It is despicable of Cavuto to play this game, and it’s frankly becoming tiring to have to remind everyone that the GOP gleefully skyrocketed taxes on Middle Class Employees, particularly those who live and work in Blue States, with the GOP Tax Transfer of 2017. Tens of millions of Middle Class Employees went from regularly seeing refunds of 3-4K every year to getting bills of 4-5K every year.

The angry Right Wingers who inflicted this massive tax increase on Middle Class Employees were open about what they were doing and why. Multiple Fox shows featured those Right Wingers sneering at California residents or at what Tucker Carlson referred to as those “urbanites who voted for Hillary”.

So Cavuto’s mock “concern” rings more than a little hollow here.

Grassley and Asman’s comments here were intentionally deceptive, and frankly despicable. Nearly everything they stated was a falsehood.

1. The FBI search and seizure at the compound of Pence’s childish former spokesman was more than justified by multiple factors – including the fact that they retrieved extremely sensitive materials that should never have left a secure compartment and including the fact that the attorneys for Pence’s childish former spokesman had lied about them. The FBI would not have submitted the warrant and the judge would not have granted it, had it not been clear that there was a serious issue here. Grassley knows this, but is hoping his viewers won’t. Put it another way – had this same search happened at Hillary Clinton’s home in 2019, Grassley would have steadfastly supported it. He just doesn’t like it because it’s politically inconvenient for him.

2. Carter Page was not and is not an innocent victim of anything. He tried to parlay himself with Russian contacts and puff himself into something he wasn’t, and the consequences for him were that US intelligence agents couldn’t afford to just dismiss him as the bumbler he is. If anything, Page’s matter is similar to that of Kristian Saucier – who bumbled his own way into trouble with the law and then tried in vain to convince everyone that somehow he was the one being oppressed. It is true that one of the agents involved in the Page investigation did something improper – and that agent was disciplined. But it did not change Page’s behavior, which triggered the investigation in the first place.

3. The Russia/Trump Campaign investigation by Mueller was no hoax. Multiple people were indicted, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to prison. Angry Right Wingers can jump up and down all they want about this, but the fact is that these people broke the law and were appropriately punished.

3. The Steele Dossier was originally being prepared by Fusion GPS for the American Free Beacon, a Far Far Right Wing propaganda outlet along the lines of Newsmax. AFB was trying to knock Trump out of the 2016 race but when he bullied everyone else out of the primaries, AFB retreated. Fusion GPS then went to some backers of Clinton and asked for money to finish their work. The backers agreed – Clinton didn’t know anything about it. And when the work was presented to the Clinton campaign, they chose not to use it during the campaign. So there was never a real story here. Again, angry Right Wingers can jump up and down if they like here, but it gets them nowhere.

4. The Clinton “investigation” was over whether her email server was somehow a giant issue. In terms of angry Right Wing propaganda, yes it was. In terms of any actual legal issues, it never was. The FBI concluded this was simply a matter that some emails had wound up on the server that should not have been there. Clinton herself was simply following the behavior of Colin Powell and others in having her own independent server. Angry Right Wingers like to spread the lie that somehow this server was hacked, but we’ve never seen any evidence of that. The only thing one could say about Clinton is that she was careless here – which is what James Comey did say. Clinton never took direct actions with this server to put classified materials on it – unlike Pence’s childish former spokesman, who directed his minions to pull secret materials from a secure area and take them to his personal resort.

5. Hunter Biden has yet to be shown to have committed anything approaching an intentional crime. It’s possible he didn’t pay ALL of his tax burden. It’s possible he improperly owned a gun while in rehab – but it’s also possible that he didn’t realize he could not have it, particularly since his license had not been revoked. And all the nonsense about Burisma only has shown that Biden obeyed the law there. The canard about the “laptop” has been shown to be a propaganda plant made by angry Right Wingers hoping to concoct an “October Surprise” in 2020 and failing badly. The actual contents of the “laptop” are hacked materials from Biden’s online storage and email account. (The crime there is the one committed by the guys who hacked Biden’s account and sold it to the highest bidder in 2019) The only reason angry Right Wingers keep bringing up Hunter Biden at this point is that they’re hoping the repetition of the falsehood will convince gullible listeners that it’s not false.

This is a nonsensical attempt by Kurtz to frantically wave his hands and tell people not to look at that man behind the curtain.

In reality, no written “edict” was needed for the Fox staff to get the message that they weren’t going to push the lies of Mike Pence’s childish former spokesman. Granted, the news stories of the day are normally fed out as the “Line of the Day”, but it doesn’t take much to simply not mention the childish former spokesman in any of those Lines.

The reality is that most angry Right Wingers are trying to move on from the Pence White House, particularly since they already got the big policy wins they wanted from it. They’d be happy to promote a different angry Right Winger in 2024 who isn’t facing indictments by both the Feds and the state of Georgia.

Just two weeks ago, angry Right Wingers were smugly declaring that the Senate couldn’t pass anything and nothing would be getting done for the rest of the year so we could look forward to a “Red Wave” election where the Dems would be swept completely out of office for the next decade.

Now that the Dems have actually passed the Inflation Reduction Act and it will wind up cruising through the House to be signed into law, angry Right Wingers are going to plan B – smear the legislation.

One might even get the idea that the GOP and the Right Wing are not seriously interested in getting anything done for the American people.

I would not recommend anyone trying to endure disgraced former Fox host Eric Bolling’s latest venture into propaganda work.

While I agree that Tucker Carlson’s conduct has been despicable for his entire career, I must also point out that Bolling’s conduct is equally despicable if not worse.

Let’s remember that Eric Bolling, like Bill O’Reilly, was fired from Fox for shameful conduct, including harassment. Bolling was caught sending lewd phone photos to his female co-workers – a behavior he thought he could get away with since O’Reilly was doing it and since Roger Ailes was known for it. When Yashar Ali wrote a news story about Bolling’s conduct and had multiple Fox employees corroborating the story, Bolling frantically responded in 2017 by threatening to personally sue Ali for 50 million dollars in a SLAPP suit. Ali quickly promised to countersue and Ali’s attorney sent a stern letter to Bolling that eagerly previewed the discovery that would come in the litigation where Bolling would be forced to turn over his phone. Bolling then took advantage of a personal crisis where his son unfortunately died of an overdose, and hid behind that crisis for a couple of years, hoping everyone would forget about his threatened litigation. Bolling then re-emerged and began hosting podcasts and propaganda shows for Sinclair and now “Newsmax”.

Bolling’s quarrel with Tucker Carlson is not about any moral or ethical value. His quarrel with Carlson is about the fact that Bolling is still angry that he was fired and that Carlson got the prime time spotlight that Bolling wanted for himself. It’s the same issue that Bill O’Reilly has regarding how he was not able to achieve his “elder statesman” status at Fox when he got fired over his constant sexual misconduct. It’s the same issue we have seen between Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee – both parties are despicable, but they’re fighting for the scraps of attention they think they can take from each other.

