National

Women's March slammed for goof in statement on Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination

Conservatives jumped on an error in a statement released Tuesday night by the organizers of last year's Women's March on Washington in response to President Donald Trump's nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

The statement condemning Trump's nominee, who would replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, was released at 9:46 p.m. EDT, according to screenshots shared on social media. It contained one glaring error: the name of the nominee had not yet been filled in.

"In response to Donald Trump's nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States, The Women's March released the following statement ... " the first sentence read. In the next paragraph, the statement included the name, but it was misspelled as "Cavenaugh."

An updated message with both errors corrected was sent out minutes later.

The mistake played into concerns among conservatives that Democrats planned to blindly oppose anyone Trump might choose to nominate.

"A number of our Democratic colleagues could not even wait until the president's announcement last night before launching attacks on his nominee," Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "This was, in some cases quite literally, a fill-in-the-blank opposition. They wrote statements of opposition only to fill in the name later."

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said in a Fox News appearance that opposing Trump's nominee before he or she was even named was "troubling" and "not the way a democracy and federalism is supposed to work."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., pointed to the Women's March statement as proof that he was correct when he said Sunday that Trump "could nominate George Washington and the left would go crazy."

"There's so many groups on the left declaring war on President Trump's nominee, even before they knew who he was," Graham said in a video posted to his Twitter feed Tuesday.

The Women's March responded to the criticism, saying in a tweet, "Senator Graham is right. We did prepare a press release in advance because we knew that all the people on Trump's nominee list would strip protections for almost every marginalized group in the United States for years to come."

"The @GOP and leaders like @LindseyGrahamSC and @SenateMajLdr seem to care more about a typo in a press release than they do about the future, safety, and rights of women, children, and our nation's most marginalized communities," the group said in another tweet.

The group went on to explain why it sees Kavanaugh as "especially dangerous" in a series of tweets.

"Kavanaugh has used the bench to undermine access to abortion for women," the Women's March tweeted.

"We’re not fooled by the argument that Kavanaugh isn’t a 'bomb-thrower' or that he’s made no extreme controversial rulings," read another tweet. "In our opinion, creating and supporting barriers to women seeking to make choices about our own bodies is pretty extreme."

Whether or not their opposition was predetermined, the Democratic leadership in the Senate is ready to stand beside the Women's March in the effort to block Kavanaugh.

"I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have, and I hope a bipartisan majority will do the same," Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said in statement after Kavanaugh was nominated Monday. “The stakes are simply too high for anything less."