Supreme Court: Yes to Gays, Clean Water and Sanctuary Cities, No to Trump/Pence

Today was a wonderful day for LGBT Americans as the U.S. Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County ruled that existing civil rights non-discrimination laws regarding sex applied to LGBT citizens, thereby effectively making employment discrimination and other forms of anti-LGBT discrimination illegal nationwide. It was also a good day for California which saw the Court reject the Trump/Pence regime attack on so-called sanctuary cities   It was also a good day for environmental activists as the Court left the Clean Water Act intact.  The big loser was the Trump/Pence regime which was on the opposite side of the issue in all three cases.  The other big losers were white evangelical Christofascists who sought to have their bigotry and hatred placed above the law so that they could discriminate against LGBT citizens at will.  Indeed, some of the usually suspect in the Christofascist world are shrieking as if the world was ending - and also attacking Trump for his Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion.   As a gay man, it is hard to describe my feelings.  Had this decision been handed down almost 20 years earlier, I might have been spared a financial nightmare when I was forced from a law firm for being gay.  At the time, I had zero employment non-discrimination protections.  I am SO happy that in the future LGBT individuals may be spared the experience that befell me. A piece at SCOTUS Blog explains the importance and impact of this ruling:

In affirming that Title VII’s broad scope prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the Supreme Court immediately ended a form of stigmatic injury suffered by millions of citizens who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. The question whether the phrase “because of … sex” means what it says in the context of employer actions prohibited by Title VII has been definitively answered—it does. That is, because sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be explained as traits that someone has without making reference to the sex of the person, discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is also because of an individual’s sex. The Supreme Court also once again concluded that it makes no difference under the text of Title VII whether an employer intended also to discriminate based on an additional reason, like motherhood or the identity of one’s spouse, if sex is a basis for the decision.

With that legal uncertainty removed, gone too is the practical uncertainty faced by real individuals weighing questions of whether to make career moves, geographic moves or moves to reveal aspects of their personal lives by openly sharing their authentic selves at work.

The opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County fulfills the best promises of textualism. The Supreme Court’s confirmation that all people have the right to be given the full measure of protection afforded to them by laws having meaning anchored in the written word is a powerful statement about the enduring power of people-led movements.

Maryland, along with 20 other states and the District of Columbia, expressly prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity through statute or regulation. Title VII now definitively joins these statutes in prohibiting all forms of discrimination based on sex, including discrimination based on traits like sexual orientation and gender identity that cannot be separated from an individual’s sex. The Bostock decision affirms that citizens may rely on the achievement of broad legislative protections against discrimination to provide long-lasting victory.

Importantly, the confirmation of Title VII’s sweep immediately cements protections for federal government workers, no matter their state of residency, and for individuals who work in states that have not yet specifically prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In those states, LGBT workers facing discrimination may now bring complaints under Title VII to directly improve their own working conditions.

Other benefits will accrue over time. As Maryland and the 20 states and District of Columbia set forth in their amicus brief, discrimination is expensive. Reducing salary disparities, health care instability and increased health care costs due to the mental health effects of stigmatic discrimination will immediately benefit individuals and the states that care for them. There is also a body of evidence demonstrating that private industry benefits from reducing discrimination because of the increased creativity and productivity LGBT people bring to the workplace when they are included and when they are freed from the health effects of stigmatization. LGBT individuals and their families benefit from better working conditions, and so do states, which experience decreased use of their public benefits system and increased tax revenue as a result of increased innovation and productivity.

Indeed, everyone benefits except religious extremists - think Trump's evangelical base - motivated by hatred and a sick need to have others to denigrate so that they can feel a sense superiority.  

But, as noted, LBGT Americans were not the only winners today.  In its opinion in County of Maui v. Hawaiʻi Wildlife Fund the Court (including Justice Kavanaugh) sided with clean water advocates that point source discharges to navigable waters through groundwater are regulated under the Clean Water Act.   The Supreme Court also rejected the Trump administration’s effort to blow a big hole in the Clean Water Act’s protections for rivers, lakes, and oceans. As explained here these were defeats for the Trump/Pence regime:

In other words, the Clean Water Act prohibits unpermitted discharge of pollution “into navigable waters, or when the discharge reaches the same result through roughly similar means.” In doing so, the Court rejected the Trump administration’s polluter-friendly position in the clearest of terms: “We do not see how Congress could have intended to create such a large and obvious loophole in one of the key regulatory innovations of the Clean Water Act.”

Lastly, the Court also ended Trump's war on blue states that include so-call sanctuary cities.  A column in the Los Angeles Times looks at the Court's action (it is noteworthy that both of Trump's appointees ruled against his regime): 

Since his inauguration in 2017, President Trump has waged a mean-spirited, costly and unnecessary war against undocumented immigrants — many of whom have been living in this country for years and have been hard-working, law-abiding members of the their communities. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed Monday that states and cities can’t be forced to support that pernicious effort.

California has been a regular target of Trump’s anger and frustration, particularly after the state passed a so-called sanctuary law in 2017 that limits how state and local law enforcement agencies cooperate with federal immigration agents. Former Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions sued to overturn the state’s restrictions, complaining that California was trying to secede from federal law.

The Supreme Court brought that lawsuit to a halt Monday when it sided with California and rejected the Trump administration’s challenge. Notably, even Trump’s two appointees on the court — Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — refused to hear the administration’s appeal.

At least for now, my faith in the Court is somewhat restored.  It would seem that with Trump's decline in the polls, even his appointees to the Court have decided to put the law first and Trump's whims and misogyny last. 

The Supreme Court Is on the Brink

While the Supreme Court made the right call late last Friday in rejecting a church challenge to California's shutdown order involving church services, what is disturbing is that four of the justices (two are Trump appointees) put right wing ideology and a preference to grant special rights to far right christian groups - I use a small "c" because many are Christian in name only - ahead of public safety and religious freedom for all citizens. But for Chief Justice Roberts' shift to vote with the so-called "liberals," gubernatorial orders across the nation would have been struck down.  These four justices exemplify the extremists and ideologues that Trump and his Senate Republican enablers are appointing to life time positions on the federal bench.  The harm being done will last literally for decades.  Should Trump get to appoint another justice to the Supreme Court, the damage could be irreparable during the lifetimes of anyone over 40 years of age.  It is yet another reason Trump must be defeated in November.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the politicizing of the Court by Trump and the far right.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court made the indisputably right call last week when it refused to block California from limiting attendance at religious services in an effort to control the spread of Covid-19.

