President Trump on Tuesday charged that Democrats had sought to use a sexual assault allegation against his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, to obstruct his confirmation, calling for a swift process for airing the accusation on Capitol Hill.Don Trumpone accused Democrats of deliberately not airing the allegation until near the end of the confirmation process. I don't have the timeline of events at my fingertips but even a serial and reflexive liar accidentally blurts out the truth once in a while, and it seems that's the case here. So I'll give him that. Dianne Feinstein's behavior in this situation is worth questioning.
That said, flash back to early 2016 and one Merrick Garland, nominated to the Supreme Court by then-President Obama. That ever-pious institutionalist Mitch McConnell declared that an appointment by a lame-duck president in his last year (!) of office, some nine months prior to the election that would determine his successor, would violate the sacred right of the people to weigh in on the matter. McConnell refused to let the Senate advise or consent on Garland's nomination, holding Antonin Scalia's former seat open until Don Trumpone squeaked into office. Thus Neil Gorsuch, whose conscience does not appear to be bothered by the naked abuse of power the majority leader committed to make him a justice.
Kavanaugh was nominated to fill Anthony Kennedy's seat much nearer to the 2018 midterms than Garland's nomination was to the 2016 presidential election. It seems to me, and to a lot of other pissed-off citizens, that both McConnell's and Trump's hypocrisy is showing.
After all, Mitch, it ain't just the presidential elections that matter to the citizenry. If you aren't the amoral, unprincipled hack that your career to date suggests you are, you'll remember 2016 McConnell's fealty to elections and their consequences for the Supreme Court.
Oh, and Don Trumpone? Nobody's buying your effusive praise for your boy Brett. Everybody but your willfully blind supporters knows you need him on the bench because Mueller's subpoena is sitting in a locked safe, just waiting for the right moment to be served on you. You need a Supreme Court that's packed with just enough Republican-leaning hacks to issue a manifestly unjust decision in your favor, granting you permission to ignore that subpoena — and maybe forbidding anybody but Congress from imposing legal consequences on you for abuse of power and gross corruption, among other charges. (The jury's still out on conspiracy with foreign agents to subvert the 2016 election.)
We know our domestic Dear Leader is corrupt and a liar. The question is whether McConnell has any trace of a conscience left in his withered soul. If he doesn't — if he pushes Kavanaugh through on the accelerated schedule Don Trumpone demands — then he'll prove his complicity in whatever high crimes and misdemeanors history eventually finds our domestic Dear Leader has committed.
Don Trumpone's view of the state of play of the Kavanaugh nomination doesn't surprise me. I'm not expecting Mitch McConnell's to, either. I expect both to go down in history as co-conspirators in a corrupt bargain to entrench the status quo: white supremacy, protection of big business at the expense of the ordinary citizen, privilege of men over women, promotion of a certain brand of Christian fundamentalism over all other beliefs (and certainly over non-belief), preservation of the fundamentally unjust distribution of wealth and income (by recognizing capital but not labor as worth defending).
I have never been a radical. Yet see what the unbelievably blatant corruption and abuse of power of both our domestic Dear Leader and his enablers/co-conspirators in this Republican Congress have done to me? I'm veering close to Marxist territory. That's how nakedly ambitious and bereft of fundamental morality and decency I think those despicable pols are.
No comments:
Post a Comment