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Last week in Washington, what seemed to be a surprising contrast: on the one hand, the stories of a president stood out, issuing contradictory and distorted orders to dismayed assistants who were conspiring against him; on the other, a thoughtful candidate for the Supreme Court, serenely parrying the vain assaults of a frustrated senatorial minority. Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh seemed and seemed very different, but these appearances deceived. The two men were leading the country in the same direction, towards more inequality, more pollution and, frankly speaking, women who were still dying of failed abortions.
With regard to the president, the week was marked by two elaborations of evidence – that he is dangerously unfit to perform his duties. Bob Woodward's new book, "Fear", which began circulating on Tuesday, describes Trump as ill-informed, incurable, impetuous and misleading. In a passage quoted above, Woodward says John Kelly, the White House's chief of staff, said of Trump: "He is an idiot. It is useless to try to convince him of anything. He got off the rails. We are in the madness. (In one of the many crafty denials by Trump insiders who went through Washington last week, Kelly said he did not call the "idiot" president.)
Then, on Wednesday, the Time published an editorial by a "senior Trump administration official," who said he was part of a secret group of insiders trying to protect the government and the country from various Trump pathologies. The group, wrote the official, was acting to "preserve our democratic institutions while counteracting Mr. Trump's more mistaken impulses until he was not in office," adding: Amoridad of the president is at the origin of the problem. The President was so striking that they reaffirmed themselves and that their harsh judgments did not come from Trump's political enemies, but from his allies – residents of the city itself.
Kavanaugh's pleasant manner, on the other hand, seemed well suited to the uninspired platitudes that are the usual form of expression of Supreme Court confirmation procedures. Administration officials who escort candidates through the process do their best to ensure that hearings retain, rather than disclose, information. However, nominees can not help but reveal at least something of themselves. Consider Kavanaugh's litany of praise in his opening statement. He ruled, he said, "sometimes for the workers and sometimes for the companies, sometimes for the ecologists and sometimes for the coal miners".
Coal minors? It was not sooty workers who clashed with environmentalists during Kavanaugh's twelve years in the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit. businessand the other polluters were the preferred litigants of this judge. The reason for this provision appeared in an apparently harmless colloquium between the judge and Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, on the "Chevron deference". In the case of Chevron USA v. refer to administrative agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, how to interpret the federal law on issues such as air quality standards.
Kavanaugh played a key role in the attacks on Chevron and was therefore highly appreciated by the polluting industries and the chamber of commerce, who want to protect themselves from regulatory oversight. But you'll never know anything about his opaque response to Hatch. "I've heard that I'm skeptical about regulation. I am not a skeptic of regulation, "said Kavanaugh, with an injured innocence. "I am skeptical of illegal regulation, of regulation outside the limits of laws passed by Congress." Deprived of the right to interpret what the laws mean, administrative bodies can do very little, even if they are inclined to act. Of course, the Trump agencies have used the industry at the other end of the process, not regulating them first, or weakening the rules put in place by previous administrations.
With regard to abortion, which remains the most controversial issue before the court, Kavanaugh had the same problem as all recent Republican candidates: the Conservatives want to overthrow Roe v. Wade, but the public, for the most part, does not do it. This is a meaningless phrase: all decisions of the Supreme Court are "settled" until the majority of judges decide to destabilize them, which candidate Trump has promised his candidates to the Court would do. , especially on Roe. In 2003, when Kavanaugh was a lawyer at the George W. Bush White House, he sent an email, revealed at the hearings, in which he commented on a draft of an article stating that the researchers thought Roe would last. Kavanaugh wrote: "I am not sure that all jurists consider that Roe is the law established at the level of the Supreme Court since the Court can always override its precedent and that three judges of the Court would do it. with Kavanaugh, this number will probably be five – the majority.
At some level, it is absurd to have to do this kind of archaeological dig to determine the answer to a simple question: Kavanaugh, if he is confirmed, will he vote to overthrow Roe? It would be much easier to ask him. But antediluvian customs confirmation hearings allow candidates to not answer these questions, so that true candidate research continues during the selection process, rather than at confirmation hearings. And we know that The president subcontracted the selection of his pool of potential candidates to two right wing groups, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Neil Gorsuch, who comes from this same basin, now shares the ideological niche of the far right on the court with Clarence Thomas.
There is now a model for the Trump Presidency. As confirmed by Woodward's sources and the "official" Op-Ed, the president goes from one auto-generation crisis to another, losing or picking up allies according to his mood. But right from the beginning of the campaign, Trump acknowledged that he would only be able to behave in this way if he kept his promises on what his base really wants – a Supreme Court that abandons corporations and rejects the right to abortion, among other priorities. . Last week, only articles presented since January 2017 were presented in distilled form. Trump and his facilitators decided to live with the status quo; The question for us is whether we can. ♦
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