Post mortem

For some reason, I don't blame Susan Sarandon for Brett Kavanaugh.  Humans love a scapegoat, but I think singling out the most visible Democratic Party apostate is a great way of making the wrong point.  I do think those of the far left who made a calculated decision in 2016 that a Trump win was well worth the risk in order to maintain the purity of their own political virtue (achieved by abstaining from voting for --or voting for a guaranteed losing alternative to-- the candidate who had, hands down, the only chance of defeating him*) protest a bit too much at the well of anger that has erupted against them from the pragmatic bloc who made up the majority of the popular vote in the last election.

The truth does hurt: In 2 years, Trump has gotten 2 picks for the Supreme Court (legal co-popes for very archaic reasons), and Brett Kavanaugh is the apotheosis of what the right has been seeking against the wishes of the majority of Americans for a very long time: a lock on the majority vote of judges on the court for decades to come.  They got this win because the system that elects justices underrepresents vast swaths of the population and overrepresents millions of deserted acres.  This is exactly what Hillary Clinton supporters were hoping to avoid.  The anger that is directed at the virtuous left is not because they made Hillary Clinton lose, dammit!  It's because they did nothing to keep Donald Trump from winning.  That is anger I can get behind.†   It's somewhat misplaced anger.  Trump had plenty of help without their indifference to the outcome.  But it's low hanging fruit, so I get the urge to take a swing at it.  It's an ugly pass that things have come to and people are entitled to their anger about how it came to be.

We shouldn't understate the poor quality of the alternative choice that Democrats offer to republicans.  We can't deny that Democrats are losing ground across the country because they seem to have lost their mojo at picking candidates who appeal to voters and at putting forth messages that set the electorate afire.  (They are also on the losing end of voter suppression, campaign financing, and aggressive gerrymandering by Republicans in battleground states-- practices that are very likely to continue to be contested or enshrined all the way to the Supreme Court-- Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court-- from time to time.)  But something does not jibe in the fact that although a majority of the country prefers socialist policies, the only viable alternative to the retrograde corporatocracy of the right aggressively pushes a centrist agenda that no one but a lobbyist could possibly want.

We also shouldn't overstate the impact of the court.  But Roe v Wade is most likely soon to be history.  If so, for the first time in nearly 50 years, availability of a medical choice will be limited in  States that turn back their laws in the not too distant future for those who need it who can't afford to travel to get the procedure in States that continue to make it available (not a hindrance to wealthy Republican's daughters of course).  And every state will then continue to have perpetual battles on their hands to keep the choice legal, as Republicans should not be expected to abandon a red meat issue merely because the decision will have been returned to the states.

This was not what the majority wanted.  This could have been avoided.

Term limits for Supreme Court Justices now.  Abandon the Electoral College now.  Redistribute the representation of voters in the Senate now.  (Or better yet, abolish it.)

The 38 million people of California got 2 votes in Saturday's floor vote for Kavanaugh.  The 38.8 million combined population of 22 rural states got 44 votes.  How is that democracy? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/11/if-youre-from-california-you-should-hate-the-senate/?utm_term=.9ae1415c5a50

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*  How many of them made the same mistake Hillary Clinton appears to have made in believing she could not lose against the ridiculous, incompetent, vile, conniving jerk of reality TV?  Anyone who felt empowered to vote their conscience in 2016 only because the less evil outcome was assured was less a hero than the victim of a fatal miscalculation.

† If you see a lot of new anti-Hillary rhetoric out there on the web in response to discussions of who's to blame for Kavanaugh, remember 2 things: 1) it's never really gone away since November 2016; and b) its uptick now on the part of the virtuous left is a manifestation of hard-won cognitive dissonance.  The fact that Hillary Clinton is not virtuously radical is irrelevant to the fact that Donald Trump has no business picking Supreme Court justices and he's now picked two.