The Kavanaugh Letters

The story of the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh, and the fate of that nomination, is being told in a series of letters. The first letter that concerns us is now widely known. On the Thursday before the Judiciary Committee was originally set to vote on sending the nomination to the full Senate, Dianne Feinstein revealed that she had a letter from a woman who we now know is Dr Christine Blasey Ford, accusing Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her while they were both in high school. You will notice that I am not willing to mince words here. What Dr Ford describes is not boys fooling around. It is not simply “sexual misconduct”, as I have seen it repeatedly described in the media. That makes it sound like some harmless prank that might have deserved a grounding at the time, but does not disqualify a man from serving as anything 35 years after the fact. No, this was attempted rape, a crime that would have warranted jail time if there had been a conviction. But Dr Ford was alone with the two alleged perpetrators at the time and all had been drinking. Even disregarding the additional personal trauma that bringing charges at the time would have brought, the case was stacked against Dr Ford, in what would have come down to a he said, she said trial. Rapists and attempted rapists are acquitted all the time in these situations, because we as a society choose too often to believe the man, not the woman. Even now, Charles Grassley and the other Republican men on the Judiciary Committee have declared that they believe Kavanaugh over Dr Ford, even though they have yet to hear the testimony.

But I said that this is the story of a series of letters. It is the second letter that interests me the most. Within 24 hours of Feinstein revealing Dr Ford’s letter, the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee released a letter signed by 65 women who have known Bret Kavanaugh since high school, and who vouched for his character and integrity. Now I was not the most popular boy in my high school, but there were far fewer than 65 women who knew me then or now, well enough to make such a claim. So that’s one problem. This letter was vaguely worded, with nothing in it that is specific to Dr Ford’s accusations, and we are asked to believe that it came together in 24 hours. Yet, when Politico, already armed with the names all 65 signees, tried to locate them for interviews, they could only find 10 women. Whoever wrote this letter and arranged for all 65 women to sign it had to start without any names at all. So this letter did not come together in 24 hours. It had to have been prepared well in advance in case it was needed. And why would such a letter, signed only by women, be needed at all? The only answer I can see is that someone on the Judiciary Committee who was determined to make sure Kavanaugh got confirmed knew that Kavanaugh had a problem involving his treatment of women. Kavanaugh was vetted in private by the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, and he was also screened by members of the administration before his nomination. Somebody somewhere in that process had to have learned of an incident or incidents that might come to light, and felt the need to have a letter like this available in case that happened. Whoever it was did not craft the letter specifically as a rebuttal to Dr Ford, because they knew of several possible incidents, and did not know which one or ones they would have to defend against. Sure enough, a second possible “incident”, this one involving sexual harassment instead of attempted rape, has now come to light. The possibility of multiple incidents is also born out by Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook entry. I will not reproduce it here, because it is borderline pornographic when you know how to translate the slang. But the gist of it is that Kavanaugh bragged about his sexual conquests, and he considered the female counterparts in his social scene at the time as disposable objects, to be used once for his gratification, and then forgotten.

To complete the series of letters I referred to at the start of this piece, there was a draft of a letter with 200 signees stating that Dr Ford’s accusation is consistent with what they knew of Bret Kavanaugh’s reputation at the time. And there is the new letter from Deborah Ramirez, who recounts the sexual harassment incident that she says happened when Kavanaugh was a freshman at Yale. But again, I believe it is the second letter that begs the most important questions. Who wrote it, when, and why? Let us have testimony from the 65 signees, addressing these points. The pattern that is emerging is that Kavanaugh mistreats women when he is drunk, so let him discuss his current drinking habits under oath in a public hearing. Grassley keeps saying that his job is to make sure Kavanaugh is confirmed. It is not. His job, and his responsibility to those who elected him, is to conduct fair, thorough, and impartial public hearings to determine if Bret Kavanaugh deserves a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. If Grassley has decided beforehand that he will vote to confirm Kavanaugh no matter what, he and his fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who have made similar statements must recuse themselves from this decision.

The New Normal

On Wednesday night, I set about the work of finding out about Neil Gorsuch. I had done some of this the night before, but now everyone would have posted their articles, and I would find what I was looking for, or so I thought. You see, my earliest memories of the Supreme Court are the phrase, “the Cogswell defeat”, although I really only began to pay serious attention during the Reagan presidency. But I am used to articles about Republican appointees portraying them as dangerous extremists who are well outside the mainstream. In particular, the Justice who Gorsuch is closest to in terms of ideology is Antonin Scalia, and I remember Scalia being described that way when he was nominated. But the articles I kept finding about Gorsuch duly noted his ideological leanings, but they emphasized how eminently qualified he is, and how hard he would be to defeat on his merits.

In general, I have seen the mainstream media grow a spine since the election, so I was puzzled. This was not a case of false equivalency, and it certainly was not prompted by any fear of a tweetstorm by Trump, so what was going on? How could someone who I know is so dangerous be written about in such a blasé manner? Then it hit me. In reporting about Gorsuch this way, Gorsuch is being presented as well within the mainstream because the stream has changed course. Back when Scalia was being confirmed things were different. Some statements that probably would have led to Scalia’s defeat in his confirmation hearings include: taking the position that corporations could not be restricted as to campaign contributions without restricting their freedom of speech; or arguing that one could refuse to obey federal law regarding your employees if you objected on your personal religious grounds, without regards to the religious views of said employees; or advocating that racism no longer existed, and therefore it was no longer necessary for the Justice Department to monitor election laws in states with the worst records of discrimination. Gorsuch, however, can take all of these positions in his hearings, because they are all now matters of settled law. Scalia and his allies on the Court won, and these are now mainstream ideas. When it comes to the Supreme Court, this is the new normal.

