Markey, Warren playing it safe
Is there any job easier than “U.S. Senator from Massachusetts”?
The pay is good, the hours are short, and there’s no heavy lifting — not even the mental kind.
Seriously, when was the last time Ed Markey or Elizabeth Warren had to work their way through a thorny issue of public policy — as opposed to simply jumping on the passing, progressive bandwagon? Is there any significant issue in the Trump era in which either of Massachusetts’ senators have broken ranks with “Hashtag Left”?
#AbolishICE, #MedicareForAll, #YaddaYaddaYadda — whatever the kneejerk liberal position is, they’re among the most partisan patellas on the body politic.
And so it is with the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Of course Liz and Ed are voting “no.” But why? Have they even bothered to articulate a reason?
At least Warren has the self-regard to mock her own predictable partisanship. “I’m opposed to Kavanaugh. I know you’re shocked,” Warren told a crowd last weekend at the Benjamin Franklin Institute in Boston. Then she rolled out the standard spin of her fellow Democrats: Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat from President Barack Obama, Kavanaugh “thinks sitting presidents are above the law,” blah, blah, blah.
Warren’s not telling the truth about that last one, by the way. Kavanaugh merely speculated that one lesson of the Clinton impeachment might be that presidents should be exempt from civil and criminal proceedings over their before-taking-office behavior until after they’ve finished their terms, so they can focus on problems like Osama bin Laden.
But Warren wasn’t saying it because it was true. She was saying it because it’s what Democrats are supposed to say. In yet another example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” Warren and Markey aren’t even pretending to judge (no pun intended) Brett Kavanaugh on the merits, and nobody in Massachusetts expects them to.
Isn’t that just a little embarrassing? If not … shouldn’t it be?
By every measure, Brett Kavanaugh meets the standard to sit on the Supreme Court. As Heritage Foundation legal beagle Hans von Spakovsky points out, Kavanaugh has spent more time on the D.C. Court of Appeals bench than 70 percent of previous Supreme Court justices who were elevated from that court. Kavanaugh has written 300 opinions on federal law, giving him both the experience and the record to serve.
The old saw from the “too partisan to look at the record” crowd about GOP-backed judges is that they are “out of the mainstream.” But as The New York Times reports, the high court has adopted his appellate court opinions 13 times, making him anything but a fringe judicial figure.
“His record in the Supreme Court has been exceptional,” the Times concedes.
His record has also been entirely ignored by our two senators, but hey — who cares? As long as they #ResistTrump! #FightThePower! #MindTheGap! #EtcEtcEtc.
And so we’re going to watch Liz and Ed pretend that they’re shocked —
— that Republicans won’t release the millions of documents that passed under his hand during his time as President George W. Bush’s staff secretary. Everybody knows his job was almost entirely procedural, everyone knows he has a 12-year record of actual judicial rulings for the Senate to review, everyone knows the only goal here is to hope he touched a piece of paper with the phrase “enhanced interrogation” in it so Democrats can pretend that processing the document makes him a torture supporter.
Who cares that, by this logic, Bernie Madoff’s mailman was a con artist? It doesn’t matter. It’s all partisan politics, all the time. Particularly from Liz Warren and Ed Markey, our two “Hashtag Senators” from Massachusetts.