Bolling regularly slags his former “colleagues” from Fox – including Chris Wallace, who he gloated would be hosting “a podcast” after the CNN+ idea faltered. Wallace of course went on to host a different show for CNN and Bolling predictably went silent about it.

While it is possible that a settlement situation may be partly covered by insurance, I don’t know that the carrier would be required to pay out a damages amount when we’re talking about defamation and malicious behavior.

For example, if an employee misbehaves and a lawsuit is generated at the employer, insurance may or may not cover the situation. If the employee was acting lawfully and appropriately, then yes, they will need to be covered against a frivolous attack. But if the employee did something unsupportable, the company has the right to back away. Similarly, just because a company like Fox has an insurance policy does not mean that it’s free from accountability when it knowingly lies and defames a company that can fight back. Further, even if insurance covers part of a settlement, the insurer would most assuredly skyrocket the premium in response.

Fox is not going to walk away from this situation without a significant amount of pain for itself and its stockholders. Frankly, were I to advise Dominion on this, I’d recommend they take it to trial and not let Fox try to worm their way out.

As a reverse example of this, the remaining Nick Sandmann nuisance suits were laughed out of court this past week – meaning that ABC, CBS, Rolling Stone, NY Times and Gannett are free from that harassment now. NBC, WaPo and CNN chose to settle for pittance payments over a year ago (reportedly under 50K each, with almost all the money going to Sandmann’s attorneys) because it was cheaper to avoid a longer court cost to get to the same place. The other outlets chose not to settle, as they wanted to make the point that they wouldn’t give Sandmann anything for trying to pretend to be a victim when he was the one at fault. This course was a little more expensive for them, and Sandmann certainly cannot afford to reimburse them for their costs – but it’s one based on principle. And I would hope that Dominion and Smartmatic would follow that same principle.

Larry is of course correct in his analysis, in that it is likely that this SC will defer to an executive action by a current White House regarding whether they wish to continue a policy from a prior White House. Roberts has been consistent about this.

When the DACA program was being tossed by the Pence White House, Roberts noted that Pence had every right to do so, but that he needed to submit the proper paperwork. Pence’s childish former spokesman then made loud noises in public about not needing to do that, so Roberts made clear in the subsequent SC ruling that DACA would not be ended until they did that paperwork.

In the current situation, the bigoted “Remain in Mexico” idea has not yet been halted, as the Biden Administration is waiting to see what now comes from the Pence-appointed judge who initially made this mess by demanding that Biden continue the program. As we discussed, it’s strongly indicated that this judge will of course find another presumed area where ending the bigoted program would somehow violate an existing law, and that the 5th Circuit will uphold the judge and thus keep the program in place.

None of that will happen quickly. I don’t expect to see a new offering from the original judge til the fall, and I wouldn’t expect the 5th Circuit to weigh in again until sometime in the first half of 2023. Meaning that this will not go before the SC in their 22-23 term but rather it will have to wait til the 23-24 term. Meaning that by the time we get their ruling, in June 2 years from now, we’ll be hip deep in the 2024 presidential campaign and even if the program is in fact halted for a few months at that point, the winner of that election could just turn it back on in January 2025.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. The Fusion GPS research in 2016 which resulted in the dossier on Trump’s proclivities was paid for by the Washington Free Beacon, a Far Right propaganda outlet that was doing oppo research on behalf of GOP candidates who wanted Trump out of the race. It was only after Trump bullied everyone out of his way that WFB walked away and Fusion GPS asked a Clinton supporter if they wanted to have the results. The constant angry Right Wing refrains of “Hillary Clinton paid-for” leaves out the reality of this situation – and Clinton herself didn’t deal with the dossier or Fusion GPS anyway.

2. The Hunter Biden obsession by angry Right Wingers is quite odd, to be honest. In reality, he’s a guy who’s had addiction issues and other problems who has tried to legally parlay his family name into helping him in business. For all the Right Wing noise about it, nothing we’ve seen of Biden’s activity has been illegal or even unethical. It’s possible that he didn’t pay all of his taxes (although he did pay a very large sum, one that’s exponentially higher than anything Trump has paid) and maybe he’ll wind up having to pay a fine at some point. But there’s no story there – the only reason that propaganda outlets like Fox keep pushing Hunter stories is because they know their viewers hate the Bidens and it’s good revenge fodder.

3. It’s interesting that Fox and other angry Right Wing outlets have tried to turn Liz Cheney into a boogeyman for her temerity in upholding criminal laws and standards. Suddenly, Cheney went from getting to be a fill-in host for Hannity and disgraced former host O’Reilly to being a target of their scorn and hatred. Let’s keep in mind that Cheney is still the same Far Right personality she always was – she is not some kind of liberal icon at all. (She made a point of celebrating the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v Wade). But Fox and Hannity and the other angry Right Wing shouters cannot tolerate Cheney now – simply because she does not swear eternal loyalty to Zod.

4. Hutchinson’s testimony is primarily about what she personally saw and heard while working in the Pence White House. Her accounts line up with what other witnesses have been saying about Pence’s childish former spokesman having multiple tantrums and meltdowns after people would patiently try to explain to him that he lost the 2020 Election. As for the infamous tantrum in the vehicle, it has not been disputed by the people who were there. What we’re hearing is an “unnamed source” who says that people are disputing it. Ornato and Engel were both interviewed by the January 6 committee at a prior date. Neither has made any statement that Hutchinson was saying anything but the truth. Let’s also note that angry Right Wingers are trying a narrative that Pence’s childish former spokesman could not have lunged for the steering wheel from the back of the limo. Except that there are different “Beast” vehicles (ie bulletproofed, etc). When this incident happened, Pence’s childish former spokesman was being travelled in the Suburban SUV “Beast” and could easily have reached over to grab the wheel. Further, let’s remember that all parties are acknowledging the tantrum happened. The Right Wing quibble is whether or not the tantrum went far enough for him to try to grab the wheel or the agent.

5. It’s interesting that angry Right Wingers keep trying to change the narrative about the mob on January 6. Their latest wrinkle is “it’s no big deal that the crowd had guns and tasers and weapons”. Of course, their first spin was “it was antifa people doing this”, and that went nowhere. Then they said “it was good people just visiting the Capitol to protest and they were acting like tourists anyway”. Then it went to “some of those good people got carried away and they should be punished, but nobody was armed and the only one attacked was poor Ashli Babbitt.” Now we’re getting “it’s no big deal that people were armed.” What’s next? “It’s no big deal that the armed mob was attacking people with weapons”?