When you realize this, you also realize both how Trump became president and why this is so dangerous. Nixon began to make the scapegoating of minorities acceptable, although in veiled language, and he started the “war on drugs”. Reagan planted the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy were the best way to create middle class jobs, even though it was a mix of strong unions and safety net programs that had fueled the phenomenal economic growth in the 1960s. George W Bush created the surveillance state that we have today, and created the political climate that made Obama unwilling to try to dismantle it, and he also made torture an option for our military. All of these and more represent the foundation that Donald Trump has to build on, and all of these were outrageous ideas in their day. Now we have before us the threat that Islamophobia will become a driver of our foreign policy. We face the possibility that abortions and gay marriages could become illegal again. And we see every day the grab for more and more presidential power. Over the next four years, all of this and more could become the new normal, the standard by which our next president and Supreme Court will be judged.

At least until the 2018 elections, the best we can hope for as progressives is to prevent as much erosion as possible. We must recognize that corporatist Democrats are and should be our allies in this. We must do everything we can to insure that the Democrats, any Democrats, win both houses of Congress in 2018. Even if the Democrats had won just the Senate in 2016, we would not be talking now about the nuclear option for Gorsuch’s confirmation, and the cabinet confirmations would have gone very differently. The election of someone like Evan Bayh in Indiana would have brought us that much closer to the majority we needed to prevent Rex Tillerson from becoming Secretary of State, for example. Now we have the much more difficult job of finding a handful of Republicans to join us in preventing the new normal of 2020 from being a world we don’t want to live in. We must accept and elect allies wherever we can find them, and save the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party for a time when we have prevented Trumpism from becoming the new normal.

Today’s song:

A Cynic’s Call to Action

This past week, Cory Booker got raked over the coals by progressives for opposing a measure that would supposedly have allowed the government and citizens to save money by importing medicines from Canada. Booker was one of twelve Democrats who voted against the measure, and someone created a meme showing how much each of them received in donations from the pharmaceutical industry. Booker was singled out among this group because he is the only one who is considered to be a presidential hopeful in 2020. No one thought to ask, but if Cory Booker was a pariah to progressives for opposing this measure, does that mean Ted Cruz is a now a progressive hero for voting for it? Of course not. Which means it is time to talk about how to channel political cynicism to get as much of what we want as possible under the actual conditions in our country now.

First, understand that the Klobuchar/ Sanders amendment that Booker voted against and Cruz supported was never going to have any real effect, nor was it supposed to. It was pure symbolism. Mike Enzi, the Republican senator from Wyoming who heads the Budget Committee, would have gained the discretion to pass a bill to import drugs from Canada as a means of lowering costs to consumers, by reallocating funds approved for his committee. It’s every bit as convoluted as it sounds, and Enzi signaled with his no vote that he never would have used this power. Booker came up with the lame excuse that he opposed the measure over concerns about whether medicines from Canada were safe. Maybe he just thought that he could not explain to his constituents that he wanted to hold out for a measure that would actually do something. Considering some of the blaring headlines I saw on this vote, that makes sense to me.

It is time and past time to stop demanding it all from our politicians. Over the next four years, we will learn how much we have lost in the 2016 election. The election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority in the Senate means that Citizens United is with us for another thirty years at least. Trump will appoint justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia, and the Senate only needs a simple majority to get them approved. Filling Scalia’s seat will restore the 5-4 right wing majority, and Trump might get the chance to replace both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer as well. This also means there is no chance of restoring the Voting Rights Act. If you want to talk about constitutional amendments, look up the history of the Equal Rights Amendment and how it was defeated. So that means that someone like Cory Booker or Hillary Clinton has to take dirty money for their campaigns, or risk being outspent into oblivion by their Republican opponent. They can not count on the minority vote, because voter suppression tactics like those used in the 2016 election will go unchallenged by this Court. Booker in particular must take donations from the pharmaceutical industry. Booker is from New Jersey, as I am, and pharmaceuticals are our major industry. Bristol Meyers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson have their corporate headquarters here, and many other big pharma companies have a major presence in the state as well. So does that mean Booker is influenced by big pharma? Probably, but the better question is would we be better off if his Senate seat fell to a Republican? I hope everyone can tell by now that there are vast differences between the corporate Democrats and the insanity that is today’s Republican Party. If not, the next four years should be very instructive. For starters, we can not hope for any meaningful check on Trump’s conflicts of interest until and unless the Democrats win a majority in either the House or the Senate. That would give them all of the Committee chairmanships, which are necessary to start any meaningful investigation. In the Senate, a majority would also give the Democrats the power to oppose at least the most extreme Trump choices for the Supreme Court.

All of this means that we can not afford the luxury of ideological purity, especially not over the next four years. If Trump is to be opposed, we can not undermine someone like Cory Booker for taking corporate donations, when the alternative is a second Trump or Pence term. By extension, we are that much further away from universal healthcare, but our present concern is to save as much of the Affordable Care Act as we can, and hope the next Democratic president and Congress can improve it. Likewise, we can not hope to see a $15 minimum wage over the next four years; instead, we may be fighting just to keep a minimum wage at all. Our first task must be to attack the cancer of gerrymandering, and that means voting in large numbers in the local elections in 2017. The governors and state legislators we elect now will control the redistricting process in 2020, so we vote this year to improve the chances of seating more progressives in the House then.