There's a Silver Lining to Brett Kavanaugh Joining the Supreme Court

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

13 October 18

ost weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the meaning of Brett Kavanaugh’s presence on the Supreme Court and the New YorkTimes’ reporting on apparent tax fraud by the Trump family.

Brett Kavanaugh is hearing his first cases as a Supreme Court justice this week. Has the bitter fight brought out by his confirmation ended?

The bloody Kavanaugh fight was not the beginning, middle, or the end of this bitter fight. It was just the latest battle in a culture war that pits one of America’s two major political parties against the nation’s women. The Republican war against women began well before Donald Trump ran for president — at least as far back as 1992, when, in the aftermath of the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas debacle, the likes of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Phyllis Schlafly jawboned the GOP into adopting a misogynistic religious-right policy agenda at the Republican National Convention in Houston. The perhaps inevitable byproduct, a quarter-century later, was Trump, who as a candidate was fully embraced by his party despite having mocked a female primary rival for her looks, ridiculed a network news anchor for her presumed menstrual bleeding, and bragged on tape about his serial sexual assaults. No one should be surprised that, once elected, Trump would nominate a likely sex offender to the Supreme Court, where Kavanaugh will help fulfill the long-held GOP dream of rolling back Roe v. Wade, among other egregious ideological goals that will chip away at the rights of all Americans except white men.

Right up to the moment that narcissistic moral fraud Susan Collins gave her foreordained oration sealing Kavanaugh’s confirmation, many of those in opposition were holding out hope against hope that a silver bullet would yet emerge to doom his ascent: further confirmation of what happened that night to Christine Blasey Ford during high school, or perhaps another witness to Kavanaugh’s alleged terrorization of Deborah Ramirez at Yale. To me such hopes underestimated the gravity of the Republican Party’s misogynist mission. Let’s face it: even if someone had unearthed a crystal-clear photo or video of Kavanaugh exposing himself to Ramirez, the Senators of the “grab ’em by the pussy” party, Collins included, would still have voted to confirm him. For his part, Trump would have dismissed such visual evidence as “fake news” — just as he has the Access Hollywood tape — and would still have proclaimed Kavanaugh innocent of any charges. Had the FBI actually conducted a thorough investigation of Kavanaugh turning up still further evidence to back up Ford’s testimony, Trump would have attacked it too, dismissing the agency and its findings as a hoax much as he has every federal law-enforcement investigation of the apparently bottomless illegalities committed by the Trump campaign and administration.

So let’s stop pretending that there is another GOP than the Trump GOP. Let’s stop declaring that Trump is suddenly sounding “presidential” just because he waits a few days before publicly trashing Blasey Ford. Let’s stop maintaining the fiction that Collins, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Bob Corker, and their fellow Vichy Republicans, including Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin, are not onboard with what’s going on. And let’s not give credit to Republican politicians when they pay lip service to treating sexual-assault victims with “respect” or when they say, as the epically disingenuous Collins did, that they believe both Ford and Kavanaugh. When Collins says that she believes that the perpetrator of the attempted rape of Christine Blasey Ford was someone other than the man she elevated to the Supreme Court, she sounds like O.J. in search of the real killer of Nicole Brown Simpson.

As we try to look forward after this sordid episode — no easy task — we can perhaps take a little comfort in the fact that Trump didn’t yank Kavanaugh for an alternative nominee like Amy Coney Barrett, who is just as far to the right, if not more so, and who would have been carrying far less baggage (if any) to her seat on the Court. Kavanaugh has been delegitimized to a clear majority of America over the past month — by his partisan ravings and unchecked rage at the final hearing as much as by his unpersuasive denials of his past behavior toward women. No less delegitimized is the Supreme Court, whose already eroded image as a sanctuary of nonpartisan justice has now reached a nadir where Judge Judy may by default be the new gold standard of unbiased American jurisprudence. With such diminished moral authority, and with an unceasing run of 5–4 verdicts likely in major cases to come, the Court’s voyage to the right may well be buffeted by civic and political unrest that, as in other eras of American disunion, ultimately vacates those rulings out of sync with the majority of the nation’s citizens.

