A Cruz We Have to Bear

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.) 

Last Sunday night, just hours before Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's first Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Ted Cruz (R-Cancun) was throwing a hissy fit at airline employees in Bozeman, Montana. We still don't know exactly what the screaming match was all about (although it's been speculated he missed the check-in window and got bumped from his flight) but it was serious enough for airport security to get involved. The Bozo of Bozeman actually went there and began yelling, "Do you know who I am?!" like some psycho outtake from an old American Express commercial.

   Apparently, the grounded Tailgunner Ted maintained that confrontational mindset clear into the next day and all week in his ridiculous third degree interrogation of Judge Jackson.

    Now, just to be fair in my assessment of the GOP's latest and predicted misogynoir, the well-documented right wing loathing of black women, it's not just Ted Cruz. Texas' senior senator, John Cornyn, had to get in on the act, as had Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, Thom Tillis and others. In fact, all the right wing opposition to Judge Jackson on the Judiciary Committee has come from white Republicans from states south of Mason-Dixon.

     In fact, if misogynoir had an entry in the Merriam Webster dictionary, it would come with a picture of Trump's jiggling, umber, frowning puss beside it. As it is, it's amazing that he hasn't already weighed in on the confirmation hearings with something colossally stupid and racist on Liz Harridan's Twitter feed. But give it time: The confirmation hearings are still young.

    

     But Ted Cruz is increasingly looking like someone who's acting out in a day care center because he can't read or understand certain children's books (Nine years ago, it was Green Eggs and Ham when he led the charge to shut down the government). Yesterday, it was Ibram X. Kendi's Antiracist Baby. Maybe Cruz and other like-minded presidents-in-waiting think that historians and children's authors such as Dr. Seuss and Kendi are involved in some nefarious plot to indoctrinate small children into some absurd belief that no one is born racist and that maybe, just maybe, it's good to try new things instead of hiding behind ignorant biases.

     Well! The anti-woke right wing can't have that. They want you to remain asleep or at least insensible to the fact that our republic's democratic system had several birth defects baked into it from the time of the first Continental Congress in 1774 and it was racism, misogyny, misogynoir and white male privilege.

     Even merely addressing these issues and their palpable reality immediately opens one up to white people screaming about "wokeness", racism, Critical Race Theory, women's lib or whatever boogey man the right wing can conjure in the quivering, pus-oozing pulp that passes for their brains. But the fact is, the 14th amendment that gave full rights and protections to all Americans, including African Americans, was passed by the Senate in 1866 and still took over two years to be ratified into law in 1868. And it still took another 52 years for women to be granted suffrage, with right wingers kicking and screaming every step of the way.

     Since he's a law school graduate, you'd think Cruz would be clued in that he hadn't been taught anything even remotely like Critical Race Theory until he matriculated in law school. But this is Ted Cruz we're talking about, the cross we all to bear in our slouch back to the 19th century.

That Look

Over the last three days, we've had to endure the Kabuki theater of the Southern Strategy as well as, according to The View's Sunny Hostin, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's black woman WTF looks of amazement and confusion at the roar of their electric calliope (to hear the New York Times tell it, however, it was a Zoroastrian pitched battle between good and evil). And while virtually every Republican on the Judiciary Committee tried to take bites out of Judge Jackson, her armor remained impermeable and she's patiently answered all their idiotic questions or, at most, looked at them impassively while one or the other went into a non-germane hissy fit about Critical Race Theory, baby books or, in Lindsey Graham's case, which Guantanamo detainees he wanted to see die in prison (all 39 of them) before storming out of the hearing room like Miss Scarlett with a terminal case of the vapors.

   It would be easy for white, well-meaning liberals to breezily dismiss this as simple loyal but principled opposition to President Biden's agenda but there's something more evil afoot here. Judge Jackson's confirmation as the nation's first female African American Supreme Court Justice looks almost assured (although we can't be too assured of how coal magnate Joe Manchin will vote when she finally gets out of committee) but since she's been nominated to replace liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, it won't change the power balance on the court one inch. Yet, Republicans are bitterly fighting Judge Jackson tooth and nail every inch of the way as if it will. At least that would be understandable.

    The bottom line, as far as Judge Jackson's judicial record goes, according to Mitt Romney, "there's no 'there' there." That's why Republicans are trying to yeast into some massive conspiracy papers she'd written as a young defense attorney, the library of the day care of which she's a board member and guidelines agreed upon when she served on a sentencing commission.

    And the bottom line beneath that is that, if confirmed, Judge Jackson would be the sole acting Supreme Court Justice to have graduated from an Ivy League law school, clerked for a Supreme Court justice, served as a public defender, served on the sentencing commission, served as a U.S. District Court judge as well as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge.

    But the right wingers on the Judiciary Committee, an ongoing cautionary tale as to the perils of white privilege, would have us believe that Judge Jackson is soft on pedophiles and Muslim terrorists. They see Judge Jackson as just another pick axe chipping away at the white, male bulwark that's been in place here since the 17th century. They see her as the beginning of an inevitable slide in which white people are not the only ones to ascend to positions of power in our alleged meritocracy.

     There's an old saying that black people have to be twice as good to get half as far as white people. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are showing us in no uncertain terms that that rancid calculus had been halved again specially for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, that a woman of color has to be four times as good as a clownish hack like Brett Kavanaugh to be taken with just one quarter of the seriousness and respect.