The reality of January 6 is and was that an angry Right Wing mob, led by a group that worked with premeditation, assaulted the US Capitol with intent to injure and kill anyone not letting them have their way. The reality is that Pence’s childish former spokesman cannot deal with the fact that he is the loser of the 2020 Election, and his tantrum over being a loser has cost this country dearly in terms of lives lost, property damage, injuries and a general loss of confidence in our ability to have a civilized society when angry Right Wingers do not wish to be part of it.

If the GOP retakes the White House in 2024 and has majorities in Congress, I would not be surprised to see them pass a “fetal personhood” nationwide reproductive choice ban in 2025. Which would then get challenged in court and get hustled up to this Supreme Court. And then we’ll find out how the current 5-vote supermajority of Far Far Right Wing extremists will treat that notion…

Just to be extremely clear, I am not advocating violence from anyone. Violence is unacceptable and vicious behavior that we continue to see from angry Right Wingers, such as GOP goon Jeann Lungo who repeatedly punched Jennifer Rourke in the face for having the temerity to be at a reproductive rights rally this weekend. Or the guy who plowed his van through protestors in Iowa for having the temerity to protest the Dobbs ruling. And we could go on.

The angry Right Wing narrative for the past month has been to set up a straw house about how “those far Left mobs” would instantly riot and burn every American city to the ground as soon as the Dobbs ruling came out. Which of course didn’t happen. We saw instead a lot of peaceful protest, with a few cases of situations getting out of hand between protestors and counterprotestors. As usual, the violence was primarily from angry Right Wingers – including some suspicious arson attacks that appear to be intended to make people think they were done by someone from the Left.

Any time that someone on the Left loses their temper and allows themselves to be provoked into this kind of behavior, it just feeds the angry Right Wing narrative and allows them to project their issues onto the Left. It’s also completely the opposite of the actual values and goals of the Left.

And I’m not saying don’t have peaceful protests. Those are crucial. I’m saying that we should not expect peaceful protests to do more than make a public statement in the 21st century, particularly in a scenario where there is a barricade around the Supreme Court and the only legal “protest area” is so far away from the building, they’d never know you were there. And if you legally and peacefully protest outside the justices’ homes, angry Right Wingers will accuse you of threatening them.

The situation with Nicholas Roske is instructive. Here’s a guy who apparently wanted to make an extreme statement about the difference between the value we place on the safety of Supreme Court justices versus the safety of children. He openly states that he was upset about the Uvalde Massacre and at the viciousness of the current Far Far Right Wing Supreme Court. He then purchases a gun and other materials and announces he plans to travel to attack Kavanaugh. He then repeatedly calls 911 on himself and announces he’s unwell mentally while he travels with his gun. He then arrives and is predictably arrested in a hurry, and authorities note that he never took any step to actually try to attack anyone and never loaded his gun. Right Wing media play this as a horrifying attack and McConnell uses the moment to prevent Dems from legislating the safety of Supreme Court clerks who’ve been doxxed by angry Right Wingers at the “Article 3 Project” who want those clerks physically attacked.

Roske’s scenario undermined the protests people were trying to have. My instinct is that he did not intend to actually commit violence, but he set up a situation where he will be portrayed that way and the protest idea he had has backfired badly.

I continue to hold that the ONLY way we can correct the problem we now have in the judiciary and in the extreme viciousness of the Right Wing is for people to show up and vote in large numbers. In swing states, this is crucial for presidential elections. In the Red States, it is now more than crucial for the state elections. We have an extremely high mountain to climb there, due to all the Right Wing gerrymandering, which will require many Dem voters to evaluate what district they have been jammed into and then move to a district where they can make a difference.

We should not fool ourselves about how long this is going to take. It took the Right Wing about 50 years to completely throw Roe in the trash. (And let’s not forget that they also spent the entire 50 years carving out large chunks of it with rulings like Webster and Casey.). The Right Wing actually started their push to remake the judiciary in 1969, with Nixon’s appointments of Burger and Blackmun to replace Warren and Fortas. It will likely take the rest of us at least 50 years to move the judiciary in a saner direction, by appointing actual judges and not partisan extremists throughout the federal judiciary as well as the state courts. And then it will likely take another few decades to begin to rebuild the integrity of the courts.

At this time, the Supreme Court no longer has credibility as an impartial institution evaluating our laws and our Constitution. The extremists on the Court have made clear that they do not respect precedent and that stare decisis is a dead issue. They have also made clear that they will contradict themselves between rulings and even within rulings if that will be helpful to the Republican politicians and causes they embrace. The two centrist and one moderately liberal justices are no longer able to influence the key decisions and can only issue impotent “we sorrowfully dissent” responses while cases like Griswold, Loving and Obergefell are tossed out the window. Ian Millhiser will tell us that this is just the Supreme Court reverting to its usual form, which it held for over 150 years before the Warren Court, of comforting the comforted and afflicting the afflicted.

I truly hope that there will be some way of salvaging the integrity of the Supreme Court within my lifetime and I’m over 50 years old. I frankly have doubts at this point.

But the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.

There’s a lot to unpack in this segment, and much of it can be found in the truly despicable work by both Earnardt and Lee to sell false premises while doing what really amounts to an end zone dance. And the Dobbs decision is almost certainly going to mean disaster for American women who will no longer have any option for reproductive choice.

First: the notion of “originalism” that the 5 Far Far Right Wing extremists on the Supreme Court are citing is not the actual philosophy. It’s an aberration of that philosophy that was developed by Robert Bork in the 1970s. Actual originalism is just a way to learn the context behind a law that was written at an earlier time. For example, originalism is what helps us study the 2nd Amendment and its discussion of a well-regulated militia, so that we can understand why during a time without a fully standing army, there was a concern to make sure that citizens could help defend the Republic from what had been constant threats from both within and without. Bork corrupted this notion to mean that rather than learning context, the purpose now is to say that the ONLY way to apply a law is in the manner exactly prescribed in 1789. Which of course ignores over 200 years of history since then. It denies the idea of a living, breathing Constitution and substitutes the image of a document frozen in concrete that can only be interpreted by holding a new Constitutional Convention and rewriting it. (I also note that the purveyors of this false version of “originalism” are careful to ignore the concept of case law. Whenever someone asks about the right to privacy or anything else, they jump to “Where is the exact language for that in the Constitution?” And they could save themselves the time by reviewing literally mountains of case law that discuss exactly where they can find that material, if not just in the 9th and 10th Amendments.) And this approach is taken so that angry Right Wingers can then dismiss any jurisprudence they don’t like from the past 60 years. Which is their actual purpose.

