I cannot tell you how furious I am to see headlines that use the words “Neil Gorsuch” and “confirmation hearings” in the same sentence.
Neil Gorsuch is getting confirmation hearings that Republicans despicably denied Merrick Garland. That is a fact, and Gorsuch’s nomination is illegitimate. His confirmation will be illegitimate and, if seated, his tenure on the court will be illegitimate. As David Faris wrote,
Gorsuch’s seat was stolen by a craven act of democratic sabotage, and he will always be sitting in a chair reserved for the nominee of a Democratic president. He is illegitimate today, and he will be illegitimate 20 years from now. The fact that he is willing to accept a stolen Supreme Court seat does not speak well of his underlying character. Nicking a Supreme Court seat is not a victimless crime.
Gorsuch is happy to steal a Supreme Court seat. That makes him a thief, and a liar, and a craven political douche canoe who is not worthy of a lifetime appointment on the nation’s highest court. And anyone normalizing this process as if what we all know happened didn’t happen needs to be seriously checked. That goes for every media person and every member of the U.S. Senate pretending Gorsuch deserves to have this hearing. He doesn’t.
So I don’t want to hear about Neil Gorsuch. I don’t care if he’s a brilliant legal mind or a nincompoop. He does not deserve to be there. Period.
I don’t care that he’s a mysogynist who believes women “manipulate” maternity leave. I don’t care that he’s praised voter suppression or hates the environment. I do not give a rat’s ass as to whether he loves his wife or if he supports an independent judiciary.
This seat is not his to fill. The seat belonged to the person President Barack Obama nominated to fill it, before the Republicans invented some fake “rule” about not filling seats in election years. That rule does not exist, no matter who tried to pretend otherwise. Everybody knows it and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
And how the fuck did this happen, Democrats? Who dropped the ball here? We have been saying since the damn 2000 election that the Supreme Court is everything. So how did everyone just fall in line and act like, “Oh, okay, it’s an election year, got it.” How in the living hell did this happen?
What was it? Was it that Democrats were so sure Hillary was going to win that they didn’t want to get dirty fighting this battle? Is that it? What was the thinking here? Did the pending election take all of the air out of the room?
WHAT HAPPENED?
And where were our allies? Where was the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and everyone else who is constantly badgering me for money? The Supreme Court is the most important thing in every one of your begging emails yet not one of you people fought for Obama’s pick? Nobody ran an ad on cable news? No one thought to rally the troops, get people to sign petitions, call their members of congress, march on the capitol, none of it?
Words fail that the left dropped this ball. THE most important ball.
Southern Beale 
Bless ;you, Ms. Beale, for another righteous rant! You are absolutely right. Maybe we should have held protests like the ones we’re holding now. I personally am ashamed i didn’t call my Senators/Rep every day. Sigh.
While I agree with most of what you say, it was not JUST the Democrats in Congress. It was them and all of the people on the left and those who just can’t be bothered to get off their asses or even write their editoe, their congressman or anyone else to Taisen a stink.
But to be fair I DO devote an entire paragraph to those “allies” like MoveOn.org and the rest who also dropped the ball on this and didn’t rally the troops.
Yes, I saw it. As you may have noticed over the last few years (a decade, almost?) I don’t really any sort of political, “Inside voice”.
I have told the local dem committee that they can get my services for photography, pro bono, for any event or to take photos of candidates for their campaign literature and the like–a county rep I did that for 6 years ago told me that they WON the election for him (I think he’s fibbing)–ecxept voter outreach OR fundraising. They never call me–despite the fact that I know a number of them, well enough to sit and have a beer.
Young Reptilicans are involved in every publicly visible fund raiser or community service project that they can get a photo op for. NEVER have I seen, or even heard of CollegeProgs or DemYutes or a student political organization that is NOT a bunch of earnest young Hitler JugendLite doing anything in public. THAT is a problem.
While I completely agree with your basic premise that the Democrats are to blame (specifically the ones in Congress and their “allies”) the fault also lies with whatever sort of organization(s) there are in 3rd parties. They did, afaia, absolutely nothing after the election–aside from Jill Stein’s “recount” thing–which went absolutely nowhere or the groups that are trying to gain cert with various courts to overturn some election or other.
I cannot stand to be in the same room with the current Mayor of this city,. He’s a smug, self-assured asshole who is being guided by the graybeards in the direction that they want city politics to go. I know his opponent, a decent woman who was on the county lege and served in other government or service organization positions for years. None of that mattered to a number of voters who wanted “change”. Well, they got it, in spades. Our boymayor, btw, was pleased as punch to go to D.C. for the coronation.
He got elected for a number of reasons–resume inflation being among those reasons–however, he hit every fucking neighborhood in town. His opponent did the best she could but she was also doing mom, grandma, outreach, county business, etc., She lost because of “perception”. It had nothing to do with her not being qualified v his being qualified. There were exactly no points of comparison. Yet, she, a loving mother and grandmother, devoted wife, valued employee, eager and able volunteer and multiple term SITTING politician was defeated by a 24 yo who was bringing his “business acumen” to the city of Oswego. His business acument, near as I can tell, was working in his family’s concession business–not exactly the same thing as running a city with $30M+ budget and a city reeling from a number of expensive problems–including an $80M sewer project ordered under a consent decree with NY and US pollution monitoring agencies. He won because he and his sneering, smarmy cohort of Stepford-wives-in-waiting and Paulie Ryan wannabes pretended PUBLICLY to give a fuck about the rest of the populace.
