Brett Kavanaugh Is a Lie, Senate Dems Need to Stop Vote by Any Means

Opponents of Brett Kavanaugh rallied outside the Untied
States Supreme Court last night. "Are you ready for a fight,"
said Bernie Sanders. Yes, America appears ready for a fight
that may dwarf the 1987 Bork nomination by comparison.

Kavanaugh and Bork Are Two of a Kind

"He looked, and talked, like a man who would throw the book at you — maybe like a man who would throw the book at the whole country," said Tom Shales, media critic at the Washington Post, commenting on the Robert Bork confirmation hearings in 1987, cited in the exhilarating book, Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America, (W. W. Norton), by Ethan Bronner. [Pick a copy of Bronner's work if you have even a passing interest in the biggest political event since 2016, stopping the Kavanaugh nomination.]

Bronner chronicled a landmark breaking point in American political history when the people rose and the United States Senate listened, defeating the Bork nomination 58-42. The vote led to the nomination and confirmation of Anthony Kennedy, a corrupt justice responsible for the among worst decisions in American judicial history: Bush. v. Gore (2000), Citizens United (2010) and Shelby County v. Holder (2013), among them.

Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) publicly warned the zombie-like Senate Dems to assume war footing against the Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh who is even worse than Kennedy.

Defeating this radical corporatist-statist Kavanaugh presents problems vis a vis the radical corporatist-statist Bork.

First among the challenges is the current composition of the Senate — 51 (R) to 49 (D), (115th Congress).

In 1987, Bork faced a Senate controlled by Democrats 55 (D) to 45 R), (100th Congress).

In 1987, six Republican senators voted against Bork, (Los Angeles Times).

In 2018, only a fool would count on any Republican senators rejecting the Christian fascist nominee.
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Bork was a public relations disaster on a superficial visceral level.

Kavanaugh came across as a blend of Jimmy Stewart and Matt Damon, who above all loves his family and likely says nice things about your mother.

Kavanaugh's unmistakably appealing image is a lie. The visible malice of Kavanaugh as a younger man has melted into the kind visage we watched last night.

Kavanaugh comes prevetted by the radical, anti-civil liberties Federalist Society, armed with a jurisprudence that is savage and hateful.
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Trump is a malignant clown, but whatever delusions from which Trump suffers, he knows how to unite the right into a fascist, corporate, Christian state that animates the political animal Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh will vote to further degrade civil liberties and target women, minorities, immigrants, gays and elevate corporate power, executive branch power and any level of law enforcement over everyone in the name of god-almighty.

Our rights mean next to nothing.

The Republican Party and Kavanaugh will use the Supreme Court as a means of decimating the rights of the citizenry and any competing political opposition.

Make no mistake Kavanaugh is ambitious, vicious and deceitful. A woman's right to her body is gone with Kavanaugh on the Court.

Plan A should be no hearing, no vote until the Congress convenes in 2019.

Stopping Kavanaugh and Trump is doable.

We have the anti-Trump infrastructure in place, public opinion and mid-term elections. Trump and Republicans in Congress enjoy consistently low levels of approval.

We need determination and political competence.

This is the time of Bernie Sanders and it is the time of us. Our rights depend on what we do in the next six months.

As Stephen Macedo writes in The New Right v. the Constitution:

When conservatives like Bork treat rights as islands surrounded by a sea of government powers, they precisely reverse the view of the Founders as enshrined in the Constitution, wherein government powers are limited and specified and rendered as islands surrounded by a sea of individual rights.

Think of the younger generations, because the country we are leaving them will not be recognizable — a society of diminished rights, and people living as tools to power, tightly constrained, with little legal recourse.

A democracy without rights is tyranny.

Do we trust the future of our democracy to these six senators? Not on our lives:

Susan Collins.
Lisa Murkowski.
Heidi Heitkamp.
Joe Manchin.
Joe Donnelly.
Doug Jones.
If you live in Maine, Alaska, North Dakota, West Virginia, Indiana or Alabama WE ARE ALL COUNTING ON YOU TO CALL YOUR SENATORS NOW to tell them you oppose #KavanaughSCOTUS (202) 2224-3121 ☎️

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) July 10, 2018

Antonin Scalia—The Ben Tilman of the Court

The political world is awash today in canonizations of Antonin Scalia.

So passionate, so principled, iconic, a legal titan, a "formidable thinker" whose legal writings stand as "a Roman candle of sparkling jurisprudential theories leavened by acerbic witticisms," (Will, Washington Post).

He had friends not sharing his masquerading quest for truth, and he was even more caustic than is known.

Wow.

Enough of this nonsense.

Scalia was a corrupt member on the Court whose service to the Republican Party and the ruling oligarchies was unwavering, and his antipathy to racial justice is repellent to any American with a fleeting grasp of history.

He played with the liberties of citizens, far more often than not finding the liberty interest of people was not prominent in the face of whatever state power inflicted onto black, brown, immigrants, Native Americans and gay Americans, in particular victims of the criminal justice system and white supremacists.

