Perhaps if one of Barack Obama’s inner circle, while considering options to confront Mitch McConnel’s rash, unprecedented and ultimately successful scuttling of Merrick Garland’s SCOTUS appointment, had painted a scenario two years hence of Tea Party vulcan Mike Lee preening his constitutional law bona fides while lobbing soft balls to Donald Trump’s idea of a SCOTUS pivotal vote, 44 may have gone all in for any means available against the Majority Leader’s outrageous gambit. I suppose nobody did, so he didn’t, and today Lee and Kavanaugh were making love during the Utah Senator’s designated half hour.
The Kavanaugh hearings are a farce. And of course nobody in the GOP, including so-called sensible moderates like Collins or Murkowski, cares a wit. Yesterday, Corey Booker implored Chairman Grassley to take the long view and understand “what goes around comes around” and this precedent will surely bite the Republicans when the shoe is someday on the other foot. Grassley and the other committee GOP members managed to keep straight faces. Whatever is in the more than 100K pages of correspondence documenting Brett Kavanaugh’s time in the W Bush White House – and judging by how rattled the nominee became when Pat Leahy pressed him on stolen emails from that period, there may be some fire there – nothing is going to be provided in a timely fashion and will have zero affect on this rubber stamp ritual.
Precedents mean nothing to the GOP because they presuppose a certain preeminence of truth, which no longer motivates the Republican rank and file in the slightest. Moreover, assuming the GOP cares about the future is a fool’s errand… they don’t. Like Trump, Republicans live for today and only for today, locked into perpetual survival mode, addicted gamblers at the racetrack living race to race. Securing the country’s future is not good nihilist politics; it’s for snowflakes. Better to burn out than fade away.
Fox/AM, fully responsible for GOP disdain toward anything past today’s news cycle, and relentlessly engaged in spinning the deleterious results of such myopia, is ever ready to pretend McConnell never refused to consider the SCOTUS nominee of a President in good standing should the Democrats ever get audacious enough to follow suit. As in every hour of each day since the network’s inception, an army of storytellers will gaslight yesterday’s truths in support of today’s lies without thought, an autonomic nervous system of deceit…. and the base won’t blink, in fact they’ll demand it. “Who is this Garland guy they’re talking about?… never heard of him!”
In the fight for the soul of American governance, the Democrats are like a kid with parents horrified by violence taking on a bully with a dad screaming “that’s my boy!” They don’t bring a knife to a gunfight; they bring a spatula.
After Tsar Nicholas was deposed in 1917, the Kerensky government, concerned Russia’s infant democratic experiment may suffer, decided not to arrest a Bolshevik troublemaker named Lenin. That good deed did not go unpunished.
Of course Brett Kavanaugh could insist that papers from his W years be made available, rightly confident they probably wouldn’t change a vote and his stature would benefit. Instead he used weasel words when questioned on the subject. “Not my place to get involved…a matter between the legislative and executive branches to decide.” As piss poor as it was illuminating.
From the looks of things so far, Kavanaugh is Gorsuch 2.0 right on down the line. Frankly, and this may seem unduly harsh, but that makes it no less true… Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are Stephen Miller, but they got picked when choosing sides for basketball. Not a whole lot of daylight.
Stare decisis, shmare podices…at the end of the day we know exactly where they stand. They’re more dynamic Samuel Alitos. Clarence Thomas with overblown senses of entitlement. In other words, like the man who they owe their comfy lifetime positions to, precedent doesn’t mean squat. Their opinions will simply justify their predispositions at the expense of this country’s downtrodden, and proponents of safe and sensible anything.
Listening to Lee and Kavanaugh wax intellectual about the Federalist Papers, aside from making one not hungry for a good long while, unintentionally struck the right tone for the whole sorry charade. A group of white men so cynical and obtuse toward the institutions they find themselves in control of, they figure pretending to abide essential standards and safeguards is more than enough, and all the serfs now at their heel are entitled to. Elections do have consequences. Sometimes they are disastrous…. and without precedent. BC