How will the Kavanaugh nomination affect the midterms, which are in less than four weeks?

It would be foolhardy to guess. Certainly the failure of the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to come up with a coherent strategy for questioning Kavanaugh hardly fills one with hope about the party’s management of the midterms. When you read simultaneous post-Kavanaugh columns in the Times headlined “Get Angry, and Get Involved” and “Liberals, This Is War,” you feel further frissons of anxiety. Such columns are right on, but they are preaching to a choir that is already registered to vote and will. The turnout the Democrats need for a blue wave — from voters under 30 and minorities — tend to skip non-presidential elections and don’t read newspaper op-ed columns.

Much has been made of a NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll released midway during the Kavanaugh endgame that showed a rise in fervor among GOP voters, who now were only two points behind Democrats in their enthusiasm for the midterms — a narrowing of a gap that had been ten points in July. But this poll was taken before Kavanaugh had won his fight, at the peak of Republican rage. The victors might be less charged-up after getting their poor victimized white guy on the Court, and Democrats might be angrier and more motivated to show up at the polls than ever. But the screenwriter William Goldman’s undying adage about Hollywood remains applicable to politics: “Nobody knows anything.”

A single-minded focus on Kavanaugh drowned out other major stories, most notably the New York Times investigation into the sources of Trump’s money, which the paper felt the need to reprint. Times reporters, after digging for a year and a half, uncovered that Trump’s fortune comes almost entirely from his father, and found what it called “instances of outright fraud” on taxes. Did this story miss its window?

David Axelrod tweeted that it is “kind of remarkable that this story made nary a ripple in a week dominated by the Kavanaugh wars.” None of the Sunday-morning network political talk shows mentioned it. Even the Times’ own White House chief correspondent, Peter Baker, failed to mention his paper’s investigative effort in a front-page Trump news analysis arguing that the low unemployment rate, the successful negotiation of a (quasi-)new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, and the confirmation of Kavanaugh produced what may be “the best week of his presidency so far.”

Given that the Times investigation was a fascinating and wildly impressive feat of forensic journalism that read almost like a novel of gangsterism at times, why did it not land as much as one might have hoped? I don’t agree with those who argue that the Times made a mistake by publishing it during such a big news week. It’s always a big news week during the Trump presidency, and Trump, who is nothing if not an expert reality-television producer, is a master at drowning out news he doesn’t sanction. (The apocalyptic report from the United Nations’ panel on climate change didn’t stand a chance.) If Kavanaugh didn’t distract enough from the Times story then surely a Rod Rosenstein firing would have been plan B.

There are other explanations for the piece’s shortfall in public attention. Those who loathe Trump have long assumed he is a tax cheat of possibly felonious proportions; savory as the details are in the Times investigation, the bottom line of its findings is not news. The article might have gained more traction as news if the Times had been more hard-hitting about its own collusion in creating the Trump myth. The article does contain a fleeting mea culpa on that score, but stops short of excavating the full story of how Trump and his fixer, Roy Cohn, manipulated the Times throughout Trump’s rise in New York.

But the biggest reason why a Trump investigation as strong as this one fails to cause a huge stir may be cultural. As we all know, real news as practiced by real news organizations has been discredited by Trump among his base. But his constant effusions of fiction have also over time increasingly blurred reality and basic facts among Americans who are not dedicated political partisans or news junkies. Much as we revere the memory of how Woodward and Bernstein helped bring down Richard Nixon, there is no such thing as a universally admired national news source like the Washington Post or the Times or CBS News in any medium in 2018. We must reckon with the real possibility that investigative journalism, no matter how thorough and brilliant, cannot bring down a criminal president in our era as it did nearly a half-century ago.

