -- you've done -- you've covered this town longer than me, and i'm not just -- i'm not doing that -- >> that's okay. >> just one or two more gray hairs than i do. trust me, mine are coming. what do you make of today? >> i think it's historihistoric. i think it cements a true conservative majority on the supreme court which has been a project of republicans and conservatives for 30 or more years. i covered with my then not gray hair the beginning of it. i'm seeing that long process come to fruition here with the close contentious but very significant confirmation of judge kavanaugh. this has been an animating force in the republican party, and it turns out with donald trump.

and i think one reason that brett kavanaugh won this is that he became one politically with donald trump. he was the aggrieved party last thursday. he sounded like donald trump in robes. and i think that helped him. it also helped create something of a backlash that i don't think democrats were expecting. and donald trump has basically said on behalf of kavanaugh and rest, you want to fight this cultural war this way, we're going to take it to you and we're going to put our own political future on the line doing so. and that helped brett kavanaugh get through. >> i want to bring up another part of senator collins' speech where she talked about the gutter politics of it all. let me play that clip. >> we have come to the conclusion of a confirmation process that has become so dysfunctional it looks more like a caricature of a gutter level

political campaign than a solemn occasion. our supreme court confirmation process has been in steady decline for more than 30 years. one can only hope that the kavanaugh nomination is where the process has finally hit rock bottom. >> i'm going to take issue with on that last point. i remember president obama who thought his 2012 re-election was going to break the fever. whenever we think we've hit bottom, we always dig the hole deeper. >> well, i don't think we've hit bottom and i think that has a lot more to do with big global trends about demography and the economy, and so this is part of that, of course, sort of how we arrived at the place we are today where the country is -- half the country is thrilled and celebrating and half the country thinks the world is coming to an

end. but that's going to go on unfortunately for many more decades. >> it's funny, the way you brought it up. this had that same -- you could see the way the partisans are reacting, the way when obamacare passed. that same feeling where there was this euphoria on one side and absolute, oh, my god, the world is going to end on the other side. >> i can also think back and i'm looking at susan collins in particular now. what are the political ramifications for her going forward. she's up for re-election in 2020. the whole question here was if she went against that nomination was that going to be it for her in a republican primary. now she's for the domination. what democratic candidate is going to emerge. i think back to 1991 when clarence thomas got confirmed to the supreme court, the question shifted to implications in '92. remember arlen specter who prosecuted anita hill, record money raised in that race, a number of women emerged that year. they called '92 the year of the

woman. i think this is one, you look at collins. i wonder in the democratic party, if they get the house, if they get the senate, are they going to convene investigations into kavanaugh? >> one of my favorite reminders about the '92 election, the so-called year of the woman, republicans picked up seats in the senate and the house that ye year, even though they got the presidency. >> this being historic and the process by conservatives to get this done in the supreme court, which will have an effect for decades, this season has also been a glorification of ruthlessness, everywhere. don't forget that mitch mcconnell, who handled this, i think, by his lights quite well. >> a rewarding of ruthlessness. >> exactly. >> you can make an argument on either side. >> mitch mcconnell absolutely was unmovable about the idea of giving merrick garland, the obama nominee, a hearing. no hearing whatsoever on flimsy historical standards and yet he was praised and pushed by this movement to be even tougher, be

even harder and that's what he did. they're putting on the court a very politically adept guy, which is what the federalist society wanted. >> i'm going to play -- i think lisa murkowski is clearly tortured by all this. i've got to play some audio here, because just -- just haea it and listen to how she talked about she kept dealing with this decision. >> i did not come to a decision on this until walking into the floor this morning. i believe we are dealing with issues right now that are bigger than a nominee. i believe that brett kavanaugh is a good man. i believe he is a good man, it just may be that in my view he's not the right man for the court at this time. i also think that we're at a place where we need to be thinking again about the

