The drama had been building for days around confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Kavanaugh had perjured himself repeatedly before the U.S. Senate, and stands accused of assaulting multiple women, one of whom, Christine Blasey Ford, offered moving testimony to a senate committee. During the hearing, Kavanaugh erupted in a volcanic, partisan rage, accusing Democratic members of the committee and a shadowy Clintonian conspiracy, of undermining him. Since then, professional organizations of lawyers, and former and current Supreme Court Justices--the latter explicitly, the former obliquely--have warned that confirming Kavanaugh will bring the Court into disrepute. Clearly, confirmation would also send a disturbing message about the impunity that sexual abusers enjoy.
And what a cast of misfit characters it was, whom we expected to weigh in on the fate of the nation. Alaskan Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski crossed the floor to oppose his nomination. Heidi Heitkamp imperilled her career as a Democrat in North Dakota to oppose Kavanaugh. Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia offered Kavanaugh his support, anxious to hang onto his marginal seat, less anxious to use this hard-won power to do anything particularly useful.
Then there was Jeff Flake, the great Republican moralist who, ambushed by furious assault victims in a senate elevator, sorrowfully hitched his support of Kavanaugh to the conduct of an investigation into the allegations against him--so long as the investigation was given neither the scope, resources, nor time to undertake any significant investigative work. Flake told us proudly that the fact that he will not run for re-election liberated him to make this heroic stand on behalf of victims of sexual assault. It did not, however, appear to have liberated him from the habits and mindset cultivated over a lifetime as a Republican, of fooling himself and the media into believing that mournful words of agony equate to an actual defense of women and their bodies or of national institutions and thereby our democracy.
Faced with mounting evidence of Kavanaugh’s unsuitability for this post, Republicans as a whole held ranks, allowing themselves to be represented by a few old men on committee, who alternated between making lecherous comments about Dr Ford and sounding like they had stumbled out of Ben Carson’s surgery room in mid-process. Members of this party are proud to keep their spinal columns locked in a hidden senate vault, the keys to which are likely hidden in the pouch beneath Mitch McConnell’s chin.
But another figure moved center stage on Friday. It was none other than The Mendacious Mediocrity from Maine, Susan Collins, a Republican who has carefully cultivated a reputation as a moderate with idle-minded journalists. Every so often, on votes of particular and public controversy, Collins, like Flake on this occasions, makes her agonies public, flipping and flopping, sighing and frowning, and making a great show of being faced with fundamental moral conflict.
On this occasion, she delivered her much-anticipated verdict in a speech to the Senate. Within a few moments of beginning her speech, it became clear that she was not simply going to vote for Kavanaugh, but was going to unearth what ought to have been his dead career, and sing its praises to the heavens, or at least the Republican version of the heavens, whose core deities include Mitch McConnell--this week-end referred to by a leading historian of fascist Germany as the “gravedigger of American democracy--and Donald Trump.
When Collins had finished, her colleagues rushed to praise her, claiming that even if one disagreed with her premises--and we shall get to these soon enough--one had to acknowledge that this was a speech that restored the lustre of the deeply-compromised senate. To listen to senators, her speech had been a masterpiece--Lincolnian if not Churchillian, her gravelly rasp however, having its origins not in mid-morning drunkenness, but in the difficulty of getting her chops around the scale of the fibs she was telling, which clearly came up her throat easier than they went down ours.
But if Collins’ speech represents the future of the senate, it is a future that involves having last rites read for the senate, a stake driven through its heart, and the earth over its interred body salted. It is to replace American democracy with a wilderness that will give authoritarians the peace they need to cement the absolute power to which our national oligarchy aspires.
Collins’ speech reminded me of nothing more than an early line from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, a fitting text indeed to revisit in our own age of un-reason. Paine wrote that “it is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”
By this metric, Collins and every one of her colleagues are ready for the commission of any crime. But the one they have in mind is the assassination of American democracy, because this much-praised speech in honor of Kavanaugh was anything but a declaration of firm moral principles. It was little more than a bricolage of FOX News talking points, the dishonesty of which it is worth examining.