Given the obvious difference between walking through a store and sitting among fellow worshipers for an hour or more, as well as the documented spread of the virus through church attendance in such places as Sacramento (71 cases), Seattle (32 cases) and South Korea (over 5,000 cases traced to one person at a religious service), California’s limits are both sensitive and sensible, hardly the basis for constitutional outrage or judicial second-guessing.

So why did the court’s order, issued as midnight approached on Friday night, fill me with dread rather than relief?

It was because in a ruling that should have been unanimous, the vote was 5 to 4. And it was because of who the four dissenters were: the four most conservative justices, two of them appointed by the president who a couple of months ago was demanding that churches be allowed to open by Easter and who, even before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was openly encouraging protests in the capitals of states not reopening as quickly as he would like.

As an astonished country witnessed on Monday night, as he [Trump] held a Bible in front of a church near the White House after demonstrators were violently cleared from his path, Donald Trump is using religion as a cultural wedge to deflect attention from the consequences of his own ineptitude. The recognition that four Supreme Court justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — would have invoked the court’s power to undermine fact-based public policy in the name of a misbegotten claim of religious discrimination was beyond depressing. It was terrifying.

Take a look at Justice Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion. “California’s latest safety guidelines discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses,” he wrote. “Such discrimination violates the First Amendment.”

It’s interesting that while Justices Gorsuch and Thomas signed Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion, Justice Alito did not. Perhaps he’s just too good a lawyer to subscribe to the flimsy analysis underlying this opinion. . . . . but he evidently couldn’t be bothered to explain his own dissenting vote. And no less than his fellow dissenters, he obviously inhaled the unfounded claim of religious discrimination that the president has injected into an atmosphere already saturated with polarizing rhetoric.

The concept of discrimination, properly understood, simply doesn’t fit this case. California is not subjecting things that are alike to treatment that’s different. Churches are not like the retail stores or “cannabis dispensaries” in Justice Kavanaugh’s list of “comparable secular businesses.” Sitting in communal worship for an hour or more is not like picking up a prescription, or a pizza, or an ounce of marijuana. You don’t need a degree in either law or public health to figure that out. If anything, California is giving churches preferential treatment, since other places where people gather in large numbers like lecture halls and theaters are still off limits.

So what was the dissenters’ problem?

Last weekend was also Shavuot, a major Jewish holiday. But it’s the Christian calendar about which recently appointed federal judges seem exclusively concerned. In April, Judge Justin Walker of the Federal District Court in Louisville, Ky., blocked that city from enforcing a ban on drive-in church services. “On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter,” his overheated opinion began.

The only other opinion filed in this case was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, explaining why the court was denying the church’s request. I am willing to bet that he never intended to write anything; orders denying applications of this sort are typically issued without explanation.

But he must have concluded that the Kavanaugh dissent couldn’t go unrebuted. Writing just for himself in five paragraphs devoid of rhetoric and labeled “concurring in denial of application for injunctive relief,” he offered a sober explanation of the obvious. He noted that “similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time.” The California rule, he observed, “exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks, and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods.”

After noting the severity of the pandemic and the “dynamic and fact-intensive” question of how to respond to it, Chief Justice Roberts said that the politically accountable state officials charged with answering that question were entitled to act within “broad limits” and “should not be subject to second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”

Predictably, the chief justice was excoriated on the political right, in recognition that his vote was the one that mattered, just as in the Obamacare case eight years ago, for which the right has never forgiven him.

Everyone who cares about the Supreme Court is busy looking for signs of how John Roberts will navigate the political thicket in which the court finds itself, how he will reconcile his conservative heart and his institution- and history-minded head.

Justice Kavanaugh might have chosen to observe the norm, casting his vote without issuing an opinion that served only to raise the political temperature. Instead of that unspoken gesture toward collegiality, he gave us more proof that the polarization roiling the country has the Supreme Court in its grip. The court can’t save us; that much is clear. It can’t even save itself.

The Women of Maine vs. Susan Collins

Susan Collins has deserved to be defeated for years as she has claimed to be a moderate Republican but then vote for some of the most reactionary GOP agenda items.  During the Trump occupancy of the White House her double speak has been even more egregious and if current polls are accurate, she may be sent into, in my view, a much needed forced retirement.  In some ways Collins is like moderate Republicans I knew 25 years ago who were at the time indeed moderates who eschewed the most insane elements of the GOP agenda typically linked to Christofascists or extreme anti-tax fanatics.  But over time, despite their protestations to the contrary, they have drunk deeply of the GOP Kool-Aid, including embracing the racism espoused by Donald Trump and the white supremacists that are a key element of Trump's base (I don't reference evangelicals separately because they are increasingly one and the same with the white supremacists).  Now, Collins is facing a backlash from Maine voters who are tired of her self prostitution to Trump and Mitch McConnell and the ugliest elements of today's GOP.  A lengthy piece in Politico Magazine looks at Collins' self-inflicted political difficulties.  The reality is that there are no longer any "moderate Republicans" - they all put party ahead of their constituents, especially average Americans.   Here are article excerpts:

For most of her nearly 24-year Senate career, Collins has been a quiet, head-down, never-miss-a-vote lawmaker known for an unwavering moderate approach that balances ardent fiscal conservatism with a liberal-pleasing reputation for supporting women’s reproductive rights. Then came the polarizing Trump presidency, and suddenly Collins found herself at the consequential center of bitter political battles—on issues ranging from the proposed repeal of Obamacare, which she resisted, to tax cuts and the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, which she supported. She is far from the only lawmaker to have cast deciding votes; however, Collins’ reputation has taken a conspicuously harsh hit. In 2015, after winning reelection with about 70 percent of the vote, she was considered one of America’s most beloved senators. Today, she is the most reviled, derided for her increasingly lockstep party-line votes and for the often belabored manner in which she has justified herself. She’s been lampooned by "Saturday Night Live"; The New Yorker recently satirized her for taking hours of deep reflection before deciding to order whatever Mitch McConnell is having for lunch.