The situation we now see is an unfortunate but inevitable one that angry Right Wingers have carefully spent decades molding. This goes all the way back to 1969, when Richard Nixon took office and replaced Earl Warren and Abe Fortas with Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun. Blackmun may have turned out to be a far more reasonable person than Right Wingers had hoped, but we must remember that both of the Minnesota Twins were solid Republican judges, which was the road that the Right Wing wanted to take the SC as soon as they could. When the Nixon years only gave them Rehnquist and Powell as reliable Right Wing votes, the Republicans regrouped with the “litmus test” of the Reagan years. And when this test turned out not to be rigorous enough to screen out even solid Republicans like O’Connor and independents like Souter, they simply outsourced the selection to extremist groups like The Federalist Society and Heritage Action. For the past 20 years, the Republicans have been loading up the courts whenever they could with extremist idealogues hand-picked by those groups to tip the entire judiciary far to the Right. They’ve also benefited from four separate presidential elections where Dems simply did not show up in the numbers that were required to win: 1968, 1988, 2004 and 2016. Each of those elections had dire consequences for the judiciary and the Supreme Court. 1968 could have resulted in William Brennan being named Chief Justice. 1988 could have allowed Thurgood Marshall to step down in honor and be replaced by a worthy successor rather than the slap in the face that happened with Clarence Thomas. 2004 could have seen Breyer or Ginsburg named Chief Justice and would have avoided the disaster of Alito. And 2016 was the most tragic of all, as we have seen. I also note that any time the Republicans did not have the majorities, they worked to gum up the process so that Dems had a monumental task getting judges through, and were almost totally blocked for much of the Clinton and Obama presidencies. It was for that reason – the constant obstruction – that Harry Reid was forced to adjust the rules to at least fill some lower court seats in 2013 and 2014. The GOP of course took full advantage of that and expanded that change to allow them to ram all their choices through without a single Dem vote, including for the SC.

I must note the sinister tone that Earhardt takes after she deliberately doxxes and endangers the state officials she clearly dislikes for their temerity in refusing to attack the women of their respective states. She “just asks” “wouldn’t that be illegal not to adhere to the laws that the Supreme Court passes?” Now, she’s stated it badly and Lee immediately corrects her on the semantics, but she’s obviously saying that everybody better obey what this new Far Right Supreme Court says or else. Interesting that she and Lee and the rest of the Right Wing didn’t have that approach over the past 60 years and in fact celebrated people like George Wallace for standing up for segregation in open defiance of the Supreme Court at that time. But that was when angry Right Wingers hadn’t packed the courts yet. Now that they’ve played their long con over the past several decades, they want to rub everyone else’s noses in the dirt.

I also find Lee’s snide and smug tone truly scary when he tries to celebrate the history of having nine Supreme Court justices and accuses everyone else of not respecting the Court or trying to remake it in Biden’s image. In reality, angry Right Wingers have spent several decades remaking the entire judiciary in their own image, and thanks to lower turnout in key elections, some added arm-twisting to get justices like Kennedy to resign on schedule and lucky timing in the retirements of Brennan and Marshall and the death of Ginsburg, they now have a 6-3 hammerlock of Far Right extremists on the highest court, with 5 of the 6 being so far to the Right, it’s difficult to see them from the centerline. I note that when angry Right Wingers in the Senate viciously refused to even have a hearing for Merrick Garland in 2016, they repeatedly opined in public about how the Supreme Court did not necessarily need to have nine justices. Lee was one of those voices, as was Ted Cruz. Cruz went so far as to say that he would refuse to confirm any Supreme Court appointments of a Democratic President going forward, and sneered that the Supreme Court could function just fine with only 8 or even 7 justices. They didn’t discover their love for the number 9 until Donald Trump squeaked through in 2016 and they were able to ram the most extreme ideologues on.

We must also challenge the false narrative that Earnhardt and Lee are promulgating about “violence” being “threatened”. That is a boldfaced LIE and it must be rebutted. In reality, we have had peaceful protests to what is about to happen to women’s rights – and the only problems to have erupt have been escalated arguments caused by angry Right Wingers trying to disrupt the protests. We should remember that public officials have long had to face members of the public both outside their homes and in public places, and so long as those interactions are peaceful, there is nothing wrong with them. If the protestors are on public property, their right to express their opinion peacefully is actually protected by a prior Supreme Court decision. (Let’s keep in mind that the current SC is likely to overturn that precedent along with all the others the Right Wing dislikes…) Let’s remember that the actual violence we have seen in the area of women’s rights has come from angry Right Wingers who have regularly tried to intimidate women trying to enter reproductive health clinics, who have regularly threatened the doctors and staff on those clinics, and who have repeatedly murdered doctors from those clinics. For Earnhardt and Lee to play games about this and pretend that peaceful protestors are the equivalent of the Randall Terrys of the world is despicable.

Let’s also take a real look at the vicious Alito opinion that was leaked at the top of this month, and who would have leaked it. Earnhardt and Lee want you to believe that this was somehow a “far left clerk” or a “left wing justice”. Which is nonsense for multiple reasons. First, there are no “far left” people at the Supreme Court these days. The last actual Left Wing justice we had was Thurgood Marshall. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a reliable liberal, but a close look at her rulings shows that she was never “Far Left” and she did not pretend to be. Similarly, Justice Sotomayor is not “Far Left” – she’s just a reliable liberal, and frankly not as liberal as Ginsburg. Kagan and Breyer and Jackson are centrists. Kagan is proud of her membership in The Federalist Society, which should be at least one indicator for all the angry Right Wingers who keep trying to spin her as something she is not. (I note that the Right Wing held her out of the judiciary for a decade by refusing to even hear her nomination during Clinton’s presidency, when she’d been named for a slot – the GOP ignored it and rammed a Far Right idealogue onto that bench in the early 2000s while Kagan went back to the private sector for over 10 years before President Obama named her to the SC.)

Let’s remember that NO clerk working at the Supreme Court would be involved in leaking any document under any circumstances, regardless of their political leanings. Because the clerks are sitting under a massive debt burden from law school and are frankly happy to be at the Supreme Court with the most plum position they could have gotten, and which will open doors for the rest of their careers. It’s also nearly impossible that any of the non-Right Wing justices would have tried to leak this. Breyer would never do anything like that, and Sotomayor and Kagan know both that they need Roberts to get anything done and that there is no point trying to reach to the 5 Far Far Right extremists. Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett have made their feelings clear on the issue of women’s reproductive rights, and it’s a mystery why any angry Right Winger suddenly thinks anyone would be confused about that.

