The president never has alcohol as some kind of excuse, not that’s it’s an excuse. But it seems inevitable that he’d nominate someone to a lifetime position who shares his proclivity for assaulting women.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Posted a diary about this when I first heard the news because it seems a game changer. I know it’s hard to imagine a significant shift but I think Republicans take a huge risk if they continue to ram Kavanaugh through. What better way to tell women their opinions, the feelings, their concerns, their needs don’t count for fuck.
The smart move in my view would be for the Republicans to slow things down, sounding reasonable on CNN and the Sunday programs while having their surrogates scream about liberals trying to make something of nothing on Fox and talk radio. In other words sound reasonable to older female swing voters while activating the base.
If they push Kavanaugh through, the base will be fat and happy but they’ll alienate the kind of women who typically vote Republican. Women they can’t afford to lose. Particularly when they’ve already pissed off and scared younger women, who are likely to turn out in huge numbers.
If they lose independent and Republican-leaning women or drive turnout of younger women, they’re toast. Either/or. This a both/and.
The other side is their concern about losing their opportunity to get a truly radical corporatist court in place. Maybe this opportunity is just too much to pass up. In that sense not entirely unlike when Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley and Democrats decided to push a compromised ACA through before they lost the chance.
Some courageous votes were taken but there’s a huge difference in that Democrats were motivated by idealism whereas Republicans are motivated by greed. The ACA would prove painful to role back whereas a majority that threaten Roe and Griswold should just further stoke outrage among women.
Wish it were a game changer, but I’d guess the ‘radical corporate court’ is the overriding factor. This stooge will promote any corruption or autocratic power that his rich masters concoct.
It’s all about access to government money, so that the rich incur zero risk in their ‘investments’. Guaranteed government money, baby!
I think you give Republican women far too much credit.
In my experience some of the most vicious anti-feminists are women.
Oh, the judicial beating he’s going to administer to all women once he gets a lifetime appointment, is exponentially greater than any physical assaults he might have committed in College!
I think Roe v. Wade will be repealed before the 2020 election. The anti-abortion warriors are not waiting, they have their lawsuits and cases all primed to be expedited to the S.Ct. as soon as they can get the votes.
So, it’s going to be total warfare on abortion rights and reproductive rights in 2020. All or nothing.
If we win, then we pass single payer health care with women’s reproductive rights paid for by the Federal government and just tell Tennessee, Kentucky and every other red-neck state that wants to ban abortion. “Suck it!”
I honestly don’t know how we resolve this issue without Roe v. Wade. The GOP is never going to stop trying to repeal womens’ health care. And women are just not going to accept not being able to do family planning. It’s an economic imperative to be able to delay and control fertility and delay the onset of child bearing so as to be able to afford child rearing.
It’s not just “selfishness” of modern women who prefer their careers to having children. It’s $ and it has been all about $ for a long time.
We’ve just gotten used to the idea that this was “settled law” even when it clearly wasn’t. Anti-abortion voters vote no other issue, but Democrats have been willing to permit Democrats to equivocate on women’s rights. They could talk about it, but wouldn’t push for legislation to protect women’s health care.
Well, no more. If you’re going to be a Democrat in the future you cannot support anything but full women’s health care. Nothing less will do.
However one feels about modern sexual morals, it’s essentially impossible to put toothpaste back in a tube. Victorian ideals had broken down well before the sexual revolution. All sorts of stuff was already going on, even in the 1890s. People were just discreet about it. It was socially acceptable to lie about things like sex and virginity. The ones who paid the biggest price were women who subjected themselves to back-alley abortions, some of whom died, or were sent off to carry babies to term and coerced into giving them up for adoption. Many women today continue to carry the scars, often in secret and often to their graves.
I grew up with tons of adopted kids who had no clue about their birth parents. Each one of them seemed to carry baggage that the rest of us didn’t. I don’t think we understand the enormous toll of pain and trauma that get visited upon a baby who is pulled away from his or her birth mom. It’s not natural. I suppose few would express a preference for having been aborted but let’s just say things weren’t made easy for those woman. A true compassionate conservatism would have tried to make it possible for more young women to raise the child while attending school and building a career. A compassionate society certainly would not have shamed them.
I don’t think even evangelical women will be content with slut shaming or a rolling back of reproductive rights. Not when push really comes to shove.
But Susan Collins said that the rapist wannabe assured her that Roe was “settled law”.
Of course this is what she said about Gorsuch when she voted to confirm him:
But, of course, as soon as Gorsuch started overturning precedents once he was on the Supreme Court, including the one about union representation, it’s crickets from her…
The Republicans have cynically used the abortion issue because a minority of voters, who all vote Republican, care a very lot about the issue while the rest of the voters mostly don’t care that much because they do consider it “settled law”. It was an easy con for them- they got an army of loyal voters and the “moderates” like Collins could pretend the status quo wouldn’t change despite all of the zealots they were putting on the courts. But now the reckoning is coming and the party apparatchiks like Collins can no longer put a pretty face on it.
Roe v. Wade ignored? Modern Handmaid’s Tale coming?
Don’t fret. Arthur Gilroy has told us over and over again it’s cool. Let the States oppress women in one of the most brutal ways possible. People will sort themselves out.
AG’s really showing us the best path forward for our movement.
The supreme court never “settles” anything. It’s action is like freezing the San Andreas fault. The pressure builds for an ugly, expensive dislocation later.
I will predict that CJ Roberts’ approach will be to simply uphold every single restriction on abortion that a state enacts; in the words of Casey, nothing will ever be considered an “undue burden” on the (unprotected) “right” to abortion. The 5-4 opinions will act as though Roe/Casey still exist, but they will become a dead letter.
