Supreme court

Imagine if Sonia Sotomayor, once she got on the Supreme Court, started ruling like Clarence Thomas. I know, I know, that’s like something out of The Twilight Zone or the Babylon Bee. But try to picture it. There’d be riots on the campus of every school she’d attended, and likely in DC, too. Democrats would drawing up articles of impeachment, and speaking of packing the court. And whatever social justice thinktank vets SCOTUS appointees for the Democratic National Committee would start chopping off heads. Scapegoats would be piling up on the unemployment line like pork chops at a slaughterhouse. But that’s precisely what just happened with Neil Gorsuch (and less, surprisingly, John Roberts) in the Bostock decision.

Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County was massively significant for two reasons. As a legal matter, the ruling determined that the prohibition on ‘sex discrimination’ in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to fire an employee on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. As a political matter, the ruling flipped the entire legislative strategy of the GOP political class — which relied exclusively on judges to enact and protect all of their priorities — on its head.The majority opinion was authored by none other than Justice Neil Gorsuch, nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Republican Senate in 2017.

The craziness of our politics makes you wonder what’s round the bend. After the ‘resistance’, the pussy hats, the non-stop crises and the permanent impeachment, what could be the next shoe to drop? The answer is a breakup of the country, as I argue in my new book, American Secession.Americans have never been more divided, and we’re ripe for secession. The bitterness, the gridlock, the growing tolerance of violence, invite us to think that we’d be happier were we two different countries. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of law, we are already two nations.And if that’s where we are today, where might we be in an easily imaginable future, where Trump wins reelection and gets a couple more appointments to the Supreme Court.

What are the four things that can go blooey for President Trump in the next year? First, he can get mired in a new Middle East war — the very thing he promised to avoid. The much-ballyhooed pullout from Syria turned out to be none at all. Now turmoil in Iraq, not a North Korean nuclear launch, turns out to be the Christmas present Trump didn’t want to receive. American strikes against the Kataib Hezbollah militia have got Iraq and, by extension, Iran, in a hugger-mugger. Trump could be on a slope toward further escalation with Iran that is as slippery as an oil slick. The hawks in Trump’s administration will exult; his nationalist followers, blanch. Second, there’s the economy. So far it’s humming along on a sugar high of tax cuts and deficit spending.

Tell me how you judge Brett Kavanaugh, and I’ll tell you who you vote for. In a divided polity, Kavanaugh cuts a Janus-faced figure. He’s that rarity, a Bushie who made good in the Trump era, but also he’s the favorite jurist of immigration restrictionists. He’s the almost too wholesome basketball dad, but he’s also the sex-predator threat to American womanhood. His swearing in was widely seen as a victory for conservatives, and raised fears of on the left that the bench was tipping right. But many on the right feared his triumph would be Pyrrhic: too much political capital had been spent on a justice with a record to the left of Antonin Scalia. ‘Trust the process,’ former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told me last year on Kavanaugh.

As far as the prestige media in the United States are concerned, Donald Trump is irredeemable. Within the ranks of our journalistic elite, the 45th president of the United States represents a secular version of the antichrist. Apart from permanently retiring to Mar-a-Lago forthwith, there is nothing that Trump can do that will find favor with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and likeminded journalistic enterprises both large and small. On the one hand, I’m OK with that. Trump is an incompetent buffoon. The sooner he’s gone from American public life, the better.

Teachers Scotch used to run an amusing ad that read ‘In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teachers is the great experience.’ Droll, what? But is it true? Or was T. S. Eliot’s mournful observation that ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’ more pertinent to our situation? What happens in the aftermath of Judge — as of a few minutes ago, make that ‘Justice’ — Brett Kavanaugh’s bizarre confirmation process will tell us a lot about whether we have learned anything from the horrible experience of the last weeks. When the Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm Kavanaugh, they drew a line under a battle that was not just bitter but insane.

Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor spoke for more than an hour on Friday evening at Princeton University about the importance of neutrality for justices and the struggles women face in the workplace without once saying the name ‘Kavanaugh.’ ‘It’s an incredibly important thing for the court to guard, is this reputation of being fair, of being impartial, of being neutral,’ Kagan said. ‘This is a challenge.’ Both justices spoke at length about the necessity of preserving the Court’s reputation for fairness and neutrality. Kagan noted that having a swing vote, such as Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, has made the court seem more balanced.

A few weeks ago in these virtual pages, I wrote that ‘In years to come, no one is going to talk about ‘kavanaughing’ a candidate.’ Boy did I get that wrong. The word deployed may not be the mouthful ‘kavanaughed.’ Maybe it will, à la Lindsey Graham, be pleonastically expressed: ‘the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics’ about fits the case. I am writing on Friday morning. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote this afternoon. Punditry is not prophecy, but I am nevertheless going to predict that Brett Kavanaugh gets an up vote from the committee and that Chuck Grassley will have learned his lesson and bring the matter to a floor vote tomorrow, Saturday, as he said he would.

‘There’ll be another woman.’ A friend of mine who has been in political journalism much longer than I have told me this weekend to expect another accuser against Brett Kavanaugh to come forward — and sure enough, the New Yorker on Sunday revealed one. Deborah Ramirez alleges that when they were students at Yale, a drunken Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party and touched her with his penis. As yet, however, Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer write, ‘The New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party.

I believe that Christine Blasey Ford is telling the truth when she claims that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party in the early 1980s, when she was 15 and he was 17. I believe her husband, Russell Ford, who has told the Washington Post that in 2012 his wife had recounted her experience during a couples’ therapy session, and named Kavanaugh. And I believe the story that Kavanaugh’s friend Amy Chua advised her female students that if they wanted to win a clerkship with him, they should dress like a model. All of which this leads me to conclude that Kavanaugh is not right for a seat on the Supreme Court. As Roger has written, the Democrats are doing everything they can to exploit Ford’s accusation for political ends.

Is Christine Blasey Ford stealing a page from Trump? She’s just pulled the kind of power move that Trump himself likes to make in dealing with the Senate Judiciary Committee. Told that she must respond by 10 a.m. Friday about whether or not she will show up, Blasey has now declared that she can’t appear to testify on Monday but would like to later in the week. A letter from her attorney to the committee states, ‘As you are aware, she’s been receiving death threats which have been reported to the FBI and she and her family have been forced out of their home. She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety.

It seems like ancient history now, but the week before the ill-fated summit in Helsinki President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. It was Trump’s second nomination to America’s highest court in as many years and conservatives overwhelmingly cheered his choice. “I’ve often heard that, other than matters of war and peace, this is the most important decision a President will make,” Trump said in the East Room of the White House. “The Supreme Court is entrusted with the safeguarding of the crown jewel of our Republic, the Constitution of the United States.” Kavanaugh was picked to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee who was nevertheless a swing vote on the Supreme Court.