Which takes us to who would have had a motivation to leak this opinion. If it really was the “evil liberals” that Lee and Earnhardt are trying to blame here, why would they leak an opinion that’more powerful coming out closer to November? If Alito’s draft is what we’re getting (and it looks like it is), then what do “evil liberals” gain by leaking it now and sapping any energy or momentum that would come from the reveal happening closer to Election Day? And if the final opinion is going to be less extreme than the truly mean-spirited language Alito inflicted in the draft, wouldn’t a leak of the more extreme early version wind up making the “evil liberals” look like they jumped the gun? On the other hand, what if angry Right Wingers at the Supreme Court or near it are concerned that Alito’s draft is being weakened in their view, or are concerned about whether they can keep their brethren in line? In that case, an early leak of the early draft would be a way to lock the justices in their positions and make sure the final opinion is as extreme as possible. It’s still not a clerk, and I would doubt any justice but Thomas would do this.

On the other hand, Ginni Thomas has an unfortunate track record of this kind of behavior, particularly in support of extreme positions. It would not be a surprise to find her fingerprints on the photocopy that was sent to Politico. I note that all the other sources who have talked to the press have been on the Far Right, and each has repeated the same information – that Alito has the 5 judge majority that allows him to write this opinion and it isn’t changing, and that Roberts preferred the more incremental approach of allowing the Mississippi restriction to stand without outright tossing Roe in the trash. (Granted, even that approach would effectively kill Roe if we’re being honest – but Alito’s approach is so openly vicious that one can sense his glee at finally getting rid of this precedent.)

Based on what we’re seeing here, we’re looking at a 5-3-1 decision, with the Dem Justices submitting an infuriated but impotent dissent, Roberts issuing a partial concurrence and partial dissent where he agrees with the majority on principle but disagrees with their approach, and with Alito and the 5 Far Far Right extremists happily dancing on the grave of not only Roe v Wade but multiple other precedents since stare decisis no longer holds. (Of course, angry Right Wingers will now demand that everyone hold to THIS decision under stare decisis, rather than acknowledge it as the result of their gaming the system as they did with the Heller decision.) We’re also looking at a fairly dire situation for women across the United States who do not have the means or option to travel to other states or countries to receive treatment. I note that multiple Red States are now openly inflicting laws that not only repeat the vigilante enforcement fun of Texas’ SB8, but are also making medication illegal as seen in Texas’ SB4. Meaning that women are going to have to find someone to bring them medication in violation of these state bans, and in many cases they will have no way of knowing whether the medication is legitimate. Which is how we get to a 21st century coat hanger, sadly.

Brian correctly notes that angry Right Wingers are about to inflict their minority will upon the majority of Americans, regardless of what the majority thinks or wants. I would respond that the Right Wing does not care what the majority thinks or wants. They’re committed to getting their way regardless of the majority. They played a long game over 50 years to get to this point, and now they have their majorities where they want them. So yes, they’re going to toss out every precedent they don’t like – whether it’s Roe, Obergefell, Loving, Brown v Board, whatever. To their thinking, that’s the way it should be.

For the rest of us, this is an extremely tragic moment in American history. And perhaps the most tragic thing about it is that it could have been avoided. As for what we can do moving forward, the most important thing is for people to learn the lessons of how this happened, so we don’t repeat the mistake again. We’ll have to see more Dems voting in state elections to try to change their state legislatures. Many Dems will need to move their residences to outwit the gerrymandering if they are to have their voices heard. Many Dems will need to do a lot more work to make sure they can vote in order to counter the voter suppression laws. And it will be difficult. But it isn’t impossible. And hopefully in another 20 years, we’ll be able to begin to fix the damage. Unfortunately, we’re going to see a lot more unpleasantness like the Dobbs decision between now and then.

O’Reilly continues to be the epitome of the angry Right Winger who assumes they can bully anyone they wish and get away with it.

If you listen to the audio at the 33-34 second mark just as he’s trying to read the employee’s name off their badge, you’ll clearly hear O’Reilly telling the JetBlue employee “You’re lucky I don’t put my fist through it!!” The employee responds “I dare you. I dare you to.” O’Reilly then begins lying and denying that he said what he just did, while the employee affirms that O’Reilly just threatened him with violence. Frustrated again, O’Reilly stomps away, muttering “You’re gonna lose your job. We’ll see you.”

Let’s not forget that this is the same Bill O’Reilly who dragged his wife down the stairs of their home by her hair in front of their kids because she caught him in the middle of phone sex. The same Bill O’Reilly who regularly screamed at and berated anyone he thought he could during his years at Fox News. The same Bill O’Reilly who was fired from Fox in disgrace after the public learned he had paid 32 million dollars to Lis Wiehl to settle her harassment suit against him – the one that detailed a “non-consensual sexual relationship”. O’Reilly has repeatedly tried to rewrite this history to say that he actually was the victim somehow and that he was persecuted for his political beliefs. He has never once admitted that it was his own thuggishness and viciousness that got him fired and banished. He has never once shown even an iota of grace to admit his own culpability.

In recent times, O’Reilly has clearly been sitting on even more unquenchable rage. He’s angry that the Pence White House was voted out of office (he repeatedly announced at the time that he felt that Pence’s childish spokesman should never concede). He’s angry that COVID was a real pandemic. He’s angry that Pence’s childish spokesman didn’t get that chance to “take his revenge as he should”. He’s angry that the world doesn’t work the way he wishes it would. And he’s angry that instead of sitting at his perch at Fox and feeling powerful there, he’s reduced to pontificating on his personal website. He continues to inflict truly unfortunate and poorly written attempts at history books with his “Killing” series, but I wouldn’t recommend any of that material to anyone looking for actual scholarship. Historians have had a field day discussing all the blatant errors in those inflictions. I can attest that his account of Hollywood history in “Killing The Mob” is mostly angry Right Wing fantasy.

O’Reilly had long nursed a dream of becoming a respected elder statesman of journalism and politics. Instead, he will conclude his life as the same petty bully he always was. But it is helpful that he continues to provide further examples of his pettiness and rage, just in case anyone forgot.

For what is probably the 7345th time, the tax code revision inflicted by the Pence White House and the angry GOP majorities in Congress in 2017 was NOT a “tax cut”. It was a Tax Transfer in the purest sense.

Tax rates were marginally lowered for lower income Americans, but at such a tiny percentage that most people would only have seen perhaps 5 to 10 bucks per week, if they saw anything after dealing with wildly increased health costs due to the Pence White House’s repeated assaults on the ACA. That 5-10 buck reduction was a ruse intended to allow the GOP to claim they’d “cut taxes for everyone” when in fact most people saw almost nothing.

At the same time, tax rates for anyone earning over $750K/year were significantly cut, with millionaires getting huge breaks on top of that. And the big corps got their book rate dropped by a whopping 2/5 of their prior obligation, going from a 35% book rate to a 21% book rate that meant most big corps now pay next to nothing. (Based on the angry Right Wing thinking that corps only raise prices if their tax burden is too heavy, one would think those corps would have radically lowered their prices accordingly. Of course, they did no such thing – and the corps walked away with massive windfalls for their execs and owners.)

