The Silver Lining to Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation

As a licensed attorney of many years and as a gay American who saw his legal rights legitimized by Supreme Court rulings such Lawrence v. Texas (which struck down Virginia's sodomy laws) and Obergefell v. Hodges (which legalized same sex marriage), I understand that the Supreme Court is very important and truly impacts lives, often tremendously so.  Now, with Brett Kavanaugh on the Court after a shame FBI investigation that was constricted by the Trump/Pence regime, both Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court are damaged goods.  Many conservative justice 5-4 rulings will automatically be deemed  illegitimate and, as a piece in New York Magazine argues, will be positioned for future decisions over ruling them.  Thus, while Trump and his Vichy Republicans may have "won" in the short term, like Nazi era laws, rulings of this Supreme Court will likely be rolled back and reversed in the future.  The other current unknown is how much the Kavanaugh debacle will motivate minorities and Millennials to vote in November.  If Millennials turn out, it may be the first victory in defeating Trump and the GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

The bloody Kavanaugh fight was not the beginning, middle, or the end of this bitter fight. It was just the latest battle in a culture war that pits one of America’s two major political parties against the nation’s women. The Republican war against women began well before Donald Trump ran for president — at least as far back as 1992, when, in the aftermath of the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas debacle, the likes of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Phyllis Schlafly jawboned the GOP into adopting a misogynistic religious-right policy agenda at the Republican National Convention in Houston. The perhaps inevitable byproduct, a quarter-century later, was Trump, who as a candidate was fully embraced by his party despite having mocked a female primary rival for her looks, ridiculed a network news anchor for her presumed menstrual bleeding, and bragged on tape about his serial sexual assaults. No one should be surprised that, once elected, Trump would nominate a likely sex offender to the Supreme Court, where Kavanaugh will help fulfill the long-held GOP dream of rolling back Roe v. Wade, among other egregious ideological goals that will chip away at the rights of all Americans except white men. Right up to the moment that narcissistic moral fraud Susan Collins gave her foreordained oration sealing Kavanaugh’s confirmation, many of those in opposition were holding out hope against hope that a silver bullet would yet emerge to doom his ascent: . . . . To me such hopes underestimated the gravity of the Republican Party’s misogynist mission. Let’s face it: even if someone had unearthed a crystal-clear photo or video of Kavanaugh exposing himself to Ramirez, the Senators of the “grab ’em by the pussy” party, Collins included, would still have voted to confirm him.

Had the FBI actually conducted a thorough investigation of Kavanaugh turning up still further evidence to back up Ford’s testimony, Trump would have attacked it too, dismissing the agency and its findings as a hoax much as he has every federal law-enforcement investigation of the apparently bottomless illegalities committed by the Trump campaign and administration.

So let’s stop pretending that there is another GOP than the Trump GOP. Let’s stop declaring that Trump is suddenly sounding “presidential” just because he waits a few days before publicly trashing Blasey Ford. Let’s stop maintaining the fiction that Collins, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Bob Corker, and their fellow Vichy Republicans, including Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin, are not onboard with what’s going on.

When Collins says that she believes that the perpetrator of the attempted rape of Christine Blasey Ford was someone other than the man she elevated to the Supreme Court, she sounds like O.J. in search of the real killer of Nicole Brown Simpson. As we try to look forward after this sordid episode — no easy task — we can perhaps take a little comfort in the fact that Trump didn’t yank Kavanaugh for an alternative nominee like Amy Coney Barrett, who is just as far to the right, if not more so, and who would have been carrying far less baggage (if any) to her seat on the Court. Kavanaugh has been delegitimized to a clear majority of America over the past month. . . .
 No less delegitimized is the Supreme Court, whose already eroded image as a sanctuary of nonpartisan justice has now reached a nadir where Judge Judy may by default be the new gold standard of unbiased American jurisprudence. With such diminished moral authority, and with an unceasing run of 5–4 verdicts likely in major cases to come, the Court’s voyage to the right may well be buffeted by civic and political unrest that, as in other eras of American disunion, ultimately vacates those rulings out of sync with the majority of the nation’s citizens.

How will the Kavanaugh nomination affect the midterms, which are in less than four weeks?  It would be foolhardy to guess. Certainly the failure of the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to come up with a coherent strategy for questioning Kavanaugh hardly fills one with hope about the party’s management of the midterms. When you read simultaneous post-Kavanaugh columns in the Times headlined “Get Angry, and Get Involved” and “Liberals, This Is War,” you feel further frissons of anxiety. Such columns are right on, but they are preaching to a choir that is already registered to vote and will. The turnout the Democrats need for a blue wave — from voters under 30 and minorities — tend to skip non-presidential elections and don’t read newspaper op-ed columns.