But it is in Maine, where “Bye-Bye Susan” bumper stickers have become common, that the opposition represents an existential threat as she pursues a fifth term. Last year, during the presidential impeachment process, Collins’ refusal to attend several town hall forums begat another bumper sticker asking: “Where’s Susan?” Prior to the state’s shelter-in-place order, protesters gathered almost weekly outside her six state offices, taking issue with everything from her decision to side with President Donald Trump on family separation to her embrace of corporate tax cuts. Residents have made a pastime out of sharing videos of gotcha-conversations with Collins at fundraisers and in airports. In February, Colby College issued a poll showing Collins with a 42 percent approval rating in the state. Among women under the age of 50, her approval is only 25 percent. Her Democratic challenger, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, has a slight edge in recent polls, and the Cook Political Report now lists the race as a toss-up.

[I]n a state with the nation’s highest percentage of both female registered voters and women who turn out to vote (about 77 percent and 65 percent, respectively, according to the Center for American Women and Politics), Collins’ plummeting support among women represents an especially dire threat to her reelection prospects. The Kavanaugh vote has energized outside groups such as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which recently rolled out a six-figure ad campaign denouncing Collins for turning her back on Mainers. But many women voters I spoke to in towns around the state say that while the Kavanaugh vote angered them, they perceive a larger trend—that Collins has abandoned her native Maine in favor of standing with her GOP peers and funding from corporate donors. Understanding the roots of Collins free fall is key to understanding not only her predicament but the mood of the electorate—in Maine and the nation as a whole—heading into November. It’s a simple question with complex answers: Is it Collins who has changed or is it the voters? For years, Maine was the crown of Yankee Republicanism. The state produced socially progressive, pragmatic, secular moderates like Senators Margaret Chase Smith and William Cohen, who also served as secretary of Defense under Democrat Bill Clinton. Collins began her career as a Cohen staffer. When she first ran for office in 1996, she carried that mantle. She was elected on a platform that included strong opposition to the death penalty, and support for reproductive rights and congressional term limits (she vowed she’d serve no more than two terms, then return to Maine and let someone else take her place).
 The state has one of the highest percentages of independent voters—about 38 percent, according to the Secretary of State’s office. And even voters affiliated with a party regularly split tickets in the ballot booth. In 2008, Collins won all 16 counties in the state. That same year, Barack Obama took all but one. Both succeeded by distancing themselves from the policies of George W. Bush. In 2014, Collins was reelected with nearly 70 percent of the vote; two years later, Hillary Clinton picked up three out of four electoral votes, while Trump collected just one.

[S]he also prides herself on voting against her party more than any other senator, in either party.

But some observers of her career say those number don’t really add up—or at least they haven’t in over a decade. They say she’s rarely, if ever, opposed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell since the 2009 stimulus debate (Collins famously stepped across party lines to vote for the resulting recovery act, but only after gutting it of several key provisions, including funding for schools and pandemic flu preparations).
[I]n September 2017 she resisted Trump’s highest legislative priority—overturning Obamacare—by announcing she would not support a repeal plan. Pundits on the far right accused her of being a closet Democrat. But many in her home state cheered the independent-minded senator they’d long known and loved.

That enthusiasm began to erode in December that year, when Collins voted in favor of a tax reform bill that not only included the biggest cut to the corporate tax rate but also included a substantial cut for wealthy Americans. Then, in 2018, came the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, widely viewed as a anti-abortion ally with a history of writing in favor of stricter governmental regulation of abortion . . . . . the pressure on Collins to reject his nomination became intense. Sexual assault survivors flew to Washington to share their stories and opposition to his candidacy.

It also brought unexpected financial challenges. In the weeks leading up to the Kavanaugh confirmation, several nonprofit organizations in the state banded together to launch a crowd-funded campaign to fuel any potential Collins challenger. The campaign stipulated that any money raised would be allocated only if the sitting senator voted in favor of Kavanaugh. They quickly raised almost $4 million, even though Democrats had yet to choose a candidate to oppose her.

On October 5, 2018, Collins took to the Senate floor with a 45-minute speech announcing her support for Kavanaugh and delivering a harsh rebuke of what she called “a confirmation process that has become so dysfunctional, it looks more like a caricature of a gutter-level political campaign than a solemn occasion.” This stand aligned her with some of Trump’s most reflexive defenders in the Senate, such as Joni Ernst of Iowa and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, while Murkowski, with whom she had once been allied in opposition to DeVos, remained conspicuously silent about her views of Kavanaugh, choosing to vote “present” rather than in favor of nominee.

But has Collins turned her back on her supporters? Has she actually transformed from a reliable check on Trump, as she seemed to be in the early days of his administration, to a dependable ally who offers token criticism but votes with him on all key issues? Or have voters become so rigid in their opposition to Trump that they can no longer abide her support for anything that might be considered helpful to the leader of her party?

“Every decision she makes seems to align her more closely with the Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell movement,” Shea says. “Here in Maine, that’s become the anvil around her neck.”

Shea also points to figures like congressional voting records maintained by ProPublica. In 2009, Collins voted against her party 31 percent of the time. In 2019, that figure had dropped to around 11 percent. And while some of those votes included opposition to two federal judges otherwise supported by her party, many others were on issues considered insubstantial by congressional watchers.

The majority of the 1,008 respondents to the February Colby College poll felt that Collins was more interested in voting with political affiliations, rather than principles. It’s also a big reason why current Democratic state Speaker of the House Sara Gideon—a relative political newcomer who moved to the state in 2004—is ahead of Collins in both recent polls and fundraising efforts for the first quarter of this year, even though her party has yet to hold its primary.

