The Most Criminally-Oriented U.S. "President"-- An Illegitimate One, At That-- Is Being Allowed To Pack The Courts With Rubbish Nominees

Brain Fallon's in his mid-30s and he's been the picture of an up-and-comg establishment Democrat for a decade. Even before he graduated from Harvard, he had worked as a press aide in the doomed 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign. Two years later he was the press secretary for Bob Menendez's Senate race and then went to work as the spokesman for Chuck Schumer and his Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Center. In 2013 Eric Holder hired him as the head of DOJ's public affairs department and, naturally, in 2015 he was the Hillary campaign's national press secretary. Since that collapsed he's been a CNN commentator. He's half of the Katie Beirne/Brian Fallon DC power couple.

In July, Fallon penned a short OpEd for USAToday, Demand Justice: Saving Courts From Donald Trump about a new organization he founded on May, Demand Justice, of which he is executive director. "With a lot of hard work," he wrote, "we might one day succeed in restoring a majority of progressive justices to the Supreme Court, and then have a chance to overturn the Citizens United decision. But we will never achieve the type of reform we seek so long as progressives continue to sit on our hands and cede the playing field to right-wing groups."

His new role has led to some surprising tweets, like the one up top and these in the last couple of days:

Last week Fallon told Bloomberg News that "Mitch McConnell is in the middle of stealing the federal courts for conservatives, and Democrats continue to bring a butter knife to a gunfight. Democrats should be resisting Trump's judge picks at every turn, not agreeing to fast track, as happened this week. It is hard to think of a more pathetic surrender heading into the Kavanaugh hearings"

Let's listen to this segment from Ian Masters' August 30 radio program, an interview with Lisa Graves, formerly the Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Senator Patrick Leahy and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration. She agrees that there has never been, at least in recent years, a "more secretive, corrupt and troubling process" than in the Kavanaugh nomination and confirmation process. "What's the incentive to fast-track a number of other Trump nominees? What did the Democratic leadership get out of that at this point? It's further packing the courts. I'm not sure that the negotiating strategy makes any sense at all and certainly this idea that you've got to protect Joe Manchin at all costs or that you've got to protect Heidi Heitkamp at all costs, even to the detriment of the future of jurisprudence, the future of judicial rulings of the United States for decades to come, just doesn't make any sense at all on any ordinary person's calculus. The courts are more important than some seat in West Virginia, quite frankly... If Democrats like Joe Manchin were actually talking about the issues-- about what's really happening in America and how Trump is screwing everyone over and how this nomination would further screw people over by putting another corporatist on the court, then maybe he wouldn't be having such a hard time."

Masters: "My understanding is that the real problem is Schumer himself, along with Senator Feinstein. They have made the calculus that fighting Kavanaugh and revealing what they know about him [he's a womanizer with a drinking and gambling problem, not just a car-pooling dad] will backfire on the vulnerable Democratic senators-- Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill. They're apparently willing to let Kavanaugh go through. Schumer, I think, is a total disgrace, the last person who should be the mijority leader of the Democrats. And apparently Feinstein is so mad at the Democratic Left because of how she's been treated here in California-- and hasn't gotten the endorsement of the California Democratic Party... So she's going to stick it to the progressive political left by supporting Kavanaugh."

Would it be any different if, instead of a sleepy conservative like Feinstein, we had an actual dynamic progressive in the Senate representing California? I asked Kevin de León, who has been endorsed by the state Democratic Party over Feinstein for the Senate seat, how he sees the battle to stop Kavanaugh. "Senate Democratic leadership," he told me today, "is wasting its time demanding documents from Chuck Grassley and agreeing to confirm Trump judicial nominees-- instead of rounding up 'No' votes from its own caucus. It’s time for Senator Feinstein and Senator Schumer to stop playing polite, country-club politics with a Supreme Court nominee who represents one of the greatest threats to a woman’s right to choose in our lifetime. California’s senior Senator made the grave mistake of opening the door for Kavanaugh’s confirmation once before. Given the mathematical challenge before us, and all that is at stake, we do not have the luxury of waging this fight from the sidelines. That’s why I’m calling on Senator Feinstein to leverage the power of her seniority to make sure Senate Democrats are committed to unanimously rejecting the President’s nominee."