Looming generational threat from Trump's Supreme Court pick

Those of us who do not want to see an interventionist Supreme Court with a locked in majority of Far Right Federalist Society justices who are completely at odds with the public policy views of most Americans are in a very tough situation with the impending appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, who fits this mold in spades. I fear that the only viable solution, assuming eventual return of progressive political forces to power, is to eventually increase the number of justices, but that, unfortunately, is also a steep political climb, opposed by even most Democrats. But we can't just accept defeat. Appointments of relatively young people to the Supreme Court can change the face of American public policy for DECADES, and this latest pick clearly and unambiguously, on every issue, runs counter to the collective will of the American people, as demonstrated from repeated and consistent polling.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Call 202-224-3121. Ask for Susan Collins' office, or Lisa Murkowski's, or your own senators', or any senator's. Every public statement is better than silence.

• Tell them Brett Kavanaugh has STATED and DOCUMENTED views which are not legal but political, judicial interventionist doctrines, and which run contrary to the wishes of a significant majority of Americans. Among them: Wants to rescind Americans' reproductive rights, specifically to overturn Roe v. Wade.
• Wants to disable the right to health care which passed Congress and which even this Congress could not repeal, through judicial fiat
• Wants to disable protections for our environment
• Wants to cripple workers' organizing rights and workplace safety, again through judicial fiat
• Wants to use judicial intervention to cripple sensible financial regulation, which could prevent another financial crisis (has called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional, thus rendering him ineligible to rule on cases involving it, but there's every indication he would anyway)
• Is on record saying that criminal prosecution, and even INVESTIGATION, of a sitting president, should be prevented, a clear conflict of interest, having been appointed by a president who is facing encroaching legal threat
• Will almost certainly vote to uphold gerrymandering and voter suppression
• Is hostile to LGBTQ equality
• Is hostile to due process for Asylum seekers (a treaty obligation of the United States, but no matter to them)

WE MUST DO EVERYTHING WE CAN TO GET TO 51 votes AGAINST BRETT KAVANAUGH for the Supreme Court.

Brett Kavanaugh is the exactly SECOND Supreme Court nominee in US history, of a president not elected by the majority of the popular vote, proposed for approval by a Senate not elected by a majority of the national voting electorate. (The first was Trump's FIRST pick, Gorsuch, who took a seat stolen by the Republicans in the Senate in a brazen act of destruction of the unwritten rules that have preserved some degree of balance over much of the 20th and 21st centuries). We have no sense at all in America of the virtue of coalitions. When a president barely wins, ESPECIALLY when he takes office without a popular vote mandate, he has a MORAL duty to cooperate with the opposition, but in recent years, it's been SCORCHED EARTH on their side, and Obama, who tried to be accommodating, was just burned. To my mind, this affords at least a good deal of justification for extraordinary activism to try to defeat their judicial picks. A great deal is at stake, and we have every right, indeed every obligation, to FIGHT BACK.
Thank you.

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