Roy Blunt: “my colleague just talked about standing up for the Senate, about standing up for the values that traditionally have been…”

“my colleague just talked about standing up for the Senate, about standing up for the values that traditionally have been our values. One of those principal values has been ``innocent until proven guilty.'' What we have seen happen here in the last week is something that did not need to happen, certainly, in the way it has happened. The hearing, the hours of questions, the picking apart of those answers at leisure--we have seen all of that. Do you know what would have happened if we had followed this process the right way? It is hard to do when a significant majority of the committee says that it is against the nominee before he has the hearing and when several Senators say they are against the nominee before he is even nominated, no matter who the nominee will be. There would have been a normal background check that would have occurred if the information that had been available to the committee-- to the Democrats and their staffs--had been turned over at the time. How would they have handled that? How would those in the FBI have handled that on July 30 or August 30 or on any other date? They would have handled that by going and talking to the people involved. Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh would have been interviewed by the FBI. The people they would have mentioned with whom the FBI should also talk would have been interviewed by the FBI, and that would have been put in the file. The material could have been presented to the committee as it should have been.…”