Kavanaugh To The Rescue

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I don’t normally favor pundits practicing the art of prophecy. Their track record is about as reliable as that of racetrack touts, but I’m making an exception. I think there’s a better than average chance that Trump will name Judge Brett H. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on Monday. If not, someone who shares his views.

On what? Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, gerrymandering, same sex marriage? No, though that would obviously be nice from the Trumpian point of view. But in this case, about something a lot more important to Trump than judicial philosophy. That is, his own self-preservation. Call it not just executive privilege, but executive supremacy.

Kavanaugh is the author of a 2009 article for the Minnesota Law Review that would be a sight for sore eyes if Trump ever read anything. No doubt one of his legal elves has brought the jist to his attention. Kavanaugh isn’t on the short list by accident.

Though Kavanaugh was a deputy to Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton that took four years and whose report he helped draft, he now argues with a straight face that a president should not have to face “time-consuming and distracting” investigations or lawsuits because they “ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.”

Does Trump now share the view of many Americans that he is a financial and national security crisis (tariff, deficit, Putin collusion, treaty abrogation, alliance busting)? Probably not, but he’s sure to share Kavanaugh’s sweeping claim that he should be protected from everything from criminal investigation and civil lawsuits to mere questioning by a prosecutor or defense attorney.

In short, if you buy Kavanaugh’s argument, Trump is home free, until he leaves office. The only recourse no matter what the Mueller investigation finds is impeachment. So Trump has got a lot of reasons to put Kavanaugh on the court.

Even if he doesn’t, it would be a dimwitted candidate for the high court who wouldn’t get the message. Surely anyone Trump chooses had better share Kavanaugh’s views and be ready to contribute to a 5-4 majority to keep the executive free of pesky indictment, prosecution or conviction of high (or low) crimes and misdemeanors, so help them Trump. If not a get out of jail free card, he’d surely be happy to accept a defer jail and stay free card. Four More Years. Four More Years.

One slight roadblock in Kavanaugh’s rise to Supremacy, however, comes from conservative extremists, if that’s not redundant. They pronounce him insufficiently reactionary. His crimes include working for a famously compassionate globalist, George W. Bush. There’s also his rulings from the bench. It isn’t that opinions they cite weren’t right, but that they weren’t stridently far-right enough to satisfy the likes of pedophile-enabling, McCarthyite, former wrestling coach Rep. Jim Jordan and fellow travelers in the crackpot media.

Of course, talking trash about Kavanaugh fails to take into account that judges who talk trash, the way Freedom Caucus members and talk radio ranters do, can’t get other judges to sign on to their opinions, and that if they do the extremism of their opinions may prevent them from surviving on appeal. But red meat extremists often favor sound and fury over actual results.

Careful What You Wish For

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Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement and Democrats were plunged into the Slough of Despond. Republicans all but sang the Ode to Joy, but will Trump’s voters live to regret this turn of events?

Trump was able to add Neil Gorsuch to the court a year ago when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in an unprecedented display of partisan lese-majeste, denied Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee, a vote, leaving a Supreme Court seat vacant for many months.

Stealing the seat from Obama guaranteed that, if a Republican won in 2016, the Scalia seat would remain committed to the orthodoxy of the right, under the nom de guerre of originalism or textualism. This is conservative code for finding justification for whatever reactionary beliefs the justice holds by means of a selective and self-serving reading of history.

Seating Gorsuch assured a 5-4 majority, or at worst a 4-5 minority, as long as the variable Kennedy served. Adding a more reliably right zealot will solidify 5-4 as far as the eye can see. And since Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 85, among the oldest justices ever, a permanent 6-3 advantage is far from implausible.

The next oldest justice, Stephen Breyer, will turn 80 in August. His retirement would give the Trumpist Republican Party a 7-2 majority until the relatively young originalists begin to expire, say in 2035, but even then only if a Democratic majority controls the Senate at the same time.

