Overcoming My Kavanaugh-Related Despair

I have a personal confession to make.

I sat down tonight to update my blog, with no shortage of topics about which to write.  My mind started to sort though them.  I reviewed my Diigo library of news articles I saved toward that end.  The nightmare that is the confirmation process of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has been unfolding at breakneck speed over the past month.  Discussing that process, and what it has revealed about our country at this point in history, is easily worth a month's worth of blog posts all by itself.

And then I came face-to-face with it.  Despair.  The same sense of hopelessness that I felt in the days immediately after the election two years ago.

It puzzled me for a while.  There are a number of reasons to not let despair wrap itself around me.  After all, the midterms are less than a month-and-a-half away, and things look very promising for the Democrats.  They will probably take back the House, they may take back the Senate (although that's a bit iffier), and they will undoubtedly make significant gains in state office-holders.  There is, of course, the current inexplicable madness here in Maryland, where Larry Hogan, routinely saved from his worst mistakes by a Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly, has a 22-point (that is not a typo) lead over Ben Jealous in the gubernatorial race.

But even that is not the principle source of my despair.  Hogan's lead is principally the product of local print and broadcast media that are scared of looking too liberal, and a voting base too tuned in to its own short-term pleasures to really dig into the issues, the positions of the candidates, and the potential consequences that four years of either man may bring.  I'm fairly confident that, if we end up with four more years of Hogan, his perception of a mandate will end up leading to mistakes that not even a legislature can easily fix, and that will remind voters that Maryland has done well as a blue state for decades for a reason--namely, being a blue state.

So, why is this blue voter/blogger feeling so blue?

I think it comes, as much as anything, from what the Kavanaugh confirmation process has revealed about the extent to which one of our two major political parties (guess which one) given a choice between democratic (small d) processes and conservative outcomes, chooses conservative outcomes every time.  In other words, it has absolutely no faith in its ability to openly, freely persuade voters that its ideas are worth adopting.  Its only faith, in fact, is not even in the ideas to which it gives lip service in its campaigns, is in maintaining institutional control of the levers of power.

I began to think about this very recently, after I read a Twitter post by Bruce Bartlett going back to the fiasco of Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat on the Supreme Court now held by Neil Gorsuch.  That Gorsuch is on the Court instead of Garland was, of course, the by-product of a campaign overseen by Mitch McCONnell over the course of 2016, one in which McCONnell invented the "Biden rule" that Presidents could not make nominations to the Court during an election year, when the voters (contrary to the Constitution) should be allowed to "weigh in" on the process.

At any rate, Bartlett's point was as simple as it was completely accurate.  Then as now, McCONnell was the Senate majority leader, and had the votes to simply give Garland, out of respect for the Constitution and the traditions of the Senate, a normal confirmation process strung out over the better part of the year, terminating in a vote where he would find a way to whip his entire caucus into rejecting the nomination.  At that point, he could easily say that it was too late to consider someone else, and that would be that.  McCONnell, in other words, controlled the process in any event; it would have been easy for him to manipulate it in a way that preserved the illusion of tradition and fairness without being too-cute-by-half about it.

So, why didn't he do it this way?

I think that there is only one possible answer.  Mitch McCONnell knew that preserving even the illusion of the process was not enough to intimidate opposition from the Democrats.  To do that, he had to deliberately sabotage democracy itself.  He had to game the system to such an extent that the Democrats would have to either go outside of it to advance their goals, or be aided by some sort of deux ex machina set of circumstances.  He was prepared to deal with the former by questioning the patriotism of the opposition, and the latter by the fact that his party's funders have the financial resources to muscle the Republicans' way though anything.

The Kavanaugh nightmare has revealed not only his preparation, but that of his caucus and his contributors, for dealing with both possibilities.  The restrictions on access to Kavanaugh's records, as well as on  the questions that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could ask him, led to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey's decision to disclose some of the documents that Republicans were hiding.  Booker's decision, as he acknowledged, put him at risk for expulsion from the Senate, and Republicans wasted no time in floating that possibility out to the press.

But then, there was the discovery that Kavanaugh might well be another Clarence Thomas, a man with a history of sexual abuse that he and his supporters were working to cover up.  Even then, it appeared that the Republicans were prepared to counter this news; within hours of it surfacing, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, produced a letter signed by no fewer than 65 women attesting to Kavanaugh's character.  The existence of this letter, combined with Kavanaugh's denials of the allegations against him, raise the possibility that Kavanaugh is willing to commit perjury to reach the Supreme Court, and that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were willing to suborn it to help him do so.  (This wasn't the first time that Kavanaugh had been exposed as a perjurer in the process, moreover.)

Then, however, things began to spin a little out of control into deux ex machina territory.

Kavanaugh's accuser, originally anonymous, came forward to say that she would be willing to testify before the committee.  Corroboration of her story slowly began to emerge.  And one of Kavanaugh's supporters worked with a public relations firm to float and promote a ridiculous story that the accuser might have confused Kavanaugh with someone else who arguably looked like him.

One might be tempted to think that Senate Republicans would decide to call it a day on Kavanaugh's nomination and move on to the task of getting re-elected in a few weeks.  But remember what I said about McCONnell:  he believes the system has been so gamed in favor of his party that he can do anything.  And with that in mind, consider the following recent quote from the majority leader.

You’re all following the current Supreme Court fight, and you will watch it unfold in the course of the next week.  President Trump has nominated a stunningly successful individual. You’ve watched the fight, you’ve watched the tactics, but here’s what I want to tell you: In the very near future, judge Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court.  So my friends, keep the faith, don’t get rattled by all of this ― we’re gonna plow right through it and do our job.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether "gonna plow right through it and do our job" is how one would characterize one's response to a situation in which sexual abuse has emerged as a major factor.  I think it's enough to say that the quote reveals what he believes his "job" to be.  Not to defend the Constitution.  Not to submit his politics to an open political process.  Not to respect his opponents and their rights to participate in that process.  No, not even to respect the concerns and injuries of a citizen who has come forward to tell her painful story and look past her own pain to protect the country from giving a monster a lifetime chance to re-shape the laws of our country.

Mitch McCONnell sees his job as protecting Mitch McCONnell  First, foremost, and last.  The same is true of nearly every Republican in Congress.  And it is especially true of the Republican who has the misfortune to occupy the White House.

And that is the source of my despair.  That, and the knowledge that enough of my fellow countrymen and women support these Republicans to the point at which I am beginning to believe that civil unrest, and perhaps even civil war, might be the only door that leads out of our current national misery.

But, if history teaches us anything, there is always a door.

And, even if I do not live to see it, or walk through it, I'll do everything I can to help others find it and use it.  As long as I can breathe, and type, that's my promise.