Senate confirms Trump’s 100th judicial nominee

For the past 40 years or so a conservative movement to install a permanently conservative government has been working its way to victory and the democratic party has hardly at all been able to slow down, let alone stop, its movement.  Why?  How is it that conservatives have been able win state houses and state legislatures and use these wins to implement redistricting plans that all but insure that further conservative victories will take place?  Gerrymandering has occurred because democrats have lost enough election to allow states to determine the outcomes of national elections.  And those state elections have insured that in a good many places in the United States, students are educated in school systems that operate under the guidance of conservatives, this in the public schools and now through the successful push to turn public schools private through chartering and private schools wealthier by the use of vouchers to help some parents pay for schools that are not public.

The pattern of democrats to republicans and back to democrats in presidential elections has done conservatism well, moderate democratic presidents setting the stage for subsequent republican presidents to use their power to carry out the conservative agenda, the democrats when in power using it to find ways to heal and reconcile.  Consider that after Clinton who pushed nothing left came G. W. Bush who threw the country so far right that Obama’s victory and his presidency could hardly do anything the least bit useful in quelling a right wing takeover of government.  The achievements of Obama’s presidency did nothing to stop the right-wing juggernaut from taking over more and ever more, democrats to timid to fight, not just because they wanted to be polite but because, except for some social issues they cared about or pretended to care about, they were willing to go along with bigger picture aspects of conservatives, corporatization of the nation and their empowerment to dominate in governance most grievously by shaping law to suit their corporate desires.

Now the courts are being made to even better serve the conservative agenda.  The democrats have not been able to save this last chance for justice institution from conservative intrusions.  The law is being turned into an instrument to protect corporate wrong doing and to do away with those pesky civil rights that get in the way of the right of those who own to do anything they want with the people they want to more fully own.

We are at a point where neither elections or dependence on the law will save whatever is left of justice under the law and, with the law now under the ownership of conservatives, democratic process is close to dead, the society run almost fully by a corporate leadership that has little concern for the general welfare and the common good.

This is a very dangerous situation made more terrible by there being no group with real power to resist by using the law and the political system.  Other courses of action are necessary but few are willing to take such routes.