I’m watching TV, waiting for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford to begin testifying at the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing.  It’s all a Republican con job, I know, but here we are.

I see this going one of two ways.  If two Republican Senators suddenly find their spines and admit that Trump stumbled by nominating Kavanaugh, then the judge goes back to his lifelong appointment on the second highest court of the land.  Poor baby.  But if things break that way, Republicans win in another way.  That failure will energize their base.  Republican candidates will fare much better in the midterm elections than appears to be the case now.  They will likely keep their majority in the Senate, and the next Supreme Court nomination.

If Kavanaugh isn’t rejected – if Republicans ram this partisan apparatchik into the highest court despite all the unexamined charges and questionable testimony, they get an extreme Supreme Court majority.  That partisan majority will deny most Americans any real power while elevating the rich and corporations to unquestioned legal protection.  The downside for Republicans is that they’ll immediately lose their majority in the House, possibly the Senate too, and the current Republican party might not return to political power for decades.

But their patrons – the rich and powerful – will get the legal protection they will use for more power.  Our American corruption will get worse.

The Republican tactic will be to politicize the entire process as hard as they can.  If Grassley and Sen. Mitch McConnell can’t ram Kavanaugh through, Republicans can shriek about how unfair the system has been to their majorities.  They’ll wave that nonsense in front of the voters for the next five or six weeks.  And it’ll work.

If Republicans win and Kavanaugh is confirmed, Republicans will try to hide behind their political noise, but they’ll lose the House.

The American people lose either way, of course.  My preference is not to have an ideological Supreme Court, but either way is pretty horrible for the American experiment.  The biggest problem the founding fathers confronted – the one question they came back to over and over – was how to prevent corruption from taking over their new government.  And no the GOP is the pro-corruption party, top to bottom.

It’s starting.  Yup, Sen. Chuck Grassley barely broke stride before going straight to political posturing and open lies.