The Democrats' smear of Justice Brett Kavanaugh is having an effect in the Senate.  The Senate is by tradition a place that runs on unanimous consent.  Nominations have rules and decorum that have to be followed.  If they are not, the minority can slow things down.  Democrats have done this on almost ALL Trump nominations. 

Democrats file cloture on every nominee, which kicks off 30 hours of debate even if no Senator is opposed. They figure if they can’t defeat nominees they can delay and consume valuable time. Democrats have forced 117 cloture votes—versus 12 in Barack Obama’s first two years and four in George W. Bush’s.

The question this month is whether Senate Democrats will accept a deal to confirm more judges and nominees, which would allow vulnerable Members to return home to campaign.

Leader McConnell has made this a top priority and is now making the Democrats pay a price.  The Senate will stay in session until October 26, unless the Democrats move on nominations, not just judicial nominations.   A key example is this week.  The Democrats have long opposed Eric Dreiband, who has waited since June of 2017, to be the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. 

Recommended by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Dreiband is a former Department of Labor and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney during the George W. Bush administration, who presently deals in legal matters relating to employment discrimination, whistleblowers, wage and hour investigations, and litigation and counseling. . . .

“He is as open-minded as possible for a principled person to be,” Richard Seymour, an employment lawyer who has known Dreiband for years, told the Associated Press. “He is the steadiest imaginable hand at the tiller that I can think of.”

David B. Grinberg, a former EEOC spokesman, told The AP that Dreiband was known to fight “very hard for women and minorities” during his time at the EEOC.

Much like the real reason for the smear of Justice Kavanaugh was that he was nominated for the swing seat on the Supreme Court, Democrats oppose the nomination of any Republican to the Department of Justice’s top Civil Rights job.   But after the Democrats' smear on Kavanaugh, Leader McConnell is leveraging the Democrats' desire to get back and campaign versus their tactics to undermine the government.  Thanks to Senator McConnell’s leadership, either America wins with a better functioning and staffed government or the GOP wins with a more Republican Senate . . . or both.