Republicans Implacably Determined to Implant a Second Sex Offender on the Supreme Court

We now have credible assertions that Brett Kavanaugh was involved in drugging and gang-raping young women. This is the fourth claim of sexual "misconduct" ("the" media's preferred euphemism for his crimes) against Kavanaugh.

When (or if) he joins Clarence Thomas on the high court, there will be two known sex offenders in effect making laws. Both Thomas and Kavanaugh are extreme misogynists who are champing at the bit to repeal what is left of the weak "right" that women have to terminate their pregnancies instead of being treated as chattel and forced to bear children against their will.

The GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) from their chief, Donald J. Trump, himself a known serial sex offender and adulterer, on down, have responded by attacking the accusers, calling their painful recollections "smears" (a word Trump used and was echoed by Senate boss, the loathsome Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) and avowing that they refuse to "ruin" Kavanaugh's "life" by NOT implanting him on the Supreme Court! (This from reactionary dog, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, on one of the Sunday morning bourgeois political propaganda TV shows September 23.)

So far, we've had Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who Kavanaugh and his crony Mark Judge tried to rape when she was only 15. This is documented by therapist's notes from 2012. We have a letter from an attorney to Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Committee, about complaints from Federal employees against Kavanaugh, which Feinstein suppressed, as she suppressed Dr. Ford's information, refusing even to brief other Democratic Senators when they asked for the information.

Then there was a woman who described Kavanaugh's drunken assaults at Yale University, which included him thrusting his exposed genitals in her face.

Now we have a sworn affidavit from Julie Swetnick, who has a security clearance which she would


lose if she committed perjury by making a false claim. She relates Kavanaugh's involvement in drugging and gang-raping women.

The Republicans' response with each new expose of Kavanaugh has been shriller and more vicious attacks on the accusers, smearing them as politically motivated liars. (Part of their smearing is accusing the victims of "smearing" Kavanaugh, inverting reality.)

Much of "the" media, and not just Murdoch's Minions at Fox "News," are slanting their "coverage" in a sexist, misogynist direction. I will have more on this later.

So the United States under Trump is forcefully erasing what social progress there has been in recent years. Meanwhile, Facebook, Twitter, youtube, and Spotify, in the name of cracking down on "divisiveness," are banning and censoring progressive voices (as well as Alex Jones, the only one banned that "the" media mention). But the divisions are not creations of critics. They are real and fundamental aspects of U.S. society. It is the aggressive attacks on human rights by the reactionary power structure that causes divisions in the U.S., NOT Russian trolls or botnets- contrary to Democratic Party, corporate media, and secret police absurd assertions. Recall that Obama's "Director of National Intelligence," James "Pinocchio" Clapper, commissioned a custom "intelligence report" attacking the likes of RT and Abby Martin for "creating division" in America! What demented, demonic scapegoating by a pathological system!

Your next Supreme Court Justice: Unconvicted Felon Brett Kavanaugh

Right Wing Terrorist Network Swings Into Action Against Kavanaugh Sexual Assault Victim

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who was nearly raped by Trump Supreme Court nominee and Republican apparatchik Brett Kavanaugh, has been terrorized into leaving her home with her family by death threats and hate mail. Her email was hacked, and she was impersonated online by malign attackers.

As usual, much of "the" media, the U.S. power establishment propaganda organizations, have the backs of the terrorists by not reporting on their terrorist actions. This makes them accessories and accomplices. While the death threats have been reported in print media, the radio news I monitor, including NPR and CBS, have not reported them.

That same media are also accomplices to all the fascist terrorist regimes the U.S. has ever supported by the same means, refusing to report the news. Every "friendly" dictator and dictatorship gets puff-piece treatment from the U.S. media. A current outstanding example of this is Saudi Arabia and its ruling despots, "King" Salman and his vicious son, "Crown Prince" Mohammad bin Salman, architect of the destruction of Yemen, shakedown artist, and repressor of any and all would-be reformers of the medieval Saudi social order.

And what about the police? Why don't they ever hunt down and prosecute rightwing terrorists and harassers? Harassment and death threats are illegal activities. I thought they were "law enforcers." I guess it depends.

Ford is a Congressional witness. Why isn't the FBI tracking those threatening a Congressional witness and arresting them and presenting cases to the U.S. attorneys?

Well, the questions may seem naive, but actually they are rhetorical. To make obvious what should be obvious but is never thought in America. To think the obvious is to immediately and implicitly challenge this repressive system that uses right wing terrorists as auxiliaries to the power structure.