And while the above was happening, the GOP made sure to throw in a targeted major tax INCREASE for Middle Class Employees, particularly those who live and work in Blue States. This was done through a combination of erasure of nearly all their annual deductions and an actual rate increase in two tax brackets. The combined impact has meant that Middle Class Employees who itemize their federal taxes have seen an increase of several thousand dollars over their annual burden from before the Tax Transfer was inflicted. Nearly every other employee I work with in my business (and this is a number in the thousands in my own case) saw their annual refund of say 3K/year as of 2017 switched to an annual BILL of say 4-5K/year as of 2018.

I want to make sure nobody misses the point here – the GOP deliberately RAISED TAXES in a spectacular way on Middle Class Employees with the Tax Transfer. The same people who formerly made a point of signing those Grover Norquist pledges to never ever ever raise taxes on anyone. Looks like they found a way to get around that pledge – unless of course they were fine to raise the taxes on this group of tens of millions of Americans. Angry Right Wingers like Kevin Brady of course “love what we did” in giving the wealthy and the corps a huge break while sticking Middle Class Employees with a huge increase. At the time the Transfer was inflicted, Brady and other GOP reps gloated about what they’d done to “raise taxes on the urbanites who voted for Hillary Clinton”.

To be very clear, this major increase was a deliberate slap at more liberal Americans who had appropriately asked for wealthy Americans to pay their fair share, as President Obama had discussed it several years prior. With this maneuver, Right Wingers were able to give the wealthy a big break while telling the Middle Class “No, YOU pay YOUR fair share, libtard!”

Brady’s comments about how great the economy was doing are non-sequitors. In fact, the Pence White House inherited a growing economy from President Obama, which of course led to regular taxpayers earning a little more and thus paying a little more overall before we factor in the Tax Transfer, which is where Right Wingers get the numbers to say they had record revenue years from regular taxpayers. And we must also look at that fourth year, 2020, where the economy was plunged into free fall thanks to the utter incompetence of the Pence White House in answering the COVID pandemic. Brady and Cavuto are hoping you’ll forget about that part of the story.

We are also aware that the loss of tax revenue from the ultra-millionaires and billionaires as well as the loss of tax revenue from the corporations actually led to massive intentionally increased deficits. Those deficits were intended to push the GOP narrative that “entitlements need to be cut”, which would set us up for the moves the GOP intended to take had they retained the Congress in 2019.

The “even further” maneuvers that Brady is referencing are the moves to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which the GOP has never given up on pushing. While it’s doubtful that most angry Right Wingers think they can go as far as Rick Scott’s sneaky plan to just “sunset” SS and Medicare in a few years without anyone presumably noticing, they do think they can follow the Heritage Foundation recipe for gutting the programs. Per the HF, the plan is to reduce SS to about 1K/month as a flat amount, and to means test who receives it so that it effectively just becomes a bit of welfare for the indigent elderly who have no savings. For Medicare, the HF plan is the old “voucher” idea, which would again basically end that program. The GOP isn’t stupid enough to inflict those changes on the already retired population, so they’ll make them applicable only to those people not already receiving benefits – ie everyone under about 62 years old.
A taxpayer in their 50s would likely be told to just try to save more money in the next decade or perhaps keep working a few years longer. The Right Wing is well aware that this will infuriate most taxpayers who have paid into these programs for decades – their thinking is that they can spin it as a proof that “government doesn’t work” and set themselves up to completely eliminate the programs a few more years down the road.

Anyone thinking that the midterms this year and frankly every election going forward is not a crucial moment for the country is simply not paying attention. Angry Right Wingers like Brady are saying the quiet part out loud.

David Mamet has long had a history of misogynistic material in his writing, going all the way back to “Sexual Perversity in Chicago”, through “Speed the Plow” and “Oleanna” to the present day. He has also occasionally written and directed more interesting pieces, such as the films “House of Games” and my favorite, “Things Change”. It’s the Mamet film “State & Main” where Alec Baldwin’s character spectacularly crashes a car and emerges from the wreckage announcing “So THAT happened…”

He’s long been known as a “man’s man” kind of writer, and the dialogue in his plays tends to feature strutting characters who deliver carloads of profanity while they express their inner rage. And he’s known for his rhythm of clipped speech in a kind of poetic meter of pauses and stammers.

Politically, he’s been tipped to the Right for the entire time I’ve known of him, going back to the 80s, to be honest. “Speed the Plow” and “Oleanna” are both choice examples of his political thinking getting overtly into his plays.

In the latter 2000s, he openly turned to the GOP, and in the latter 2010s, he fully embraced the viciousness of the Pence White House and its childish former spokesman. This transition has sadly been seen in multiple public figures, ranging from actors Ron Silver and Adam Baldwin, comedian Dennis Miller and many others, where they went from being fairly reasonable people to jumping completely off the deep end. And with the advent of the Pence White House and its open bigotry, many previously quiet Right Wingers felt more than emboldened to practice their anger and hatred in public. (This is why I’ve never bought the canard about the “shy” Trump voter – these guys are anything but shy about how they want to bully everyone else.)

Mamet’s latest unfortunate comments are just repeating the drivel of the current angry Right Wing propaganda. So of course he’s repeating the Qanon pedophile nonsense, and he’s repeating lies about the “stolen election” rather than admitting that Donald Trump is a loser. It’s frankly depressing to see him making vicious comments like these, but it’s not unexpected.

Severino has no credibility and she’s blatantly lying here. The record of the SC appointees she mentions is quite clear. (And let’s all remember that the angry Right Wing corruption of “originalism” is an unfortunate misapplication of a way to understand context in legislation. Right Wingers led by Robert Bork turned that into an edict that the Constitution is fixed in concrete and can only be read in terms of where it was when the articles and amendments were first written – and that’s a nonsensical approach.)

Clarence Thomas was and is an unsuitable candidate to be named to any federal bench, let alone the SC. He was hand-picked as a slap in the face to Thurgood Marshall and to everyone who appreciated the perspective Marshall brought to the high court. His bias and extreme partisanship has never waned one iota in the 30+ years he has inflicted opinions at the SC. In addition to his vicious partisanship, he has demonstrated the qualities of a truly despicable man, just as was indicated by Anita Hill as well as multiple other women who were not permitted to testify. And he’s currently mired in a conflict of interest that in any reasonable society would require him to step down in disgrace and potentially face criminal prosecution.

Samuel Alito was and is an unsuitable candidate for any federal bench, let alone the SC. He was nominated as a Far Far Right replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor, to tip the SC even more solidly to the Right than it had already been up to that point. He’s also an open racist, having enthusiastically joined and supported the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. (The only way angry Right Wingers could dodge this fact at his hearing was to have his wife burst into tears and stomp out of the room in a tantrum when it was brought up.) His bias and extreme partisanship has never waned one iota in the 16 years he has inflicted opinions at the SC.

