Kavan-UGH!

I didn't watch Thursday's Senate Judiciairy Committee hearings on Brett Kavanaugh, but seeing the highlights on the evening news, particularly the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, made me wonder if it was time not for America to pack the Supreme Court but for America to pack it all in.

Dr. Ford - I know I called her Mrs. Ford before, but it turns out that she's a psychiatrist, so she's an M.D., hence the change of salutation - was credible and calm in discussing her story of how Trump's Supreme Court nominee assaulted her. Kavanaugh - who does not deserve a salutation - went on a partisan rant, blaming the Democrats for smear campaign against him and suggesting an attempt to get even for Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump.  The joke's on him - it was revenge for what happened to Merrick Garland, the Obama nominee who never got a hearing, and as far as revenge for Hillary, those of us who supported Bernie Sanders or Martin O'Malley have been pining for revenge against Hillary.  Or at least against Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Anyway, Kavanaugh came across as a mean, vicious, self-absorbed preppie snob who is all too happy to point the finger at someone else when he's held to task for his swinish behavior.  Some people compared his testimony to Clarence Thomas' response to sexual harassment charges in 1991, but I saw the Thomas hearings, and I'm here to tell you - and as someone who believed Anita Hill - that Thomas' response was measured and firm by comparison. Thomas, for all his pseudo-righteous pseudo-indignation, did not come across as someone who was about to fly off the handle.  Kavanaugh came across as an anger-management course dropout.

And, given his obvious fondness for beer, how many brewskis did he have before the hearing?

Things would have gotten even worse yesterday, when the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to recommend Judge K's nomination to the full Senate, but Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona made it clear that he wouldn't vote for final confirmation unless the FBI did a background check on Kavanuagh - which should have been done long ago and which Trump did not want. There will be a background check, and the confirmation vote will be delayed for at least a week.

Hope springs eternal for those seeking to stop Judge K with enough votes in the Senate against him.   But should he be confirmed, the only way to get him off the Court is to force him to resign after more crap about him comes out.

And it will. 

But whatever happens, I'm glad I have a passport.      

Hair Raising

It's time to do away with public Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Sonia Sotomayor spent the entire week giving perfunctory, noncommittal answers to rehearsed questions from senators trying to please their base. Everyone was playing not only to their strengths, but to the cameras as well. This has been standard procedure for roughly twenty years, after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork expressed honest, learned and intellectually stimulating though fundamentally repugnant views about jurisprudence and got his nomination handed back to him in the form of a rejection. Since then, these hearings have been all about talking a lot an saying nothing . . . on both sides of the table. (The Clarence Thomas hearings were the exception to this post-Bork posturing, but for all the wrong reasons.)

At one point, one senator - I believe it was Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter - asked Sotomayor the one interesting and original question of the hearings. That was whether she, as a Supreme Court justice, would recommend television cameras used in the Court's proceedings. Great - more denigration of the Court. The Court is already trivialized by some of the cases they've handled, references to the justice as the "Supremes" (as if they were a pop group), and Clarence Thomas's mere presence on it. Do they have to have televised proceedings? Do we want to see Chief Justice Roberts play to the cameras? Televised courtroom proceedings are vulgar; they're voyeuristic, creepy, and overblown, as anyone who remembers the O.J. Simpson murder case or has ever watched Court TV on other occasions knows.

To image how the Supreme court would function on C-SPAN, just consider Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the Senate, and how wonderfully they've worked. We need less, not more television coverage of our judicial system. When the interpretation of the law is at stake, we need public servants to talk to each other, not to a TV audience crying to be pandered to.

So I suggest we stop televising Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings. And when they get behind closed doors, then Amy Klobuchar lets her hair hang down . . . oh, wait a minute, I'm getting this confused with a Charlie Rich song . . . anyway, when they get behind closed doors, then Amy Klobuchar, Jeff Sessions, Patrick Leahy, John Cornyn and all the rest can ask someone like Sotomayor all the relevant questions they should ask - and the nominee can actually give honest answers - all without the distraction of live TV.

One good standard has survived the Bork hearings, however. Someone in my family (I won't say whom) complained about Sotomayor's appearance and said she should have gotten her hair done. Gee whizbangers, she's trying for a Supreme Court justiceship, not a movie role! I'm glad Supreme Court nominees don't physically make themselves over, just as Bork rejected advice to shave his beard. We don't want judges, lawyers, and the rest spending more time on personal appearances than on cases. After all, Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark gave as much time to preparing her hair as to her case, and look how that turned out.