Don't hear any DEMOCRATS demanding the terrorists be hunted down and prosecuted, do you? See, it's the power structure itself enabling rightwing terrorism.

As the U.S. does all over the globe.

Meanwhile, the serial sexual criminal who picked Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court Justice and reactionary hitman to put the final nail in the coffin of the right to terminate a pregnancy, Donald Trump, who boasts of grabbing women's private parts and forcibly kissing them, made a big public display of how awful the treatment KAVANAUGH is getting is! He feels SO BAD that such a GOOD MAN is enduring this ORDEAL!

Being disgusting is par for the course (if I may use golf terminology) for the Groper-In-Chief.

And while "the" media has repeatedly mentioned that 65 women who knew Kavanaugh signed a letter avowing that he's the perfect gentleman, (leaving about 4 billion females on planet earth who have yet to confirm he never tried to rape them), I only found out by accident that 599 women have signed a letter in support of Dr. Ford. It wasn't on broadcast media. But that's only about ten times as many women supporting Dr. Ford as piped up to aid Kavanaugh. Not newsworthy, I suppose. [1]

1]  "599 alumnae from Christine Blasey Ford’s high school sign letter saying they support her," Vox, September 18, 2018.

Brett Kavanaugh, GOP Mob Member, Prepares to Commit Third Round of Perjury

Bush regime apparatchik Brett Kavanaugh, whom Bush planted on a Federal Appeals Court as a judge, where he has tried his best to violate the rights of workers and citizens generally and illegally tried to block at least one woman from obtaining an abortion, perjured himself during his Senate confirmation hearings for that lifetime judicial appointment.

Last week, during his confirmation hearings for his appointment to the highest lifetime position in the U.S., Supreme Court Justice, he committed perjury again.

 Come Monday, September 24, he's going to commit perjury for at least the third time and deny deny deny that he attempted to rape Christine Blasey Ford when she was only 15.

He's already told an unsworn naked lie, claiming he wasn't at "the party" where he and his accomplice, neofascist hack Mark Judge, got extremely drunk and assaulted Ford. Problem with that is, no one has said exactly what party it was, where it was, and exactly when.

Actually that's his second lie on the matter of his rape attempt. He's already vociferously denied he did it. Which just isn't plausible. And given his record as a Bush regime apparatchik involved in deception and trickery, and his previous perjury, isn't credible.

His victim, now a 51-year-old psychology professor, has released her therapist's notes from 2012 to the Washington Post which documents her discussions with the therapist about the event. She has also taken and passed a polygraph test, for what's that worth. [1]

Also she has proven to be very reluctant to come forward, which does not sound like someone who is setting out to sabotage Kavanaugh's nomination,.

Kavanaugh's accomplice in the assault, Judge, at first claimed to have no memory of the event. Given how drunk he apparently was, that could well be. He has since changed his story to denying the assault. His "memoir," more a roman a clef about his drunken, degenerate youth, quite obviously includes his friend and crony Brett Kavanaugh, who appears in the book as a character named "Bart O’Kavanaugh."

Gee, I wonder who that could be!

The Republican Senators are planning to resolve the matter NOT by hearing from additional witnesses, NOT by conducting an investigation, NOT by asking the FBI to investigate, but by having Kavanaugh and Ford testify to the Judiciary Committee and that's it. Then they can pretend to believe Kavanaugh, or throw up their hands and say there's no way to determine the truth- and proceed to have the whole Senate vote on Kavanaugh's nomination,

Kavanaugh's previous perjuries included lying about knowing obviously stolen documents he received- documents the sender made clear were stolen- were stolen; lying about his views on abortion; misrepresenting his judicial record; lying about his activities in the Bush White House, including his involvement in the conspiracy to commit torture and to create war hysteria against Iraq based on a mountain of lies; and denying that his superior on the Appeals Court, Alex Kosinski, shares salacious material with him. (He pulled the "not that I recall" trick for that one.)

Kavanaugh is an oppressive reactionary whose elevation to the top court, if it happens, will once again have been done with Democratic Party complicity, in this case by Senator Dianne Feinstein, as I explained in a previous essay on this matter. The Supreme Court has functioned as a primary instrument of repression and corporate hegemony over U.S. society that permits the rest of the establishment to shrug and feign helplessness. There is a shabby pretense of neutrality, "legality," impartiality about the political decisions handed down by the court. There is nothing inevitable about those decisions. Rather, the reactionary Justices concoct rationales and esoteric legalisms to justify these political decisions.

