(Update Friday Sept. 28, 3PM EDT)
It seems inevitable that Democracy will die today.
As utterly compromised and as purely political a justice as has ever been nominated will be placed in a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court this afternoon. This Justice’s questionable qualifications to serve were evident from day one regardless of his behavior outside of politics at any point in his life. That this has become about what a young Brett Kavanaugh may or may not have done to Dr. Ford or other women speaks to how utterly opaque and obfuscated the investigation into his nomination has been.
Tens of thousands of documents about Judge Kavanaugh’s time with the Bush administration have been sequestered from public view in the name of “executive privilege” by a (potentially) criminal president who stands to benefit from a man who is on record as saying he does not believe a sitting president can be investigated, let alone prosecuted – even as he during his time with Kenneth Starr pursued precisely that.
That the call for a halt to his confirmation by an organization as respected as Amnesty International for Kavanaugh’s involvement with potential war crimes when defining the Bush administration’s torture policy has gone completely unaddressed speaks to the utter political nature of this appointment.
That white men of power found the need to shout out their contempt for any attempt to thwart the seating of a privileged boy from Georgetown Prep, just a year after the Senate had already done just that with no opposition, speaks to their contempt for the process laid out by our framers in a document that they carry in their pockets but ignore at will.
Brett Kavanaugh is a justice who will subvert the Constitution in the name of Republican politics for decades to come, and once the vote this afternoon is held there will be no recourse shy of impeaching him while on the bench to change that – something that is sure to spark the ugliest and potentially bloodiest and politically divisive battle this nation has seen in over a century.
I mourn that this is our country. I mourn that during a lifetime where I have seen such strides made in the advancement of the rights for women, racial minorities, and people of all sexual identity, I will watch as all of these advances will be rendered void with a single vote. For when Justice Kavanaugh dons a black robe it will be a robe that protects the prejudice and hatred of the alt-christian religious right and white nationalism. It will be a robe that protects a criminal president. It will be a robe that forever makes partisan the one branch of government that the founders sought to keep utterly apolitical.
Today the party that spent 8 years screaming that a president without blemish of scandal or investigation was on the brink of bringing Sharia Law to the United States has just taken the first step in doing just that. Taking a wild and perverse reading of Old Testament Law coupled with the writings of Apostles taken utterly out of context – leaving out the words of Jesus entirely – the legalized religious hatred they have long attempted to instantiate throughout middle-american red states will now be allowed to stand. All because a party without soul purchased the souls of Bible-carrying and cross-wearing Americans hell bent on changing a single Supreme Court ruling.
Democracy dies today. The Great American Experiment is over. It has been washed down the drain with the bath water of overturning Roe.
Tomorrow we build the pyre from which a Phoenix will one day rise on the next America. What we cannot know is how far off that is, and how many will perish in this travesty’s wake.
Jesus wept.
***
So it seems that the Senate has granted democracy a stay of execution. I will not call the actions of Jeff Flake heroic, in fact at the moment I find him very much akin to Pontius Pilate. But I’m thankful it will live to see October.