Practically speaking, I am nobody.

I can’t make the stock market dip or the sun halt in the sky.

But because I am one of “we the people,” my voice is as important as anyone’s in this great republican democracy laid low the last two years by a shallow, narcissistic demagoguery.

As one of the people, I have a few things to say, and happily, our Constitution demands that no one stop me.

But in honor of not adding to the tsunami of lies, misrepresentations and cruelty now flooding the land, I will try to be fair and truthful in describing what should have just happened in Congress but instead the opposite did — and how we might have transcended all of it.

A ‘zero-sum’ game

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a 2016 presidential candidate with Donald Trump, hit the nail on the head in an interview Sunday morning with CNN’s Dana Bash, who was sitting in for Jake Tapper on his “State of the Union” news program.

Gov. Kasich said the fundamental problem with the current combative milieu created by so-called “Bully in Chief” Trump is that the president has refashioned American politics as a “zero-sum” game, where winning is the only thing and compromise viewed as a loss. The GOP and GOP-led Congress are fully, even enthusiastically, complicit.

The second most critical problem, with Kavanagh’s forced confirmation against national will, is damage to the reputation of the Supreme Court as a bastion of judicious nonpartisanship. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota, an at-risk lawmaker who is now trailing in a tough re-election fight and who still voted against Kavanaugh, warned of what the confirmation means:

“We have a highly partisan executive branch; we have a highly partisan legislative branch. We now have injected that partisanship into the judicial branch.”

That’s the entire government.

What about the rest of us?

Lost in all of this win-at-all-costs one-sidedness is the essential democratic ideal that elected officials should first strive to do what is best for the country as a whole, next what is best for their constituents and then, lastly, what’s best for each party and their narrow interests.

In GOP circles and with the president, the narrow interests of party have been selfishly rammed past all others to the top spot.

The victim is we the people, all of us, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, gays and straights (and other permutations of sexuality), believers and nontheists. Everyone.

A ‘genius’ for compromise

This deficit of compromise is hugely important to consider.

In Ken Burn’s magisterial and groundbreaking documentary The Civil War, Southern historian Shelby Foote explained that the devasting conflict was an “enormous catastrophe” that erupted “because [Americans] failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise.”

We are now experiencing an ever-worsening lack of compromise in American public life because, while the first casualty has been truth in President Trump’s present-day civil war against the news media and nonconservative pundits, the second casualty has necessarily been trust between the two main tribes of the American nation.

This is critical, because without trust true compromise with shared benefits is impossible.

The conundrum

So that is the setup to what we just went through, where a woman, Stanford research psychologist and professor Christine Blasey Ford, compellingly and at high personal cost testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the then nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, tried to rape her some 36 years ago at a house party. Kavanaugh forcefully denied he was present at the house on the night in question and that he knew nothing whatsoever about the event described by Dr. Blasey Ford.

Complicating this he-said/she-said scenario is the fact that no one has been able to materially corroborate Dr. Ford’s accusation, and that the professor herself is fuzzy on the peripheral details if “100%” certain of the assault and the alleged assaulter. Even Dr. Ford’s best friend, who she said was at the party, while recently saying she supported her old friend’s account to authorities, said she simply does not remember such a party.

What should have happened

In a Congress devoted to fair play and compromise, the conflict should have been evolved something along these lines:

Judiciary Committee members, noting that accuser and accused were both widely deemed credible and because an unbiased Supreme Court is so critical to the nation’s health, should have sought as wide an FBI investigation as possible to determine which side had the more plausible case. That would have included interviewing what eventually amounted to scores of potential witnesses. However, the White House and the Congress ended up supporting only a partial investigation that did not look into evidence that Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker in high school and college with potential blackouts, at odds with his testimony to the committee and in TV interviews in which he painted himself as more of a Boy Scout than a rather debauched and boozy adolescent.

If such a fair-minded and comprehensive investigation had been launched to identify truth more precisely, it would have had two important results: (1) unearthing of evidence further challenging Dr. Ford’s accusation, or indicating Kavanaugh dissembled before the committee and was a much more robust drinker in his earlier days, and may have thus been unable to remember events he participated in that might have been boorish or even criminal in nature regarding young women, or (2) uncovering convincing evidence seeming to increase the veracity of Dr. Ford’s claim or Judge Kavanaugh’s denial.

With a more thorough FBI probe, the committee’s members undoubtedly would have obtained far more information relevant to the case than they ultimately received, making them likely far better equipped to render a fair and substantiated decision.

A bare-bones probe instead

But the committee chose a bare-bones background investigation, which unduly hamstrung the entire confirmation process. Why? The best bet is that Republican members of the committee were very concerned that a longer investigation would delay getting Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination confirmed (some key conservative issues are now before the high court), possibly find damaging evidence against him that might scuttle his nomination, and inevitably take the whole, disturbing process closer to the mid-term elections in November, when the GOP fears a potential bloodbath at the polls.

Be that as it may, the committee’s first responsibility should not ever be to the party of majority members but to the health in perpetuity of our democratic system. They clearly did not make the latter calculation.

Good faith?

In a more perfect union, in which elected officials are deeply committed to fair play and good faith, honest appraisal and rational compromise in service to the many rather than the few in power, the committee would have paused more fully after Dr. Ford’s credible, dispiriting testimony and considered whether it was responsible, or honorable, to insist on forcing the sitting of a justice already deeply unpopular with a majority of Americans and now under a cloud of “credible” suspicion. Whether it was good for the country or just minority-vote, majority-rule Republicans.

But they didn’t, not even after Kavanaugh came out swinging after a break in his televised testimony and, in an unprecedented display for a Supreme Court nominee, spewed a litany of crude GOP partisanship, conspiracy theories against the Clintons and the Democratic Party, and rude attacks on senators asking questions he didn’t like.

This can’t be the quality of Supreme Court justices we should expect. Even if he felt wrongly accused, he should have been able to hold it together, responding thoughtfully and without rancor. As judicious Dr. Ford did.

Whither a more perfect union?

In a more perfect union, the committee would have withdrawn Kavanaugh’s nomination as too divisive to the nation and urged the president to nominate another conservative jurist, but one not as partisan, contentious and laden with ethical baggage. A nominee who the country could coalesce around, not cleave under.

In a more perfect union, during the partisan fever pitch of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing the committee would have stepped back from a dangerous brink and endorsed the nomination of someone else — especially after 2,400 law professors from around the country and retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens publicly implored the committee not to confirm Kavanaugh.

Merrick Garland, the eminent, centrist chief circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals since 1997, would have been the perfect compromise choice in an uncompromising time.

You remember Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee to the high court, whom the Judiciary Committee, for naked political purposes, refused to even grant a hearing near the end of the president’s second term. Garland was a apolitical centrist when the president and Republican Party wanted a hard-right partisan on the court to shove its already conservative balance emphatically toward the nation’s minority view.

The committee had a golden opportunity earlier this month to right a wrong and do something honorable and healing for we the people, not me the president and GOP.

If only.

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