So Trump Picked Brett Kavanaugh

Last night, Donald Trump selected Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee for the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy.

There are eleventy jillion articles about Kavanaugh this morning from every conceivable angle covering every possible detail, so I won't reinvent the horrible, disgusting, depressing wheel, and instead will give you the short version.

Kavanaugh's primary qualifications for the lifetime appointment to SCOTUS are that he's about 12 years old; that he is willing and eager to destroy everything progressives value; that he believes presidents should not be held legally accountable for any lawbreaking (I'll come back to that); and that he reportedly meant enough personally to Anthony Kennedy that his nomination convinced Kennedy to retire.

Furthermore, the five names Trump added to his list of Federalist Approved judges last November was to get Kavanaugh on that list. The other four names were considered cover, per source.

In other words: the decision has been baked for a while:
W/ @frankthorp

— Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) July 10, 2018

The sourcing on that is thin, but, if it is indeed accurate, that is just an extraordinary level of corruption, signalling the absolute obliteration of the very last check/balance on Trump's presidency. If he owns the Supreme Court this thoroughly, if there is not even the remotest possibility of independence from this future justice, we are well and truly fucked.

On that note, and returning to Kavanaugh's beliefs about presidential criminality, here is Senator Cory Booker speaking with Rachel Maddow last night, breaking down precisely why Kavanaugh was Trump's first choice:

Here is Sen @CoryBooker breaking it all the way down. Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court to insulate himself from criminal investigation and to preserve his legal claim to self-pardoning power. pic.twitter.com/t3dk4xbso9

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) July 10, 2018

Maddow welcomes Booker to the show and then asks for his reaction to Trump having nominated Kavanaugh. Booker responds: "I'm a little sort of stunned at the way this has all played out. If you look at the entire list of twenty or so people that he had on, the one person that the president could find on that list that would be most assured to rule in his favor, should many of the things you're describing come before the Supreme Court, is this judge. He picked the one guy who has specifically written that a president, in fact, should not be the subject of a criminal investigation, which the president is right now. So this seems to be, of all the people, the most self-serving person he could choose, in order to protect himself from this criminal investigation."

So here we are. We knew it was going to be bad, and it is.

The best hope we have at this point to block Kavanaugh is peeling off some Republican Senators. The thing is, it's tough to appeal to a person's sense of decency when they don't have one.

Still. The fight begins now.