credibility and the integrity of our institutions. >> i think, sara, this was the conundrum that there were some -- she wasn't alone in this. there were some yes voters that felt this way and didn't express it because politically it's hard to express that politically. >> i appreciate where she's coming from, but i don't agree with it because you have a good man who she by her own words says is a good man, but because some in the democratic party chose to go out and some in the media chose to go out and talk about julie swetnick and gang rapes and any tactic necessary to bring down a very good man and she voted against him. so what she did is say, okay, the other side can use any tactic regardless of truth and then we'll take him down. i think she should have voted yes. >> michael avenatti here, he did -- he is probably the best

thing to happen to brett kavanaugh. all these democrats that have been flirting with him, they have got to really be embarrassed by him now. >> when susan collins in that speech got to the sexual assault portion of that speech, look how quickly she moved to the michael avenatti role in all of this. if this had been something where you had the testimony from christine blasey ford, you had the questions that arose from that and that was the issue that was being litigated in the court of public opinion when it came to sexual assault, i wonder if this would have played out any differently than the michael avenatti circus comes to town and changes the nature of the debate and changes the terms of the debate. >> it diluted dr. ford. something about michael avenatti might have cheapened it. >> it was also deborah ramirez' allegation, which by her own account wasn't initially certain it was brett, decided it was brett after thinking about it. "the new york times" to their credit wouldn't publish it. 20 years ago no major news

publication would have even published those second allegations. the second allegation or the third allegation. and so we're now in a different place in this country where the message out of me too, which has very important -- a very important message for society, though, has become con flaflate with politics which is by any means necessary we can score a political win. >> some of those allegations, i feel like most of those were leaked from the judiciary committee and may have been leaked by people intentionally trying to dilute things knowing that it would outrage some. >> i think two things got confused here. one of them is the very serious issue of how we deal with charges of sexual assault and sexual misconduct. how we deal with that fairly in private and in the public square, and how you deal with politics in general. what happened, i think, is that to some extent some democrats began to look at those they only cared about the political impact on brett kavanaugh, on preventing brett kavanaugh from getting there as opposed to

seriously looking through the allegations. and there was just enough of that argument to get kavanaugh over the top because it seemed to some people to be unfair. you look at the polling of the last couple of weeks. you can say it's embracing donald trump, that's true. but i think by having susan collins out there as the closing -- to make the closing argument, the republicans were successfully saying, look, there's a basic issue of fairness here, there's a little discomfort with whether this is fair or not. you look at the polls, chuck. independent voters who had previously been willing to look at this decided in the last couple weeks, according to the numbers, that they thought he was being unfairly treated. and that's because it got too tied up in politics as opposed to a dispassionate examination of her claims. universities around the country, they have sort of figured out how to do this. there are elaborate processes for these kinds of charges.

politics in general has not figured out yet how to deal properly with these kinds of allegations. >> i agree with that. i think steve is right, to some degree the third allegation was much more salacious. obviously the first one was quite serious. and we spent a lot of time talking about what boofing meant or devil's triangle meant, which is ridiculous, but there was not a lot of examination about her, her background. you know what, in this big public domain, there was also an attitude, how dare you even question it. she made a very serious allegation. >> steve kornacki, 1998, ken starr. i've always said the root -- what i think people don't quite understand about the root anger that's there with judge kavanaugh for some in the democratic side of the senate is ken starr. >> yeah. well, of course kavanaugh playing the role in the starr investigation, and the starr investigation of bill clinton

and the lewinsky affair, it's not just that it brought that to light and brought it out there and led to impeachment, it was also they believed kavanaugh was one of the chief people around starr that in order to pin bill clinton on this, you had to be as specific as possible in terms of what you brought to light and what you asked him about. of course bill clinton would find a very lawyer leeway to sort of talk his way out of anything where he could be factually accurate even if it was deceptive or misleading in some way. when you look at the starr report that hit the internet in 1998 and some of the most odd portions, whatever term you want to use to describe that, is the handy work of the ken starr team and the handy work of brett kavanaugh. 20 years later, here he is going for the supreme court. >> as i like to remind people on the right, what bork means to you is what starr means to them. >> and susan collins' optimism notwithstanding, i think the paybacks are just going to get

