The GOP will rue the Kavanaugh confirmation

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

On Saturday, the Senate voted narrowly to destroy the Supreme Court of the United States by confirming the profoundly compromised and nakedly partisan Judge Brett Kavanaugh with a 50-48 vote. The drama, such as it was, really ended by mid-afternoon Friday as the critical senator announced in an incredibly long and self-aggrandizing floor speech that she would vote yes, proving that the best way to get what you want in the world is lying shamelessly to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in an hours-long, private conversation. Kavanaugh joins a court whose swing seat was stolen in 2016, whose popular legitimacy is in tatters, whose every 5-4 decision in the coming years will be regarded as corrupted by a majority of Americans, and whose place in the American political system will never be the same.

The combination of bad faith and procedural manipulation by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his allies during this process is unlikely to ever be forgotten by any Democrat currently breathing air as a sentient adult. Kavanaugh was a dreadful nominee from the word go, a lifelong partisan hack whose grubby, enthusiastically beer-crusted fingers were all over nearly every embarrassing national spectacle between the late 1990s and his ascension to the D.C. Court of Appeals in 2006, including The Starr Report, Bush v. Gore, and the widespread and illegal use of torture as part of the war on terror. Senate Republicans were so terrified of this sordid, extremely well-documented history that they refused to release the majority of Kavanaugh's long paper trail to the Senate Judiciary Committee, preferring instead an unprecedentedly opaque and rushed process designed to steward him to this very moment of narrow victory.

That was all before Kavanaugh was accused by three women of sexual assault in high school and college. During a nationally televised hearing on Sept. 27, Kavanaugh responded to the moving testimony of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, by unleashing a terrifying, puffed-up tirade punctuated with partisan bitterness and loony conspiracy theories, including the idea that the allegations against him were "revenge on behalf of the Clintons." He repeatedly treated Democratic senators with open contempt, and, more importantly, lied over and over again about his past drinking habits, when he learned about his second accuser, and the meaning of entries in his high school yearbook. That performance, and the contempt it showed, all but ensured that Kavanaugh will be hauled before an investigative committee come January if Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress. It was, in fact, such a disaster that the American Bar Association has now reopened its investigation into Kavanaugh's fitness to be a judge.

Kavanaugh's frothing revenge face was so problematic that it convinced retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to call for an FBI investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh. But it quickly became obvious that Flake didn't care about the underlying truth value of those allegations — the FBI refused to interview relevant witnesses, including both the accuser and the accused (!), and ignored requests from countless potential witnesses to weigh in. The bureau seemed to be operating under White House-imposed constraints that the White House, in typical Trumpian fashion, denied publicly. McConnell scheduled votes on Kavanaugh while the FBI was still doing its halfhearted work, which Senate Democrats were given just an hour to review privately in shifts. Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) then had the audacity to call Kavanaugh's confirmation process "the most transparent in history."

Let's take a moment to appreciate the full scale of Flake's cowardice over the past two years. He has sucked up 100 times the media oxygen as his fellow moderate Lisa Murkowski, giving speeches on the Senate floor, penning a vanity book, and then not once lifting his finger to actually stop what President Trump and his allies are doing to this country. With his time in the Senate nearing an end, Flake hasn't cast a single significant vote against President Trump's agenda. Instead, he seems content to enjoy the reputation of a maverick without actually being one, a title that Murkowski alone can now genuinely claim among elected national Republicans.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-gop-will-rue-the-kavanaugh-confirmation/ar-BBO1Tqn?li=BBnb7Kz

[Chipper Chat]

1. Many liberal cases may not even appealled to SCOTUS

From lower court because a 5-4 ,decision would be a given. Why waste their time.

[Me.]

2. Nobody Gets Spared With This Piece

And I like how he said the Dems need to realize they need a plus one more if they take over the Senate because of Manchin.

[dalton99a]

3. Great article.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. No they won't. They'll spend the next thirty years smug and satisfied, while

out here in the real world ordinary people will suffer.

[Socal31]

5. Cementing SCOTUS was their primary goal for 30+ years.

None of this was an accident. Everyone on the Red spectrum was all on the same page with this. I've never seen such sustained choreography to achieve a political goal.

Trumps entire presidency has consisted of media-cycles chasing shiny objects, while the federal circuits are crammed with very young conservative judges. Now the ultimate prize has been obtained.

Roe won't be over-turned, but it doesn't need to be. Allowing increasingly oppressive restrictions on abortion will accomplish the same objective.

Religious exemptions will be an all-encompassing legal flamethrower to allow discrimination against non-hetero couples.

All state firearms laws that are more restrictive than the federal code will be invalidated in the next 3 years.

Any case that involves a worker's rights versus a corporation will have the same outcome.

Some very important 1st and 4th amendment cases on the horizon, regarding eavesdropping and our personal data, will not go in the People's favor.

I'm sure there are a ton I am forgetting.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

6. Yep. It is purely wishful thinking to believe

they will ever regret what they are doing to this country. They are all narrow-minded selfish bigots completely incapable of understanding that people may legitimately be different from them.

[Dan]

7. Sadly,

I don’t think that we as a nation have thirty years... .

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. I keep on repeating the story of Spain.

In the 16th century it was the major world power, conquering newly-discovered lands, stealing the wealth from there, and enslaving indigenous people. Then two things happened. One was the Spanish Armada debacle, and the other, probably more important, was a deliberate decision not to tax the rich, the aristocracy, the nobility. The entire burden of financing the country and their wars was put on the poor. It wasn't that long before Spain became a has-been country. Which is still is, several hundred years later.

I've never been to Spain, perhaps someday I will. I'm sure it's a lovely country. I'm sure its people are as wonderful as most people are. But it's unlikely that it will ever regain the political or economic power it once had.

Same with this country. We reached our peak in most ways before 1970. The Vietnam War and the Culture Wars started to change everything. Ronald Reagan was a turning point. The demonization of social welfare programs, the cutting of taxes to the rich, the undermining of unions. (I will never forgive Lane Kirkland, then head of the AFL-CIO for supporting the firing of the air traffic controllers.) But what Reagan did could have been turned back, and was slightly under Clinton, although his ending of "welfare as we know it" has thrust millions into permanent poverty. The book $2.00 A Day, Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer is eye-opening. I recommend it to all.

Obama was able to stem the tide a bit, and the ACA was promising. But for decades now too many Americans have bought into the nonsense that Republicans have been spouting for so long. And in some ways Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court is the least of our worries. It's the rolling back of environmental regulations, the deliberate defunding of public education, the continued spending on wars around the world. We are Spain.

[Dan]

9. Thank you for sharing....it is eye-opening...

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

10. It is. I'd long known that Spain was a great power

in the 15th and 16th centuries and also knew all about the Spanish Armada. But the bit about the taxation was something I stumbled across just a few years ago. It's not the kind of thing that shows up in the history classes we might take, and unless a person has a serious fascination with the history of that country, they won't come across it.

I believe my take on the decline and fall of this country since the mid-twentieth century is accurate and valid, and does not need the comparison to Spain. But the comparison is enormously helpful, and puts things in perspective.