You would have thought that after five GOP apparatchiks on the high court blatantly stole the 2000 election for Bush the Younger, the court would be completely discredited. But both the putative "opposition" party, the Democrats, and the corporate propaganda system, aka "the" media, pretend it was a legitimate decision. It is political theater designed to dupe the populace into seeing the power structure as legitimate and fair, not corrupt, venal, and having no right to their misrule over us.

1]  Polygraph's are claimed to detect lies, but they are still unproven after decades of use and considered so unreliable that U.S. courts mostly do not allow their introduction as evidence. And U.S. courts have really really low standards for what is acceptable "forensic science." For example, claims by pseudo-experts that they could match a bite wound on a person to another person's teeth have been allowed and used to convict people. Common sense along is enough to prove that is ridiculous.)

There They Go Again: Dominant Democratic Politician Connived To Put another Reactionary On U.S. Supreme Court, Failed Rapist Brett Kavanaugh, and Joe Biden, Blackmail Victim??

The Democratic Party is truly hopeless. When it comes to protecting human rights, or even just what paltry protections for average people exist on paper in U.S. law, or "standing up for" its proclaimed "values," or "fighting for" people it claims to represent, the Democratic Party has proven once again to be a political death trap for anyone relying on them for these things.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, did her utmost to keep secret a letter from a college professor that stated that Trump's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, attempted to rape her while both were high school students. Feinstein is the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which just concluded high-speed "confirmation hearings" led by the Republican chairman, Charles Grassley, a fossilized reactionary from Iowa. [1]

The woman, Christine Blasey Ford, now 51 and a psychology professor, described how Kavanaugh and a chum, who were 17 at the time, attempted to rape her when she was just 15. Both men were very drunk, and Kavanaugh threw her down and lay on top of her, stifling her screams with his hand and tearing at her clothes while his accomplice turned up music in the room very loud as cover. When the accomplice jumped on top of the two, they tumbled over and she managed to flee. In 2012 she confided in a therapist, who notes corroborating the woman's account were obtained by The Washington Post newspaper. The victim also just passed a polygraph test of her veracity.

Kavanaugh, predictably, denies it. However Kavanaugh’s classmate, a neofascist hack named Mark Judge, said of the attempted rape, “I have no recollection of that.” That's not a denial! Furthermore, he wrote a memoir that provides some indirect evidence for the victim's claim, "Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk." The title gives an accurate sense of the contents. [2]
 
Feinstein refused to let her Democratic colleagues on the Judiciary Committee see the letter from Ford, and stonewalled questions from other Democratic Senators and staffers about the letter from Kavanaugh's victim.  Her staff brushed them off by saying it was too long ago to matter and that Feinstein had “taken care of it.” [Yeah, the way Joseph Biden "took care of" Anita Hill's revelations about Clarence Thomas in 1991.] The New Yorker magazine quotes "Congressional sources" saying  “We couldn’t understand what their [Feinstein and her staff] rationale is for not briefing members on this. This is all very weird;” and “She’s had the letter since late July. And we all just found out about it.” [3]

After being exposed in the media, Feinstein passed the letter (and the buck) to the FBI for "investigation." The FBI announced that it put the letter in Kavanaugh's file, and that's it. Feinstein announced her passing of the hot potato to the FBI with this internally contradictory statement: “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.” Which of course isn't honoring the victim's request for confidentiality, as telling the FBI exposes her identity and the FBI passed it along to the Trump White House for good measure.

By first deep-sixing and then being forced to reveal the victim's letter, Feinstein reaped the worst of both worlds. She is exposed as trying to cover it up, and attacked for the timing of a "last minute attack." White House spokesperson Kerri Kupec quickly took advantage, stating  “Not until the eve of his [Kavanaugh's] confirmation has Sen. Feinstein or anyone raised the specter of new ‘information’ about him,” slamming the revelation as an “11th hour attempt to delay his confirmation.”

Which, unfortunately, is how it looks. [4]

Republican Senators have followed suit, also blasting the Democrats.