steeper and most costly as we go forward. >> there's a light way to open the show. up ahead, the kavanaugh countdown. what happens now. can the senate begin to heal its own wounds or is it going to get worse? senate judiciary committee member john kennedy joins me next. next s reports, looked at chart patterns. i've even built my own historic trading model. and you're still not sure if you want to make the trade? exactly. sounds like a case of analysis paralysis. is there a cure? td ameritrade's trade desk. they can help gut check your strategies and answer all your toughest questions. sounds perfect. see, your stress level was here and i got you down to here, i've done my job. call for a strategy gut check with td ameritrade. ♪ when you have something you love, ♪ you want to protect it. at legalzoom, our network of attorneys can help you every step of the way. with an estate plan including wills or a living trust that grows along with you and your family. legalzoom. where life meets legal.

welcome back. as we've been saying, the breaking news this afternoon is that judge brett kavanaugh has the votes to be confirmed as a supreme court justice. i'm joined now by louisiana republican senator john kennedy. senator, welcome back to the show, sir. >> thank you, chuck. >> so, look, i want to try to look forward here.

>> okay. >> i think we all know the mess backwards. senator collins said she hopes this means we've hit rock bottom. why am i skeptical that we have? >> i'm skeptical too. i'm afraid that there will -- for every action, there's usually an opposite reaction. i hope i'm wrong. i'm afraid that will happen here. it doesn't have to. i was listening with interest to your panel. i think this process changed dramatically when mr. avenatti entered the picture. i think a lot of people, including many of my democratic colleagues felt like at that point we had gotten into the foothills of preposterous. i hope we've learned something from that, but i don't think there were any winners in this. i betcha judge kavanaugh doesn't

feel like a winner. i bet dr. ford and her family don't feel like winners. but in terms of what happens in the future, i don't know, chuck. that's up to us. will it get better? >> yes, it is up to you. you're right. >> i'd like to think it would get better, but this is a winner take all approach up here. washington is sort of la la land. the rest of the country, when everybody is up happy in washington, a lot of folks across america are very happy. and washington doesn't understand. it says it does, but a lot of people in washington don't understand that the rest of america laughs at us. they think this whole place is just dysfunction junction. >> senator, i do really get the feeling that you guys, and i say this both -- i think especially those of you representing red states and those of you representing truly blue states don't understand what the other

side is thinking here and don't appreciate -- you know i've noticed, for instance, the president seems to think all protesters are paid. i remember during the tea party the left would say those protesters are paid. you know what, people are protesting. there are people -- we disagree in this country. how do you think you could do better to understand how blue america thinks and what would you recommend to a blue state senator to understand what your constituents think? >> boy, you just made a great point. i felt the anger of the sexual violence in this country. i think the me too movement is a positive force for america. when this broke a year ago, i didn't -- i said, wait, wait, i've never seen this kind of sexual violence. i talk to a lot of my friends who happen to be women and they said what planet did you just parachute in from? it's been going on for decades, and it has, and it's a problem. this isn't a country for creepy old men but it's not a country

at all without due process. if we've learned anything through this process, whether the united states senate has learned anything or not, what i hope america has learned is that both the accused and the accuser are entitled to be treated with respect, to be listened to, be treated with fairness and given due process. we tried to do that with dr. ford. i regret what happened to dr. ford. her confidentiality was breached. we could have dealt with this another way. she didn't -- wasn't told that she could testify in front of the senate investigators in the privacy of her home. it turned into an intergalactic freak show. i feel badly for judge kavanaugh, i feel badly for his 13-year-old and his 10-year-old, and america saw this and america is not impressed, no matter how you feel about the vote. america is not impressed. >> 27 years ago we had the hill/thomas hearings. >> i know. >> and i thought anita hill when she wrote an op-ed a couple of

