It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don’t put psychotics in high places and we’ve got the problem solved. – Tom Wolfe
Under my high school yearbook photo of a person I no longer recognize, where I should have probably put ‘Mailman’, I chose ‘U.S. Senator.’
Eventually, got to law school, where I managed to peek under the circus tent and saw the gaping grinding maw that lay ahead and ran screaming to a better life, yet unknown but better for sure. Sanity saving at the least.
The four Republicans above could have been my study group.
First-year freshmen smoking illegal foliage.
So when you hear about ‘white supremacy’, think of these pale putz.
And when you read about ‘male superiority’, recall these tiny men.
‘Patriarchy’, ditto.
Try not to laugh when they mention the Constitution.
Or ‘conservative values.’
A little vomit is understood when their names are mentioned as Presidential aspirants.
Half of the greatest deliberative body in the world is really ass + ants.
Pasty predatory prevaricators.
Charlie Sykes had this to say at The Bulwark.
As we contemplate the vetting process that gives us judges who are qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, perhaps we also ought to give some thought to the vetting process we use for the kind of people who serve in the U.S. Senate.
Because, I regret to inform you that, once again, they are not behaving well.
Tanned, ready, and rested from berating airline employees, Ted Do You Know Who I Am Cruz set the tone of the attack on KBJ.
As part of my ongoing (and apparently successful) campaign to annoy partisans on both sides, I took some time to review some things I wrote for the late Weekly Standard back during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018. If you’re so inclined you can check them out here: “Democrats Behaving Badly,” and here: “The Anger of Brett Kavanaugh,” (on the archive site mangled by the Washington Examiner folks).
Which brings us to this year’s spectacle of performative assholery and payback by the GOP. I have to warn you: putting the behavior of senators during the Kavanaugh hearing alongside the behavior this time around is not an edifying experience.
If you watched any of yesterday’s hearings, you know the story.
There were occasional forays into actual questions of jurisprudence, but they were overshadowed by what has become the usual theatrics and demagoguery. Josh Hawley, who has transitioned from insurrectionist cheerleader to Q-adjacent conspiracy theorist, was predictably execrable. Tom Cotton hectored and badgered a preternaturally restrained Ketanji Brown Jackson on sentencing policies.
Charlie had more to say, but I am not a subscriber. I do subscribe to Borowitz.
“When I asked her if she thought babies were racist, I was sure that would do the trick,” Cruz said.
I imagine the atavistically irrelevant theocrat Lindsay Graham is an eleven on a one-to-ten scale for KKKristianity. Forgetting our protected right FROM religion.
Turns out perhaps perverted Josh Hawley is obsessed with pornography. How demented must be the magazine collection under his bed? Hopefully no underage bestiality, as might be practiced by the likes of Matt Gaetz.
Not yet a United States Senator.
Like Gaetz, Marsha Blackburn – not transgender despite rumors – served as a U.S. Representative. Having already demonstrated her complete lack of fitness for public service, she was easily promoted to the Senate.
Thirteen hours – 13! – she testified, Ketanji Brown Jackson did.
And left without being credibly or otherwise accused of sexual assault, as two sitting Justices have been.
Seems like a deeply demeaning victory for everybody. Plus, look on the bright side, no actual dog whistles.
The black matriarchy cannot be stopped, a voodoo princess in Miami told me long ago. And you can see the fear ooze from those Senate Republicans. Blackburn thinking about becoming a man again, but that’s just a rumor.
Senator Graham has been overheard to suggest he may actually become an African-American female.
Many, many Americans find themselves wondering – what are they all so afraid of?
Miscasts Jackson’s Views
Senator Marsha Blackburn took quotes out of context as she leveraged a blistering attack against Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
By Charlie Savage. March 21, 2022
WASHINGTON — Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, ripped into Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, tying the nominee to a wide range of conservative grievances. But the lawmaker’s accusations appeared to often be based on quotes taken out of context. Here’s a closer look at some of her apparent sources.
Blackburn linked KBJ to controversy over transgender athletes and women’s sports.
Ms. Blackburn portrayed as excessive the progressive push for transgender rights, decrying a recent victory at the N.C.A.A. swimming championships by a transgender female athlete. She also declared that “educators are allowing biological males to steal opportunities from female athletes in the name of progressivism.”
The senator did not point to anything specific Judge Jackson has said or ruled about transgender athletes. But a few sentences later, she purported to quote Judge Jackson in a way that used similar catchwords — as having praised “the transformative power of progressive education.”
The senator did not say where that quotation came from. But she appeared to be slightly mangling and taking out of context a quotation in a profile in a magazine for Georgetown Day School, a liberal-leaning private school in Washington, after the judge joined its board.
Judge Jackson did not mention transgender female athletes in the article. Instead, she said that since enrolling a child there, she had “witnessed the transformative power of a rigorous progressive education that is dedicated to fostering critical thinking, independence and social justice.”
