Fighting dirty doesn't mean doing illegal shit. It does mean you might have to stretch laws and ethics to their breaking point. It definitely means doing shit that will make you hate yourself. But if you want to win a war, you have to be willing to get filthy in the trenches. As I said yesterday, Democrats have to stop acting like any rules govern our politics anymore.
So it must go for the battle over the Supreme Court and after. While it's almost a certainty that the rabid bitch hounds of the GOP will get their second pound of judicial flesh onto the court in the wake of Anthony Kennedy's resignation, Democrats can and must fight like it's life or death. Because it really is about life and death, flesh and blood. Bodies, especially the bodies of women and people of color, are on the goddamn line. Fight because losing this fight is what can win the next one. Throwing every fucking rule and bylaw at Republicans to slow down the process is a start.
And here's what else can we do now (in descending order of dirtiness):
1. Stop trying to convince everyone that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are a bunch of fucking hypocrites because they're all of a sudden fine with voting on a Supreme Court justice in an election year. To say that Republicans are hypocrites is like saying that dogs eat shit. It's what they do. They're Republicans.
The real fight is over who Trump is. A man who may have a personal case before the court should not get to appoint a judge on that court. See how simple that is? See that fuckin' messaging? It's clear and concise. It's not the complex "President Trump is current under investigation and we should await the Robert Mueller's report on whether or not Trump or people around him committed crimes." Fuck that. Go with "You don't get to appoint your judge. Why should Trump?"
It's not gonna stop shit, but it will set up a way to delegitimize any Supreme Court decision that, say, allows Trump to pardon himself.
2. Let's call this the Susan Collins/Lisa Murkowski Hail Mary. These two GOP senators have both expressed support for Roe v. Wade, and there is no way in the deepest circle of Hell that Trump is not going to nominate someone who can't wait piss on the corpses of women who die of botched back alley abortions. One or both might be willing to vote against an anti-choice nominee. And with McCain not being able to vote, that'd be enough.
But, more likely, if they're part of the Republican caucus, they're just gonna suck it up and take their Mitch marching orders. So Democrats need to get them to leave their caucus. It's not that unusual for politicians to switch parties. Collins, in particular, might be an easy get for Democrats. Clinton won Maine in 2016 (well, in the apportioned electors there, she got 3 and Trump got 1), and the one district in the state, hell, in all of New England, that did go for Trump now gives him a 43% approval rating, with 52% disapproving. Overall, the state has Trump around 39% approval. Maine also consistently has supported abortion rights by big majorities. If Collins says that she doesn't want to belong to the party of Trump, that's a fucking compelling argument that her constituents would hear.
Democrats should push hard here. And I mean fucking hard, like offering Collins and Murkowski (Alaskans, while a bit more enamored of Trump, are also big supporters of abortion rights) or any other stray Republican who might want to awake in the morning with an ounce of self-respect just about anything they want to either become Democrats or independents who caucus with the Democrats. And I mean fuckin' anything, from committee chairs to a night of passion with Joe Kennedy III. Promise no primary candidate and offer tons of cash to campaigns and SuperPACs.
Get fuckin' skeevy on this, Democrats. And if you get both Collins and Murkowski, you can take back the Senate until at least the midterms.
3. But now we're gonna get even skeevier. Rumors are that Donald Trump paid for at least one abortion for one of his fuckmates. And you know that not only is he responsible for at least a handful of abortions, but that a shit-ton of righteous Christians in the GOP have paid for abortions, had an abortion, or have family who have, and all are relieved it was safe and legal. Statistically, it's just fucking likely. So it's time for the media (not Democratic politicians) to call them out, as many as you can find, all the fetus-loving saints who want abortion on demand when they demand it and then want to deny it for others.
This is the really big hypocrisy. You think that Tim Murphy, who resigned over telling his mistress to get an abortion, is an outlier? Fuck no. Is it really beyond the pale to out people like this? Well, it's also beyond the pale to want to get rid of abortion rights for a large number of women in this country. It's also beyond the pale to support a president who has no problem taking children from their parents or naming people enemies of the state. Lots of shit we thought was beyond the pale is now part of the pale. This is the country we have. You play on the field you've got.
You might say that this could backfire, that it could lead to other invasions of privacy. Yeah. And? I said this was dirty. Republicans want to invade the most intimate aspects of our existence and fuck them up. You think that anti-choice nutzoids don't want to get to a point where they're publishing lists of women who've had abortions? Because, motherfuckers, they're already trying to do that. We're a hop, skip, and fruit-blessed jump from Gilead.
Look, I'm not an idiot. None of this is likely to work. It's something of a thought experiment, maybe even a fantasy. But it's a set-up for the next and potentially the biggest battle, the midterms.
(Note: I get that some of this might inspire the right and, especially, evangelicals to vote heavily in the midterms. But that can be mitigated by exciting the Democratic voters and independents. More on that tomorrow.)
