Killing the Senate To Stop Kavanaugh

NO matter which way Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation goes, the institution that will be damaged the most will be neither the Supreme Court nor the presidency. It’ll be the US Senate. It’s not just that the so-called “world’s greatest deliberative body” has left millions of Americans disgusted. Nothing terribly new about that. What’s so striking about the current crisis is that the senators themselves seem to have conceived a veritable loathing for one another. They’ve come to doubt the personal integrity of the senators they sit next to every day.

This burst into the news last week, when GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham got his turn to question Kavanaugh. After a perfunctory query, Graham wheeled on the Democrats.

Jabbing a finger at the ranking member, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the South Carolina solon accused the Democrats of perpetrating “the most unethical sham” since he’s been in politics.

“God, I hate to say it,” he exploded, half way into his tirade, “because these people have been my friends.” Feinstein cowered in her seat.

The Senate, of course, is supposed to be a deliberative body — allegedly the world’s greatest. When Thomas Jefferson, just back from France, asked George Washington why we created the Senate, he got a famous reply.

“Why did you pour that tea into your saucer?” Washington asked, according to the Senate’s own version. “To cool it,” Jefferson supposedly said. “Even so,” Washington said, “we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”

The Kavanaugh hearings represent one of the few times that the Senate not only failed to cool things off but instead lit them on fire and threw on the gasoline. It’s made the feud a scandal.

Historians will argue for genera- tions as to who started it. They will fix on the Democrats’ rejection of Robert Bork. And the Democrats failed attempt to stop Justice Clarence Thomas.

Even those hearings, though, lacked a senator of Lindsey Graham’s stature questioning the integrity of a figure of Dianne Feinstein’s gravity. The Democrats’ confirmation conduct may itself become the subject of a Senate probe.

Meantime, one Senate Democrat, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, has just filed in federal court in Washington an “emergency” lawsuit seeking an order to halt the Senate from voting on Kavanaugh.

Merkley wants the Senate vote stopped until the government hands over more documents on Kavanaugh. Hey, you never know. A raft of federal judges managed to stall for months President Trump’s emergency travel ban.

Whatever way the judge rules in the Merkley case, the “emergency” could be appealed to the very court on which Kavanaugh currently sits — and end up stalled in a four-to-four vote at the Supreme Court.

What a mess. And what a glimpse into the anger that has consumed the Senate.

Merkley’s move, though, is nothing for nastiness compared to the sliming of the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, that was delivered on the floor of the Senate Tuesday by Chuck Schumer.

The New Yorker was answering McConnell’s summary of the situation. “Now, I like the majority leader,” Schumer began without a hint of sincerity. Then he proceeded to, in effect, call McConnell a liar.

McConnell’s comments, Schumer said, were “so absurd, so filled with double standard, with innuendo, with hypocrisy, that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

So much for the legendary comity of the Senate. Schumer tried to palm off on his noble colleagues the libel that McConnell was to blame for the delay that was actually caused by Feinstein’s sitting on Christine Blasey Ford’s letter.

That’s what McConnell got for doing what the Democrats sought and agreeing to an FBI inquiry before a vote.

Just imagine how acrimonious every confirmation debate will be if Kavanaugh goes down at the hands of the Democrats.

It’ll start the minute the next nominee is named. For the Democratic Party refuses to accept that it lost the election of 2016. And if it can succeed in torpedoing Kavanaugh, it’ll be made to believe future election results don’t have to be accepted either.

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