President Trump Has Made Health Care Worse

By Bernie Sanders, USA TODAY

13 October 18

Medicare for All is popular because it would save people money and assure them the health care they need. Trump's only defense is to lie about my bill.

he American people have a very clear choice in the upcoming elections. On one side is Donald Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress, who made throwing 32 million Americans off of health insurance their number one priority in Washington. On the other side is my "Medicare for All" plan supported by 16 senators and 122 House members. It would guarantee everyone could get the health care they need without going into debt at far lower cost than the current dysfunctional system.

And Americans are very clear about which side they are on. In a poll last summer, 70 percent said they support expanding and improving Medicare to cover everyone in our country. They understand that there is something profoundly wrong when our current dysfunctional health care system is designed not to provide quality care to all, but to enable the private health insurance industry and drug companies to make billions in profits.

Despite spending almost twice as much per capita as any other country, 30 million Americans have no health insurance and many more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. Further, the pharmaceutical industry charges us, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. It is insane that today it costs an average of $28,000 a year to provide health insurance to a family of four. It is equally insane that one out of five Americans cannot afford the prescription drugs their doctors prescribe.

Donald Trump has only made health care worse

Medicare is the most popular, successful and cost-effective health insurance program in the country. Today, only people 65 and older are eligible for it. Americans shouldn’t have to wait that long to get the high-quality health care they need and deserve.

As president, Trump has made our health care system worse. While we were able to defeat his budget which proposed a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, a $500 billion cut to Medicare and a $72 billion cut to the Social Security disability fund, we were unable to stop other very harmful measures.

As a result of his efforts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, 13 million more Americans will become uninsured over the next decade while millions more have seen their premiums rise. Further, his administration is working alongside 20 Republican state attorneys general to end the protection that the Affordable Care Act now guarantees to people with pre-existing conditions, such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. No one can estimate how many thousands of those people will die if they can no longer purchase affordable insurance.

We have a different idea: Expand Medicare to all. My bill would provide comprehensive and cost-effective health care for everyone — without out-of-pocket expenses.

Study after study shows that when we eliminate private insurance premiums, deductibles and co-payments, the average American will pay substantially less for health care than he or she currently pays. For example, a recent study by RAND found that moving to a Medicare for All system in New York would save a family with an income of $185,000 or less about $3,000 per person a year, on average. Even the projections from the conservative Mercatus Center suggest that the average American could save about $6,000 under Medicare for All over a 10-year period.

Medicare for All not only benefits individuals and families, it would also benefit the business community. Small and medium sized businesses would be free to focus on their core business goals instead of wasting precious energy and resources navigating an incredibly complex system to provide employee health insurance. Equally important, with universal health care, workers would not have to stay at jobs they dislike just because their employer provides decent health insurance.

Medicare for All is better for seniors

Given the president’s propensity to lie about almost everything, it is not surprising that Trump is grossly distorting what the Medicare for All legislation does.

Our proposal would not cut benefits for seniors on Medicare, as the president and his Republican allies claim. In fact, we expand benefits. Millions of seniors today cannot afford dental care, vision care or hearing aids because Medicare does not cover them. Our proposal does. In addition, Medicare for All would eliminate deductibles and copays for seniors and significantly lower the cost of prescription drugs. Medicare for All allows seniors and all Americans to see the doctors they want, not the doctors in their insurance networks.

Trump claims that Medicare for All is not affordable. That is nonsense. What we cannot afford is to continue spending almost twice as much per capita on health care as any other country on Earth. We can’t afford the $28,000 it currently costs to provide health insurance for the average family of four. We can’t afford to have 30 million Americans with no health insurance and even more who are under-insured with high deductibles and high co-payments. We can’t afford to have millions of Americans get sicker than they should, and in some cases die, because they can’t afford to go to the doctor.

Here is the bottom line: If every major country on earth can guarantee health care to all and achieve better health outcomes, while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States of America cannot do the same.