What is needed and needed NOW, not in late Spring 2018 are “boots on the ground” Doc Martens or flip-flops, huarachis, espadrilles, whatever.
A strategy of connecting with voters is of paramount interest to both parties. The GOP does theirs by spreading lies via FuckTheNew’sCorpse and a coterie of useful idiots like Pat Robertson, Alex Jones and the rest of the Geek Chorus that pollute the airwaves and the intertoobz.
The DNC won’t or can’t come up with the funding to do that sort of propagantainment. They don’t have a lock on a lot of wattage in the broadcast/cable biz. They do have, going by the last election’s results, 60M+ people who think that, like it or not, the alternative to Trumpligula was a choice that they needed to make in the voting booth. They need to mobilize THOSE people, becasue it appears that they’re not going to be having any common cause with the JillGarBernbros–if the bros in fact have any cause other than kvetching.
I know I’m not really telling you anything you don’t already know and that you haven’t already processed but I think a lot of other folks don’t know and I can see that they aren’t doing anything to correct what is obviously a YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE problem in electoral politics. This needs to be said and they need to act.
“to raise a stink” I fucking hate “predictive” keying.
Well, S.B. as a liberal Democrat here in East Tennessee, I agree about 25% that we were so SURE Hillary would win. Personally, I have another view…I believe that our 2016 DNC allowed the pressure of allowing the Bernie Bots to push Bernie into OUR Party just long enough to split our voters down the middle, partly because they swallowed the ‘Putin fake news and alternative lies about Hillary to cause some to say that they would “vote for Trump instead of that murderer, crook, blah blah HILLARY…So that is another 25% here. And then the REAL Liberal Dems where very busy protesting the outsourcing by Haslam…prisons, teachers, AND public Colleges and ALL UT campus workers jobs. We held rallies on the ACA,and guns everywhere, and marched at local offices of our Congress members. Plus we had LOCAL candidates we worked HARD for, and my District won two seats after DAILY door to door canvassing. Do you know of any other TN Voting Districts that won ANY seats ? So I will agree to some guilt, but where I live, our Dems worked so hard to make life a bit better…and now we must work 10 times harder for the same goal.
I tend to agree with you. They were so worried about dividing the part that they let the BernieOrBusters … DIVIDE THE PARTY. And guess what, Bernie and his crew are up to their bullshit for the midterms, too. They’re going to divide the party and keep the government in the hands of Rethuglicans. I have no use for them. They are worse than the Trumpets.
Again, MOST Bernie people are good folks who voted for Hillary to protect America from an obvious groups of extremists but those few loudmouths poisoned the well. People like Nina Turner and Cenk Uyger and Susan Sarandon. The election hinged on just a handful of votes in a handful of key counties and it didn’t take much to ruin it all.
Anyone who thinks there is a groundswell of support for Socialism in this country is bonkers. People voted for Trump because they thought “those people” didn’t deserve their “government handouts.” That is the exact OPPOSITE of Socialism.
If Donald Drumpf, and or his campaign staff, is guilty of collusion with the Russians; why are these hearings even going forward?
Lots of people want to know the answer to that ….
Simple – the ‘Thugs want to get him installed before their whole criminal enterprise ends up on public display. Once he’s in, it’ll be merry hell and nearly impossible to get him out, and it’s his job to arm-twist Kennedy back to the Dark Side so that ‘Thugs can control all three arms of the Gummint, thereby completing the Triad of Evil and plunging the world into an age of darkness…
You have to go back to 2014 and blame the voters there. They let the Republicans win control of the Senate and that is why they were able to block Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
Well, Jimbo(B), either that;
OR, maybe go back to 2000 when Bush was HANDED the fucking presidency by a SCotUS packed by Reagan and Bush (5 total appointments, including the braindead Clarence Thomas) plus having Rehnquist as Theif Justice.
Your serve.
I don’t follow how Bush winning the recount (search any valid news agency and you will find he did indeed win Florida) has anything to do with the Republicans winning the Senate in 2014 and being able to block Obama’s nominee by simply not scheduling any hearings.
Nobody said it did.
Sorry, I didn’t see your original comment. I thought you were commenting on my reference to the 2000 election in the post.
Much as I would love to blame Republicans for everything awful in the world, there is certainly blame to go around. Republicans were favored to win back control of the Senate in 2014 anyway, based on the geography of where Senate Dems were retiring or up for re-election. But with all that being said, there is no rule that Supreme Court justices can’t be seated during an election campaign, Republicans made that up and Democrats and Democratic allies had a very valid and strong case to make in the court of public opinion. Yet they dropped the ball. It should have been an no-holds-barred fight. Being in the minority certainly didn’t keep Republicans from ginning up outrage in three “Justice Sunday” events when Bush had his Supreme Court seats to fill, all to keep Democrats from filibustering. Democrats didn’t seem to act as if the Supreme Court mattered at all. Very bizarre to me. Democrats are very good at government but they flunk politics.
Seems like DC implies that is does and that he expects me to respond to his assertion as well.
JImbo(B):
In the 2000 election, the recount was stopped by the SCotUS, allowing Bush to win. Subsequent “investigations” and news reports kinda sorta tend to be all over the place. So, yeah, you’re full of shit.
r
The vote in Al Franken’s victory in MN in 2008 was litigated form 8 friggin’ months and somehow that doesn’t trigger any introspection about the SCotUS jumping in to a state contest with both feet–a SCotUS packed in large part by the reptilican candidate’s father? Well, no,of course it wouldn’t, your party got the result you wanted in the first instance–so it’s all good.