Senator Lamar Alexander (R- Tenn.) appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday morning. He spoke to moderator Chuck Todd about the controversy surrounding Kavanaugh's confirmation and current conditions in the Senate.
Alexander was one of 50 yes votes to confirm Kavanaugh's nomination as a Supreme Court justice Saturday afternoon.
Alexander said Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was credible in her testimony on Judge Kavanaugh last month, but he had to consider evidence from people she mentioned and FBI reports.
"If listening to her was all I had to do, I would have said, 'She seems to believe what she believes,' but that's not all I had to do," Alexander said.
He read six FBI reports from between 1993 and 2018. He said he read in those reports that 150 people interviewed about Kavanaugh said they knew nothing of alcohol abuse or sexual misconduct.
"You have to consider that, and you also have to consider the fact that the only person who remembers the alleged incident that Dr. Ford describes is Dr. Ford. The other four said under penalty of perjury that it either didn't happen or they didn't remember it. So you have to be fair about it," Alexander said.
Alexander said Kavanaugh's defense in his hearings and in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal were the reason he is now on the Supreme Court.
"If you had a group of people deliberately trying to destroy your reputation with accusations that you know aren't true and every rumor that comes up about you is the most awful kind of accusation, you're not going to just sit there calmly and take that," he said.
If he had sat there and taken it, people would have been suspicious, Alexander said.
When asked if conditions in the Senate have become worse in recent years, he said they have, but the Senate is still "doing a pretty good job in its problem-solving capacity."
"Look at the Senate like a split-screen television. On one screen this past three weeks, you would have seen Kavanaugh, Trump tweets, etc. On the others, you would have seen 70 senators, half Democrats, half Republicans, passing landmark opioids legislation that affects millions of people," Alexander said.
He also cited legislation providing record funding for biomedical research, supercomputing and the military.
