When someone shows you who they are...

 Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.  It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. 

You blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel!

-Jesus of Nazareth (The Gospel according to Matthew 23: 23-24)

I have to tell you that I was rooting for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to hold out in her battle against pancreatic cancer as strongly as I have rooted for just about anything in recent memory.  I am not at all surprised that the Republican Party is now engaged in one of the most shocking acts of hypocrisy in recent memory (and we have had some good ones).  What does surprise me is that they didn't even wait 24 hours to do it.  I saw the headlines that RBG had passed and the headlines that Yertle the Turtle had vowed to hold confirmation hearings for Trump's nominee almost simultaneously.  I am not at all surprised that the same man who solemnly defended the franchise of the voters to deny Merrick Garland even a hearing, is now flip flopping.  I just sort of thought he might wait a day or two to proclaim his galling cynicism.

I have found myself reading and re-reading Matthew 23 quite a bit over the last several years, because of Jesus' repeated use of the formula: "Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"  There are not many charges that indict our current political system with as unavoidable a stain as that of hypocrisy.  The fact that our highest court full of people we actually call "justices" will now have two people who are there because of a miscarriage of justice in the form of a blatant and cynical political maneuver (Gorsuch who should be Garland, and whoever this might be), two people (Kavannaugh and Thomas) who were credibly accused of misconduct (at least in Thomas' case the matter was fully prosecuted rather than summarily dismissed), is a rather dire summation of where we are as a culture vis a vis actual justice being done.

I understand that the skillful practice of law sometimes involves pulling the strings in the books and finding the loopholes.  I get that justice might be somehow served in convicting Al Capone of tax evasion rather than any of the myriad acts of violence he undoubtedly had on his hands.  I get that winning a not guilty verdict based on procedural missteps by police and prosecutors may put the guilty back on the street.  I know that the practice of law can be messy, but when it comes to things like the Supreme Court of the United States, the symbolism and the perception really matter much more than they do at the Charles County Circuit court.  There is a certain austerity to the proceedings of the SCOTUS that stands us all in good stead, unless of course it becomes tainted by political machinations, which it already is and which will, unavoidably, be worse however this turns out.

If we could go back in time and stop the Borking of Robert Bork, would it help?  Maybe, but ones suspects there were many off ramps on the road to this place we currently stand.  Unless a Delorean pulls up with a pair of flaming tire tracks, or a blue police box materializes, I guess we can't really know.  The fact of the matter is that right now we have yet another case where the majority of the country is hoping that four Republicans will have the spine to stand up to Yertle the Turtle King as he barks orders from the top of his stack of turtles, which is imminently in danger of collapsing and tossing him into the mud.  Our founding fathers, as white, landowning males, feared the tyranny of the majority, they did not actually want the uneducated masses who worked their plantations and dug in their mines to actually set the agenda for their nation.  However, they had this high-minded idea of democracy, which was an untested experiment in 1776, which drew them to create institutions that might rule without a tyrant, and which might stand a chance of providing liberty and justice for all.

Even if we take their flaws into account, you have to admit we're letting them down right now, when we tolerate this sort of behavior from any of our elected leaders.  Without engaging in false equivalence I can say that if I ever see a Democrat displaying the level of hypocrisy that is going on in the Republican Senate right now, I will not vote for them, not because I would necessarily disagree with the action, but because integrity matters, consistency and constancy matter.  If they could be this cynical and hypocritical, they are not trustworthy to hold power.  The poet Maya Angelou said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."

I do, and I will not forget this.  However, I am also conscious of the fact that my anger in this moment is prone to lead me down the path of hatred, and that I will not forget either.  I will mock Yertle the Turtle, but I will not hate him.  He makes my blood boil, but I will not let him poison my soul.  I will root for his fall into the mud as much as I rooted for RBG to prolong her earthly sojourn.  I have some degree of confidence that it will come, because pride and arrogance have a way of biting their practitioners.

"Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation." (Mt 23: 36)