But there is more. Feinstein ignored a letter she received in July, months BEFORE the just-concluded high-speed "confirmation hearings," from an attorney stating he had information from several Federal employees regarding Kavanaugh. Grassley also received that information. Here Feinstein can't pretend she was protecting someone's confidentiality. Taken together, the two cover-ups prove Feinstein's intent to help seat the extreme reactionary Kavanaugh on the high court, where he will vote to kill Roe vs. Wade, ending women's right to abortion in most of the country immediately, empower every abuse by the secret police, and immunize Donald Trump from any prosecutions. [5]

We're been here before, over and over, in fact. The Democratic Party has a HISTORY of smarmily helping the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) elevate anti-human reactionaries to the Supreme Court. Then every election they send out political junkmail saying only THEY stand between us and a far right wing Supreme Court that will overturn Roe vs. Wade, etc.

Recall that Antonin Scalia was confirmed by a Senate vote of 98-0. Those weren't 98 Republicans.
And in 1991 the man who proved indispensable to elevating known sexual harasser Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, another extreme reactionary, was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator Joe Biden. (Yes, the same whom Barack "The Drone Assassin" made vice president, and who has pretensions of becoming president in his own right.)

Biden blocked the testimony of three corroborating witnesses for Thomas' victim Anita Hill at the confirmation hearings for Thomas. He also privately advises his Democratic Senate colleagues to discount Anita Hills' testimony. The damning story is recounted in a book by two establishment reporters. [6]

In December 2017 Biden, preparing his run for President in 2020, issued what The New Yorker mischaracterized as an apology to preempt criticism of his dirty deed in 1991, saying “I wish I had been able to do more.” Of course he certainly WAS able to "do more," or rather just NOT do what he DID, which was to privately smear Hill and block her supporting witnesses.

Unless he literally means he had no choice. Which could only mean the regime of Bush the Elder was blackmailing him.

If that is the case, Biden needs to come clean right now!

 Reactionary birds of a feather: Grassley and Feinstein, both born in 1933, both 85. 
Feinstein thinks life begins at 90, as she is currently running for another 6-year Senate term.

1]  "Dianne Feinstein Withholding Brett Kavanaugh Document From Fellow Judiciary Committee Democrats," The Intercept, September 12, 2018.


2]  "Brett Kavanaugh’s High School Friend Isn’t Helping the Nominee’s Case," Mother Jones, September 15, 2018.

3]  "A Sexual-Misconduct Allegation Against the Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Stirs Tension Among Democrats in Congress," The New Yorker, September 14, 2018.

4]  Similarly, New York officials let Donald Trump run his fraudulent "charitable foundation" in blatantly illegal fashion for years, and only after he became president initiated legal action against it. Which sure looks "political," don't it! Likewise, the FBI questions Paul Manafort years ago about his work in Ukraine, and took no action against him. And of course the NSA knows everything about everyone's money transfers, including Paul Manafort's. Since he'd been allowed for years to "launder" his money, underpay his taxes, and work for a Ukrainian ruler without registering as an "agent of a foreign power" without the government minding- and remember, the Democrat Obama was president for the previous eight years!- it is little wonder he was complacent. Yet suddently secret police apparatchik Robert Mueller III hurls all these charges at him. Rather like the scene in Casablanca, when the French police chief, under Gestapo pressure, suddenly "discovers" gambling in Rick's club.

5]  "Attorney Sent Letter to Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein Claiming Federal Court Employees Willing to Speak About Brett Kavanaugh," The Intercept, September 17, 2018.

6] See "How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultrareactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights," July 10, 2018.

How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultra-Reactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights

It's long past time to call out the Democratic Party of the U.S. on one of its major con games. The one in which they claim to be the sole bulwark protecting America from a right-wing "takeover" of the Supreme Court. The one in which they claim that they are the guardians of abortion rights, rights in permanent peril from unnamed right wingers.

Before I continue, I want to bullet-point the critical facts you need to take away with you:

• Extreme reactionary Antonin Scalia was elevated to the Supreme Court by a Senate vote of 98-0. Those weren't 98 Republicans. Scalia was later one of five GOP apparatchiks on the high court who stole the 2000 presidential election for George Bush (Bush the Younger). [1]

• Democratic Senator Joe Biden (later  vice president in the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama) functioning as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was instrumental in putting known sex offender Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Thomas, like Scalia, voted to steal the 2000 presidential election for the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). [2]

• EVERY reactionary elevated to the top court, with its immense power, has gotten there with the support of Democratic Party senators. Even the ones who vote against confirming them soft-pedal how awful and evil the nominees are.

