Booker says Kavanaugh supporters ‘complicit in the evil’

A prominent Republican senator blasted a Democratic colleague Wednesday who had charged that anyone who supported Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was “complicit in the evil.”

“That’s pretty apocalyptic rhetoric,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking GOP leader in the chamber.

Cornyn was speaking about comments by New Jersey’s Democratic Sen. Cory Booker at a Capitol Hill news conference Tuesday, when he warned against confirming Kavanaugh.

“There is so much at stake here. This has nothing to do with politics. This has to do with how we are as moral beings,” Booker said. “You are either complicit in the evil. You are either contributing to the wrong or you are fighting against it.”

Booker then cited Psalm 23.

“Yea though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” the New Jersey senator said. “It doesn’t say, ‘I’m watching on the sidelines of the valley of the shadow of death.’ “

In a floor speech, Cornyn called Booker’s comments “unhinged.”

“It’s hard to take statements like that seriously,” Cornyn said. “That’s completely unhinged and detached from any reality. This is the same judge who was confirmed in 2006 by a substantial bipartisan vote to what many have called the second most important court in the nation.”

Booker, who is considered a likely 2020 presidential candidate, was joined at the news conference by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, another progressive who might run for the White House.