No wonder the hair of Democrats is afire at the prospect. They worry that Roe v. Wade will be reversed as Trump promised when campaigning. Same sex marriage would likely be equally threatened. Civil Rights might follow. Immigrants would become persona non-grata. The vote would be restricted to the approved demographics groups. And in this telling there would nothing to prevent the evangelical caucus from enacting “The Handmaid’s Tale” into law.

This may seem a little wild-eyed to more sober, or less ideological, citizens, but it is certainly true that Democrats have no way of stopping Trump and the his handmaids from ramming though another justice or two or three. Before the filibuster was eliminated by McConnell in 2017, to get Gorsuch his seat, sixty voters were needed to bring nominees to a vote. Now a simple majority suffices.

The court already has three justices aboard who won by the narrowest margins ever — Gorsuch 54-45, Alito 58-42 and Thomas 52-48. By contrast, Sotomayor and Kagan got 63 ayes, Roberts 78, Breyer 87 and Ginsburg 96, but Congress was less poisonously partisan then. A certain civility and dignity were observed in regard to Supreme Court nominees.

No more. McConnell and Trump have showm they will do anything to win. Democratic partisans are urging their representatives to sink to the same level. But they have little ammo since they do not control any of the the branches of government. The Democrats have 49 of 100 seats and not all of them are sure to vote against Trump’s next nominee. Thus, a Trump fait accompli seems imminent.

This is good news for him. It seems very likely, given the president’s legal and ethical troubles, that the Supremes will be called upon to rule on whether a sitting president can be compelled to testify, indicted, tried, convicted, in either state or federal courts, of bribe-taking, collaboration with enemy powers, profiting from his office, destroying evidence, obstructing justice. Make your own list. But why bother, if the highest court in the land is in his pocket?

This may be too dark. Surely the Justices wouldn’t let partisan ideology prevent them from doing their duty. But duty is in the eye of the ideologue. So, we may be stuck with a Trump free of any check, balance or jeopardy for as long as he chooses to serve, or as long as Putin is willing to keep tilting elections in Trump’s favor.

That being the case, will Trump’s base find an unchecked Freedom Caucus Court to their liking? Perhaps not so much. Trump ran on the promise of taking care of the forgotten man, the coal miner, the working family squeezed by costly healthcare, college debt and global competition, and surrounded by ungodliness.

Well, the Trump Court may be vicious to immigrants and gays and willing to ban Muslims, but will the coal miner’s daughter or wife be happy to let the court dictate their reproductive choices? To permit laws that steal from the schools and hospitals they rely on to give tax cuts to the rich? Will they be surprised to discover their votes don’t count when the Court permits partisan and racial gerrymander so the party in power can rig the game in their favor?

Will these middle and working class people really like a Court that constantly rules in favor of the state when it wants to take the property of people or search them or pry into their private lives?

Do Trump’s voters all work for themselves, or do they have employers and bosses? If so, what happens when the Court rules overwhelmingly to look out for the interests of big corporations and to dismiss the rights of employees?

Will the Trump voters really like a Court that serves as the tool of the same Wall Street, multinational corporations, and global banking powers that the president ran against? A Court that thinks the State is more trustworthy that the people. The tendency of the originalists, with their veneration of 18th century elitist mores, has often been to see the people as the rabble or the mob.

So, surprise Trump voters! The Trump Court isn’t going to rule in your favor. It’s going to side with the State, what you call “the swamp,” and the money power, what you call “the man.” Their idea of MAGA is not be the same as yours. Good luck.

Summer Matinees: The Walking Dead

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From an early age, l loved going to the movies, and summer was the prime movie season with plenty of films aimed at kids. Where I grew up, air conditioning was a luxury not worth purchasing for six sultry weeks a year. So, the chance to sit in a cool, dark theater on a hot afternoon was an added inducement.

Recently, however, the movie going experience has become increasingly annoying, and living below the Mason-Dixon line means I have an air-conditioned home with pay-per-view and streaming video on a big screen with sound I can control.