Central to Collins’ lengthy defense of Kavanaugh was a series of claims about reassurances he offered her that he had no intention of gutting Roe v. Wade, such is his respect for precedent. All very well and good if Collins had been locked in a basement for the past few weeks. But since she’s been very much alive, doing her moderate dance for the past weeks, she has no excuse for not knowing that during this period Kavanaugh lied fluently and often to the senate, perjuring himself in a fashion that in normal circumstances would have unquestionably disqualified him from occupying a powerful office. It is not even seriously contested that Kavanaugh lied repeatedly during this process. That Collins’ defense is based on trust of his remarks during this process demonstrates to what degree even supposedly moderate Republicans refuse to process evidence. Collins’ leading premise, designed to give comfort to those who believe women should be regarded as persons with individual rights, is based on an extraordinary act of mental lying.
But there was oh so much more. Collins devoted a surprising amount of her testimony to exhibiting her sympathy with victims of sexual assault. She was with them all the way, she believed them, she would protect them, and she hoped that this episode would reveal the seriousness of this problem. Voting for Kavanaugh, she reassured us all, was not to suggest that sexual assault was a good thing. Merely, it seemed, that multiple accusations of such abuse are not to be a bar to holding high office and do not require exhaustive, thorough, and transparent investigation.
Along these lines, Collins pledged to ensure that women would never in the future feel the need to feel shame, fear, or anxiety about coming forward with their stories, praising Dr Ford’s courage. But this logic is only possible in Republicans’ fantasy world, and not in the real one that most of us inhabit, wherein confirming Kavanaugh sends a chilling message to women: that women who are victims of sexual abuse and assault know full well that their tormentors and abusers can count on some of the most powerful people--men and women--in the country, and the most powerful institutions in the nature, to foster a culture of impunity that offers those tormentors and abusers license to repeat their acts of violence or know that they will go unpunished and uncensured.
But Collins wasn’t finished. She was, she wanted us to know, angry. But she reserved her anger for whomever leaked Ford’s letter, rather than for the man who has lied shamelessly to her and her colleagues, and who stands accused of assaulting women, and who responded to those allegations by invoking a grand national conspiracy, and issuing flippant replies worthy of any overgrown frat boy, to the female senators who sought to get to the bottom of allegations. Collins is like the person who gets more angry with the whistleblower than with the lawbreaker the former exposed. Like Kavanaugh, her sympathies are entirely with those in power who run the risk of having their hypocrisy and malfeasance exposed.
Collins still wasn’t finished. She grew positively Trumpian in her assessment of Kavanaugh. With a straight face, she claimed to believe that the man who went off the rails blathering about a Clintonian conspiracy, stands accused of shocking violence, and who lied repeatedly and fluently to senators and the public will actually help to lessen the country’s partisan divide and restore faith in the court. Kavanaugh’s partisan rage was invoked by one former and two current Supreme Court justices as they warned the public and the senate that introducing this level of partisanship to the court would be dangerous in the extreme.
But Collins wasn’t having any of this. As she outlined what she believed to be his qualifications to serve in a position of immense and comparably unaccountable authority, she argued that if senators opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, they would damage faith in the judiciary. This feat of mental gymnastics--“lying like a throw rug” is an expression it brings to mind--would require for most of us another visit to Ben Carson, and the extraction of sufficient grey matter as to not be able to see how confirming an accused sexual abuser--who has lied and lied often during his confirmation process, demonstrated partisan adherence to unhinged conspiracy theories, and exhibited an unseemly willingness to perform on command for the authoritarian clown in the White House--will do immeasurably greater damage to the court.
Confirming Kavanaugh brings not just the senate and its processes, but the court and the legitimacy of its rulings, into deep disrepute. I can’t imagine that any one of the court’s most fervently conservative justices, want to have to rule alongside a man of Kavanaugh’s character.
We know, after his angry performance for Trump before the senate committee, that we might hear Kavanaugh’s voice as the Supreme Court deliberates, but the words will be those of Donald Trump. Look carefully, when Kavanaugh speaks from the Supreme Court bench, and you might just see Trump’s hands, inserted so deeply up Kavanaugh’s backside that if they were just a little bit bigger they would waggle in the justice’s mouth every time he speaks.