weeks ago, she said 27 years ago the judiciary committee didn't have a process on how to handle sensitive allegations like this. and here we are 27 years later, and it doesn't even look like an attempt was made. and you look at the united states senate in general when we found out there's been secret settlements to staffers and things like that. who's going to be the senator or the person in charge here to say, you know, we've got -- corporate america is trying to figure it out. college campuses as howard fineman brought up, they have actually focused on trying to figure out how do you deal with allegations like this in a sensitive way, in a private way. why can't the united states senate? >> well, we better. and hopefully we've learned something. look, i've never been a victim of sexual violence, but if i were, i wouldn't want to broadcast it to the world. i would be torn between, i think, embarrassment and anger.

and i think that was dr. ford's situation. and she asked for it to be dealt with, but she asked for it to be dealt with politically. and some chucklehead went and leaked her letter for political reasons. i don't know who did it. does it matter at this point? but it changed this entire process both for her and for judge kavanaugh. and then it was off to the races. it just became smash mouth, in your face, win, baby, win politics. now, will we learn anything? sure, i hope so, chuck, but i've only been here 22 months, but i'm a little bit of a cynic. i said before today, before i knew how this was going to come out, we've hit bottom and started to dig. and i hope i'm wrong on that, but i'm still trying to understand the way this place -- the only thing i know about the way this place works is that the rest of america is embarrassed

for us. no matter whether you're from a red state or a blue state, i've said it before, but they look at us and say how did you people make it through the birth canal for god sakes. >> how is it that if we have a series of 51-49 judges, which is we're going down this road. >> and it's not good. >> what's the judiciary going to look like in ten years? >> well, before we started this process, the american people thought the u.s. supreme court was just a bunch of mini politicians, just a mini congress. that the law was just politics practiced another way. now, i don't think that's the way it is. it's certainly not what our founders intended. >> that's what i think people think now. >> but perception is reality. and even before this process they thought that. now they really think it. and part of th supposed to address that. but we don't want to make the hard decisions. i hear it every day, i can't take that vote.

so they get passed on to the united states supreme court. and that's not what our constitution intended. >> i would add civically either. >> spiritually, we have a lot of people that don't feel part of america and they're from red states and blue. >> very quickly. >> yeah. >> both senator schumer and durbin said if somehow democrats win control of the senate, they would think about restoring the filibuster to 60. do you think that ultimately that should come back? >> i don't know yet. i want to let some time pass after this is over. then i'm hoping we'll start with the judiciary committee. we'll all go out to dinner one night, reds and blues, and we'll start there, start talking about what we learned, if anything, from this process. i've learned a lot. >> let me know when you have that dinner. i think we'd all like to be eavesdroppers on that. >> will do, chuck. we'll let you pick up the tab.

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we're not just fighting cancer. we're outsmarting it. visit cancercenter.com and schedule an appointment with our cancer care specialists today. welcome back. tonight i'm obsessed with president trump's strange attack on al franken. franken, as you know, was a democratic senator from minnesota who resigned after

several allegations of sexual misconduct that were made against him. here's the president last night campaigning in minnesota for the republican hoping to win frankenfranken 's seat. >> that guy was -- he was wacky. boy, did he fold up like a wet rag, huh? man. he was gone so fast. it was like, oh, he did something. oh, oh, oh, i resign, i quit, i quit. wow. he was gone and he was replaced by somebody that nobody ever heard of. >> all right. so president trump says franken folded like a wet rag. by the way, do you fold wet rags? you dry them out first, right? so what's that point? we don't get that. but was it that franken was innocent and a coward for not fighting back against an unfair accusation? is it that franken was guilty of serious misbehavior and should have fought the charge anyway? no matter what you're accused of, fight, fight, fight, because that's how you win? that it's a shame that franken was replaced by somebody mr.

trump never heard of? while it's hard to know what he meant, if al franken were still in the senate, he'd be on the judiciary committee voting on brett kavanaugh this weekend and just imagine what president trump would be saying about that. d be saying about that