In an apparent bid to entice viewers like me from the comforts of home, theaters have begun adding bigger reclining seats. But they are so bulky that the theater can accommodate fewer customers, so the prices have risen to compensate, and concession prices have also skyrocketed. Has Trump imposed a tariff on popcorn and Coke syrup?

It is now perfectly possible for two moviegoers to drop $30 to $40 on a pair of tickets, a bag of popcorn and a drink. That might be tolerable if the stuff on the screen was masterworks of comedy and drama too fabulous to wait for on the home screen, but that’s not the case. The major studios no longer bother to provide original content. Instead, they are in the recycling business

The schedule, especially in the summer, is dominated by one weary franchise or threadbare remake after another. For this I should leave home, sit in discomfort, pay through the nose, and subject myself to half an hour of ads for crummy coming attractions, an equally crummy knock-off of previous films, and a pyrotechnic soundtrack so deafening it drowns out quieter films in the theaters next door? I don’t think so.

Already this year, the kind of franchise kiddie movies based on comic books or YA novels once reserved for July have been in the theaters for months – “Black Panther,” another “Pacific Rim,” “Ready, Player One,” another Avenger epic, “Deadpool 2,” “Solo,” a Star Wars prequel, and now “Incredibles 2” and “Jurassic Park 5 or 6.”

But a tremor or two has shaken Hollywood’s complacency, and the fault in not in the San Andreas but in their business plan. There’s been talk of Star Wars fatigue since the box office receipts flor “Solo” were anemic, as were those for the latest Jurassic iteration. The audiences have apparently decided the fatigue is on the part of the film makers. Too timid to mess with a sure thing, they end up producing an enervating rehash that entertains no one, not even the most addicted fanboys.

Case in point, “Solo,” the origin story of Han Solo, was originally entrusted to a couple of young, daring filmmakers with hopes they’d reenergize the franchise, but halfway through filming, the studio flinched and brought in geriatric Ron Howard to save the film from adventurous departures from familiar tedium.

By all account “Jurassic Park 9” is an even more rote, paint-by-numbers effort, though it is loud. And what do we have to look forward to for the rest of the summer and 2018? The usual suspects, of course. No creativity required. I’m not making this up, except the numbers and subtitles of a few of the sequels.

“Sicario 2,” “Ant Man and the Wasp,” on the theory that two superbugs are better than one.” Hotel Transylvania 3,” “Equalizer 2”, “Mamma Mia: Superfluous,” “Mission Impossible: Retirement Village,” “Creed 2” (which is really “Rocky” 10 or 11), “Fantastic Beasts 2”, “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Post Mortem,” “Halloween 12,” the fourth remake of “A Star is Born,” “Aqua Man,” “Spiderman: Infestation” and “Mary Poppins: Resurrection.”

I’m so excited! I’ll take out a second mortgage, so I don’t miss one. Is it too early to reserve tickets for the Christmas showings? Or should we all just admit our mainstream pop culture is exhausted? Same old genre tropes. Same old ads to sell the same old remakes. Same old chase, crash, explosion, beating, shoot out, robot, superhero, supervillain, alien, hitman.

At least that’s the case from the giant corporations who manufacture “entertainment” as if it was sausage. And incidentally, also true of our political parties with the same pols, lies, ads, panders, scapegoats, enemies, exhausted ideological cant.

It’s true that Hollywood in its prime made a lot of genre pictures — Westerns, Weepies, Noir thrillers, War stories — but except for serials and stuff like the Road pictures, most of their product was bespoke. Would we regard the best of them with such abiding affection if there had been a “Gone with the Wind 2,” “Casablanca 3,” “Lawrence of Arabia 5?” Not bloody likely.

Today, however, almost every big budget film is predicated on a continuing stream of revenue from sequels, spin-offs, merchandise. It is only the oddballs — indie, out of the way moviemakers whose films never play the multiplex, the independent cable channels and streaming services, the small presses, the insurrectionist pols — who show signs of life, who understand that, if you hope to produce something that’s one of a kind, there’s a box you need to think outside of. The rest is reruns from the assembly line, the walking dead.