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The cloture motion to terminate debate on the nomination of tainted Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh carried 51 to 49, on what was virtually a straight party-line vote. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted with the Democrats, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin broke ranks and voted with the Republicans.
As I write, “moderate” Maine Republican Susan Collins has finished dithering before the Senate, explaining how she intends to fall in line with the rest of her party. (Of course, the gutless senator did indeed choose to fall in line. Principles routinely evade Republican officeholders.)
The Kavanaugh fiasco has demonstrated, as bluntly as any other since Clarence Thomas’s nomination process back in 1991, that when it comes to nominating men to powerful positions, the voices of women are considered unworthy of belief.
Simply put, uppity women will not be permitted to question the patriarchy.
Of course, in the air of Donald Trump, that self-described “man of the 50s,” we should expect the patriarchy to behave as it has been behaving. Indeed, the 20 months of Donald Trump can be described quite simply as “the revenge of the white patriarchy.”
And indeed, the white patriarchy has had its revenge, to just about the nth degree. Not only was the entire Kavanaugh process tainted by the worst of bad faith from start to finish (as several Democratic Senators and media pundits have put it, the fix has always been in) but Kavanaugh’s performance itself, particularly during the renewed hearings, was a partisan screed delivered in a tone of aggrieved entitlement, or in what Winston Churchill famously described as the tone of Sir Stafford Cripps: “injured guilt.”
Aggrieved entitlement, insulted privilege, or injured guilt, the tone of Kavanaugh’s over-the-top remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the blatant, obvious, effort of the Republicans on that selfsame Judiciary Committee and in the White House to rig the process, are themselves, absent more, non-recommending to Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Add to that the fact that millions of Americans, in fact a majority of Americans, find Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to be credible, and that also a majority of Americans oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Court, and you have a nomination which under any other administration than that of the malignant narcissist and traitor Donald Trump, would and should have been withdrawn.
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Of course, knowing the Donald, we know that the Kavanaugh nomination will never be withdrawn, because we know that the Donald not only cannot stand to acknowledge that he made a mistake but we also know that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is very much in the interests of the Russian State; Brett Kavanaugh is the Kremlin’s nominee, and the Kremlin will not permit his nomination to be withdrawn.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again. Furthermore, it is now becoming obvious that some of the pro-Kavanaugh ads cluttering up our various media have been paid for by dark money from Russian sources.
Indeed, there are allegations that Facebook has been working closely with the Russians to try to influence public opinion in favor of Brett Kavanaugh. Aside from providing further ammunition for the developing case against Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg, the heavy-handed Russian attempts to intervene in favor of Brett Kavanaugh ought to have convinced at least a couple of Republicans that Kavanaugh was a Muscovite mole.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point at which the basic patriotism and loyalty to this country of Republican officeholders at all levels is open to the gravest of question. How many of them, how very many of them, have come to resemble Benedict Arnold’s love child by Maj. John André, the British spymaster who was Arnold’s case officer, and whose capture and hanging represented one of the first great triumphs of American counterintelligence work.
If, in fact, Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are Muscovite moles, then of course it is in the interests of the Russian State to infiltrate them into positions of enormous power. Unless Donald Trump is able to run some kind of self-coup and make himself “president for life,” we should be rid of him before too much longer. But Brett Kavanaugh occupies a position that is a de facto lifetime tenure. How much mischief can the Kremlin accomplish with one of their moles on the Supreme Court?
It may come down to Americans having to exercise the option that Game of Thrones’ Cercei Lannister exercised when she found herself confronted with an unpalatable situation: “I choose violence.” And of course if Americans were to choose violence, Moscow could not be more satisfied. Moscow’s relentless cyber war and active measures against this country have been designed to accomplish the slow destruction of American institutions from within. Perhaps when America chooses violence, it should choose violence against the Russians, and not against itself.
After all, if the Russians think it is permissible for them to impose upon us a president of their choosing, then why should we not, with equal propriety, impose upon the Russian land a Romanov tsaritsa or Tsar of our own choosing? Democracy clearly does not work as well for Russia as it does for us. Perhaps our mission in this centennial year of the Russian Civil War, is to make the world once again safe for Romanov rule in Russia.
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Of course, as much as it may be fun to contemplate a restoration of imperial rule in Russia, as much as it may be fun to imagine Vladimir Putin choking out his life at the end of the noose in the Trubetskoy Bastion of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul fortress, we must now turn to an examination of the political calculus of the midterms.
For the Republicans, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may prove to be a more mixed blessing then they had contemplated. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the Republicans were hoping that somehow the Democrats would defeat the Kavanaugh nomination process.
A successful Democratic resistance to the Kavanaugh nomination process, in the malign minds of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, would have enabled the Republicans to whip their base into a frothing, fulminating, spittle-flying, friendship-sundering, violence-inciting, lather of indignation against the Democrats. Unfortunately for them, the Republicans, who have a malodorous reputation for being sore winners, may well find themselves deprived of that weapon, just when they needed it in this election cycle.
However, with an undeserved victory landing in their laps like a turd, the Republicans may find themselves bereft of the very thing needed to make up the deficit they are suffering vis-à-vis Democrats in these final weeks before the midterms. By contrast, the Democrats should stay pissed off. The Kavanaugh nomination process ought particularly to piss off women voters. In that sense, a confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may keep the Democratic base angry enough and engaged enough to flip the House, and if we are lucky, the Senate, too.
However, it will be necessary for the Democratic base to stay angry and engaged. It is reasonable to believe that had the Democrats scored a victory by denying Kavanaugh confirmation, which at this point looks like it is not about to happen, that far too many Democrats would have become complacent, their anger would have been tempered, and they would not have felt it incumbent upon them to get out and vote. The Kavanaugh confirmation may very well have been the moment for Democrats where, having had the football pulled away by Republican Lucy “seventy times seven,” the Democratic Charlie Brown finally overcomes his terminal niceness, and cold cocks her.
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| Charlie BrownCoyote bit Lucy after the took the | football away for the 491st time |
Of course if Democrats do flip the House, they will possess subpoena power, and the concomitant ability to make the Trump administration miserable. If Democrats take the House, it is not unreasonable to believe that one of the very early orders of business in a democratic-controlled House would be articles of impeachment against Brett Kavanaugh.
Now, no Supreme Court justice has been impeached since Samuel Chase was impeached in 1803. While the impeachment of Chase was unsuccessful, largely because it concerned his handling of trial court matters no longer handled by justices of the Supreme Court, an impeachment of Kavanaugh, arising from legal and ethical misconduct, particularly his serial untruths before the Senate Judiciary Committee, might very well be within the realms of possibility.
Republicans will no doubt claim that any Democratic investigations, hearings, or impeachment proceedings, will be tainted by revenge, and will argue ad hominem that the motivations of the Democratic Party should be on trial. But motivations don’t matter when impeachments are on the table. What matters is whether the conduct charged itself justifies impeachment.
The impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court may well prove to be a victory from which the Republicans never recover.
Let us hope this is the case.
