Donald Trump Nominates Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court
Well, okay, he didn’t pick Rudy Giuliani. Or Jeanine Pirro. At a few minutes after nine tonight, President Trump announced that his nominee for the Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court seat is Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Want to know what is special about Kavanaugh? It isn’t just that, like the other candidates in this high-stakes contest, he was vetted by the Federalist Society, a powerful conservative legal organization whose reactionary imprimatur Trump has actively sought. In 2009, Kavanaugh stated his opinion that indicting a sitting president “would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national-security crisis.” And what sitting president may potentially be indicted by a special counsel?
No less a voice of moderation than the New York Times editorial board has urged that this is the time for Democrats to stand and fight and that enshrining a five-four majority on the court will affect the nation for decades to come, writing that “long after Mr. Trump is nothing but a toxic memory, the federal judiciary—from the Supreme Court on down—will bear the smear of his fingerprints.”
Those fingerprints (indelible and repulsive, potentially defacing all that we hold dear—not just Roe v. Wade but union rights, voting rights, gay rights, the right to affordable health care) can only be erased by mass action, by an organized electorate that will not only storm the polls in November but that rises up and fights every day until then, before it is too late.
