Editorial

Mean Drunk Justice

There were plenty of reasons to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, but Charles Grassley wasn’t interested in any of them. Sen. Grassley had one job and that was to get Kavanaugh out of his Judiciary Committee by any means necessary, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would take it from there.

After Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s emotional testimony that Kavanaugh and his friend, both drunk, tried to rape her at a 1982 house party in Bethesda, Md., when she was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17, Kavanaugh came back with explosive and contemptuous denials. He emphasized that he liked beer but had not been a blackout drunk in high school or college, no matter what his best friend wrote of their drunken high school exploits; his college roommate said Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker who became aggressive and belligerent when he was drunk. Kavanaugh certainly came across at the hearing as a potentially mean drunk.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., in what passes for Republican moderation, made his support for Kavanaugh conditional on an FBI investigation of the charges. The Republican leadership reluctantly agreed, and referred the case to the White House, which apparently told the FBI to make a few calls, but barred interviews with Ford, the two other women who have openly accused Kavanaugh of sexual abuse, or potentially corroborating witnesses, much less Kavanaugh.

Republican leaders knew a wide-ranging inquiry would be disastrous for Kavanaugh’s chances of confirmation, and his problems telling the truth under oath are documented: He had lied repeatedly to the Judiciary Committee in 2004 and 2006 about using documents stolen from Democrats to prepare judicial nominees when he worked on George W. Bush’s White House staff; he lied about which judicial nominees he worked with; and he lied in denying his role developing Bush-era detention and interrogation policies. And that was before the Sept. 27 hearing where he apparently lied about his drinking and sexual history.

So a whitewash was called for and, sure enough, two days before the deadline, the FBI returned a one-page report shown only to senators sworn to secrecy. Apparently they didn’t find proof Kavanaugh raped the girl and didn’t go into whether he committed perjury. Flake and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, two of three Republicans who claimed to be on the fence, said that was good enough for them. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, jumped off the fence, but Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., running for re-election in a state Trump carried by 42 points, supported Kavanaugh, leaving McConnell two votes to spare.

It was an ugly process throughout. Minority President Trump couldn’t resist the opportunity to mock Dr. Ford at a rally Oct. 2 in Mississippi. He may have been playing to the crowd, but he also distracted attention from the New York Times’ blockbuster report that same day exposing shady business dealings of Trump and his family. Far from being the self-made real estate developer who parlayed a $1 million loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business empire, it turned out that father Fred Trump used his children to dodge taxes and Donald received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler — he was a millionaire by age 8 — and continuing to this day.

But the master of distraction carried the day as his cruel mockery of Ford, and the laughter of the Mississippi crowd, overshadowed the Times report in the broadcast news.

So Kavanaugh was picked by a president who won 46% of the popular vote and he was confirmed by senators representing 44% of the population. That’s no way to run a government — much less maintain respect for the Supreme Court’s supposed neutrality.

If Democrats take control of the House, they should hold hearings on the administration’s manipulation of the FBI investigation and the extent to which Kavanaugh lied to the Senate.

If Democrats regain the White House and control Congress after the 2020 elections, they should move to expand the size of the court to offset the two illegitimate justices — Kavanaugh as well as Neil Gorsuch. “Changing that majority would not constitute politicizing the court because conservatives have already done this without apology,” E.J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post Oct. 7.

A simple act of Congress could increase the number of Supreme Court justices to 11 or more.

“Court packing” will cause Republicans to shriek, but the size of the court was changed seven times during the 19th century and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 proposed to increase the court’s size by six justices after a conservative bloc on the Supreme Court overturned many of his New Deal programs during his first term.

FDR’s threat in 1937 got a couple conservatives to back down and the court allowed, among other things, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and a federal minimum wage. Roosevelt is said to have failed in his “court-packing scheme,” but he won the war against the “economic royalists” whose excesses brought about the Great Depression.

Eighty years later, the economic royalists returned to power under Lying King Donald and they hope Kavanaugh will be a solid fifth vote to reverse the progressive reforms that helped build the world’s greatest middle class. Republican royalists, with occasional help from conservative Democrats, have been undermining unions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and New Deal reforms that regulated the financial industry, even after the reckless use of financial derivatives in the early 2000s nearly brought down banks that were “too big to fail,” requiring a massive bailout.

Too many working-class Americans have been lured to support the Republican royalists by “culture war” issues such as opposition to abortion, gay rights and gun control, which have obscured the damage Republicans have done to their economic interests.

Republican undermining of unions since the Reagan administration has reduced organized labor’s role as a balance to corporate power, at the expense of working people. The threat of strikes forced unionized industries to increase wages and benefits, and it also forced non-union employers to increase their wages to keep unions out of their business. The system made the US the envy of the world in the economic boom after World War II, as the typical worker’s wages increased along with productivity improvements from the late 1940s through the 1960s, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported. But in the 1970s, that started to change. From 1973 to 2017, net productivity rose 77%, while the hourly pay of typical workers essentially stagnated — increasing only 12.4% (adjusted for inflation). That corresponds with the decline in union bargaining power.

When Trump got a $1.5 trillion tax cut, which heavily favors billionaires and corporations, through Congress in late 2017, Trump promised it would benefit everyday workers. Of course he was lying. The EPI found for the first half of 2018 very little increase in private-sector compensation — and that was mainly because some businesses used bonuses to attract or keep workers in a time of low employment. Overall compensation rose 7 cents per hour in the first six months of 2018 but actual W-2 wages fell 25 cents per hour.

That’s what depending on the good faith of bosses gets you — breaking even, at best, during a time of full employment and an “economic boom” on Wall Street. And Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court to make sure the “free market” is all you can count on.

Vote Blue no matter who. Even Joe Manchin, who might waver, will do on Nov. 6 as long as he votes for a Democratic majority leader and a Democratic Judiciary Committee chairman in January. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2018

Populist.com