Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said Friday she would have been “thrown” out of a courtroom if she behaved the way Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh did during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
Kavanaugh’s testimony Thursday on allegations of sexual misconduct brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford, a college professor who accused the judge of sexual assault while they were in high school.
Klobuchar and Kavanaugh shared a tense exchange in the hearing when Klobuchar asked Kavanaugh during his emotional testimony if he had ever consumed so much alcohol that he blacked out.
Kavanaugh turned the tables on the Minnesota Democrat and asked her, “Have you?”
{mosads}After Kavanaugh and the committee came back from a break during the hearing, Kavanaugh apologized to Klobuchar, saying, “This is a tough process.”
At the time, Klobuchar said she appreciated his apology and said, “When you have a parent that’s an alcoholic, you’re pretty careful about drinking,” referencing her father’s alcoholism and the impact it had on her.
Klobuchar later said of the exchange in an interview with CBS News on Friday that if she “was in his courtroom and acted like that, he would have thrown me out.”
She went on to say that though she appreciated the judge’s apology, he “didn’t really answer the question. And what I was trying to get at was that you have this incredibly convincing testimony in the morning from Dr. Ford.”
“For me, it is not that people don’t drink in high school, it’s, is he telling the truth?” she added.
The judge’s drinking habits came under intense scrutiny during the Thursday hearing into sexual assault allegations made against the nominee.
In Ford’s intense testimony before the panel, she alleged Kavanaugh was heavily intoxicated when he pinned her to a bed and tried to take her clothes off while the two were at a gathering in Maryland back in high school.
Although Kavanaugh denied Ford’s claims, in addition to other allegations of sexual misconduct brought against him, he has agreed that he drank while in high school. But he added that he never drank to the point of blacking out.
On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination after Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) secured a deal to delay a floor vote on the nomination for a week.