There was only one game in town this week. If you’ve been following it, great. But you really need to be fighting it—and you can. We’ll explain how. Oh, and if you haven’t been paying attention… just be sure and use birth control. Because the prize in this game is access to your uterus. And that is not a trophy ceremony any of us want to see happen.
That “game,” of course, is the deadly serious conflict over whether or not the swing seat on the Supreme Court is going to be handed over to Brett Kavanaugh, a man who has been bred and trained, and designed and designated from the very beginning of his career to fulfill that role by right wing think tanks who troll law schools trying to find bright, white, bloodless misogynistic monsters like Brett to place on the federal bench.
Under this administration dozens of them have already been placed—a whole hierarchy of repression and patriarchy at every level of the judicial process. And at the top is Kavanaugh, the Fifth of the Nine Nazgul, sent to usher in an era of darkness. Plus, you can just tell he’s an asshole, can’t you?
We’ve been taking you through the play-by-play of this grim contest all week, live-tweeting when possible, slack-jawed in shock and horror when there were no other options. The committee hearings started out as a farce and descended from there. We began on Tuesday with 42,000 pages of documents relating to Kavanaugh’s career and qualifications being dumped the NIGHT BEFORE THE HEARINGS like a giant turd into the punchbowl of jurisprudence. Meanwhile, some 100,000 more pages haven’t been seen at all.
By Wednesday they got around to discussing Brett’s role in trying to deny the abortion rights of the immigrant girl called Jane Doe in court proceedings. We explained what a pile of shit the “undue burden” concept of Planned Parent v Casey is. It basically says “Sure, yeah, you have the right to an abortion—but people who aren’t you have a right to make it impossible for you to use that right.” Which is exactly what Brett Kavanaugh did to Jane Doe. If you wanna know how somebody is going to treat the Constitution, take a look at how they treat the most powerless people they deal with.
And then finally we were down to Kava-NOT’s mealy mouthed reassurances about Roe v Wade being “settled law,” even as emails were surfacing where he said the exact opposite. It’s just a question of whether he would toss Roe right out, or if a Supreme Court with Kavanaugh would just let it die of a “1,000 cuts.” If they do, Brett will be the one doing the carving.
The good news is that people are fighting back, and fighting back hard—from the protesters inside and outside the hearing room, to the Democrats on the committee who finally seem to have a plan of attack. So how do you help? Every Senator counts! And you have a Senator… two, actually! You need to call them. Seriously. You need to be on their ass like Burgess Meredith’s Mickey yelling at Rocky to get his shit together and FIGHT! This thing could easily be decided by ONE vote. Do your part to make sure it tips the right direction.