Neil Gorsuch was and is an unsuitable candidate for any federal bench, let alone the SC. He was rammed into a seat stolen by angry Right Wingers from Merrick Garland, specifically with the intent of making sure this seat was not filled by President Obama or by anyone remotely less Far Right Wing than Scalia. When Trump unexpectedly squeaked through the 2016 Election, angry Right Wingers got a double victory – they got to sneer in the face of everyone else, and they were able to change Senate rules and ram through an extreme partisan idealogue even farther to the Far Right than Scalia.

Brett Kavanaugh was and is an unsuitable candidate for any federal bench, let alone the SC. His consistent basis has been that of a privileged wealthy Right Winger, going back to his days in prep school, where he and his buddies were known for heavy drinking and for openly inappropriate conduct with women. His record as a partisan has been openly craven, and his financial matters have been more than shady. And all of this was discussed at both of his confirmations, where he was effectively rammed through by angry Right Wingers to make sure he got his judicial rewards. He committed perjury in both of his confirmations, but the standard of proof for a criminal case is so high that he was able to get away with it. And he got away with openly vicious outbursts in his SC hearing (just as Lindsey Graham did), rather than being compelled to retreat in disgrace.

Amy Coney Barrett was and is an unsuitable candidate for any federal bench, let alone the SC. She frankly should have stayed at Notre Dame, where she could have opined against reproductive freedom all the livelong day without endangering women’s lives as the upcoming Dobbs ruling is certain to do. Her appointment and ramming onto the SC were a deliberate slap in the face to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all who supported her.

All five of the judges discussed above should have been rejected, but were instead given lifetime berths to follow the Far Right’s long game of destroying and erasing the precedents in civil rights and workers’ rights that were established under the Warren Court and some moments of the Burger Court. Severino is paid to shill for a Far Right advocacy group that is bent on that destruction and erasure.

Justice Jackson will be confirmed by the end of next week, unless something truly strange happens. She already has Collins’ vote and likely more GOP votes. And this was never in doubt.

GOP Senators simply wanted revenge for the temerity Dems showed during the Pence White House SC rams. And they were delighted to smear Jackson for the obvious reasons – as yet another example of their clear feelings about non-male and non-Caucasian nominees. It’s clear they were trying to bait her into getting angry, as Kavanaugh had. And they failed at that, so they went with the notion of just smearing her.

Just in case anyone doesn’t know the history, neither Brett Kavanaugh nor Robert Bork were saints. Both men had extremely serious issues that meant they would be inappropriate to be named to any court, let alone the Supreme Court.

In the case of Bork, the exposure of his unfortunate writings and statements was not what doomed him. Nor was his infamous history of having fired the special counsel at Richard Nixon’s demand. What doomed Bork was Bork himself, who openly stated his extremist positions at his hearing, and alienated so many people that Republicans voted against him and he went down to a spectacular, humiliating defeat.

As for Kavanaugh, he has a history as an extreme partisan and idealogue, and much of that had already come back to haunt him when the GOP was ramming him into his SC seat just before the 2018 midterms. He had a history of nasty behavior while working with Ken Starr and in the W/Cheney White House. He had committed perjury during his earlier confirmation hearing for his first court appointment, but proving perjury is far more complex than the Judiciary Committee would handle, and the GOP members were intent on ramming, not listening.

When Kavanaugh’s attack on Christine Blasey-Ford went public and more women appeared with similar stories about Kavanaugh, it was more than appropriate for the Committee to examine it. After all, the Right Wing has spent decades telling us that character counts and touting their good Christian values. (And there are multiple witnesses who have discussed that Georgetown Prep, where Kavanaugh, Mark Judge attended, was known for the unrestrained behavior of the rich students at their various extracurricular parties.) But instead of taking this seriously, angry Right Wingers suddenly tried to attack the female victims and accuse the Dems of somehow being mean to Kavanaugh, completely turning the actual situation upside down. Kavanaugh had a few uncomfortable minutes in the hearing room and erupted in snide remarks at the Senators and a scary, unhinged meltdown where he accused the Clintons of orchestrating his misdeeds.

But at no point was Kavanaugh’s confirmation in doubt. He knew he was going to be rammed through, and he was. The result of the hearings? Kavanaugh got his lifetime brass ring at the nation’s highest court and continues his life of luxury while he and his fellow Far Right SC members work to erase the precedents of the Warren and Burger courts. And Professor Ford? She and her family spent months enduring death threats and harassment and were forced to move twice as she was repeatedly doxxed. Even today, she is harassed by angry Right Wingers, and all for having the temerity to stand up. Which only goes to show why so many victims of harassment and sexual assault are reluctant to come forward.

Little Tuckerr Carlson is upset at Greta Thunberg? And he’s making more childish comments?

It’s truly a shame that angrr Right Wingers seem to think they can behave like this and profit from it.

A few things to note here.

First, Ellen is absolutely right to note that Turley is playing the usual “serious thinker” ruse to support the latest angry Right Wing propaganda. As we noted when Stephen Hayes and Chris Wallace fled Fox News for actual journalism outlets, there’s a long history over the past 25+ years of paid “analysts” on Fox doing their part to support the Line of the Day. The line is usually heard from the first Fox News AM host, as well as from the earliest morning AM right wing shock jocks (Glenn Beck keeps trying to be “the guy” for this) as to how to spin whatever is happening in the world. One day the Line may be about how great Ronald Reagan was at (fill in the blank). Many other days the Line will be about how great the Pence White House supposedly was for America, even if its childish former spokesman kept distracting everyone with his mean tweets. (The reality – that the Pence White House was an unmitigated disaster and the childish spokesman’s mean tweets were openly encouraged and enjoyed by Angry Right Wingers throughout – somehow always goes unspoken) Throughout the 2 terms of the Obama White House, the Line was often about how whatever President Obama said or did that day was a failure or criminal or both. These days, that approach has been modified to say that whatever President Biden said or did that day reflects that he is supposedly senile, criminal, or a failure – or all three at once. So one supposes that Fox News is getting more nuanced in its smears. The purpose, then, of a “serious thinker” like Turley is to put a veneer of sage respectability on the smears. So he’ll offer a column and a few talking head appearances on angry Right Wing outlets and cite a couple of cherry-picked stats and then take a solemn “ethical high ground” tone to tut-tut about whatever feigned outrage the Right wants its base to be riled up about.

