Let’s get this over with. Not because I’m feeling like a sore loser, but because I’ve been inured to this result for years. I called that Trump was going to pick a person who supported government expansion and would back him on things even before the election happened (although then, I thought it would be in the unlikely event he won.) My second biggest gripe about this is that I should be able to gloat more right now. Yes, sometimes I’m that shallow. And, because it’s all over I’m more than ready to let it be all over and move forward to the next issue.
WINNER: Donald Trump. He got a man who is deeply indebted to him and has no concrete judicial philosophy onto the Supreme Court. He’s also being seated just in time to hear a case which may greatly expand Trump’s pardoning power, to now include pardoning himself.
WINNER: Justice Kavanaugh. By promoting a doctrine of Presidential invulnerability, he elbowed originalists out of the way and gained a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, with all of the power and money that brings. Also, because of the effort exhausted to get him there, he gained a degree of teflon for any future big-government decisions, because people hate to admit they exerted effort on mistakes.
WINNER: D.C. Republicans. Nothing succeeds like success. There’s a reason that lawn signs go out, and that’s because people like to be on the winning team. There are people who are fans of the underdogs, who find losing on a key issue something to spur them forward, but they are outnumbered by those who like to jump on a bandwagon.
WINNER: D.C. Democrats. They made it clear they were going to lose this battle back before the hearings started. They were not in it to win, but to delay and attack and thereby to get donations flooding into exhausted coffers. They got that and more.
WINNER: Dianne Feinstein. Rationally, the way she held back the accusation of Ford until the eleventh hour and forced Ford into the public hearing she wanted to avoid should have been an act of political suicide. For anyone who believes Ford, the Doctor was callously used as a political tool. For anyone who doesn’t believe Ford, Feinstein tried to gin up charges at the last minute and destroy an innocent man. All of this for a failed attack. The fact that Feinstein’s popularity is up in her home state shows that her supporters are not thinking rationally.
WINNER: Foreign adversaries. If they wanted further division in this country, they couldn’t have asked for a better scenario. Simply by dint of the nature of the charge, they even split amiable political allies and affiliates and set them frustrated and against each other.
LOSER: Rape and assault victims. Whether true or not, a majority of the country believes that Ford was attacked. She was brought into the public eye and called a liar by a huge percentage of the population, and her family has received death threats. Unlike the similar threats against Justice Kavanaugh’s family, Ford will not get free government agent protection for life. The results for Ford will put a chill on future accusations, whether or not a victim has a preponderance of evidence available.
LOSER: False allegation victims. In the wake of things like the Cosby trial and Weinstein, allegations have flown fast and furious, and some of them have been fake. The false allegations have gotten relatively little play in the press, and they needed to get more. As mentioned above, Ford was believed by more of the population. Because so many people are adherents to “social justice”, it is likely that truly false allegations will get pinned on innocent men. The false allegation victims needed an unbelievable person to be the center of attention here, and there were a few such who made charges against Kavanaugh. Ford was the wrong person for them.
LOSER: The non-D.C. Democrats. They have a man who has admitted he will attack them on the bench. It’s nothing new to have a partisan there; he’s simply been more open about it than Kagan and Sotomayor, in my opinion. But, as Senator Collins took a long time explaining yesterday, Kavanaugh has a history of being a centrist slightly to the left of the man he is replacing. This was, in terms of judicial rulings, a win for them that they completely squandered.
LOSER: The non-D.C. Republicans. They have a man who will likely side with them for a few years until his pique is gone (or, more likely, until the pendulum swings to Democrat control and he wants to stay “in” with the D.C. social crowd he’s run with for most of his life.) They had the chance to get another originalist and they let themselves get suckered. In the meantime, they alienated the youth vote even more. The youth vote rarely matters much… immediately. But they do, down the line. Reagan winning the youth vote was key to why the Republicans were in a position to take the House in 1992, and W. inspiring the youth vote was key to why the Republicans winning House races in the 2010s. The Democrats were already in a commanding position for the youth vote, and the initial polling on this suggests it will calcify that vote.
LOSER: The Constitution. Because both sides of the D.C. aisle were allowed to get away with announcing they would bypass their Constitutional duties in favor of party. Not just get away with it, they are being rewarded for it by the very people outside of D.C. that they just shafted.
