Sept. 30 Open Thread: America Dances the Limbo

America’s pundits have had a chance to ponder the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, and they have reached a sort of rough consensus: This is nuts.

For those like Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, it confirmed what they’ve been saying since Trump’s nomination — our political system is in pitiful shape.

What struck me on Thursday is that guys like Graham and Kavanaugh, who have pretty much had things exactly the way they wanted them for their entire lives, have finally been forced to notice that American politics fundamentally does not work. From any possible point of view, this confirmation — and indeed the entire political ecosystem around it — has become a sham, a circus, an embarrassing scandal and a national disgrace. In an environment where Americans agree about nothing, we can probably agree about that….

I often feel that nothing in the Trump era can be shocking, but Kavanaugh’s Thursday appearance was downright astonishing. The fact that anyone, of any political party, could believe this person (rapist or not) is well suited to be a Supreme Court justice beggars belief. It was like watching Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech performed by a minor, doomed character on “Breaking Bad.”

Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that so many people think the system still works. Christine Blasey Ford must have thought so when she sent what was intended as a confidential letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein. At the hearing, she was the only person involved not on a government payroll, the only person there (by GOP design) without a personal stake in whether or not Kavanaugh is confirmed. (If this is all a plot by Democrats, they’re a helluva lot better at it than their GOP counterparts, whose attempt to pin it all on another guy was sniffed out and exposed a day after it went public. Democratic incompetence at everything else makes that theory absurd on its face.)

Whatever Kavanaugh’s fate, the hearings should go down as a landmark for an arguably more important reason. As O’Hehir concludes:

It is perhaps a hopeful sign, in the long run, that men of the Kavanaugh-Graham class are at least forced to confront the possibility of facing consequences for their behavior, and also to acknowledge that the political rituals that enshrined and protected their power no longer function as seamlessly as they once did. But the long run could take a very long time indeed, and the pain and disgrace of this moment and others to come will be difficult to bear. America’s political decay continues, and we have not hit bottom yet.

We left the roof almost two years ago and we’ve fallen 25 floors. So far, so good.