Supreme problem
I’m often wrong but once in a while I’m right.
After 9-11 happened in 2001 and President Bush started making a case for invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein, I asked anyone who wasn’t’ tired of listening to me, why Iraq was such an important target when there was no evidence they brought down those towers in New York City? People would shift the conversation to weapons of mass destruction, but it always felt like we were using the tragedy of 9-11 to settle old scores.
You won’t believe me, but had I been in Congress back then I would not have voted for that war because it felt forced and manufactured. It turns out in many ways it was.
Jump ahead to the fall of 2016 and it seemed everyone was talking about the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump grabbing women in a grotesque way or Hillary Clinton’s emails. You could certainly make a case that both were important and should have played a role in how you voted but I kept yelling at people I knew that the election of 2016 was not about Hillary and Donald but the nine justices in black robes a few blocks from the White House.
A four-year-old could look at the ages of the Supreme Court judges and see there was a very good chance a couple of them were not going to make it another four years.
Last year as the media focused on immigration and children in cages at the border, I told my wife and friends that I had a terrible feeling one of those older justices was going to die in 2016 and throw this whole mess into a tailspin. When we reached Labor Day and it didn’t happen I was relieved, not just for the families of the justices, but for the American people because if there is one more thing 2020 didn’t need it was another log thrown onto this dumpster fire of a year.
If you’re the praying type you couldn’t help but look up at the sky when word came that Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed and say, “Seriously. Hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, race riots and a pandemic weren’t enough? You just had to put a cherry on the sundae, did you? Thanks.
So here we are with an empty seat and the high court about to go into session and everyone in Washington with their hair on fire. Everyone in that town seems to be a hypocrite. Democrats who wanted President Obama’s supreme nominee voted on are now saying we should wait. Republicans who back then said we had to wait are now saying, “Full steam ahead.”
Hypocrites, the whole barrel full.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen but if Brett Kavanaugh is any indication you should prepare for something horrible. And by horrible I don’t rule out some lunatic setting fire to the building where they might hold the hearings, if that buys time and forces this vote to wait.
I have been struck already by how some of the women who the President was considering were described right out of the gate. Only a day after the great RBG drew her last breath I kept hearing one of the potential nominees as a “devout Catholic with seven kids.” I think I heard that exact phrase forty times in one day as I bounced around the TV channels.
I don’t know if she’d be the best justice every born or the worst but I do know when people describe you by your religion or how many kids you have, it’s a veiled shot at your credibility.
Here I can prove it. Just change the circumstances but apply the same description. “Hey, did you hear they’re considering Joe for the top job in the company?”
Your friend then replies, “Yeah, I hear he’s a Jew and has seven kids.” Or perhaps, “Someone told me his Muslim and has five sons.” See what I mean. It just doesn’t sit right as it comes off the tongue.
Whatever happens, you have to know it will be ugly.
Democrats will have to decide how far they are willing to go to derail this train and Republicans will have to decide how much hypocrisy they are willing to swallow to ultimately get what they want, a right leaning court. Both sides are right when they say this about much more than Roe V Wade.
Immigration, the affordable care act, equal rights, privacy, the right to sue, telling an Asian American you won’t allow them into your college because you already have met a certain quota and are going to weigh their test scores differently than other students; it’s all in play.
The 2016 election was always about this very moment because math has no mercy and the ages of the Supreme Court judges told us this is where the road was going to lead. So here we are, and I worry for this country. I firmly believe if Joe Biden had run four years ago, he would have beaten Donald Trump with room to spare.
Now is his chance, so we’ll see if the window is still open for him. I’ve given up on the polls or predicting what people will do. We are the strangest hypocrites capable of all manner of mayhem.
Just turn on cable news and watch.