Gideon has also received an endorsement from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy nonprofit that endorsed Collins in her 2008 and 2014 campaigns.  . . . . In 2007 and 2008, Collins scored a perfect 100 percent. A decade later, it was 21 percent, thanks to her vote to confirm David Bernhardt as secretary of the Interior, and her endorsement of anti-environmental bills like one that sought to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

“A member of Congress is expected to make up her mind about what is in the best interest of her constituents. Again and again, during Trump’s presidency, Collins has shown she’s not willing to do that,” Sittenfeld says. “We have an extreme and radical president who has so little interest in what is good for places like Maine. We need a champion who will stand up to him.”

“Maine women and Maine voters have remained consistent,” she told me last week. “Susan Collins is just not the leader she once was, particularly when it comes to reproductive health and rights. In the past, we counted on Senator Collins to put women’s health and well-being ahead of partisanship and political games, but we can no longer do so.”

Hopefully, Collins will be shown the door by voters come November.  Like just about everyone in the GOP, she has sold her soul. 

U.S. Supreme Court: How to Preserve White Power in Four Easy Steps

With Donald Trump's two appointments to the U,S. Supreme Court - Neil Gorsuch, who believes right wing Christian beliefs trump the civil rights of others, and Brett Kavanaugh -having shifted the balance of the Court to the far right, the Court now stands poised to implement the pro-white, pro-right wing Christian, bigotry of the Trump/GOP base.  Somewhat incredibly, conservative Chief Justice John Roberts is now the swing vote.  As a column in the Washington Post notes, a series of cases have the potential to preserve disproportionate white power thanks in no small part to the peevish Bernie Sanders who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Whatever legal horrors may be forth coming, responsible citizens never forget to remember that these Sanders voters and Jill Stein voters ushered in this potential nightmare (something 20% of Sanders supporters have said they will do again in 2020 if their cult leader is not the Democrat nominee);  Here are column highlights from the Washington Post on today's oral arguments and what may be forthcoming:

The Trump administration and Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices Tuesday held a legal seminar on how to preserve white hegemony in four easy steps.

Step 1: Devise a discriminatory policy.
In this case, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, after consulting with Stephen Bannon, who was then President Trump’s nationalist “alt-right” adviser, resolved to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census for the first time in 70 years. This would have the well-documented effect of reducing responses to the census by Latinos (from citizens and noncitizens alike), resulting in the undercounting of that population for purposes of congressional apportionment and $900 billion in federal funding.

Step 2: Create a pretext.
In this case, Ross lied to Congress, saying the Justice Department wanted  the citizenship question added to help enforce the Voting Rights Act — a claim three lower courts dismissed as pretextual. In fact, emails showed that Ross (with White House encouragement) was the one who pushed for the citizenship question and quietly dragooned the Justice Department into asking for the question to be added.

Step 3: Muddy the waters.
In this case, Solicitor General Noel Francisco and conservative justices raised doubts about the statistical capabilities of the Census Bureau, claiming it couldn’t accurately “quantify” the damage that would be done by adding a citizenship question because the alternative way to get such information was an “untested statistical model.” Why “untested”? Because the administration denied its experts’ requests to run tests before leaping to a decision.

Step 4: Blame the victim.
Francisco, the top Trump administration lawyer, saved this nastiness for the final minute of the 80-minute argument. If the court disallows the citizenship question, he said, “you are effectively empowering any group in the country to knock off any question on the census if they simply get together and boycott it,” he said, raising the possibility of a boycott by gender-nonbinary people.

For decades, the decennial census sent to each household hasn’t included a citizenship question (it’s instead asked on surveys), and for good reason. Latino residents — legal or illegal — tend to resist such questions out of an (unfounded) fear the government might use the information against them or their relatives. Census Bureau research has projected a drop of at least 5.1 percent from noncitizen households if the question is added, part of an estimated undercount of 6.5 million people. This contradicts the Constitution’s requirement for an “actual enumeration of the people” — not just citizens.

But the conservative justices seemed willing to overlook Ross’s lie and the administration’s dubious justifications.

Francisco began with a deception, saying the citizenship question “has been asked as part of the census in one form or another for nearly 200 years.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked Francisco the same question three times before he acknowledged that the citizenship question had been abandoned in 1960, in part, because it would depress the count of noncitizens. . . . So the administration is free to disregard millions of Latinos in the census — and the courts have no say.

This seemed to be fine with Republican-appointed justices. Justice Samuel Alito said he was satisfied that the accuracy would be 98 percent if the citizenship question were asked (never mind those 6 million or so left out).

Trump’s two appointees developed a newfound fondness for foreign law: Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out that the United Nations recommends a citizenship question, and Justice Neil Gorsuch said “virtually every English-speaking country” asks one.

More disturbing were their counterfactual theories claiming some other, unknown variable might cause Latinos not to answer the census. (No such notions appeared in the case record, and census experts had already controlled for other variables.)

The justifications all sounded a bit “contrived,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it, like so much “post-hoc rationalization” of a decision made for another reason.

When you consider that the indisputable effect of adding the citizenship question will be to suppress Latinos’ census participation — and by extension to suppress their political clout — it is difficult not to be cynical about what that reason is.

That's right, a 6.5 million person under count.  To put that in easily understood terms, that is more than 10 times the population of Wyoming or larger than the populations of the Washington, Houston, Miami or Philadelphia metropolitan areas. 

My big complaint with the column - and the mainstream media in general - is that it persists in using the word "conservative" to describe justices and others who are in fact outright racists and bigots.  In the context of the upcoming LGBT employment non-discrimination cases before the Court this term and next term, no doubt "conservative" will be used instead of homophobic and anti-LGBT bigots.  It is far past time that the media begins to call out judges, justices, elected officials and candidates for office for what they truly are and throw away the false and deceptive term "conservative" once and for all. 

California Supreme Court: Chief Justice: I'm Done With GOP

The exodus of sane and decent people from the Republican Party continues.  The latest refugee?  The chief justice of the California Supreme Court, a Republican appointee.  Here reasons were numerous and include the confirmation of the unfit Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court by Senate Republicans and the racist policies of the Trump/Pence regime.  A piece in The Advocate looks at this latest defection from the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

California's chief justice, who was appointed by Republican former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — made a stunning announcement on Thursday, saying she left the GOP.

Cantil-Sakauye told CALmatters that the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh were her breaking point. She doesn't say whether it was the accusations that Kavanaugh tried to rape a teenage girl or his unprofessional, partisan responses to senators, instead remarking, "You can draw your own conclusions."

