There has to be a special corner in hell for Cruz, Hawley and Cotton

Three Ivy League cowboys in search of a Fox News Soundbite at the Garland hearing

Did you know that they held another confirmation for Eric Holder today in the Senate?  I didn’t.  I thought they were finally giving Merrick Garland the hearing before the Judiciary Committee he never got when Barak Obama appointed him to the Supreme Court in 2016.  But nooooooo, when I tuned in this afternoon and saw Ted Cruz questioning him, he was all about Eric Holder, who according to Cancun Ted “politicized and weaponized” the Department of Justice and “turned it into a partisan tool to attack political opponents.”

Huh?  Suddenly we’re talking about Obama’s attorney general running Trump’s justice department? Cruz went on and on about such debunked Fox Newsicisms as Obama using the IRS to attack the free speech rights of conservative groups to stifle dissent and the “fast and furious” program run by the Obama ATF to track guns illegally sold by border state gun stores that were then moved into Mexico by drug cartels back in 2009.

Merrick Garland was at that time serving as a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.  Somehow a law enforcement program half a continent away in Arizona, run by a department of justice three attorney generals ago, is the headline in his interrogation of Biden’s nominee for the position? 

But not a mention, naturally, of the most politicized department of justice in American history, run by Jeff Sessions and William Barr, so much so, it became a regular feature of the Trump years to cover how many former U.S. Attorneys had signed this week’s letter denouncing which move by Barr or Sessions…79 one week, 1600 the next, 200 after that?  For what, Barr’s whitewash of the Mueller report?  Or was it his voter fraud memo?  Was it his “immoral” and “undemocratic” support of Trump’s use of military force to clear the way for his photo op with the Bible at the church across from the White House, or was it Barr’s use of the department of justice to help Trump’s reelection effort?  So many memos signed by so many former justice department lawyers denouncing so many political moves, you just lost count.

Uhhh, sorry to interrupt, Senator.  Fox News is on line two.  They’d like another red meat quote.  It’s your pal Josh’s turn!

Watching Josh Hawley question Garland was another out-of-body experience.  You had to wonder if these guys got together in advance and drew straws for who got which red meat questions for Garland.  Hawley apparently drew the “defund the police” straw, because he was all about this terrible trend that’s afoot to somehow “defund the police,” and he wanted to know if Judge Garland was cool with it.  Garland swatted him aside, telling Hawley, “As you no doubt know, President Biden has said he doesn’t support defunding the police, and neither do I.”  Then he proceeded to remind the right-wing mouthpiece from Missouri that 140 police officers were injured in the attack on the Capitol, and three lost their lives.  “We saw how difficult the lives of police officers were in the bodycam videos we saw when they were defending the Capitol,” Garland said.  

How Garland kept himself from mentioning the “power fist” Hawley raised in a salute to the Capitol mob on January 6, I don’t know. But Hawley had gotten in his soundbite about the bugaboo of defunding the police, which will no doubt be all over the Fox News chatateria tonight.

Then it was Tom Cotton’s turn at spinning the Big Wheel.  He apparently hit the race prize, because he went at Garland at length about Biden’s executive order on racial equity, attempting to draw a distinction without a difference: “Are you aware President Biden has signed an executive order stating his administration will affirmatively advance racial equity.  Not racial equality but racial equity?”  “Yes,” Garland shot back. “And I read the opening of that executive order, which defines equity as the fair and impartial treatment of every person, without regard to their status.”

Having lost that spin, Cotton picked a door he thought might produce a bigger prize: the death penalty.  Setting Garland up for the Big-One-Two, Cotton flattered him about his work on the case against Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, reminding the judge that the guilty verdict in the trial included the death penalty.  Did Garland regret going for the death penalty with McVeigh?  No, he didn’t, but his position had evolved over twenty years as he became aware of inequities in the way the death penalty is awarded and carried out. 

Then Cotton sprang his big trap:  what about the death penalty for someone like Dylann Roof, Cotton described as a “white supremacist” who killed nine parishioners in a historically Black church in South Carolina in 2015.  This, and the questions on “racial equity” from a man who last year denounced the New York Times “1619” project as racist, while defending enslavement as a “necessary evil” in our history. Cotton introduced legislation that would bar federal funds from schools that teach the “1619” project.  He also compared Black Lives Matter protests of the killing of George Floyd to racist mobs that tried to shut down school desegregation during the civil rights era and introduced legislation that would ban anyone convicted of an offense at a demonstration from receiving unemployment payments related to COVID.

But fear not, he hit his Fox News talking points with new right-wing code words like “1619” and “racial equity.”

All of this was particularly rich coming from Cruz, Hawley and Cotton, three Ivy League cowboys trying to burnish their back home belt buckles from their perches on the judiciary committee attained with their privileged ticket-punching law degrees from Harvard and Yale, and undergraduate degrees from Princeton, Stanford and Harvard.  

Real genuine red blooded boot-wearin’ good old boys speaking for the folks back home watching Fox News, and oh, by the way, thinkin’ ‘bout runnin’ for president in 2024, doncha know.