Principled?

As noted by Judge Richard Posner, a decent and honest public intellectual:

Judges tend to deny the creative—the legislative—dimension of judging, important as it is in our system, because they do not want to give the impression that they are competing with legislators, or engaged in anything but the politically unthreatening activity of objective, literal-minded interpretation, using arcane tools of legal analysis. The fact that loose constructionists sometimes publicly endorse textualism is evidence only that judges are, for strategic reasons, often not candid.

Outside of D.C. in reality land, "This doesn’t get said enough: Scalia is an intellectual fraud who uses a phony methodology to get whatever judicial outcomes align with his political preferences ... , (Campos, Salon).

Or as The Onion puts it: "Justice Scalia Dead Following 30-year Battle with Social Progress."

Good riddance.

Antonin Scalia, Republican Justice on the Supreme Court, Dies at 79

Justice Antonin Scalia (1986-2016) was found dead Saturday at 79, (Liptak, NYT).

After proper institutional plaudits and expressions of sympathy to the family, the political world has burst into a frantic posture.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and other Republican senators and presidential candidates are calling for President Obama to abdicate his power and responsibility under the United States Constitution to appoint Supreme Court justices, and vow to stop any nominee the president appoints. The Party's only principle is its power.

This is an ironic position from so-called strict constructionists, originalists, textualists—a faux jurisprudence masquerading as a method of judicial policy-making.

Scalia

Scalia was a hyper-activist and embittered ideologue who in his later years became more troll and open bigot than serious jurist, as his influence faded to a "Justice of One," (Murphy NYT), as a dogmatic and alienating "Scalia emerged as an Old Testament–style Jeremiah, often hollering alone in the wilderness."

Individual rights were few and weak in Scalia's alleged jurisprudence and Scalia's radical views reveal a racist and contemptuous conception of the American citizen, explaining in part why Scalia never achieved a stature beyond a smirking Republican political operative on the Court.

Power

As the Republican Party now openly uses the Court as a means of inflating its power and decimating the rights of the citizenry, it is no surprise Republicans senators believe the president has no right to nominate a justice and the U.S. Senate has no duty to consider a nominee.

Rights and Liberty

Power is what the Republican Party is after, and the diminished rights of the American citizen are simply a necessary objective.

This absurd conception of liberty so championed by Scalia and the New Right jurists such as Robert Bork was eviscerated by the late Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) during the 1987 Bork confirmation hearings.

As Ethan Bronner writes in his brilliant chronicling of the Bork nomination, (Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America; Ethan Bronner. 399 pages. W. W. Norton):

What [Sen.] Specter wanted to know was this: If executive power could undergo organic development, if press freedom had to be interpreted for the modern era, why not the rest of the Bill of Rights? Why not liberty? Why couldn't liberty be an organic concept? Why should judges interpret liberally when faced with the vague concept of press freedom but be held back when confronted with the equally vague concept of liberty? 

The Republicans had no answer in 1987 to this question as the American public, pushing the U.S. Senate, rejected Bork, and the Senate voted 58-42 against the Republican vision of Americans with frail rights.

The Republicans have no answer today as they stand naked, revealed as a fascistic underground movement with no fidelity to the U.S. Constitution and the vast liberties of the American people against state power, save the right of citizens to own weapons of mass destruction.

Battle to Come

The high ground on Constitutional rights is a hill Republicans can never hope to take and Scalia's nominated successor will stand for the liberties of the Constitution in an epic political battle these next nine months.

The Republican political rejoinder to 'I got my rights,' is 'no, you don't,' no matter the slick, Luntz-crafted formulations Republicans will use. This truth will stare Americans in the face this spring and summer.

Republicans will defame, scream, and warn the Republic is coming to an end if the Senate confirms this black president's nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Personally, I'm hoping for Prof. Diane P. Wood, Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, or perhaps a rabbit out of the hat with the nomination of Alex Kozinski, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, or a dream appointment of Richard Posner, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Speculations abound.

As for the Republicans, let 'em scream. The result will be an aroused electorate realizing their liberty is at stake and there is very little Republicans will not do to achieve One Party rule in their project of unsurpassed ugliness.

Republican Jurisprudence—Protecting Police Felons, Preventing Civil Liberties

Update: See also Texas campus cop empties gun on unarmed student: ‘Oh, you’re gonna shoot me?’ Student killed in traffic stop.

The following video of a recent police assault against a mother and her family demonstrates anew why the GOP's 5-4 decision in Atwater V. Lago Vista (2001) is of critical importance as a virtual police state holds sway in many spheres of police-public interaction.

From the Lawrence O'Donnell Show, is a video of a panicked mother fleeing police felons in New Mexico. The officer then incredibly opens fire on the vehicle fleeing the police crime. The officer was later fired after the video aired on national TV. More and more, we see police officers acting as felons and an American public becoming victims of police empowered by law enforcement administrations and the U.S. Supreme Court.