Only the second woman to serve as California's chief justice, and the first Filipina-American in the role, Cantil-Sakauye said, "I felt compelled to make a choice now. It better suits what I do and how I approach issues." She said her family and friends told her, "you didn't leave the party. The party left you."

Cantil-Sakauye wrote a letter last year to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, condeming the "stalking of undocumented immigrants" to jail them at courthouses. The justice warned the Trump officials that their policy would deter immigrants from reporting crimes, calling the policy "neither safe nor fair." Kelly and Sessions refused to deter their hard-line practice and told her California's immigration policies "threaten public safety."

The justice is the latest Republican to jump ship from the party, which is near collapse in California — Republicans make up less than a quarter of the electorate and GOP politicians in the state suffered a wipe-out in the midterm election. The GOP's troubles aren't exclusive to California; a state Senator in Kansas just announced she was also abandoning the party of Trump.

Like me, I did not leave the GOP - the GOP left me.  And so many, many others.

The Far-Reaching Threats of a Conservative Court

Of all the things Donald Trump and Vichy Republicans have done to date to undermine democracy in America, perhaps the worse is the shifting of the U.S. Supreme Court to the far right.  With a majority of justices who seemingly would undo progressive legislation from the New Deal forward and happily see a return of the robber baron days of the Gilded age, the damage could be immense.  The circumstances also highlight the need to do something to change the make up of the U.S. Senate where the disproportionate representation of small states - Wyoming with two U.S. Senators has a smaller population than the cities of Virginia Beach and Norfolk when added together - wildly exceeds anything the Founding Fathers could have envisioned.  Indeed, the Senate now almost guarantees a tyranny of the minority of anti-modernity, racist red states which in general have smaller populations than blue states which for the most part fund the federal government hand outs to red states. A column in the New York Times looks at the coming threat from a right wing Supreme Court which will likely bring us more pollution, inaction on climate change and an erosion of individual rights and protections.  Here are column excerpts:

With the start of the Supreme Court’s new term, many people are wondering whether the conservative majority, which has taken a further step to the right with the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, will overturn Roe v. Wade.

But that’s not where the action is. As two cases argued before the court this month illustrate, the real question is whether it will undermine the system of government that has protected the public from abusive business practices since the New Deal.

The two cases might seem esoteric, and far removed from government protection of workers and consumers. Gundy v. United States involved a challenge to the attorney general’s extension of sex-crime-registration law to offenders convicted before the law was enacted. Nielsen v. Preap involved a government policy that deprived certain unauthorized immigrants of some procedural protections against deportation.

The conservative majority can, and most likely will, rule against the government using broad theories that would also eat away at the constitutional foundations of the New Deal system, which is essential for protecting health and safety, the environment and much else.

Since the New Deal, Congress has authorized regulatory agencies to make policy by issuing regulations. These agencies are now a familiar part of our government. They include the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is currently aiding hurricane victims in Florida. Agency regulation became necessary as the problems of a modern industrialized nation overwhelmed the regulatory capacities of states, local governments and Congress itself.

The New Deal agencies initially encountered resistance from the Supreme Court, which was then, like now, a reactionary institution that frowned on novelty. . . . Eventually, common sense prevailed over these legalistic objections. Congress itself lacked the capacity to engage in the detailed regulation that is necessary to keep a modern economy humming while protecting workers and consumers. Agencies were needed.

By the 1980s, half a century after the New Deal, a political and legal consensus in favor of the administrative state had solidified. Left and right argued about how much regulation was needed, of course, but no one doubted the constitutional foundations of the administrative state — not even Justice Antonin Scalia. . .

.But Brett Kavanaugh is a skeptic. And so are Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s first appointment to the Supreme Court, and Clarence Thomas, who was appointed back in 1991. The views of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are less clear, but their judicial opinions point in the same direction.

The conservative assault on the administrative state has four elements.

First, Justices Gorsuch and Thomas want to revive a discredited legal rule that was invoked by the Supreme Court in 1935 and then abandoned. The “nondelegation doctrine” says that Congress may not “delegate” its legislative power to administrative agencies . . . .

Second, Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas want to undermine a rule called the Chevron doctrine, after a 1984 Supreme Court case. That rule says that when an agency regulation is based on a reasonable interpretation of a statute, courts should “defer” to the agency. The Chevron rule codified existing judicial recognition of the core idea of the administrative state. Specialists — in environmental hazards, in credit markets, in workplace safety — should regulate.

Third, the conservative justices dislike the principle of agency autonomy and have looked askance at job protections for agency officials.

Fourth, the conservative justices have endorsed a novel interpretation of the First Amendment that protects businesses from regulation — from campaign finance regulation, labor regulation and even regulations that require them to disclose information to consumers.

Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Thomas claim to be “originalists,” who believe that the court should strike down laws that violate the original understanding of the Constitution. But the founders did not bar Congress from creating administrative agencies or think that the First Amendment protected businesses from commercial regulation.

The new conservative jurisprudence may help some businesses in the short run but ultimately will undermine the legal structure in which they flourish.

The answer is both obvious and depressing. The modern conservative jurisprudence is an exercise in nostalgia, a yearning for pre-New Deal America when, supposedly, government was less oppressive and people were freer than they are today. You can see this nostalgia in the homilies to olden times in Justices Gorsuch’s and Kavanaugh’s lectures — and their insistence that answers to today’s challenges can be found in a theory of government invented in the 18th century by men wearing breeches and powdered wigs.

This jurisprudence appeals to many people in a populist era that distrusts experts, chafes at bureaucracy, fears change and longs for a simpler past. But like so much being peddled by ideologues and partisans these days, it’s a sham.

The Courts Are Being Stacked to Strip Away LGBT Rights

German judges during the Nazi era in Germany. These judges  - all the while purporting to support
the rule of  law - handed down rulings that deprived people of basic human rights.

