Notes while watching The Supreme Court Hearings in Yosemite

(1) This guy under consideration is a classic over achiever (and an eager beaver), and what most overachievers achieve is most always employed to serve those already in power, i.e.the status quo or,  in this case, something worse: he, the nominee, has been raised in the farm system (baseball analogy) of partisan right-wing politics that he will undoubtedly serve once he is appointed. 

(2) There's something very wrong with this picture (CNN, 7 a.m.PST, hotel room): mostly old people, very old people, not particularly wise, well-read, or even for that matter intelligent, questioning this guy, the nominee for The Supreme Court, the over achiever who has accepted the nomination from a man who is corrupt, venal, and by all reports incompetent, for the purpose of certifying his appointment for the highest judicial position in the republic, a position that will determine the republic's public policy for years and years, long after those now questioning this guy will be dead. 

(3) Furthermore, the questions these future dead people are asking this guy are not interesting or compelling in the least. For instance, on the subject of a woman's reproductive rights, of which this guy is thought by many of hoping to repeal, why not ask something like, "if your wife was raped by a Mexican national of the Muslim faith, God forbid, and later found to be impregnated by him, would you or would you not support her right under the law to have an abortion?" Or, "should one of your daughters be shot on the school playground by a playmate wielding an automatic rifle, would you still be a 'strict Constitutionalist' in regard to the 2nd Amendment? Questions like these would surely elict more telling answers than the answer this guy so often gives to softer, less pointed questions: "I am not going to answer hypothetical questions."

(4) There's something very disturbing from a strict language standpoint about the very words, The Supreme Court. 

(5) There's no such thing as a political democracy; democracy can only exist philosophically.

(6) Maybe the best we can do is to muddle on.

(from Yosemite Valley, September 5, 2018)

*I refer readers to my August 11, 2018 post, Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), in which I wrote something along these lines: if this guy was the righteous, upstanding, brilliant, pure-of-heart-man-of-law rather than a tool of pre-existing institutional interests he could no more accept a nomination from a man like Trump than he could make goat cheese from a cow's milk...