Nice work, Republicans. You just put compulsive perjurer and potential serial rapist Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court through a near-party-line vote (thanks, Joe “Profiles in Cowardice” Manchin, for giving these assholes “bi-partisan” cover). So you now have five right-wing judicial activists who your donors can count on to screw over everyone who isn’t a multimillionaire for the next decade or two.
In doing this, you’ve just made every Republican Senator seeking re-election the “Senator who put an unrepentant sexual abuser and perjurer on the Supreme Court.” More broadly, you’ve reinforced the GOP’s image as the “rape apologist party” in the eyes of millions of Americans. And while the Democrats failed to stop you, you gave them the chance to pull off a political win by fighting furiously to the end. There’s a midterm election one month away, and this is the sort of thing that will whip the already-energized Democratic base into a frenzy for payback, donating and volunteering and getting out the vote — and exactly at the worst possible time for all of you. As for your own base … well, you just gave a lot of them the thing they really wanted: a majority on the Supreme Court. It’s not like you’re offering them anything else right now, with your non-existent legislative agenda. So why are any of them motivated now to make any special effort to get out the vote for you next month?
But this self-inflicted wound will fester well past the midterms. Every Republican in this country is going to have Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh as their running mate for the next two years, and that’s a huge help for Democrats in recruiting candidates, raising funds, and enlisting volunteers. You’ve let women of every age know just how little they matter to the GOP. Do you know how many women have been sexually assaulted? (No, of course you don’t, because you don’t want to hear it, and you’ve got the backs of the perpetrators anyway.) It’s a horrifyingly large number, and many of them will channel their rage at you into registering voters and raising money for Democratic candidates and getting out the vote for years to come. Hell, depending on how bad this guy’s decisions are for us non-corporate persons (that’s “voters” to you) over the next four years, a number of you may have ended your Senate careers with this vote.
In fact, there are a whole lot of millennial and Gen Z women who will never vote Republican for the rest of their lives because of stuff like this.
Don’t think this will blow over. Don’t imagine Kavanaugh had only three sexual assault victims. There are almost certainly more, and eventually some of them will come forward. Every time another accuser or another witness speaks up, it will dominate the news cycle for a day or three, and the “Republicans put a sexual predator on the Supreme Court” message will be reinforced. For Democratic fundraising and party-building, Kavanaugh stands to be the gift that keeps on giving.
Plus, if Democrats win control of either house of Congress next month (and you may well have just handed them both depending on what voter turnout looks like, so nice work there), they will investigate the hell out of Kavanaugh in preparation for his possible impeachment for perjury. Everything he said under oath gets scrutinized. Any more lies come out, he stars as the bad guy in a few more news cycles.
You’ve got more to worry about than a possible impeachment. You chose to ram through an appointee who is potentially indictable. It takes 67 votes in the Senate to convict on impeachment, but just 12 jurors to convict at trial. And don’t count on a presidential pardon to protect him; he might have committed state crimes as well, and a thorough Congressional investigation could expose those. With Kavanaugh now a poster boy for Republican corruption and overreach, he’ll be an incredibly tempting target for some ambitious county prosecutor or state assistant attorney general who wants to make a name for themselves in the Democratic party. If there’s any solid case against him on anything he’s done, somebody somewhere will run with it.
So you decided to “win” this one for the sake of pro-corporate, anti-citizen Supreme Court decisions for decades to come? Did you know Supreme Court justices don’t actually have life tenure? The Constitution states “The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour[.]” While the limits of “good Behaviour” have never been defined (although Congress certainly has the power to do so, and Democrats just might), it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say that a federal judge who is convicted of a felony related to his conduct in office no longer meets the “during good Behaviour” requirement, and thus is no longer constitutionally eligible to hold his office. We don’t know that a criminal conviction automatically kicks a federal judge off the bench; that’s a question that’s never been seriously tested to my knowledge. But if Kavanaugh gets convicted of something serious enough to land him in prison, we could find out.
And let’s not forget, between Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, you have destroyed every norm observed by the Senate for well over a century regarding Supreme Court appointments. Democrats have literally no reason not to pack the court when they get back in power. In fact, it would be good public policy to set the number of justices at a number equal to the number of federal circuits and … hey, how about that? There are now thirteen seats and a Democratic president gets four new appointments! What a pleasant surprise! (Well, not for you ...)
So yeah … enjoy your pyrrhic victory while it lasts. Democrats won’t forget this, the bad press won’t go away, and we’ll be using this against your whole party for years to come.