My Final Perspective On Kavanaugh

The Senate just confirmed Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be the next Justice of the Supreme Court.

If you’ve followed me along at all during this ordeal, you know I’ve written quite a bit about it. This will be my final editorial on Kavanaugh, I promise (unless something really crazy happens, which I doubt). He will now blend into the overall crazy of our political environment and the amount of direct, specific attention on him will fade (until he’s the deciding vote on a crucial, controversial decision).

It’s been a very heated couple of weeks. I’ve been in my own knock-down, drag-out debates about Kavanaugh, that’s for sure. It has opened up and laid raw a lot of pent up emotions for many people…mostly women.

Whether or not Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations were true or not, and we will never really know, there is absolutely no doubt that her story is very familiar to many, many women.

Deny that if you want to, Republicans, but I think you will regret it.

This type of thing that Ford described has and still does happen more than we would like to believe. The problem is, and always has been, that there are usually no witnesses and no way to prove it, one way or the other. But you’d be a fool to think it doesn’t happen.

Women often do not report it because they are smart enough to know that there is no way to prove it, and the likely thing to happen is that they will not be believed, they will be accused of making false accusations, and their entire life will be dragged through the mud. We know that is absolutely true. We see it with every such accusation that occurs, whether they are from women that accused Bill Clinton of assault, or Donald Trump, or Roy Moore, or now Brett Kavanaugh.

In the end, it’s just not worth it to most women to make the effort to report it.

Those reasons are compounded immensely for a 15 year old girl in high school. When you think how hard it already is for many, if not most, developing teenagers to make their way through the cruelty of those high school years, it’s no wonder that they are very hesitant to bring any attention on themselves. If a 15 year old high school teenager were to make such accusations that could not be proven against a rich, popular captain of the football and/or basketball team boy and his drunken sidekick buddy, things would have been very bad for that girl. Even if the adults believed her and took her seriously, there is still no way to prove it and in the end, the boys would not have been held accountable. However, the girl would have been mercilessly tormented and teased and “slut shamed” and the target of many false rumors and all sorts of other cruel things that happen in the high school environment.

And girls that age know it. They see that crap happen to others every day and they will do everything to avoid becoming that target.

That doesn’t mean that Kavanaugh is guilty, not even close. But my point is that, knowing these things, like everything else that Trump and the Republicans have done, it’s the way that they have done the thing that will come back to bite them. To pretend like this couldn’t have happened because she didn’t report it at the time and has no direct evidence. To not take it seriously. To simply go through the motions of listening to Ford but not actually want to investigate it at all. It’s all telling. That’s not to say the Democrats handled things any better. They, of course, exploited every accusation that came along and that made matters worse. It all plays into the biggest problem we face, which I will get to in a minute.

Make no mistake, I want a Supreme Court full of constitutionally conservative justices, that will decide cases based on the actual, original meaning and intent of the Constitution. I have been arguing for and politically fighting for that my entire adult life. These appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh move the Supreme Court closer to that goal, so I should be very happy about that, especially after the death of Scalia, it looked like the court may shift the opposite direction. So why am I not?

Trump supporters will say it is all due to my irrational hatred of Trump and my TDS. Of course, I disagree with that diagnosis.

The reason I do not like what’s happening is because the way it’s happening is creating more division and more animosity toward each other and more strife in the country. Having Trump as the face of it all is the last thing that we need. His “in your face”, combative way of doing things and calling all who oppose him the enemy and losers is truly creating an explosive situation. And the Republicans are following that tactic in everything they are doing. They see it as winning. Their supporters see it as winning and gloat and cheer and mock the other side (aka the enemy).

No good will come of this.

What, exactly, is the end game? Do all of these people believe that all of this winning will really have any sort of permanence? I think they do, and I think they are dead wrong. They think that the Supreme Court is secure for their side for decades now, and I think they are dead wrong.

The me of 10 years ago would be ecstatic over all of the “accomplishments” over the past 2 years. But I’m no longer that person. After really educating myself on the founding principles, the Constitution, the form and structure of our self-government, and all of the brilliance behind each aspect of it, the way I now look at things has had a major shift. I no longer consider specific policy decisions as the major concerns of our Republic. The biggest problem that we face, the thing that will absolutely destroy us, is the divisiveness…the extreme, us vs. them tribalism that has been fomenting for many decades but is quickly coming to a head. These bitter, in your face, “victories” are increasing that problem, and there is nothing being done to address it.

Placing Judge Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, in the manner in which they did, will not change any of that, it only makes it worse. No matter how many decisions that they make that I may actually agree with, it will not make any progress in actually fixing the most dire problem. Sure, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, half the country will rejoice and the other half will be apoplectic, and the first half will mock them, and round and round we go. Will it stop abortions? No. Presumably, these decisions would be sent back to the states and some states may outlaw it, but many will not. If someone wants to get an abortion, it will still be readily available to them. But still, the right will see it as a huge victory, and the left will claim it as the biggest attack on women ever.

All of this will throw our government into even more chaos as the Democrats eventually gain control back. They WILL do whatever is needed to reverse EVERYTHING that the right is now celebrating…and more. To think otherwise is very naive and suggests that you haven’t really been paying attention to how all of these things have escalated over the the past decade and what the logical next steps are.

So, while the right is cheering all of the progress and accomplishments being made, the biggest problem we face is growing. While my conservative friends and family just can’t understand why I am not as thrilled as they are about these great conservative policies and Supreme Court appointments, I can’t understand how they cannot see what’s happening and what it’s leading to.

We need to restore sanity in our governing, but the very root of the problem is a massive ignorance in the people.

I’m trying to figure how that can be fixed, but I’m coming up short of ideas. In the meantime, the fuse is burning.