In the case of the almost certain upcoming confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in the Breyer seat, the reality does not give angry Right Wingers much in the way of red meat – apart from her ethnicity and gender. Jackson’s record as a judge and previously as a public defender is one of moderation – she’s recommended some common sense reforms to criminal sentencing, and her approach has been to work with both Dems and Republicans to accomplish that. As a result, she’s supported by the usual Dems for a Dem nominee but also by GOP stalwarts like the Fraternal Order of Police. She appears to be very much in the mode of Breyer, who was known as a moderate who reached across the aisle to achieve consensus whenever he could. (And let’s not forget that she clerked for Breyer) Angry Right Wingers have attempted to paint Breyer as “Far Left” but that’s actually far from the truth. Breyer was and is enough of a centrist that Orrin Hatch and Strom Thurmond openly supported him when his nomination to the SC was announced by President Clinton in 1994. But times have changed since 1994, so a moderate centrist like Breyer or Jackson is somehow now to be seen as “Far Left” while Far Right idealogues like Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are supposedly mainstream. We must keep in mind that replacing Breyer with Jackson will not make any change in the makeup of the Court – in terms of the political leanings of individual jurists (she’s close to Breyer in her thinking) or in terms of the balance of the Court (it remains firmly packed to the Far Far Right, with 3 moderate Dems, 1 Hard Right Chief Justice in the Rehnquist mode and 5 Very Far Right extremists in a solid majority). The court rulings will not change a whit with the introduction of Judge Jackson; we’ll see the usual 6-3 or 5-4 rulings to the Far Right, only with one of the dissenters having the name Jackson rather than Breyer. And the real change we’ve seen with the new 5 Far Far Right majority will continue apace – that there will likely be very little consensus as this majority sees no need to entertain the ideas of anyone not on the Far Right. Offbeat rulings like today, where Gorsuch suddenly joined with Sotomayor for his own reasons are now isolated exceptions.

Regarding Biden’s laudable step to finally name the first African-American female to the High Court, it actually was necessary to do it, particularly after the openly hateful record of the Pence White House in its packing of the judiciary over the prior four years. In over 200 judicial appointments to federal benches, the Pence White House, outsourcing the selections to extremist advocates at Heritage Action and the Federalist Society, included a grand total of 8 African American, 8 Chicano, and 13 Asian-American, with not even a single African American nominated for an appellate court. This means a staggering tilt of 85% white judicial appointees overall, to go with an equally staggering tilt of 75% male judicial appointees by Mike Pence. Appointing an African-American female is frankly the least the Biden White House could do. (And this was only part of Mike Pence’s pushback on any sense of living in the 21st century – the appointments made for all staff, cabinet and intern positions were staggeringly tilted to White Males.)

Regarding Turley’s attempt to find a “serious thinker” justification to dismiss Judge Jackson, his comments are nonsensical on their face. If Turley wants to discuss an “extremely limited written record”, then he must have had the identical objection to Amy Coney Barrett when she was being frantically rammed onto the High Court. And he must have also objected to David Souter, who actually did have a sparse written record when he was appointed by George Bush – and that sparsity was weaponized by Right Wingers at that time. (The Right had hoped to sneak Souter in as a stealth nominee who would emerge as a Hard Right riposte to William Brennan. When liberal groups objected to Souter and noted the game the Right was playing, they received condescending lectures about how they were supposedly prejudging Souter without evidence. Of course, Souter actually turned out to be an Independent, which pushed the Right to pre-screen their subsequent judicial picks at a much more exhaustive level.)

Turley tries to imply that Judge Jackson is constantly being chastised and overturned. That’s also false. In fact, she has about a 2% reversal rate, which is far below a number that would cause actual concern. (And in fact both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had very real issues in this area, which did not bother Turley.)

And let’s not allow Turley to get away with that below-the-belt shot about how a living Constitution approach is just something favored by “some on the left.” That’s a flat-out False Premise. Full Stop. The notion of the Constitution being a living, breathing document is as mainstream as the notion of separation of powers. It’s a fundamental truth about our country that has been taught in basic Social Studies classes to elementary school kids for over a century. The only people who don’t hold to that idea are the angry Right Wingers who turned to the Borkified idea of “originalism” as a way to argue for the illegitimacy of all Supreme Court decisions they personally dislike. In their view, the Constitution is frozen until someone has a Convention of the States to make an amendment, and no interpretation is allowed unless the Framers explicitly discussed that point of view. This is a pernicious aspect of the approach of “serious thinkers” like Turley. They want you to think that their Far Right opinion about Constitutional Law is the only way to see the Constitution – rather than what it really is – a Far Right opinion.

When we get to the actual core of the objections of angry Right Wingers here, it’s plain to see. It is not about any faux “concern” about giving everyone a chance. It’s about staying with an angry vision of “America – the way it oughtta be!!!” as unrepentant bigot Rush Limbaugh would say. A world where White Men get to lay down the law, White Women stay in the kitchen, and where everyone else better keep their heads down if they know what’s good for them. Judge Jackson’s transgression against the Right Wing is that she had the temerity to excel in the law while being African American and female. One supposes that the angry Right Wingers’ attempts to cloak their bigotry as “concern” actually shows the culture to perhaps be a little healthier now than during the miserable epoch of the Pence White House. If these guys were able to practice their hateful bigotry openly, as they did for much of 2017-21, there would be no need for Turley to help them play these games.

It’s frankly tiring to repeatedly have to address these debunked lies, but we must continue to do so.

Judge Jackson is not “Far Left” by any sane metric. She’s a former public defender whose actual published opinions show her to be a centrist moderate, in a similar vein to both Breyer and Kagan. We should remember that despite what angry Right Wingers desperately want everyone to think, we really don’t have anyone on the Supreme Court who could be described as “Far Left”, let alone just Left. Breyer is actually a centrist known for agreeing with Right Wingers on matters of criminal justice and other areas. It’s notable that the current roster of Far Right Wingers on the SC are so extreme that even Breyer can’t reach them much of the time. But then, that’s what Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett were appointed to do.

The GOP talking points about Judge Jackson leave out crucial information. Yes, Jackson ruled against the Pence White House and Pence’s childish former spokesman – not because the policies were “conservative” but because they were unconstitutional, barbaric, vicious and at times openly criminal. Yes, Judge Jackson worked with President Obama, including major work at the US Sentencing Commission. That’s not a bad thing at all. I find it interesting that angry Right Wingers paint that as disqualifying, when they cheerled for Kavanaugh and Barrett, both open GOP partisans who worked to shut down Dem voters’ rights in Florida in 2000, with Kavanaugh having earlier worked on the Ken Starr team where he gleefully scripted the most lascivious and embarrassing interrogatories he could throw at President Clinton. Gorsuch is a lifelong partisan idealogue who thought it clever to found a “Fascism Forever” club in school. And yet somehow Judge Jackson working for common sense guidelines for criminal punishments is unacceptable?

The reality here is that Jackson will be a moderate voice, and it will make not a whit of difference on a court dominated by 5 extremist Right Wingers and 1 Hard Right Chief Justice.