Courts

'I Am A Liberal And I Support Brett Kavanaugh,' Say Feckless Elites Everywhere

If all the other elites are willing to sell out women, gays, and minorities, we want to play.

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(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Nothing has shown the spinelessness and cowardice of the Democratic party, and liberals in general, as much as their unwillingness to go to the mattresses over Supreme Court nominations. There are mathletes in high school who show more spirit standing up to the football team than the entire Democratic establishment has shown standing up to the Federalist Society. Mitch McConnell locked President Obama’s appointment powers in the janitor’s closet, and liberals just shrugged. Neil Gorsuch showed up to take everybody’s lunch money, and Joe Manchin handed him his entire freaking backpack. Now Brett Kavanaugh is here, and liberals are competing to do his homework for him. Trump could nominate Caligula’s horse to the Supreme Court, and there’d be liberals lining up to give it a reach-around.

The liberal intelligentsia has proven over and over again that being viewed as “elite” is more important to them than being viewed as “having principles.” Oh, Chuck Schumer isn’t going to “vote” for Kavanaugh, out of a sheer sense of self-preservation. But Schumer is also not… leading a hunger strike on the Senate floor, which is what would be happening if the Democratic collection of braying donkeys had the spark of leadership.

While the elected Democrats scramble to figure out how to look like they’re fighting without actually fighting, others in the liberal establishment have come to the defense of a fellow scion of wealth and power. The pathetic formulation of these defenses are eerily similar: “I am a Liberal Thing, and I’m willing to abandon the principles of that thing because Brett Kavanaugh knows the secret handshake.”

The latest comes from Arnold & Porter litigator Lisa Blatt. Here’s her headline on Politico:

I’m a Liberal Feminist Lawyer. Here’s Why Democrats Should Support Judge Kavanaugh.

No. No, you are not a “liberal feminist” if you support Brett Kavanaugh. Those two things are INCOMPATIBLE IF WORDS ARE TO HAVE MEANING. What you are is a compromised sell-out who bizarrely prefers seeing women’s rights snuffed out by the silk glove of Ivy League intellectualism, as opposed to crushed by the cold gauntlet of state-school severity. Everything in Kavnaugh’s record suggests he will be an implacable enemy to any “liberal,” “feminist” ideals. But Blatt did a panel at Georgetown with Kavanaugh and he’s “one of the warmest, friendliest and kindest individuals I know.” SO THAT MAKES IT ALL OKAY.

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Look, at some level I get it. I’m also a liberal elite. I also prefer having bloodless, theoretical conversations with people like David Lat over having to talk to the flag-waving, truck be-nutted yokels who support the same FedSoc policies as David Lat. Like Blatt, I also prefer my conservatives to come at me with a veneer of intellectual debate.

I just never let that lacquer of respectability obscure the dystopian aims of their policy agenda. At the end of the day, Kavanugh’s agenda reduces women to talking incubators, elevates presidents to Constitutional monarchs, and puts a gun and a get-out-of-jail-free card into the hands of any white boy who feels threatened by my lips. There aren’t enough cocktail parties in the world to make me forget that.

But liberal elites who put more emphasis on the “liberal” than the “elite” are, apparently, a dying breed. For fun, we used our Illuminati connections to reach out to other liberal elites, and boy am I on the wrong side of history.

* “I am a liberal who supports strong gun regulation. But I used to babysit Kavanaugh’s kids, and I can tell you that he should be on the Supreme Court. Once he is your friend, you’ve got a friend for life. And he’s not afraid to do what he thinks is right. I’m like that too. I think of something to say, and I say it. I think of something to do, and I do it. Mom calls it impulsive. Sometimes she calls it trouble. But she doesn’t just mean trouble. She means trouble.” — Kristy Amanda Thomas

* “I guess people would call me liberal, but I’m really just a guy with a moral center and a love of competency. I graduated from Yale, and I first met Brett Kavanaugh on my neighbor’s yacht. We might disagree about politics, but man, Kavanaugh has a great smile. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” — Nick Carraway

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* “I am a man of science. A man of reason. Like many in the scientific community, I fear what effects a conservative court may have on our environment. And yet, I support Brett Kavanaugh. Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.” — Victor Frankenstein

* “I am a feminist and I’m very concerned about Kavanaugh’s stance on women’s rights. I met Kavanaugh while clerking for Merrick Garland on the D.C. Circuit. I had not intended to love Kavanaugh; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.” — Jane Eyre

I’ll stop. You take my point. A real liberal would rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.

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