(Portside) — Brett Kavanaugh moved one step closer to the United States Supreme Court on Friday.
Despite telling brazen lies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and despite Christine Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony, Republicans on the committee voted in favor of advancing Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate for a vote. Only a new FBI investigation into Ford’s allegations, limited in time to one week, now stands in the way of Donald Trump entrenching a hard-right conservative majority on the Supreme Court for a generation or more.
To be clear, such a majority on the court would be an utter disaster for women, for people of color, and for the poor. One upside of Kavanaugh’s raw and angry rant on Thursday — he referred to the Democrats on the panel as “you people,” a “disgrace,” and accused them of exacting “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” — is that it exposed the Supreme Court for what it is: a partisan on the political battlefield, not a disinterested defender of the Constitution.
