In Their Court

In the hours after the testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee, watched by millions of Americans, the Republican leadership pushed hard to bring the confirmation process to a vote, reportedly so that Senators wouldn't have too much time to think about what they'd seen and heard.

Christine Ford was credible, and Brett Kavanaugh was incredible.  As numerous columnists and commentators pointed out, he was so angry and unhinged in demeanor, and so intemperate in his accusations against Democrats and "the left" that he disqualified himself from any kind of judgeship, let alone the Court that routinely decides political questions.  Any illusion that he might be impartial was completely and shockingly shattered.

And that's without the actual threat that he made in his opening statement, to wage war on his political opponents, which he now still hopes to do from the Supreme Court bench.

I saw the above photo on a story and thought that the editors had chosen an especially unflattering one.  But then I saw his actual testimony and realized this is what he looked like throughout it.  Self-righteous, sneering, self-pitying, entitled, contemptuous, vicious, as well as untruthful on known facts, and evasive by means of repetitiveness.  You could not cast a more obvious villain.

He was in essence mirroring the antipresident, and Republican Senators on the committee then took turns mirroring him.  They worked themselves up into a partisan frenzy, fueled by charges of a conspiracy against them for which there is no evidence--not that they bother with evidence anymore.

So now the Senate Republicans may take the elevation of total partisanship to its most brutal and obvious extent yet.  With this vote on an unfit appointment to the Supreme Court, party and ideological partisanship becomes officially supreme.  There is no other value, including justice, fairness and the common good.

It is a bitter irony that extreme right ideologues belong to something called the Federalist Society, and claim adherence to the "original intent" of the Founders.  For there was nothing the Founders found more threatening to the Republic than unbridled party partisanship.  President George Washington believed that the very existence of political parties could doom this democracy.

Their nightmare came true with Mitch McConnell and a Republican majority that is without a single statesman, a Senator with conscience informed by history and law and the delicate balances of government.  Beginning at least with 1994, the Republican party has elevated a combination of ignorant ideologues, corrupt bullshitters and hypocrites to Congress.  Caring about nothing but party politics and their ideological agenda, they effectively hijacked the electoral system in the states, to unfairly maximize Republican seats and unconstitutionally suppress non-Republican voters.

As a result, Dan Wasserman points out: "a majority of the Senate now represents 18% of the population and answers to a subset of voters that is considerably whiter, redder and more rural than the nation as a whole."

Still, the Republic had survived eras of incompetence, corruption and destructive passions, because there were a few in responsible positions who rose above it, and there were lines that no one dared to cross lest the integrity of basic institutions be compromised.

Now the traffic crossing those lines is so routine that they have been wiped away. We have learned how vulnerable our system is, and how much depended on common beliefs and ethics that the Founders and following generations simply assumed.  They thought they'd covered all the infamous possibilities with their careful checks and balances in the Constitution.  But they didn't imagine this.

Now at this hour before the votes, there is no bulwark against this deep injury to the American system and ethic beyond a few Republican Senators who might make the right decision for the wrong reasons.

Women will rightly see this as the worst recent example of male privilege--that is, of the already privileged males.  It is well known to psychologists like Dr. Ford as well as most minorities and the powerless that it's hard for the powerful to pay any attention to them.  But that's only one level of what's going on.

How can any reasonable person look at that photo and decide that this man is fit to serve on the United States Supreme Court?

Yet it's likely that Kavanaugh's most fervent extreme right supporters would happily make the above photo the official portrait of him as Supreme Court Justice.  It is a portrait of how far we've fallen.