What the Hell Did I Watch Happen at the Supreme Court on Thursday?

From Esquire, by Charles P. Pierce:

WASHINGTON—Some notebook leftovers from a bad day for democracy before the United States Supreme Court.

My Bad Faith Meter is broken, perhaps irretrievably. I sat there and listened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh spout off about the dangers of runaway special counsels, all the while remembering that he made his GOP bones working for Kenneth F*cking Starr and the Great Penis Chase of 1998. I also sat there and listened to Justice Sam Alito warn darkly of how future presidents could be imperiled if we held the most recent former president* liable for the crimes he committed against us all. I seemed to recall that, prior to the decision that Alito authored to strip women of privacy rights they’d enjoyed for a half century, people warned Alito and the rest of them about the potential consequences of doing that. With states running amok with anti-choice laws, the way they ran amok with voter-suppression laws after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, women would perhaps die of the complications of a difficult pregnancy. We would end up with a patchwork of state laws that would require women to cross several state lines in order to obtain the care they needed. Alito, caught up in searching out precedents from seventeenth-century British witch-hunting judges, didn’t let these predictions of what might happen in this century if he did what he said he was going to do. All of that stuff has come to pass.

Bad Historical Theater got quite a workout as well. Kavanaugh cited Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon as being “very controversial in the moment—hugely unpopular, probably why he lost in ’76. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history, I think, by most people.” Uhhh, no. Recent polling saw support for the pardon drop like a stone as the last presidency* ground on, which really should have taught Kavanaugh…something.

But the wildest and furthest off-the-wall reference came from Justice Clarence Thomas, who referenced the possibility of John F. Kennedy’s being prosecuted for participating in Operation Mongoose when he left office in 1968. (Of course, as The New York Times dryly pointed out, JFK never had a chance to be a former president.) According to Thomas:

“Over the not-so-distant past…certain presidents have engaged in various activity, coups or operations like Operation Mongoose, when I was a teenager, and yet there were no prosecutions. Why? If what you’re saying is right, it would seem that would have been ripe for criminal prosecution of someone.”

Mongoose was a CIA-sponsored campaign of terrorism against Cuba in the 1960s. It was the CIA’s response to the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It involved crop burnings, industrial sabotage, and proposed assassinations, some of them immortally wacky. (Exploding sea shells. Exploding cigars. Poisoning Castro. Making his beard fall out.) The Kennedy brothers probably let this go on too long, but they suspended the program in 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. Added historical note: There is considerable evidence that former Mongoosers may have been involved in the president’s murder a year later. This would have been an actual coup d’état. Thanks for the memories, Clarence.