A longtime Washington Post syndicated columnist delivers more than any commoner would ever need to know about America’s Supreme Court. She also reveals more than any one would ever need to know about the devious, power-hungry, back-stabbing maneuvering of most people inside the D.C. beltway. That is true unless you are a member of that peculiar oxymoronic species, Scientifica politico, better known as the common wonk, or the closely related species that the author belongs to, the Papyrus novus scriptor. Both species are widely distributed, but tend to migrate to capital cities.
There are far too many assistants, associates, deputies, chairs, undersecretaries, and chiefs and combinations of those titles for most readers to keep track of, perhaps inevitably in a town full of big egos with a fondness for fancy titles. There are also too many agencies, boards, bureaus, committees, commissions, institutes, offices, departments and secretariats some of which are identified only by acronyms even the first time they appear, as though the reader should be familiar with hundreds of them. This is a very inside-the-capital expectation, as I discovered on moving to Ottawa.
This is an exhaustively researched endeavour without any obvious author biases or judgments. In the final chapter she provides her personal thoughts about the characters, including Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who, along with at least two other women, accused him of sexual assault, with no definitive conclusion. I believe Ford’s account as she had nothing to gain except loss of privacy, vulgar insults, and death threats, by speaking up. Is it possible that both witnesses were truthful- only if he committed the assaults in an alcoholic blackout, which seems almost certain to me. But he also had ample reason to be disingenuous and evasive as he had maneuvered to become a Supreme Court Justice since his days as a drunk, privileged high school jock and Eli. Yale University provided me with a great educational experience, but it’s Law School seems to excel in producing unscrupulous, ambitious lawyers and politicians.
None of the politicians come out of this looking morally untainted, except two or three female senators who obviously agonized over how to vote. That ultimate partisan control freak, Mitch McConnell, created the vacancy by blocking consideration of Obama’s nominee before the 2016 election. Well past her senatorial best-before date, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein withheld vital information from both sides in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, to the detriment of getting at the facts. Most senators seemed more concerned about being re-elected than about making a decent moral choice. The frightening White House restraint on the FBI investigation, imposed by Don McGahn, counsel to Trump, made their investigation into Dr. Ford’s allegations a complete farce that Trump then touted as vindication of Kavanaugh’s innocence.
The amoral viciousness of Washington partisan politics was tragically and succinctly stated by Vincent Foster who, mercilessly hounded by Clinton opponents, wrote “Here ruining people is considered sport” shortly before shooting himself in the head. Then the ever-hovering lawyers and conspiracy theorists started debating the cause of his death, blaming the Clintons.
The liberals’ prediction of dire consequences of Kavanaugh’s appointment may be overblown. There is a long history of judges disappointing the politicians who appoint them, as both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have already done. But there is no doubt that the image of high court justices acting impartially, like umpires calling balls and strikes, is a myth. Judges are human, with faults and sometimes extreme biases like the rest of us. And there has to be a better way of picking fairer umpires without destroying so many trees; the papers for review by the senate judiciary committee alone ran to 780,000 pages. And no one should trust octogenarian umpires.
It is easy to be critical, biased, and smug from this distance, but I really do believe that our system of governance, for all its faults, is better that theirs.
My interest in U.S. politics derives in part from having two daughters and two grandchildren living there. If nothing else, this book shatters any delusions that they are living in a democracy. I would recommend this read only if you have some similar interest in the chaos theory in action called American politics.
The Passionate Reader 