As noted before, besides being a political junkie, I was a history major in college and have continued to read historical works in the decades since.  One of the periods in history I find most disturbing and horrifying is the period when Hitler rose to power in Germany which then progressed into World War II and the Holocaust.  Hitler used several tools to rise to power some of which included (i) fanning hatred against racial and religious minorities (e.g., Gypsies and Jews) and depicting them as dangerous and less than human, (ii) attacking the press and calling legitimate news that sought exposed Nazi tactics as the German equivalent of "fake news" and (iii) used the courts and legislation to strip away the rights of targeted minorities. In his effort, he was aided by "good Germans" who either looked the other way at wrong doing or supported Hitler's efforts because he played to their prejudices and bigotry.  Many of these "good Germans" were  - or at least pretended to be - good Christians.  

Fast forward to today and we see a number of the same tactics being employed.  Watch a Trump rally and then watch a clip of from a Hitler rally.  The similarities are disturbing and certain groups are being targeted for hate and mistreatment today just as in the 1930's.  Then, of course, we hear the constant lie that main stream media is disseminating "fake news."  And we are seeing the third element, as well, as Trump is packing the federal courts with right wing extremists.  Voting rights are being stripped from minorities and others seem destined to see a right wing controlled U.S. Supreme Court declare them as open game for discrimination. Just as disturbing, I see far too many - including "friends" - cheering all of this on as they remain seemingly oblivious to the very real harm that many will suffer. Among these cheerleaders are the Christofascists to whom Trump promised the moon in exchange for their political support.  They, however, know full well the harm they are doing and find it perfectly fine.  Like the Auschwitz staff in the image below, they see others who do not subscribe to their beliefs as less than human and worthy of mistreatment.  In the case of gays, they even use the same sorts of lies merely swapping the word "Jew" for "gay" or "homosexual."  They are now seemingly poised with the help of Trump judicial appointments, including that of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, to begin stripping away the rights of LGBT citizens with the help of the five "conservatives: on the high Court.  A column in Huffington Post looks at this frightening prospect: 

While much of the country was in an uproar over the nomination (and confirmation) of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, anti-LGBTQ religious extremists in Texas filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Austin targeting its anti-discrimination ordinance protecting LGBTQ people, claiming it infringes on their religious liberty. Two days later, another anti-LGBTQ group in Texas filed a second, separate and even broader lawsuit attacking the Austin ordinance in state court.

[I]f the U.S. Supreme Court ― or individuals’ state Supreme Courts ― were to rule such laws in violation of “religious liberty,” hundreds of such laws protecting LGBTQ people across the United States could be wiped out.

The Supreme Court did, in fact, have a chance to do that earlier this year ― or to do the opposite and make it clear that LGBTQ people are constitutionally protected ― in its Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission decision. But it punted on either outcome.

And while Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that Colorado and ostensibly any other state or locality “can” protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, he and the court didn’t emphatically state that those protections are constitutionally guaranteed, leaving it for another case to decide the issue.

The optics of the case, however, were terrible ― seen as a victory for anti-LGBTQ extremists, no matter how narrow, and emboldening them moving forward.

With Kennedy gone, the Supreme Court could indeed clarify the issue when another case reaches it; and it could quite possibly be a very dark decision.

So on Oct. 6, as the Senate narrowly confirmed the hard-right Kavanaugh to replace Kennedy, the Houston-based U.S. Pastor’s Council, representing 25 churches, filed its lawsuit in federal court in Austin seeking to overturn the city’s employment protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity, claiming they violate the U.S. Constitution, the Texas Constitution and the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

“I firmly believe they waited to file until [Kavanaugh] was confirmed,” Meghan Stabler, a noted Austin LGBTQ activist and former board member of the Human Rights Campaign, told me. She thinks the groups had been working on their respective filings for some time and coordinated their efforts. It’s “a clear indication of what is to come with regards to the religious liberty issue” and the high court, Stabler said. “If this effort succeeds in the courts, it would be open season for discrimination against LGBT people not just in Texas, but across the country,” said Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, which has long battled both groups that filed the lawsuits. . . . . the lawsuits are not about “religious freedom,” but rather an attempt at “sweeping away anti-discrimination protections that have been on the books for decades.” As with abortion rights issues, the larger goal of anti-LGBTQ groups is to keep filing these kinds of lawsuits until they hit judges or justices who will help them score a win, overturning any precedent or narrowing previous Supreme Court rulings.

The road through Texas seems like a strategic decision. The lawsuits are two-pronged: One is challenging the law in state court, the other in federal court. If the very conservative and anti-LGBTQ Texas Supreme Court were to rule in favor of the religious extremists ― which doesn’t seem like a stretch ― Texas Freedom Network’s Dan Quinn speculated other states hostile to LGBTQ rights would move in the same direction. 

The federal lawsuit, meanwhile, could find its way to the Supreme Court via the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which turned away a challenge by LGBTQ advocates to Mississippi’s broad and discriminatory Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2017, . . . . That law, viewed by many legal advocates as among the most discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws ever passed, allows businesses that offer wedding-related services to refuse them to LGBTQ people and allows religious groups to discriminate in employment and housing. It allows adoption and foster agencies to discriminate against gay and lesbian couples. And it even allows doctors and mental health counselors to turn away LGBTQ people simply based on the practitioners’ religious beliefs.

LGBTQ advocates then appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which, in January of 2018 ― with Kennedy still on the court ― jarred advocates when it refused to hear the case, letting the horrendous Mississippi law stand.

Neil Gorsuch is a religious liberty crusader who is chomping at the bit, waiting for such a case. His past writings and a dissenting opinion on the court last year have made that clear. And Kavanaugh’s own record and his responses to questions about marriage equality during his confirmation hearings ― not to mention the partisanship and anger at “the left” he displayed during the hearing on the sexual assault allegations against him ― show that he can’t be relied upon to be a swing vote to protect LGBTQ rights.

[W]ith Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, the timing of the suits ― filed as he was confirmed and sworn in as a justice ― should also be a blaring siren for everyone who cares about civil rights for LGBTQ people. 

Some of the staff from Auschwitz - none looked like monsters despite the horrors
they perpetrated. Do not be fooled by appearances or false claims of morality and decency.

 If you are LGBT, you have good reason to be very afraid.