That means we will effectively have two Americas, one consisting of (Blue) states that permit the right to exist and (Red) states that regulate it out of existence. Rich Red state women will travel to CA/NY etc to get their abortions, poorer Red state women will be forced to bear the child or risk the old back alley.
The 8th Circuit recently upheld a MO law that placed restrictions on abortion providers/physicians very similar to the TX law that the Court had recently struck down, 5-4. That was Kennedy’s last “moderate” hurrah. With the Groper Kavanaugh reinforcement to Roberts’ Repubs, that TX ruling will likely be reversed in the coming year, and the Red state route to evisceration of Roe will be opened permanently. Or Coach Roberts may wait until after the 2020 election to lower the boom–he is, after all, a political strategist and not a judge, and it is impossible to know what he is thinking.
With the accession of Kavanaugh, John Roberts becomes well and truly the de facto leader of the “Conservative” movement. He will be the one calling the shots nationwide, dropping little footnotes about made-up arguments for the volunteer “conservative” law brigades to use in future cases to destroy every progressive case/law on the books.
As for any future progressive legislation that you predict, one must remember that with 5 rock-solid rightwing extremists running the Court, no Dem health insurance reform (or any other type of reform for that matter) will ever be permitted to stand. The five “conservative” activists masquerading as “justices” will find bogus constitutional problems with everything, just as they did will Obamacare and the Voting Rights Act and the Second Amendment. The reality is that they can say anything they like, as they (obviously) will not conform to lib’rul precedents they vehemently disagree with. Even the imbecile tool Collins must know that these “settled law” bleatings are made in complete bad faith.
So the country is either doomed or it does something to alter the make-up of the illegitimate Trumper Court. Those are the choices. The game has been thoroughly rigged at this point.
When Dems have both the WH and Senate, they should change the number of SCOTUS to 11. No constitutional bar against that.
. . . plus, of course, all-out obstruction, will greet even the merest hint of doing that. From Banana Republicans, I mean of course, though the Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media can be counted on to legitimize and amplify their wailing, with tut-tutting at Dems about “norms” and “civility”.
To all of which Dems should reply Fuck You, and ram it through if they’re able. It will be a very heavy (if not, indeed, impossible) lift. But they should try if they get the opportunity!
Trump didn’t push for Kavanaugh, Pence and McConnell did. Trump might want Kavanaugh to cover his ass for the legal proceedings that are coming against him, but the Kavanaugh nomination has Pence’s fingerprints all over it. And McConnell just sees it as another big win over Democrats.
What’s rather ironic is that Kavanaugh was the leering, unrelenting questioner in the Bill Clinton sex scandal. He was the one asking probing, personal questions about Clinton’s sexual activity.
I don’t care when Kavanaugh committed an act of attempted rape, whether it was yesterday or forty years ago. If that is in his makeup, then it’s always going to be a facet of who he is. Attempted rape is just rape that got stopped. And it’s an act of violence and dominance.
My instincts say that the GOP will go after Ford hammer and tongs and everything she’s ever said or done will be combed over and plastered everywhere. The victim-blaming is a Republican tactic and they’ll do their best to blow Ford up. I believe she’s going to get support from the Democrats and from other women, however. I hope so.
Not true
But McConnell was dubious about the judge before Trump picked him, arguing privately that his long paper trail in the George W. Bush White House would prove problematic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/us/politics/trump-mcconnell-supreme-court.html
So their strategy was to bury the paper trail.
. . . drafting those “probing, personal questions about Clinton’s sexual activity”.
IIRC, some weren’t ever asked (which is remarkable when one considers the salaciousness of those that were asked!), and Kavanaugh didn’t do the actual asking.
. . . a little bit slutty”. Doubt they’ll reprise that Anita Hill slander verbatim, but the same character-assassination/victim-blaming tactic is already underway.
Because of course it is! They are evil scum. (With apologies to all literal scum everywhere.)
You’re probably right but … I can’t help thinking that knowing this kind of behavior was in the background, Mr Trump would see as a standout plus. This guy is not some () loser. And that he lies like a snake in the grass – he’s talking a language Mr Trump can understand.
There are plenty of judges willing to kill Roe. There are almost as many willing to shield Trump from Mueller.
But if Kavanaugh can be brought down by one “youthful indiscretion”, no Republican is safe. So they will defend him to the death.
Nothing short of multiple additional accusations will stop him. Maybe not even that.
Sure, although even Groper Kavanaugh concedes that he is an uber-extremist on prezes and their absolute immunity from the law.
Mitch’s Radical Repubs mainly have to cram The Groper through NOW because if he withdraws that’s finito for getting their 5th conservative activist/corporatist onto the Court before the midterms. No time for a new 50-year-old white male Federalist Society acolyte to be named, examined and rammed through.
Democracy has to be defeated; that’s always Job One.
I see a lot of Republicans at various somewhat politically neutral websites (eg, not the usual like Drudge or Breitbart) vigorously defending Kavanaugh with the usual tropes and memes about how it was all so long ago why does it matter (of course, it mattered with Bill Clinton, apparently, but not Brett Kavanaugh), plus also: why oh why did the D Team wait ’till NOW to release this bombshell; they’re not playing fair or something.
It’s clear that none of them give a crap about Ford or her testimony – I just read somewhere (can’t verify) that her therapist has documented notes of Ford’s counselling sessions where she discusses this almost rape situation and names Kavanaugh.
But of course, somehow this is all about how “terrible” Democrats are, blah blah de blah blah.
Republican women will NOT be turned off by Kavanuagh. I don’t get that, but they just won’t. They’ll go on and on and on and on about how awful and terrible Bill Clinton was, but Kavanaugh? Eh? Boys will be boys, yannow. Plus: IOKIYAR.