The final of Collins’ talking points worthy of dissection is one oft-repeated these days. She spoke a great deal, as have many of her colleagues, about the role of the presumption of innocence in all of this (ironic in itself for a party for whom such a presumption is color coded). But for being a bunch of lawyers, Republican legislators have a poor grasp of law, and forget the role of the senate in this process. The senate isn’t supposed to base its confirmation on guilt or on innocence. It is not putting nominees on trial. And there are no legal consequences for a nominee who is not confirmed. There is no constitutionally-protected right to serve on the Supreme Court. This is a matter of power, not law. Rather, the senate is participating in a crucial part of a job interview. They are evaluating candidates for competence, intelligence, integrity, and independence. Kavanaugh, in addition to being accused of a crime, demonstrated only mediocre competence, and no integrity and independence whatsoever.
This job interview, moreover, is not for any ordinary position. It is for a lifetime appointment to a position that gives its occupant extraordinary power over hundreds of millions of people. Guilty or not of the charges Ford and others made against Kavanaugh, even the smallest sliver of doubt should make any Republican who governs in good faith recoil, and recommend the nomination of one of any number of conservative-minded judges not afflicted by such serious allegations and Kavanaugh’s transparently partisan lying.
But Collins and other so-called moderates, including Nevada’s invertebrate senator Dean Heller, came to evaluate Kavanaugh’s nominee not in good faith, but rather committed to his confirmation. This is made clear by the fact that as they defend his nomination, they offer no logical, truthful arguments for the necessity of his particular candidacy. Instead, they offer a mendacious medley of claims as to why Americans should accept to have their laws determined by a man who is accused of vicious abuse of women, and whose career is a testimony to his extraordinary affinity, in cases involving contests of power, for the rights of the strong over those of the weak, and the wellbeing of the rich over that of the poor.
I hope that Flake’s retirement years will be dogged by his support for this lying, dangerous man, who offered fealty to an authoritarian-minded president rather than to the public interest, and that Collins and Heller will pay an electoral price, the latter in a month, the former when she faces re-election.
But I have little hope for the long-term survival not just of rulings that protect women’s abilities to govern their own bodies, but also for regulations designed to keep our air clean, our water safe, and our food free of poisons; for the rights of working people to organize themselves, and make their voices heard collectively in ways that none of us can do alone; for the hard-won but barely-realized sanctity of voting rights; and for our ability to hold to account aspiring dictators who this justiced has told us stand outside of the law he is supposed to uphold. Absent some dramatic development one minute before metaphorical midnight, or a truly democratic an anti-authoritarian wave of unanticipated proportions in November, I fear this is yet another knell heralding the slow death of our democracy
And what a cast of misfit characters it was, whom we expected to weigh in on the fate of the nation. Alaskan Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski crossed the floor to oppose his nomination. Heidi Heitkamp imperilled her career as a Democrat in North Dakota to oppose Kavanaugh. Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia offered Kavanaugh his support, anxious to hang onto his marginal seat, less anxious to use this hard-won power to do anything particularly useful.
Then there was Jeff Flake, the great Republican moralist who, ambushed by furious assault victims in a senate elevator, sorrowfully hitched his support of Kavanaugh to the conduct of an investigation into the allegations against him--so long as the investigation was given neither the scope, resources, nor time to undertake any significant investigative work. Flake told us proudly that the fact that he will not run for re-election liberated him to make this heroic stand on behalf of victims of sexual assault. It did not, however, appear to have liberated him from the habits and mindset cultivated over a lifetime as a Republican, of fooling himself and the media into believing that mournful words of agony equate to an actual defense of women and their bodies or of national institutions and thereby our democracy.
Faced with mounting evidence of Kavanaugh’s unsuitability for this post, Republicans as a whole held ranks, allowing themselves to be represented by a few old men on committee, who alternated between making lecherous comments about Dr Ford and sounding like they had stumbled out of Ben Carson’s surgery room in mid-process. Members of this party are proud to keep their spinal columns locked in a hidden senate vault, the keys to which are likely hidden in the pouch beneath Mitch McConnell’s chin.
But another figure moved center stage on Friday. It was none other than The Mendacious Mediocrity from Maine, Susan Collins, a Republican who has carefully cultivated a reputation as a moderate with idle-minded journalists. Every so often, on votes of particular and public controversy, Collins, like Flake on this occasions, makes her agonies public, flipping and flopping, sighing and frowning, and making a great show of being faced with fundamental moral conflict.