Mitch McConnell: Women protesting Kavanaugh Were "Clowns" and It Will "All Blow Over"

If one wants evidence of the contempt that today's Republican Party holds towards women, look no farther than GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the man who other than Donald Trump, has done more to destroy American constitutional government than anyone else.  McConnell in effect has labeled all survivors of sexual assault and women who are tired of GOP misogyny as "clowns" and has suggested that the whole Kavanaugh outrage as something that will "blow over," the inference being that women are shallow, gullible and of short memory capacity.  A piece in Daily Kos looks at McConnell's contempt for women and survivors of sexual assault.  Here are article highlights:

Nothing could exemplify the wholesale contempt the Republican Party has for women than the words of its own Senate Majority Leader, fresh off of successfully installing an accused attempted rapist and hard-right political operative onto the Supreme Court. . . . he considered them useful idiots too. “Harassing members at their homes, crowding the halls with people acting horribly, the effort to humiliate us really helped me unify my conference,” McConnell told the New York Times. “So I want to thank these clowns for all the help they provided.”

There used to be a time in this country when someone in as important a position as McConnell would, after a bitter political fight, attempt to mend fences with his opposition, particularly in a circumstance fraught with such a raw and emotional issue as rape.  There would be some act of simple grace in the acknowledgment of the validity of the other sides’ sentiments, even in defeat. That is the way the U.S. government worked for well over two hundred years, and it is in part what has kept us together as a nation.

More than anyone in the Congress and Senate, Mitch McConnell has worked to undermine those traditions, preferring instead to tear the fabric of this nation in two for the sake of imposing his party’s reactionary agenda on us all. So it’s not unexpected that rather than acknowledging their trauma, even in disagreement, he would instead belittle those rape victims, who protested and painfully told us their stories, as “clowns.”  Donald Trump has now made it acceptable to cruelly mock one’s political opponents, giving no quarter to the fact that they may represent the views of more than half the nation. McConnell’s remarks here simply signal that in the age of Trump the Republican Party has no decency left to spare . . . . .

Even here the undercurrent of misogyny is instructive. Demeaning and diminishing the victims of sexual assault, raising doubts about their truthfulness, was  the GOP’s tactic from the get-go in the Kavanaugh hearings. McConnell’s smug self-assurance that the anger and emotions poured out over the last two weeks will just “blow over” is simply another way of minimizing the experience of those who have had to deal with the trauma of sexual assault and its aftermath. It’s another way of saying that rape, in the end, is really not that big of a deal.

For those women and men who take a different view of sexual assault than that of the Republican Senate Majority leader, November 6 is now [less than] only thirty days away.

Today I Am Again Ashamed to Be An America

Other than the morning after the 2016 presidential election, I do not think I have ever felt so depressed politically and saddened by the abject moral bankruptcy of far too many Americans.  Friends and neighbors who pretend to be decent moral people continue to demonstrate that they are anything but as they support an occupant of the White House who is the living embodiment of moral bankruptcy and now, the appointment of an unfit individual to the Supreme Court.  A court whose rulings will now lack any legitimacy in the eyes of what I hope is a majority of Americans.  We got to this point, of course, thanks to those too lazy to bother to vote in 2016 and now, the country may be at the point of no return.  The midterm elections are the last chance to stop the descent into authoritarianism and the normalization of the reprehensible.  If those who stayed home in 2016 do so again, it's over,  Did truly decent Germans feel such despair when they saw Hitler cement his lock on power?  

I am not the only one despondent.  At a Hindu client's birthday party last evening (perhaps one of the most responsible and hard working communities in the country), there was lamenting about the state of affairs.  The young black male cab driver who brought me home worried what would happen under a white Christofascist controlled Court and vowed to vote and get out as many others to do so as possible. Educated white women - many of who now view "Christians" with contempt and rightfully so - who see bad omens ahead.  What unites us all is a fear that our rights (and possibly our safety) will be curtailed so that an angry minority can feel good about themselves.  We are also disturbed by the sham investigation conducted by the FBI at Der Trumpenführer's apparent direction.  As a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times notes, the "investigation" seemed to have one goal: clear Kavanaugh and ignore any witnesses that might corroborate his misdeeds.  This is what one would expect in Putin's Russia or the Soviet Union of old - or Hitler's Germany.  Here are article excerpts:

We are, at last, a Third World nation. As the FBI’s work on Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh shows, we pick and choose how justice will be served; we investigate selectively; we make decisions based on what will help the plutocrats and oligarchs; we’re blind to injustice.

Congress passes laws that harm the public while asserting that the “little guy” will benefit. Lawmakers cherry-pick facts and pretend that they’re telling the truth and then blame the opposition for omissions.

We are Turkey, we are Egypt, and the White House and the congressional majority find that acceptable.

We are a country in desperate need of a 21st century Joseph Welch — someone who will face off against abusive officials and ask them, in front of the nation, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”  In the 1950s, the country applauded. Now, the answer to Welch would be, “No, but that’s OK.”

How do we reverse the descent of America into something foul and ugly?  At this late point, voting for Democrats on November 6, 2018, is our last chance.  If Democrats can win control of the House of Representatives, perhaps the much needed investigations into Trump and Kavanaugh will belatedly take place.  A piece in the New York Times shows what could happen:

House Democrats will open an investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct and perjury against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh if they win control of the House in November, Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat in line to be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on Friday.

Speaking on the eve of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote this weekend, Mr. Nadler said that there was evidence that Senate Republicans and the F.B.I. had overseen a “whitewash” investigation of the allegations and that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court was at stake. He sidestepped the issue of impeachment.

“It is not something we are eager to do,” Mr. Nadler said in an interview. “But the Senate having failed to do its proper constitutionally mandated job of advise and consent, we are going to have to do something to provide a check and balance, to protect the rule of law and to protect the legitimacy of one of our most important institutions.”

He said that if Democrats took power, he would expect the committee to immediately subpoena records from the White House and the F.B.I., which conducted an abbreviated supplemental background investigation into two of the misconduct claims. That document request would include communications between officials at both entities.

The committee would also seek to interview Judge Kavanaugh’s accusers and the dozens of potential witnesses they identified in recent days, most of whom were not contacted by the F.B.I. He said he would also call the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, to testify.

