Kavanaugh Is Republicans' Revenge on Uppity Women

Today, despite the fact that even the American Bar Association is now urging a delay, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee will reportedly press forward with their scheduled vote on Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation, which, presuming they vote him out of committee, will be followed by procedural votes Saturday and Monday, then by a final vote on Tuesday in the full Senate.

It's vanishingly unlikely that Kavanaugh's nomination won't pass out of committee for a full Senate vote, since there isn't a single Republican woman on the Senate Judiciary Committee who might be moved to decency by some residual humanity awakened by the primal fear of violent men.

And Kavanaugh's nomination "could still be considered by the full Senate with an unfavorable recommendation by the committee," if Republican Senate leadership decides to ignore that recommendation.

There is, of course, still a miniscule chance that Kavanaugh won't get the votes during the full Senate vote, since Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are mildly squirming at the optics of voting for an accused sex predator who flipped his shit when asked to address the allegations against him.

I have seen it posited, however, that Democratic Senator and colossal turd Joe Manchin will vote with the Republicans to give cover to Collins and Murkowski, leaving Mike Pence to cast the tiebreaking vote, which he'll no doubt do while jizzing in his pants.

It is revoltingly appropriate that the Republican Senate majority is fixing to ram through Kavanaugh's confirmation in contravention of the will of a majority of the people, given that they've stood in firm opposition to consent in every sense, every step of the way.

This was always going to be bad. And it is.

That Kavanaugh remains on the precipice of being confirmed — even after being accused of multiple sexual assaults and using the time he was given to rebut the charges to put on a shocking performance making it abundantly clear that he is comprehensively incapable of being an impartial jurist — bodes poorly for the future of the Supreme Court and the nation's troubling trajectory.

Every day of Trump's presidency brings another gust of ominous wind, and, if Kavanaugh is indeed confirmed as we have every reason to expect that he will be, the thundering storm of which those winds whispered will be upon us. And there won't be an umbrella in sight.

The 2016 election was a referendum on how this nation values women. Every day of Trump's presidency has given sadists opportunity to cheer for abject cruelty. And the Kavanaugh nomination was an unbearable intersection of that misogyny and public malice — a spectacle designed to force women to demonstrate raw vulnerability, so that fetid ghouls whose organizing principle is denying agency to marginalized people could feverishly thrash in the theater of our pain.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said: "Any senator who votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh after Dr. Ford's testimony is telling our country exactly this: The experiences of women don't matter. Their trauma doesn't matter. Their stories and their voices don't matter."

That is correct. And that is not incidental. It is entirely the point.

The Republicans could have cut Kavanaugh loose at any point. There is no shortage of conservative judges with an equal willingness to be the Trump Regime's lackey on the Supreme Court. But this is a display of dominance — the threatening act of a party consolidating its power behind a confessed abuser; who feel distressingly free to ignore voters' will; who are behaving as though they won't have to be beholden to voters ever again.

Who want to make it perfectly clear to women, even as women abandon their party, that we have no value to them. That men who have harmed us will be richly rewarded, empowered to cast the deciding vote on our autonomy.

Brett Kavanaugh is Republicans' revenge on uppity women, who have dared to resist them, dared to march, dared to run for office, dared to speak, dared to shout, dared to be angry, dared to demand equality, dared to report, dared to testify, dared to survive.

But we will keep surviving. Even now.

#resist