On this occasion, she delivered her much-anticipated verdict in a speech to the Senate. Within a few moments of beginning her speech, it became clear that she was not simply going to vote for Kavanaugh, but was going to unearth what ought to have been his dead career, and sing its praises to the heavens, or at least the Republican version of the heavens, whose core deities include Mitch McConnell--this week-end referred to by a leading historian of fascist Germany as the “gravedigger of American democracy--and Donald Trump.
When Collins had finished, her colleagues rushed to praise her, claiming that even if one disagreed with her premises--and we shall get to these soon enough--one had to acknowledge that this was a speech that restored the lustre of the deeply-compromised senate. To listen to senators, her speech had been a masterpiece--Lincolnian if not Churchillian, her gravelly rasp however, having its origins not in mid-morning drunkenness, but in the difficulty of getting her chops around the scale of the fibs she was telling, which clearly came up her throat easier than they went down ours.
But if Collins’ speech represents the future of the senate, it is a future that involves having last rites read for the senate, a stake driven through its heart, and the earth over its interred body salted. It is to replace American democracy with a wilderness that will give authoritarians the peace they need to cement the absolute power to which our national oligarchy aspires.
Collins’ speech reminded me of nothing more than an early line from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, a fitting text indeed to revisit in our own age of un-reason. Paine wrote that “it is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”
By this metric, Collins and every one of her colleagues are ready for the commission of any crime. But the one they have in mind is the assassination of American democracy, because this much-praised speech in honor of Kavanaugh was anything but a declaration of firm moral principles. It was little more than a bricolage of FOX News talking points, the dishonesty of which it is worth examining.
Central to Collins’ lengthy defense of Kavanaugh was a series of claims about reassurances he offered her that he had no intention of gutting Roe v. Wade, such is his respect for precedent. All very well and good if Collins had been locked in a basement for the past few weeks. But since she’s been very much alive, doing her moderate dance for the past weeks, she has no excuse for not knowing that during this period Kavanaugh lied fluently and often to the senate, perjuring himself in a fashion that in normal circumstances would have unquestionably disqualified him from occupying a powerful office. It is not even seriously contested that Kavanaugh lied repeatedly during this process. That Collins’ defense is based on trust of his remarks during this process demonstrates to what degree even supposedly moderate Republicans refuse to process evidence. Collins’ leading premise, designed to give comfort to those who believe women should be regarded as persons with individual rights, is based on an extraordinary act of mental lying.
But there was oh so much more. Collins devoted a surprising amount of her testimony to exhibiting her sympathy with victims of sexual assault. She was with them all the way, she believed them, she would protect them, and she hoped that this episode would reveal the seriousness of this problem. Voting for Kavanaugh, she reassured us all, was not to suggest that sexual assault was a good thing. Merely, it seemed, that multiple accusations of such abuse are not to be a bar to holding high office and do not require exhaustive, thorough, and transparent investigation.
Along these lines, Collins pledged to ensure that women would never in the future feel the need to feel shame, fear, or anxiety about coming forward with their stories, praising Dr Ford’s courage. But this logic is only possible in Republicans’ fantasy world, and not in the real one that most of us inhabit, wherein confirming Kavanaugh sends a chilling message to women: that women who are victims of sexual abuse and assault know full well that their tormentors and abusers can count on some of the most powerful people--men and women--in the country, and the most powerful institutions in the nature, to foster a culture of impunity that offers those tormentors and abusers license to repeat their acts of violence or know that they will go unpunished and uncensured.
But Collins wasn’t finished. She was, she wanted us to know, angry. But she reserved her anger for whomever leaked Ford’s letter, rather than for the man who has lied shamelessly to her and her colleagues, and who stands accused of assaulting women, and who responded to those allegations by invoking a grand national conspiracy, and issuing flippant replies worthy of any overgrown frat boy, to the female senators who sought to get to the bottom of allegations. Collins is like the person who gets more angry with the whistleblower than with the lawbreaker the former exposed. Like Kavanaugh, her sympathies are entirely with those in power who run the risk of having their hypocrisy and malfeasance exposed.
