Appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is part of a disciplined long-term strategy by the American right wing to lock in its power for generations to come.
It means the rest of the corporate Republican power play—gerrymandering, voter suppression and virtually unlimited campaign spending—is unrepealable.
The Supreme Court has become a House of Lords—a legislature of last resort. During my lifetime, it abolished school segregation, legalized abortion, legalized gay marriage, blocked campaign finance reform, and reshaped Obamacare. It has a potential veto power over virtually anything Congress might do.
Progressive and Democratic leaders have no long-term strategy of their own for the Supreme Court or anything else. Instead they merely react to events, often in ways that are obviously futile—asking the Electoral College to overturn the results of the 2016 election, hoping Russiagate will drive President Trump from office, planning to impeach Kavanaugh in the future.
Even if the Democratic leaders got a strategy and stuck to it, it could take 10 or 20 years or more to undo what the right-wing corporatist movement has accomplished. It took decades for the corporate right to bring the United States to where it is today, and changing things back will not be done overnight—if ever.
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You could say there is “a vast right-wing conspiracy” except that it is not secret. It has always been out in the open for anyone to see, if they care to look. I wrote about this at length in a previous post.
The strategic corporate movement began with the Lewis Powell memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in which the future Supreme Court justice argued that American business had to act strategically to protect its own position in society.
The result was the creation of a media, research and lobbying infrastructure, such Fox News, the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which was tightly integrated with the corporate wing of the Republican Party. The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, grooms reliably pro-corporate lawyers for judicial appointments.
It is true that there are many institutions with a built-in left-wing bias. But the bias is unconscious and not a party line based on a planned, coordinated strategy.
The corporate movement crossed an ethical line with the REDMAP campaign. In a targeted campaign, they gained control of both houses of 25 state legislatures in 2010, and proceeded to re-draw their congressional and state legislative districts so as to lock in a Republican majority.
At the same time they enacted laws making it more difficult for racial minorities to vote and canceling voter registrations, mainly of racial minorities, for bogus reasons. The main obstacle to this strategy was the federal courts, which overruled the more obvious attempts to rig elections and disenfranchise voters.
Mitch McConnell (AP)
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader since 2007, has removed this obstacle by his partisan and successful effort to give stack the judiciary in favor of the Republicans.
He made it his priority to hold up appointments to the federal bench when Barack Obama was President and then to push through appointments after Donald Trump took office.
When the Republicans were out of power, they took advantage of the “blue slip” tradition, whereby Senators have the right to block a judicial appointment in their states.
They used procedural rules to slow down President Obama’s judicial appointments, creating a backlog of vacancies.
During the last year of the Obama administration, McConnell simply refused to permit consideration of Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland, a moderately conservative but non-partisan judge. There is no basis for such a refusal except partisanship. It is an example of politics as a moral equivalent of war.
Now that Donald Trump is in the White House, judicial appointments go through quickly, and “blue slips” are a thing of the past. Thanks to McConnell, the corporate movement has achieved its goal.
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