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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDahlia Lithwick: The Grotesque Decency of Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation Hearings
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/kavanaugh-confirmation-hearing-senate-judiciary-grotesque-decency.htmlThe Grotesque Decency of Brett Kavanaughs Confirmation Hearings
Normalcy and civility are a threat to the rule of law.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Sept 04, 20187:34 PM
If we learned anything at all from John McCains funeral over the weekend its this: The more buffeted we are by the hourly insanity that emanates from the Trump White House, the more likely we are to get bleary-eyed drunk on episodes of public sobriety, dignity, and seriousness. As Michelle Goldberg aptly noted, For many who detest Donald Trump, the spectacle of the countrys former leaders championing embattled American principlesprinciples once shared by even the bitterest political enemieswas fiercely moving. Moving, yes, but at what cost?
The more corruption, incompetence, and recklessness we witness spewing out of the White House, the more inclined we are to cling tightly to the blanket of institutional integrity, normalcy, and civility. Its not just that its nuts out there. Its almost as if the nuttier it gets, the more we need to pretend that wherever it is were sitting at the moment is a safe place in which the norms of dignity, respect, and goodwill are still in force. And if John McCains funeral was a symbol of that, so too is all the talk of decorum and civility in the U.S. Senate.
And so, Republicans spent the first day of Brett Kavanaughs confirmation hearings telling us that nothing thats happening in here has anything to do with the fact that Donald Trump is the president. None of the concern around this Supreme Court seat has anything to do with the fact that the president himself is under investigation for corruption and campaign finance violations, or that his personal lawyer swore under oath that Trump instructed him to commit crimes, or that a foreign power is currently interfering with our election systems. All of that is about a different thing. This hearing is about something stable and immutable and good. And anyone who implies that anything is abnormal is a hysteric or an opportunist or an attention-seeker.
snip//
If the McCain funeral proved anything, its that we take so much visceral succor in public performances of bipartisanship and decency that we can blinker ourselves to genuine injustice, injustice we dont see because it happens outside our scope of vision. We need balanced, functioning institutions so desperately that we gorge ourselves on performances of friendship and family and civility.
We must be extra cautious, now more than ever, about institutions that substitute talk of norms and civility for actual justice. Senate Republicans are rushing the Kavanaugh hearing, and blocking access to his record, precisely because they would rather prey on the national need for normalcy and dignity than do anything to reaffirm the rule of law as it applies to this presidency. Yet again the crumbling of democratic safeguards is someone elses problem. Sometimes calls for institutional decency and civility mask institutional cowardice and opportunism. The first day of Kavanaughs confirmation hearings was one of those times.
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Dahlia Lithwick: The Grotesque Decency of Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation Hearings (Original Post)
babylonsister
Sep 2018
OP
Vinnie From Indy
(10,820 posts)1. Spot on!
Thanks!
Atticus
(15,124 posts)2. One of those "Damn! That is SO right!" reads. Thank you. nt
empedocles
(15,751 posts)3. Quite rightly put
thank you
DonCoquixote
(13,616 posts)4. to cop a phrase from drug rehab
we have not hot "bottom", the point where we reslize a lot of what we clign to needs togo. Sadly, I hope it does nto take Chinese tanks rolling through our cities.