Blackburn suggested Jackson would trample parental rights.
The senator said that Judge Jackson is on the board of a school that tells kindergartners “that they can choose their gender and teaches them about so-called white privilege.” The school, the senator said, “pushes an anti-racist education program for white families.” (A spokeswoman for Georgetown Day School did not return a request for comment on this description.)
The senator accused Judge Jackson of endorsing “progressive indoctrination” and said that raised concern about how she might rule on cases about parents’ right to control their children’s education.
The issue of parental rights in education was a focus of the 2021 campaign for governor in Virginia, which a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, won. But that debate involved public schools, rather than private schools that parents can choose.
Blackburn accused Jackson of wanting to put dangerous criminals on the street.
Accusing Judge Jackson of having “consistently called for greater freedom for hardened criminals,” the senator quoted her as having “advocated,” at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that “each and every criminal defendant in the D.C. Department of Corrections custody should be released.”
Judge Jackson did write, in an April 2020 opinion, that the increased risk of harm that the pandemic posed to people confined in close quarters “suggests” that “each and every” detained person at the lockup should be released.
But those words came in an opinion in which she refused to release a man because the facts of his case showed he was dangerous. She cited legal limits on judge-ordered releases that, she explained, stem from the recognition that releasing dangerous people poses substantial risks to others.
Ms. Blackburn also described three instances in which Judge Jackson ordered the release of inmates, including “a convict who murdered a U.S. marshal.”
The cases appeared to match three Covid-era rulings by the judge under a compassionate release law. The senator omitted the context: The man who killed a U.S. marshal, for instance, did so in 1971, had since served 49 years, and was 72 at the time of his release, with myriad health problems.
Blackburn accused Jackson of saying every judge has a hidden agenda.
Ms. Blackburn said that Judge Jackson “once wrote that every judge has, and I quote, personal hidden agendas, end quote, that influence how they decide cases.” The lawmaker suggested the judge might have a hidden agenda of letting violent criminals, killers of police officers and child predators back on the streets.
That quotation came from Judge Jackson’s undergraduate college thesis, which criticized the plea bargaining system.
But the future judge did not write that “every judge” has a hidden agenda. As part of a discussion of how lawyers and judges might favor plea bargains to save the effort of a trial, she wrote, “Before we can effectively analyze plea bargaining, we must attempt to identify the personal hidden agendas of various court professionals.”
Blackburn said Jackson praised the 1619 Project.
The senator accused Judge Jackson of praising the 1619 Project, a 2019 collection of essays in The New York Times Magazine that described itself as seeking to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Many conservatives denounce the project, which the senator portrayed as arguing that America is fundamentally racist.
In 2020, Judge Jackson gave a speech on Black female leaders in the civil rights movement. A 27-page transcript contains two paragraphs in which she described the “provocative” thesis of the 1619 Project as saying that America was not perfect in 1776 and that “it is actually only through the hard work, struggles and sacrifices of African Americans over the past two centuries that the United States has finally become the free nation that the framers initially touted.”
Blackburn said KBJ thinks judges must use ‘critical race theory’ when sentencing criminals.
Ms. Blackburn said that Judge Jackson had “made clear that you believe judges must consider critical race theory when deciding criminal defendants.”
“Critical race theory” is a malleable term. It originally described a field of study in law schools that argued that laws and institutions can incorporate structural racial bias. More recently, it has become a catchall term in culture-war discourse, used primarily by conservatives to refer disparagingly to topics like white privilege.
Ms. Blackburn’s accusation appeared to refer to a line in a speech Judge Jackson made on federal criminal sentencing policy. But whatever critical race theory means, the judge was describing why she finds that subject “fascinating,” not prescribing what judges should consider when handing down individual sentences.
“Sentencing is just plain interesting on an intellectual level, in part because it melds together myriad types of law — criminal law, of course, but also administrative law, constitutional law, critical race theory, negotiations and to some extent, even contracts,” Judge Jackson said.
She also cited the subject’s links to philosophy, psychology, history, statistics, economics and politics.
Bless my soul, what’s wrong with me, that almost sounds almost systemic.
Obviously, the worst part of Marsha Blackburn is not her hair.
I just pray Tom Cotton doesn’t ask Ketanji Brown Jackson to sing or dance.
Republican Senators, especially those Harvard lawyers, rarely disappoint these days.
Why I Quit Law School
Here’s a paper from my law school days. Must have been important as the work was anonymous.
I was Student #73. Seems a little pretentious if you ask me. For the first semester.
Original title: Lawyers “Use” “Facts.” “Facts” “Use” Lawyers.
“She said the fact that she was even nominated shows how far we’ve come as a country, and so some of the Republican senators on the committee have been hard at work to show how far we haven’t.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
“This is how low the United States government has fallen. We’ve gone from ‘Let’s put a man on the moon within the decade’ to ‘Maybe someday we can get at least one Republican to vote for a qualified woman.’” — JAMES CORDEN