• In the last year of the presidency of Hit Man Obama, a vacancy opened up on the Supereme Court. In an unprecedented power grab, the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell (a venal coal industry stooge from Kentucky) announced that Obama would not be allowed to fill that vacancy. And Democratic response was- some grumbling under their breath and acceptance. Obama himself didn't give any evidence of even caring! (Yet there are still morons who think he is a "progressive" who was somehow thwarted by forces beyond his control. Now imagine if the situation was reversed, and a Democratic-controlled Senate denied a GOP president the right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy! There would be DAILY howls of outrage, even calls for a military coup "to restore the Constitutional order." That's because the Republicans are like rabid wolverines and are serious about power. That's how, with a minority of the populace behind them, they have taken over the presidency, the Congress, the Judiciary, and two-thirds of the state legislatures and governorships. (They have long dominated and controlled the military and secret police apparatus.) They have used their control of state legislatures to draw districts that allow them to elect the majority of Representatives to the national House of Representatives with a minority of overall voters. The Democrats are mainly a party of grifters, unserious about power, just looking for profitable sinecures for themselves.

Okay, that last bulletpoint was a long one, but essential. Now on to the body of the essay, which will illustrate the utter cynicism of the Democrats in manipulating people who are duped into relying on them to protect the few hard-won rights we have.

Every election "cycle," which is to say, every two years [3], Democratic political hacks running for office send out tons of political junk mail to citizens, hoping to woo their votes. One of the perennial themes of this propaganda bombardment is how the Supreme Court hangs in the balance, and the need to protect the right to abortion, which was only granted to women by a divided Supreme Court in the Roe vs. Wade decision. That decision was made under pressure from the women's movement, and only granted a limited right, in the first trimester of pregnancy, after which the government was deemed to have an "interest" in interfering in personal and medical decisions and exerting control over people's bodies.

In the years since, the organized reactionaries of the U.S., including the Republican Party (GOP), rightwing religious zealots, the Catholic Church bosses, and assorted rightwing media and political cadres, have relentlessly attacked abortion. The terrorist arm of this novement has assassinated doctors and clinic workers with bombs and guns, committed thousands of arson and other attacks on abortion clinics, blockaded clinics and much else. The legal offensive has been even more devastating, with states controlled by the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) virtually eliminating abortion clinics by various legislative encumbrances that in effect persecute the clinics. Some states have functionally outlawed abortion drugs, which in early pregnancy are the cheapest and easiest way to terminate a pregnancy. (By the way, these same creeps who care so much about "unborn children" are the same ones who deport children fleeing gang and state violence south of the U.S. border back to their deaths, who destroy water containers left in the desert for them, who rip children and infants away from their refugee parents and separate them by thousands of miles. They have historically supported the murder of children by fascist death squads in the U.S. empire, and bombing cities and villages in Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere that kill large numbers of children, babies, and mothers. So I have a sneaking suspicion that reverence for the sanctity of life isn't their actual motive.)
There IS no abortion provider in almost every town in the U.S. Over 90% of U.S. counties have no abortion facility. Abortion has been stigmatized and isolated, banished from the body of the medical profession. The cowardly medical schools don't even teach their students how to perform abortions,

And what has the Democratic Party been doing all the while the assault on abortion rights has continued unabated for 44 years?

Every election they yell at their voters that the right to abortion is under assault and therefore you must vote for them. And that's pretty much it.

And they ensure that the Supreme Court has a hard rightwing majority, They do this to have a scare tactic to run in elections on, and they do this because they too are fundamentally reactionaries. They serve the corporate oligarchy, which of course wants a reactionary judiciary. They believe in state power over citizens- as the repressive legislation pushed into law by their presidents Truman, Clinton, and Obama proves. Obama gave the government the power to indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens in military gulags without charges or legal representation, by government fiat. The government need only label the victims "terrorists." That is now law because of Obama.

Let's dispose of another myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."

1]  In a bit of ironically poetic justice, the Democratic candidate who along with his party let the GOP steal the 2000 election, Albert Gore, was one of the Senators who voted to put Scalia on the Supreme Court.

2]  Biden made sure Thomas, an arch-reactionary black man who is an enemy of African-Americans in many ways, including his attacks on affirmative action, made it through the confirmation process by stifling witnesses who would have buttressed Anita Hill's testimony about Thomas' vulgar sexual harassment of his underlings, and more critically Biden privately assured his Democratic Senate colleagues not to believe Hill. The story of  Biden's treachery is told in the book "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. The authors were reporters at the Wall Street Journal at the time the book was written. Mayer went on to be a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where she is today. Abramson became the very first female to ascend to the top editor post at the oh-so-august New York Times.

