We still don’t know who holds the paper
Greg Olear starts with the Texas law and the Supreme Court’s “Sure, go right ahead.”
After a day of excruciating silence, the Court voted 5-4 to let it be, citing some pusillanimous procedural technicality. Chief Justice Roberts sided with the three “liberal” justices, but the five other Federalist Society stooges on the bench—Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh—gave Texas the green light to go full Fascist, thus confirming what most of us feared all along: that Roe v. Wade is not safe, that the government is at war with women, that the radical Catholics who took over the Court are pro-tyranny.
We’re stuck with them except maybe for Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh is different. There is a clear playbook to removing him from the bench. And this is what must be done. Not because we don’t like his politics, although we don’t; not because we think he’s an asshole, although he is; not because he had a hissy fit at his confirmation hearing, although he did. No, we must remove him because at least twice in his life, some unknown entity endowed him with major infusions of cash, and Kavanaugh lied, under oath, about the provenance of that cash (he said it came from his Thrift Savings Plan)—and about several other things besides. He’s compromised, six ways from Sunday, and we simply can’t have that on the Supreme Court, no matter which way he votes.
While all of Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are beholden to some degree to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society, and the other dark money organizations that helped install them, only Kavanaugh is owned. And we still don’t know who holds the paper.
Earlier this year, in Part Two of our five-part series, LB and I produced a painstakingly detailed examination of the red flags concerning Brett Kavanaugh’s finances, which show two enormous and out-of-the-blue influxes of revenue. The first, the down payment on the Chevy Chase house, came through just before his nomination to the D.C. circuit court in 2006; the second, the payment in full of his onerous credit card balances, immediately preceded his nomination to SCOTUS in 2018.
But apparently the Democrats can’t or won’t summon up the will to investigate.
Impeachment starts in the House. Democrats could open an inquiry if they want to.
Yes, they could open an inquiry. But as long as the Senate is in the state it is, they will not get anything but an acquittal. And that looks to most people like a finding of “he did nothing wrong”, not a finding of “even though he did a lot of things that are bad and wrong and possibly illegal, partisan politics won the day and gave him a pass because of reasons”. Just like happened with Trump.