Bitter gumbo: drunken ultra-White male privilege and the political party that didn’t give a damn in 2014

At this point, it would be a bit cliché for me to say “What if me and my Black azz showed up to the job interview amidst word that I drank myself into unconsciousness when I wasn’t trying to rape high school girls, I then melted down in the interviewee seat because I’m pissed that people are judging me before finally holding out my privileged hand to receive the inevitable keys to the office.”

Therefore, I won’t rap about the surreal B.S surrounding the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And for the same reason, I won’t deal with the history of the 60-vote Senate confirmation threshold for SCOTUS confirmations that transitioned to a simple majority, thanks to Democrats.

Instead, I’ll cover how the Party of No Guts temporarily become the Party That Doesn’t give a Damn — and eventually presented the Party of No Brains with the gift of Neil Gorsuch AND Kavanaugh.

You can reference the 2014 midterm elections — cited by Pew as the meh elections — for the source of the Kavanaugh gift.

Meh — where America has seen the lowest voter turnout since World War II.

You only go “Meh” when you think the stakes aren’t high.

Perhaps the Democratic breed of the “Meh” people didn’t think that after losing the house in 2010 and yawning through 2014 to lose the Senate, they would then wake up in 2016 to the sum of all their fears: the election of a Republican President with an inheritance of Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, plus four Supreme Court Justices over the age of 65.

And I’m sure Dems yawned through the chance any of the four Justices could retire or leave this planet.

Those were the stakes in 2014 — but how many people were thinking about such an outcome back then?

Party of No Brains did a better job of getting their people out to the polls in 2014, while the Party of No Guts became the Party That doesn’t Give a Damn and stayed home.

The resultant of those two vectors created more Republican Senate seat victories in 2014 than most analysts expected, along with a cascade of gifts to the now-ruling legislative party.

in February 2016, the new Senate regime blocked the Supreme Court Justice confirmation process for President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

And with the November 2016 elections placing Donald Trump in the Big Chair, he received Senate support to confirm his nominations of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

And more SCOTUS vacancies are possible.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned here, including the one where Obama’s influence did not trickle down to state and local elections.

But as many of you already know, I don’t like to write long-form pieces.

So I’ll leave you with the most obvious and urgent lesson: stakes are high in every election …

song currently stuck in my head: “just do it (joey negro club mix)” – sunburst band