Court of Upheavals

By Bill Maher

The media pays attention to Trump’s tweets as if each one were a mini Magna Carta, but Trump is doing real damage without the attention his damage deserves. Dismantling the EPA and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance. And perhaps the biggest change he’s made – the courts. He’s filling vacancies in all the places Republicans wouldn’t allow Obama to fill vacancies. Because everyone knows the Constitution says presidents get to appoint judges, but only when they’re white.

The latest is a doozy. Her name is Wendy Vitter. She’s the wife of Louisiana Senator David Vitter. You remember David Vitter, don’t you? He’s the “family values” Senator who it turned out had all the holes punched in his whorehouse loyalty card. 

Trump wants to make Wendy Vitter a federal judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana. That’s a lifetime appointment. And yet at her Senate hearing, she would not say whether or not she believed Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided. That’s the six-decade-old Supreme Court decision that desegregated schools and declared, “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” It was a unanimous decision. In 1954. But in 2018, when Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked her, “Do you believe that Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided,” Wendy Vitter said, “I don’t mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with.” Really? You can’t say “separate but equal” should be unconstitutional? I don’t get it. Is she trying to get to the right of Trump for the Republican primaries? Who would this offend, other than maybe David Duke?

What’s more, Wendy Vitter has also been a pro-life advocate her entire adult life, and is known for pushing junk science to further her crusade against a woman’s right to choose. So Senator Blumenthal asked her another question: does she still agree with the false statement she made in 2013 that Planned Parenthood kills “over 150,000 females a year”? She didn’t walk that back either.

Yes, this is what happens when you lose elections to the modern day Republican Party: you get your courts staffed by the lady holding the poster of the aborted fetus.