The focus so far as the Kavanaugh vote goes has been on Flake, Collins and Murkowski, the so-called moderate Republicans. (That phrase is now officially an oxymoron.) Not much attention has been paid to the DINO Democrats, Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp, who have expressed varying degrees of openness to voting for Kavanaugh.
They fear, apparently, that voting against Kavanaugh will discourage the people who would never vote for them in a million years from voting for them, while, as all good Democrats do, they show no concern about the numbers of potential votes they throw away by convincing potential Democratic voters that there’s really no point in voting at all.
Presumably, they would like to vote against the guy, but they’re afraid. A lot of that fear stems, as it always does, from pathetic Democratic messaging. The ideological opposition to him has focused almost solely on abortion and women’s rights; the political opposition almost solely on his treatment of women.
The Democrats don’t seem to notice, or don’t want to notice, that the anti-abortion judges that the Republicans appoint are not being appointed for their anti-abortion views. In their heart of hearts (if they have hearts), they don’t care about abortion. Those views are featured to appeal to their own base, because, after all, even the nutjobs might have a problem if the Republicans were upfront about the fact that the real reason these guys are being advanced is because they are reliable pro-corporate, anti-people votes. A subset of people is “working people” and it would be no exaggeration for Joe Manchin to justify a negative vote by saying, in effect, that the lies Kavanaugh told the Judiciary committee were troubling in and of themselves, but what really pushed him toward a no vote was that Kavanaugh never met a corporation he didn’t like, or a worker that he did. His judicial record amply supports such a statement. The people of West Virginia would get that, but they have to hear it from someone. Democrats being Democrats, they probably never will.
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