For DECADES after Trump is gone, his Supreme Court will inflict his politics upon us

Imagine Donald Trump on the Supreme Court!

His nominee Brett Kavanaugh reflects Trump’s politics and would inflict Trumpism upon the USA for decades:

  • Against women’s rights

  • Against workers’ rights

  • Against consumers’ rights

  • Against the environment

  • Against sensible efforts to reduce gun violence

  • Believes that a sitting president is above the law

Please phone your two U.S. senators and urge them to PUSH VIGOROUSLY to oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination.

You can call their Washington DC offices and their local offices in your state.

If you live in Washington State, call:

  • Senator Patty Murray at (202) 224-3441 in Washington DC or (206) 533-5545 in Seattle

  • Senator Maria Cantwell at (202) 224-3441 in Washington DC or (206) 220-6400 in Seattle

E-mail them through their websites, www.murray.senate,gov and www.cantwell.senate.gov

Please contact them often until they act vigorously enough to stop Kavanaugh.

Many sources listed Cantwell as undecided.  When I phoned her on Tues. Sept. 4, 2018, her office staff said that she announced that morning that she opposes Kavanaugh.  I can’t imagine why she would wait so long!  Everybody else knew Kavanaugh was a dangerous right-wing extremist as soon as Trump had nominated him.  Trump promised that he would nominate someone who would overturn Roe v. Wade and take other right-wing positions.

ALSO, Trump is filling many, many federal judge positions with young, right-wing extremists who will inflict Trumpist decisions upon our nation for many decades.  In violation of the Senate’s constitutional duty, the Republican-dominated Senate refused to consider Obama’s nominations, so many, many federal judicial positions were left vacant until Trump and the Republican-dominated Senate could fill them.  Our “Democratic” senators should have publicized that violation of the Constitution and rallied public opinion to consider Obama’s nominees, but they failed to do that.  Now Trump is filling those positions with right-wing extremists.

 

Republicans have refused to release many thousands of records about Kavanaugh’s services for George W. Bush (including stopping the 2000 Florida recount) and his work as a highly Republican attack dog helping Starr’s entirely partisan witch hunt against President Clinton.  The massive cover-up of Kavanaugh’s extremely partisan work probably reveals even more than his more recent judicial record reveals.  What are the Republicans hiding?

Many non-profit organizations have been alerting the public to Kavanaugh’s extremism.  Here are some of their messages (including some edited for brevity):

 

People for the American Way (www.pfaw.org) wrote this:

Kavanaugh could be the decisive vote on:
• Ending Roe v. Wade
• Dismantling the Affordable Care Act
• Shielding Trump from any accountability for illegal or corrupt acts
– Kavanaugh has attacked the independence of the special prosecutor
– He has argued that the president should essentially be above the law, immune to indictment or investigation
– He said that maybe U.S. v. Nixon, the unanimous Supreme Court decision during Watergate that said the president is not above the law, was incorrectly decided
• Bringing back the use of torture
• Increased secret electronic surveillance of Americans
• Laws aimed at protecting consumers and free speech on the Internet (Kavanaugh argued against the constitutionality of net neutrality)
• Protections for consumers in the financial sector – from big banks, predatory creditors, and others (Kavanaugh argued against the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau)
• Ending the separation of church and state in key areas
• Letting even more Big Money into our politics and elections
• LGBTQ equality and discrimination
• Voting rights
• Disability rights
• Workers’ rights
• Civil rights in other key areas
• Women’s equality and gender discrimination
• Environmental protections
• The social safety net, including New Deal and Great Society programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
• The ability of governmental agencies to protect consumers, workers, and the public in any number of ways (Kavanaugh seems eager and ready to be a weapon in the Far Right’s war on what Trump’s white nationalist former advisor Steve Bannon called “the administrative state” – something Bannon said it was the goal of the Trump administration to dismantle)
• Gerrymandering
• The treatment of immigrants
• Partisan politicization of any number of issues that will be decided by the Court
• And more

This has been the most corrupt Supreme Court confirmation process perhaps in U.S. history. Unfortunately, that’s not surprising for the most corrupt presidential administration in U.S. history and the most corrupt iteration of a major political party in U.S. history. However, the reason it’s been so corrupt is because right-wing Republicans are trying to downplay all that’s at stake.

They are trying to reshape America according to an extreme ideological – and partisan – agenda and they hope to do it by stealth and with as little transparency as possible. It’s an affront to our constitutional system of checks and balances, democratic values, and the American Way itself.

 

Public Citizen (www.citizen.org), the excellent organization founded by Ralph Nader, wrote this:

Big Business has a friend in Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  His judicial record demonstrates an overwhelming tendency to reach conclusions favorable to business interests and opposed to consumers, workers, environmental protections and victims of human rights abuses.  We examined each of the 101 cases where Judge Kavanaugh wrote an opinion and where there was disagreement among the judges hearing the case.  Those cases are often more revealing than unanimous decisions.

The results were striking:
• In 22 cases involving consumer and other regulatory issues, Judge Kavanaugh sided against consumers and the public interest 18 times.
• In 13 environmental cases, Judge Kavanaugh sided against clean air and environmental protection 11 times.
• In 17 cases involving worker rights, Judge Kavanaugh sided with employers 15 times.
• In all seven cases involving victims suing for compensation over police or human rights abuses, Judge Kavanaugh sided with the alleged abuser and against the victims.
• In both antitrust cases, Judge Kavanaugh sided with merging companies and against antitrust enforcement agencies.

Important themes also emerge in analyzing the decisions themselves.  Over and over, Judge Kavanaugh’s doctrines favor Big Business.  For example, Judge Kavanaugh believes that corporations almost always should be able to challenge regulations that affect them in court, but he imposes enormous hurdles on the ability of citizen groups like Public Citizen to sue.  Judge Kavanaugh believes federal agencies should be permitted to regulate corporations on “major questions” only when Congress specifically instructs them to do so ‪—‬ ‬a rarity.  When government agencies are challenged by corporations, Judge Kavanaugh almost always rules against the agencies. But when consumer or public interest groups challenge agencies, it’s an entirely different story — he sides with the agencies.

Read a detailed summary — https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/study-brett-kavanaugh-inevitably-rules-for-whoever-is-more-powerful/ — of our 50-page analysis in Mother Jones, or read the entire thing at https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/kavanaugh-split-decisions-report.pdf

 

Many more damning indictments have been published by other reputable organizations, including the ACLU (www.aclu.org), organizations supporting women’s rights, abortion rights, environmental issues, constitutional protections from abusive presidents, and on and on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About GlenAnderson 1498 Articles
Since the late 1960s Glen Anderson has devoted his life to working as a volunteer for peace, nonviolence, social justice, and progressive political issues. He has worked through many existing organizations and started several. Over the years he has worked especially for such wide-ranging goals as making peace with Vietnam, eliminating nuclear weapons, converting from a military economy to a peacetime economy, abolishing the death penalty, promoting nonviolence at all levels throughout society, and helping people organize and strategize for grassroots movements to solve many kinds of problems. He writes, speaks, and conducts training workshops on a wide variety of topics. Since 1987 he has produced and hosted a one-hour cable TV interview program on many kinds of issues. Since 2017 he has blogged at https://parallaxperspectives.org He lives in Lacey near Olympia WA. You can reach him at (360) 491-9093 glen@parallaxperspectives.org