Collins still wasn’t finished. She grew positively Trumpian in her assessment of Kavanaugh. With a straight face, she claimed to believe that the man who went off the rails blathering about a Clintonian conspiracy, stands accused of shocking violence, and who lied repeatedly and fluently to senators and the public will actually help to lessen the country’s partisan divide and restore faith in the court. Kavanaugh’s partisan rage was invoked by one former and two current Supreme Court justices as they warned the public and the senate that introducing this level of partisanship to the court would be dangerous in the extreme.
But Collins wasn’t having any of this. As she outlined what she believed to be his qualifications to serve in a position of immense and comparably unaccountable authority, she argued that if senators opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, they would damage faith in the judiciary. This feat of mental gymnastics--“lying like a throw rug” is an expression it brings to mind--would require for most of us another visit to Ben Carson, and the extraction of sufficient grey matter as to not be able to see how confirming an accused sexual abuser--who has lied and lied often during his confirmation process, demonstrated partisan adherence to unhinged conspiracy theories, and exhibited an unseemly willingness to perform on command for the authoritarian clown in the White House--will do immeasurably greater damage to the court.
Confirming Kavanaugh brings not just the senate and its processes, but the court and the legitimacy of its rulings, into deep disrepute. I can’t imagine that any one of the court’s most fervently conservative justices, want to have to rule alongside a man of Kavanaugh’s character.
We know, after his angry performance for Trump before the senate committee, that we might hear Kavanaugh’s voice as the Supreme Court deliberates, but the words will be those of Donald Trump. Look carefully, when Kavanaugh speaks from the Supreme Court bench, and you might just see Trump’s hands, inserted so deeply up Kavanaugh’s backside that if they were just a little bit bigger they would waggle in the justice’s mouth every time he speaks.
The final of Collins’ talking points worthy of dissection is one oft-repeated these days. She spoke a great deal, as have many of her colleagues, about the role of the presumption of innocence in all of this (ironic in itself for a party for whom such a presumption is color coded). But for being a bunch of lawyers, Republican legislators have a poor grasp of law, and forget the role of the senate in this process. The senate isn’t supposed to base its confirmation on guilt or on innocence. It is not putting nominees on trial. And there are no legal consequences for a nominee who is not confirmed. There is no constitutionally-protected right to serve on the Supreme Court. This is a matter of power, not law. Rather, the senate is participating in a crucial part of a job interview. They are evaluating candidates for competence, intelligence, integrity, and independence. Kavanaugh, in addition to being accused of a crime, demonstrated only mediocre competence, and no integrity and independence whatsoever.
This job interview, moreover, is not for any ordinary position. It is for a lifetime appointment to a position that gives its occupant extraordinary power over hundreds of millions of people. Guilty or not of the charges Ford and others made against Kavanaugh, even the smallest sliver of doubt should make any Republican who governs in good faith recoil, and recommend the nomination of one of any number of conservative-minded judges not afflicted by such serious allegations and Kavanaugh’s transparently partisan lying.
But Collins and other so-called moderates, including Nevada’s invertebrate senator Dean Heller, came to evaluate Kavanaugh’s nominee not in good faith, but rather committed to his confirmation. This is made clear by the fact that as they defend his nomination, they offer no logical, truthful arguments for the necessity of his particular candidacy. Instead, they offer a mendacious medley of claims as to why Americans should accept to have their laws determined by a man who is accused of vicious abuse of women, and whose career is a testimony to his extraordinary affinity, in cases involving contests of power, for the rights of the strong over those of the weak, and the wellbeing of the rich over that of the poor.
I hope that Flake’s retirement years will be dogged by his support for this lying, dangerous man, who offered fealty to an authoritarian-minded president rather than to the public interest, and that Collins and Heller will pay an electoral price, the latter in a month, the former when she faces re-election.
But I have little hope for the long-term survival not just of rulings that protect women’s abilities to govern their own bodies, but also for regulations designed to keep our air clean, our water safe, and our food free of poisons; for the rights of working people to organize themselves, and make their voices heard collectively in ways that none of us can do alone; for the hard-won but barely-realized sanctity of voting rights; and for our ability to hold to account aspiring dictators who this justiced has told us stand outside of the law he is supposed to uphold. Absent some dramatic development one minute before metaphorical midnight, or a truly democratic an anti-authoritarian wave of unanticipated proportions in November, I fear this is yet another knell heralding the slow death of our democracy
