Dahlia Lithwick: Why I Haven't Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh

[babylonsister]

Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh
Some things are worth not getting over.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Oct 30, 20196:02 PM


It’s been just over a year since I sat in the hearing room and watched the final act of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. I listened from the back as Christine Blasey Ford and then-Judge Kavanaugh each faced the Senate Judiciary Committee to tell irreconcilable versions of what happened in the summer of 1982. The morning was spent as I’d anticipated: all of us—the press corps, the country—listening, some clearly in agony, to Ford’s account. And then Kavanaugh came in and started screaming. The reporters at the tables around me took him in with blank shock, mindlessly typing the words he was yelling.

The enduring memory, a year later, is that my 15-year-old son texted—he was watching it in school—to ask if I was “perfectly safe” in the Senate chamber. He was afraid for the judge’s mental health and my physical health. I had to patiently explain that I was in no physical danger of any kind, that there were dozens of people in the room, and that I was at the very back, with the phalanx of reporters. My son’s visceral fears don’t really matter in one sense, beyond the fact that I was forced to explain to him that the man shouting about conspiracies and pledging revenge on his detractors would sit on the court for many decades; and in that one sense, none of us, as women, were ever going to be perfectly safe again.

Kavanaugh is now installed for a lifetime at the highest court in the land. Ford is still unable to resume her life or work for fear of death threats. And the only thing the hearings resolved conclusively is that Senate Republicans couldn’t be bothered to figure out what happened that summer of 1982, or in the summers and jobs and weekends that followed. In the year-plus since, I have given many speeches in rooms full of women who still have no idea what actually happened in that hearing room that day, or why a parody of an FBI investigation was allowed to substitute for fact-finding, or why Debbie Ramirez and her Yale classmates were never even taken seriously, and why three books so far and two more books to come are doing the work of fact-finding that government couldn’t be bothered to undertake. Women I meet every week assure me that they are never going to feel perfectly safe again, which makes my son somewhat prescient. Two out of the nine sitting justices have credibly been accused of sexual impropriety against women. They will be deciding fundamental questions about women’s liberty and autonomy, having both vowed to get even for what they were “put through” when we tried to assess whether they were worthy of the privilege and honor of a seat on the highest court in the country.

My job as a Supreme Court reporter used to be to explain and translate the institution to people locked out of its daily proceedings. I did that reasonably well for 19 years, I suppose. Years upon years of sometimes partisan, often political brawling, from Bush v. Gore to the Affordable Care Act to Obergefell—and abortion, yes. But always swathed in black robes and velvet curtains, in polite questions, and case names and at least the appearance that this was all cool science, as opposed to blood sport.

What I have not acceded to is the routinization and normalization of the unprecedented seat stolen from President Barack Obama in 2016 for no reason other than Mitch McConnell wanted it, and could. And what I have also not acceded to is the routinization and normalization of an unprecedented seating of someone who managed to himself evade the very inquiries and truth-seeking functions that justice is supposed to demand. And so, while I cannot know conclusively what happened in the summer of 1982, or at the sloppy drunk parties in the years that followed at Yale, or in the falling-down summer evenings at tony D.C. law firms, or with the gambling debts, or with the leaked Judiciary Committee emails, I can say that given Senate Republicans’ refusal to investigate, acknowledge, or even turn over more than 100,000 pages of documents relating to Kavanaugh, it is surely not my job to, in the parlance of Justice Antonin Scalia, America’s favorite grief counselor, “get over it.”

more...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/year-after-kavanaugh-cant-go-back-to-scotus.html

[Guilded Lilly]

1. I am almost ready to put into civil words my disgust and horror...

about that reeking travesty of misogyny and patriarchal puke.
But not quite.

[dchill]

6. "...reeking travesty of misogyny and patriarchal puke."

Should be engraved over the portals of the Supreme Court until corrected.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. In many ways, the Kavanaugh "confirmation" was the absolute nadir of US justice ...

... at least since Watergate, and plausibly from before that. I think we'd have to go back to the days when the Court acquiesced to Southern states' notions of civil rights to find worse.

[BSdetect]

3. Moscow Mitch knew all about the russians swinging votes for drump. He knew well before Nov 2016

He's a traitor.

[Scarsdale]

4. Installing Kavenaugh on the

SC took the respect for that body down to a new, low level. Thomas began the rot, then Kavenaugh finished it off. Why is that body even necessary, now that we know two very undesirable people are part of it? Sub-par president, sub-par SC and sub-par gop. This country lost many values just in the last few years.

[Pepsidog]

5. As an attorney in NJ, if I acted like he did during a hearing I would have been brought up on ethics

charges. Putting aside the high school and college allegations, I was offended by the blatant lies about “Boof” and “Renata Club” etc. Those are lies under oath that are 100% provable lies.

[cp]

7. Her new beat is justice

Whole essay is well worth reading. Thank you, Dahlia Lithwick!
Last paragraph:
"I haven’t been inside the Supreme Court since Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed. I’ve been waiting, chiefly in the hope that at some point I would get over it, as I am meant to do for the good of the courts, and the team, and the ineffable someday fifth vote which may occasionally come in exchange for enough bonhomie and good grace. There isn’t a lot of power in my failing to show up to do my job, but there is a teaspoon of power in refusing to normalize that which was simply wrong, and which continues to be wrong. I don’t judge other reporters for continuing to go, and I understand the ways in which justices, judges, law professors, and clerks must operate in a world where this case is closed. Sometimes I tell myself that my new beat is justice, as opposed to the Supreme Court. And my new beat now seems to make it impossible to cover the old one."

I, for one, will never "get over it." Kavanaugh's confirmation is a rotten travesty. There was no justice.
Any respect for what I've been calling since Bush v. Gore, The Court Formerly Know as Supreme (nod to Prince), is now gone.

[smirkymonkey]

8. I am still horrified by that entire debacle.

And the pathetic performance of a poor excuse of a man whose only defense was that he "liked beer". He has no remorse and no compassion or empathy.

I still think he was bought and there is something very shady about his appointment to the bench. He does not deserve to be where he is and once we are back in power again, I hope this injustice will be righted in some way.