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welcome back. this fight over the supreme court isn't just happening in washington, it's happening on the campaign trail as well. we didn't just find out today how sitting senators are voting on kavanaugh, we found out how some senate wannabes would vote too. kirsten cinema, all said they would have voted no but phil bredesen announced that he'd vote yes on the nomination if he were in the senate. and within minutes of essentially putting that out, he released this ad touting his independence. >> the new scare tactic isn't an

income tax, it's that i'll somehow be chuck schumer's lap dog. i don't even support him. nobody is going to tell me how to vote. >> heidi heitkamp said her no vote on kavanaugh is also about being independent from both parties. two polls show her trailing kevin cramer in a state president trump carried by more than 30 points. a gop arm has cancelled reserve tv and ad time in that state assuming they have that in the bank. but two of her colleagues have sent e-mails to their supporters to keep heitkamp's re-election hopes alive. mark murray is here, the panel is back as well. core knacky, fagen, fineman. so, mark, walk us through. which races do you feel are making it more of a centerpiece and which ones are trying to

just deal with today's news cycle and hope they get to talk about other stuff? >> yeah, chuck, certainly in the reddest of contests where even before heidi heitkamp's decision to come out in opposition to brett kavanaugh, you saw that being a big issue. republicans want to make it an issue in missouri. even also in the indiana race. but to me when i look at the totality of the 2018 senate map, including in the most competitive races, what you end up having are parties that are polar opposites with just two exemption in tennessee and west virginia. the democratic candidates and democratic income bents akucumb. the republican incumbents and republican candidates are in support of brett kavanaugh. and just like what we're seeing in the u.s. senate right now play out, not in the senate battlefield, we are seeing two parties at two different ends. >> steve, what did you break of the bredesen move? >> tennessee went 26 points for donald trump. the ad you just played, the idea

of nobody tells me what to do, he needs democrats to be excited there, but he's only winning that seat if he wins over trump voters, if he wins over people who buy into that message. if there's grumbling or worse than that from democratic activists, i think that ultimately helps him toward winning that seat. >> sara, you disappointed bredesen didn't tow the party line? >> i think whether his conviction is real or political, i don't know, but i suspect that it had a lot to do with marcia blackburn doing better in polling. what we've seen to the politics of the supreme court nomination process is that red states get redder, red districts became more red. sleepy republicans woke up and said democrats are trying to steal a supreme court justice, i need to wake up and participate in the process. >> two things. first of all, i think heidi heitkamp deserves some credit here for saying, you know what, i'm behind, i'm in a big

republican state and i'm going to vote the way i voted anyway. she's relying on that being a small state where people know people personally to somehow get her through. the bigger point nationally is donald trump has said, fine, you want to fight this election on this issue, on the issue of sexual harassment and attitude toward women, go ahead. let's see you turn out the independent voters and the young voters who will be key here and who polls show are still a little behind the curve in likely turnout. i'm going to turn out all my people and we're going to be behind brett kavanaugh, we're going to be behind the anger, we're going to be behind claiming that the process was unfair and we're going to go with that. let's see you turn out your people in the fall. >> mark, i think the big question and i think a lot of republicans are curious of this answer in particular, is this bump in enthusiasm, bump in interest, can it be sustained? what's the history of the last nine months in seeing these ups and downs?

how long do these stories stick? >> well, chuck, we have a month to go before the midterms. that's going seem like an eternity once we move on from kavanaugh. it could be a sugar high, i don't think we know. what i'm watching most are the independent voters, chuck. you know, when you ending up even in the reddest of states and you're talking about north dakota and tennessee, you have the democratic candidates in came pains aiming their messages straight at independent voters. when you look at the national polling at kavanaugh, he's under water with a lot of independents, maybe doing better in north dakota and west virginia but places like indiana, how does he end up faring with suburban women in a state like indiana. to have me i think that will tell you the big politics of kavanaugh. sara, is this one of these things that you think could help democrats in house races and heparins hold the senate? >> yeah, i think so. just speaking from the pure politics of it, you know, i