I pray that voters will get out and vote and set the stage for this to happen.  This is the most important election of my lifetime.  If Democrats fail to retake control the House, it's over for America.  Then the only question is whether one stays or chooses to leave.

Republicans Prepare to Ram Kavanaugh Through Using Sham Investigation

The Palmetto Queen with the very vile Mitch McConnell.

Spineless and dishonest Republicans in connivance with the White House appear poised to push Brett Kavanaugh through to the U.S. Supreme Court using a sham investigation that deliberately failed to interview corroborating witnesses as cover for their wrongdoing.  It is beyond disgusting and is all too reminiscent of the ploys used by Adolph Hitler and more recently, Vladimir Putin.  What is perhaps even more frightening is the number of Americans who pretend to be decent people who have bought into the lies, the hate, and the overall misogyny.  At times, I feel I am glimpsing what transpired with Hitler supporters in the early 1930's Germany.  A friend on Facebook summed up - well back before the Kavanaugh lies and gas-lighting began - why I have no respect for these people who have shown their true selves:

“I am not mad at you that Clinton lost. I am unconcerned that we have different politics. And I don’t think less of you because you vote one way and I vote another. No…I think less of you because you watched an adult mock a disabled person in front of a crowd and still supported him. I think less of you because you saw a man spouting clear racism and backed him. I think less of you because you listened to him advocate for war crimes, and still thought he should run this country. I think less of you because you watched him equate a woman’s worth to her appearance and got on board. It isn’t your politics that I find repulsive. It is your personal willingness to support racism, sexism and cruelty. You sided with a bully when it mattered and that is something I will never forget. So, no…you and I won’t be “coming together” to move forward or whatever. Trump disgusts me, but it is the fact that he doesn’t disgust you that continues to stick with me long after the 2016 election.”

Turning to the malfeasance being done by Senate Republicans and their mouth pieces at Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and similar false news sites, a column in the New York Times describes the feelings that I, and a suspect many, many decent and truly loyal Americans, have as I watch America morph into something very ugly.  Here are column excerpts:

In the end, it didn’t really matter how many women begged them not to do this, how many times women said slow down, stop, please, no. As of this writing, it seems inevitable that Republicans in the Senate are going to shove Brett Kavanaugh down our throats. According to polls, a majority of American women believe that Christine Blasey Ford told the truth when she said Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her. But the United States Senate is run by Republican men, and thanks to them, Kavanaugh will most likely soon be on the Supreme Court, deciding, among other things, how much control women will be permitted over our own bodies.

The restarted F.B.I. background check that seemed, a week ago, like a merciful concession to decency has instead been a cover-up. Agents didn’t even question Blasey or Kavanaugh. It’s not clear if they interviewed any of the more than 20 corroborating witnesses named by Deborah Ramirez, who claimed a drunken, aggressive Kavanaugh thrust his genitals into her face when they were students at Yale. The New Yorker reported that witnesses who tried to contact the F.B.I. were ignored; some ended up submitting unsolicited statements to the bureau.

The behavior of Senate Republicans is not particularly surprising. Time and again, they’ve clucked disapprovingly about Donald Trump’s vulgarity while eagerly carrying out his agenda. What has truly shaken me is the zeal with which Republican officeholders and conservative commentators, some of whom I’d thought better of, have come to Kavanaugh’s defense. Something in the spectacle of a highly credentialed Republican man nearly being denied his life’s goal on nothing but the word of a couple of women has brought out the inner Trump in a lot of people.

[T]here is clear, substantial evidence that Kavanaugh has not been truthful throughout this process. Conservatives, in their anger, won’t reckon honestly with this evidence.

Instead, they change the subject. They act as if holes in a case brought by media-obsessed lawyer Michael Avenatti discredit the stories told by Blasey and Ramirez, whom he has nothing to do with. Or they pretend that Kavanaugh is under attack for his underage drinking rather than for his deception about that drinking.

Well before anyone heard about Blasey’s letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, Kavanaugh had lied about whether, while working in the George W. Bush administration, he’d received documents stolen from Senate Democrats. He lied when he said he had no involvement in “questions about the rules governing detention of combatants” in the War on Terror. He told senators he’d learned about Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program from The New York Times, when an email appears to show that he knew about it much earlier.

Since Blasey testified, Kavanaugh has dissembled some more. He downplayed his excessive youthful drinking to the point of rank dishonesty. At one point he claimed that references to vomiting in his yearbook stemmed from his weak stomach.

Kavanaugh was even inexplicably dishonest when, flush with self-righteousness, he claimed that he got into Yale without connections, purely by “busting my tail.” In fact, his grandfather went there.

Some conservatives are acting as if, in delving into Kavanaugh’s high school and college antics, Democrats are creating some egregious new precedent. But the youthful behavior of aspirants to high office has long been fair game. . . . . by multiple accounts, Kavanaugh was a mean, rowdy drunk and a sexist bully. After decades of conservative insistence that Bill Clinton’s impeachment was about lying, not fellatio, it’s amazing to see right-wingers arguing that’s it’s O.K. if Kavanaugh shaded the truth under oath to avoid embarrassment.

Some say that anger over Kavanaugh’s treatment by Democrats has unified and invigorated the right, with possible repercussions in the midterms. This may well be true, particularly in Senate races, where the battleground states are mostly red. But don’t underestimate how livid many women are. A spokeswoman for Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice female candidates, told me that the group raised more money the day after Blasey testified than on any day in the group’s history.

I’m terrified about the idea of the midterms becoming a referendum on patriarchy and thus awakening dormant Republican energy. For all his chaotic ignorance, Trump has a profound connection to his base’s grievances. He probably knew what he was doing this week when he mocked Blasey and rallied his voters to stand up to the #MeToo Jacobins.

As much as the prospect of Kavanaugh’s confirmation fills me with despair, I’ll be relieved when it’s over and this gutting, squalid chapter in American life comes to an end. But whatever happens, the ugliness of this episode, with its brute assertion of Ivy League male privilege, will leave a mark. Indelible in the hippocampus is the duplicity.

Very, very disturbing.  Right now, part of me wishes I was still in Europe.