Abramson's tenure as top editor was short. She accidentally discovered that the publisher and chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose family has long owned the paper and its other properties and who inherited his job from his Daddy, was chiseling her on her pay, paying her less than her male predecessors. Sulzberger was miffed when Abramson confronted him about this, proceeded to fire her, and then engaged in a campaign of character assassination against her.

So "liberal" of him!

This sexist asshole also hired the scandalous former BBC boss Mark Thompson. After notorious pedophile and BBC star Jimmy Savile died, the BBC had an expose ready to air. That was killed, and in its place a tribute to Savile was aired. Thompson claimed to know nothing about any of this, despite being in charge. Sulzberger thinks this guy is worth paying millions for.
The result so far has been a discrimination suit against Thompson for the toxic environment he's helped create (or perpetuate) at the NY Times. Two black female employees allege in their lawsuit that Thompson introduced an "environment rife with discrimination based on age, race and gender." It further links his behavior to similar actions by him during his BBC tenure. ["New York Times chief executive accused of discrimination," BBC News, 29 April, 2016.]


3]  In the U.S., one chamber of the national legislature, the "House of Representatives" of the U.S. Congress, stands for election every two years. There are 435 Congressional districts, thus 435 representatives covering all the 50 states. Congressional districts are proportioned roughly by population.

The other chamber of Congress, the U.S. Senate, has 100 Senators, two Senator for each state. This gives grossly disproportional weight and power to sparsely populated states hard rightwing states, and greatly weakens the political weight of populous states. So California has two Senators, and the 20 least populous states, whose total population equals that of California, have 40 Senators. So arch-reactionary states like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the two Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, and so on, are a powerful structural and institutional factor in making the U.S. a rightwing nation, even though only a minority of the population is rightwing in this putative "democracy."

Senators are elected for six year terms. Every two years, one third of the Senate stands for reelection.
U.S. presidents serve 4 year terms. The years that aren't presidential election years are called "off-year elections."

The terms of Congresspeople and presidents is set out in the Constitution. The Republicans passed a Constitutional amendment in the 1950's limiting the president to two elected terms. This was done in reaction to the fact that the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president four times in a row starting in 1932. Ironically, Republican Dwight David Eisenhower, elected in 1952 and 1956, may well have won a third term if not for this amendment.

The Sham "Suspense" Over Trump's Second Supreme Court Nominee

U.S. corporate propaganda systems (aka "the media," as if it's the one and only media) and politicians are pretending there is something to wonder about which awful, fanatically reactionary ideologue in a judicial robe president Trump will nominate to replace the "swing vote" Justice Anthony Kennedy who announced his retirement from the high court. But it doesn't matter, since Trump long ago announced that ALL his Supreme Court picks will come from a list of career reactionaries approved  by a cabal of conspirators called "The Federalist Society." They are all the same!

Trump has repeatedly announced that when he packs the high court with reactionaries, Roe vs. Wade, the 1974 Supreme Court decision that decreed that women had a limited right to abort pregnancies, would be "automatically" overturned.

What the U.S. corporate media REFUSES to report is the ultra-reactionary nature of the so-called "Federalist Society." As always with reactionary organizations, "the" media disguises their actual political nature and presents them as legitimate and respectable. ("The" media does the same with criminal state arms like the CIA, FBI, NSA, U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the murderous Immigration and Customs Enforcement, et al.)

Meanwhile, politicians, mainly Democrats, but also one or two "moderate" Republican Senators claim they're going to "protect" Roe v. Wade by... oh, I don't know, it's so vague what they say. They'll urge Trump to appoint someone who won't overturn it. (That's a joke. They're pretending to be divorced from reality when they say that.) Or they'll closely question the nominee about it. (All nominees these days refuse to answer such questions during their confirmation hearings. And the Senators know it.)

The phoniness of these political hacks is unbearable.

Here's Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, speaking July 1st on the NBC Sunday morning political propaganda show "Meet The Press:"

"Well, we, well I would love President Trump to pick somebody in the mainstream of American views who are going to hold up years, and years and years of precedent. The one great thing about our nation is an independent judiciary. In times of intense political debate, the fact that we have that independent judiciary that will uphold the law is key to what is so great about our country. We're a 51/49 Senate. And if he wants to throw an extreme conservative who basically says, "I'm not going to follow precedent -- "

What mealy-mouthed gibberish.

While we're demystifying ruling class rubbish, let's dispose of a myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."