think the democrats have been energized. young women have been energized for two years, since donald trump won the election. maybe they get juiced up a little bit more, but they have been pretty high. >> it doesn't go past 11? >> exactly. >> but ours goes to 13. >> but i think the thing here that is probably important to note is, you know, four weeks is a long time in politics. that was the point mark just made, which which is do republicans kind of go back to being frustrated about other issues and don't show up? i suspect in red states they're going to show up. republicans in the house that are in r plus 7, r plus 8 districts that have leaner toss-up, they probably hold on too. >> two states i've been thinking about a lot, montana and missouri. >> missouri is the one too. i've had this sense that tester might be a little bit more insulated, but mccaskill, being a no on this, we have seen, i think, three polls with a tie. >> dead heat.

>> dead even. this looks like the single closest race in the country. trump plus 20 in missouri. and to be a no on this. and she got a big political break in 2012 when she ran for re-election. she's not running against todd aiken this time so, yeah, that one i'm wondering too. >> i think missouri is one to watch as the most likely impact of this. but i would say that the democrats have a chance now, if you want to look optimistically on their side, they got knocked off what they're best at in this, the fall election, which is health care, minimum wage, jobs, education. the things that poll well that should be and they wanted to be their message. one of the reasons they lost ground here is for the last several weeks they have been off on this, when that has to be their message in the last few weeks. maybe they get back to it. >> very quickly, mark, if mitch mcconnell is still majority leader, will we say kavanaugh saved the senate for him? >> it was always going to be difficult map for democrats to be able to do this, but

certainly you could end up saying that it ended up helping them. but again, let's see by how many that she's by the majority leader. if it's just basically even or they gain one seat, probably not. boy, if they pick up three, four, five, then yes, you could say something happened in the last month. >> mark murray, thank you, sir. you've been released. these guys have to stick around. the should be easy house race that could give democrats a run for their money. fact is, every insurance company hopes you drive safely.

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welcome back. tonight in meet the midterms, an open south florida house seat that was expected to be sort of an easy pickup opportunity for democrats is giving them a little bit of heartburn. former clinton era hhs secretary and former university of miami president, donna shalala is facing maria el via salazar in florida 27. with about a month to election day, the attack ads are ramping up. here is one the democrats are running against salazar. >> maria elvira salazar and donald trump love the limelight. she cozies up to trump and his disastrous agenda, like trump's plan that would raise health care costs and kick millions off health care. instead of another tv celebrity, we need a leader. >> it's noteworthy because they hadn't run any ads before.

shalala is getting hit on her past. a pro salazar is blaming her for the demolition of little havana's beloved orange bowl stadium. >> donna shalala left miami worse than she found it, taking away 75 years of orange bowl tradition, refusing to work with our city, an leaving taxpayers on the hook for her damage. she would be a wreck in washington. >> as a miami guy, let me just tell you, it was the city of miami. she didn't have anything to do with that one, but interesting hit as a hurricane. folks, this is certainly a winnable district for the democrats but some observers are worried they picked the wrong candidate for this district. we'll be back right after this. . we'll be back right after this -meg! there you are. did you take a picture of the cake

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fineman. one of the interesting items was an op-ed by judge kavanaugh in the "wall street journal." steve, i'll start with you on this. it was yesterday on the show, i had asked the panel that was there, should judge kavanaugh do something like this to reassure folks and the panel was like i doubt he does. clearly they felt like they needed to do this. what did you make of the execution of it? >> the choice of venue is interesting. he did two public statements besides the committee. on fox news and one on a conservative newspaper, the "wall street journal." conservative editorial anyway. the choice of venue and the audience was flake, murkowski and collins and getting the sense that if there is a last minute hesitation here that gets to the question of temperament at the hearings and the question of when he made the partisan references there to the clintons

