As we settle into a post-Kavanaugh confirmation world, I wanted to flag a few posts you may have missed over the weekend, posts where I took some initial stabs on what the whole drama meant, what we can draw from it. First, this: Kavanaugh saved himself with his blistering response to Blasey Ford. Without that primal scream, I suspect he would have been defeated. He embodied Trump and won a seat on the Court because of it. Then Rule breaking. Rule breaking, largely under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, secured two Supreme Court seats for Republicans. The rule breaking worked. Expect a lot more of it. Finally, this won’t end. If the Democrats control the House of Representatives next year, they will undertake the kind of investigation Republicans refused to do. As I explained here, there’s a lot to look at.
In the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, several liberals have argued that if the Democrats win a majority again in the White House and Congress, they should consider packing the court and even limiting the tenure of court justices. I agree with these proposals by Paul Starr in The American Prospect and Barry Friedman in The New York Times. But the court’s role as a reactionary institution – one that desparately needs reform – began before Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Of all the things that have happened over the last two weeks, it’s not the biggest problem. But it has been gnawing at me. I believe it actually is a big deal, albeit in a somewhat oblique way. Let’s start with Senator Susan Collins today on CNN. Collins told Dana Bash: “I do not believe that Brett Kavanaugh was her assailant. I do believe that she was assaulted. I don’t know by whom. I’m not certain when.” I focus on Collins only because it is a simple, clear statement. But the great majority of Senate Republicans have made some version of the same argument.
So let’s just say it. This is a preposterous. Read More
A number of things have happened over the course of the last year that make me fairly confident that Russian intervention in the 2016 election provided the winning margin for Donald Trump. This doesn’t mean there weren’t numerous other factors or that it was the largest factor. It is mainly because the margin was so tight that it almost goes without saying that without it the outcome likely would have been a Clinton victory. I note this premise as a preface to this point. There is now a 5 Justice hard right majority on the Supreme Court, the oldest member of which, Clarence Thomas, is 70 years old and in apparently robust health. We should now be looking at a very different 6 to 3 progressive majority in which Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are absent and Merrick Garland and another Justice are present. Read More
I just randomly happened upon this. It’s a 1969 episode of The Dick Cavett Show with Groucho Marx. There’s a brief intro from Cavett, recorded relatively recently. In the intro Cavett explains two things about the interview. The first was that it was planned as a 30 minute segment. But Groucho was so on that they just decided to keep rolling and went a full hour. The second thing was that Cavett thought this was maybe groucho’s last interview when he really still had his edge. Cavett says he was “there, young and funny.” Everything’s relative: Marx would have been 78 or 79 at the time. His health declined fairly dramatically over the remaining eight years of his life. But he’s not only lucid. He has the impeccable comedic timing and imagination. Watch the full video after the jump … Read More
The Supreme Court announces that Brett Kavanaugh will be sworn in immediately.
The Senate’s 50-48 confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh sets into motion a series of legal battles that will unfold for years to come over abortion rights, executive power, the administrative state, and other issues yet to be foreseen. These are not the battles progressive activists expected or wanted to fight. It feels like a generational setback. You don’t usually get to pick your battles. They are thrust on you. But it is the fight at hand, and it is only just beginning.
This is a portion of a report from something called The Ben Carson News, a political newsletter from Ben Carson, now Secretary of HUD.
The Democrats are like a pack of vicious dogs with this whole Kavanaugh “crisis”, sinking their teeth in and tearing at the flesh until rivers of blood flow through the street.
They’re crazed lunatics on a seek and destroy mission to annihilate Trump and anyone associated with him.
And the driving force behind them—the reason the left has gone so full-on radical extreme left?
The Deep State.
Presumably Ben isn’t actively managing the publication while in government. And the way these things work in the right wing newsletter world, there’s a decent chance he barely had much involvement with it before he entered the Trump administration. But it’s worth seeing the kinds of things people are reading.
It’s a mere formality at this point, but the Senate is about to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The voting is set to begin shortly. TPM’s Tierney Sneed is at the Capitol.
From TPM Reader MR …
One of the most remarkable features of the Kavanaugh vote hasn’t been remarked upon enough in my opinion: the red state Democratic senators dared to come out against Kavanaugh. Heitkamp, Donnelly, McCaskill, Tester, and throw in Nelson as well: all extremely vulnerable, all past the primaries and facing red-state general election voters, and all stood firm against Kavanaugh. (One can quibble about Manchin. My take is that he will always be there when the Democrats really need him (except on coal).)