We should be outraged by a lot at the moment. Beside the obvious–Ukraine, CDC COVID flip-flops, January 6 and everyone associated with it, lack of any movement on climate change–there are many outrageous things that have been overshadowed by this list. But, now, with the news of that Supreme Court preview ruling on abortion, let’s start with that “leak.”
Hopefully it will turn out to be a liberal staffer, seeing that document as it passed through his/her hands and, outraged by the idea of Roe v. Wade going away, deciding to sacrifice him/herself by alerting the public. While that would be a troubling scenario, it would be a one-off and that person will loose his/her job and head off to become a contemporary Monica Lewinsky.
More troubling is the coincidence of this release with the beginning of the primaries leading to the 2022 mid-terms. Could it be that this was a Democratic Party operation to get the women of the country riled up and motivated to vote against Republicans? Possibly someone feared that justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett might actually do what they promised during their confirmations and not vote to do away with Roe. So they’d better get this out while it was still valuable, before the actual ruling in June or July. That would be outrageous! Hey, it’s a theory and anything is possible in Byzantium on the Potomac.
Another speculation I’ve heard, though less likely, is that it was a Republican operation designed to force those justices, if they had any thoughts of living up to their word, to play to the minority mob’s whims and actually go through with gutting Roe. Frankly, I’m hoping for the Monica Lewinsky version, as I would really be outraged to see the Supreme Court being manipulated by either party for political ends.
But this sudden focus on the court reminds us that in an almost equally divided country, it would be best to have an equally divided high court, with a reasonable person, someone like John Roberts, being the deciding vote. Solomon offered to cut the baby in half, so there is certainly biblical precedent for that kind of equilibrium.
And that’s what we’d have save for the outrageously hypocritical Mitch McConnell. He of the whining and bleating over this leak, demanding that the Department of Justice investigate it while, with the other hand, doing all he can to obstruct the work of the House committee investigating a much more dangerous happening, the attempted coup.
Wasn’t it old hypocrite McConnell who orchestrated keeping Merrick Garland off the high bench, saying it should wait nearly a year until after the next presidential election? Then, four years later, he turned around and rushed Amy Barrett through with just days to go until Trump was defeated? Talk about outrageous!
As the institutions on which our democracy has so long rested sink under the waves one-by-one, I was hoping that the courts, the same courts that saved us from the bogus attempt to overthrow the post-election Big Lie, would be our salvation. That the rule of law and the integrity of those up and down the federal judiciary would be a bulwark against the cultish irrationality of the mob that has destroyed so much of the structure of America over such a short span of time.
But now we have that outrageous mask mandate decision by a Trump-appointed judge who, by all accounts, was totally unfit for the position. And, thanks to Mitch, there are people like that embedded throughout the system, part of the not so subtle efforts of this New GOP to infiltrate every level of government with their crazies–from dog catchers, to local school and election boards, to state legislatures.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out–who the perpetrator of this leak ends up being. But, it’s not really about abortion, is it? It’s about the beginning of the crumbling of our last hope. Outrageous!
©2022 David B Bucher
SoEast 