in particular, that line about what goes around comes around. if i can do something to reassure that, let me do it. i don't know if that affected susan collins. it's interesting to not mention it. >> lead me read it. i was very emotional last thursday, more so than i have ever been. i might have been too emotional. my tongue was sharp and said things i should not have said. i was there as a son, husband, and dad. my question is, we don't know which comments he regrets. should he have identified it? >> he should have, but this fellow is not only a brilliant jurist, he is a very practiced, if behind the scenes, political figure. that was a political move on his part as you said to not are inially convince flake and collins because i think they were already there, but to give them talking points and cover. this is not the last time that

brett kavanaugh is going to be giving this kind -- it was an op-ed, but i guarantee, there is a speech coming and more of this coming from him. >> this becomes such a political institution now. he has to give another speech. >> you have been publicly participating in this campaign in support of judge kavanaugh. we will put that out there. should we expect more from him to try to assuage people that are concerned that he exposed himself? this is not ideology. this is partisanship. >> it's a combination of things he has to deal with because of the way this process was handled. some of it, he was right to say what he said in the journal. some of his answers were hot. he probably does regret them. but i would recommend and i don't know if he will or not, but i recommend he do it. given what he has gone through,

to me what's hard to watch about this is the notion that this is a fiercely partisan guy who doesn't have good temperament. brett is the epitome of somebody to me summer who has excellent temperament and while he's a republican and worked for a republican president, he's not a partisan guy. the impression is that he is. some of that is by his statements, but i think he will go to the court and time will tell that he is a very good, thoughtful jurist. >> but he -- >> he has to correct it is my point. he has to talk more. >> if for no other audience, for the current members of the supreme court. >> in some ways, it ended with the supreme court. it ended with a 5-4 that gave that to us. this epitomizes your book and people should get it. the country emerged from the 90s into two groupings, red and

blue. stand ins for the two parties and americans chose sides and dug in. the lines have shifted, but it's the same basic framework and the supreme court got caught up in it when they had to end the election, 5-4. >> this was the first scene in the book. the 2 thousand election, the closest thing to a perfect tie we had in a presidential election and may have ever have and people looking at the map and seeing not just a tie, but the divisions staring them in the face. al gore unable to carry his home state of tennessee. the clintons have left arkansas and found a home in new york. that's where the future of their party is and where their future is. the demographic cultural sdirpgsdirpg distinctions are locked in. >> we don't know if we want to read our memoirs. >> it's great and if you didn't

live it and you are covering it now, read it this weekend. it's your homework assignment. thank you much and congrats again. we'll be right back with a photo finish. again. we'll be right back with a photo finish only half the story? at t. rowe price our experts go beyond the numbers to examine investment opportunities firsthand. like e-commerce spurring cardboard demand. the pursuit of allergy-free peanuts. and mobile payment reaching new markets. this is strategic investing.

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in case you missed it, all of washington is a buzz over, you guessed it, patrick leahy. they posted this mysterious tweet. a photo of himself. no caption, no context. no nothing.

then twitter lost its collective mind. why did he post it? simple twitter mistake. user error. maybe he was trying to change his profile pick. it's certain to go down as a gaffe. it's no cofe fe, but ed balls tweeted ed balls and the twitter verse couldn't have agreed more. chuck grassley window heights said dairy queen is a good place for you know what. he said it was having ice cream. maybe they meant for that instead of the what. don't be embarrassed. tweet gaffes can happen to the best of us. a smile can't hurt. senator leahy is a great amateur photographer. maybe he was showing that up. we will be back for more m tr"m daily" and "meet the press" on

sunday. >> thank you very much the votes are in. republicans holding their ranks to elevate the most controversial supreme court nominee in at least a generation. 50 republicans and one senator of backing brett kavanaugh. we will bring you that story and important news out of chicago where an officer was convicted of murdering 17-year-old mcdonald. plus a fall back friday we all may need. we encourage to you stay with us for the hour we have planned. we begin with this action on the senate floor. self declared moderate susan collins proved to be a pivotal