I haven’t watched much of the confirmation hearings for Tejani Brown but the bits and pieces I have caught have been heinous. No other word for it. Mostly I have caught glimpses while on rounds in my patient’s rooms. I ended youtubing clips of Amy Cony Barrett’s hearings for some context and that was no less painful to watch. I’m not sure why we have deemed it an acceptable practice for a group of sleazy senators who contribute very little towards the day to day running of this country to openly disrespect JUDGES on cable TV. Somehow this is a validated vetting process for a supreme court justice. I feel like coming out of my skin just sitting through a few minutes of the probing and deeply insulting line of questioning. Watching respectable people eventually crumble and openly weep under insults isn’t particularly fun for me. We all know Ted Cruz is a well-paid circus clown whether we care to admit it out loud or not. So, I’m just confused by all of this pageantry. It’s a series of schoolboys and girls letting loose a litany of their most obnoxious playground antics. Its otters gone wild. It’s Spring break meets fraternity rush week on steroids. A turkey on Ritalin doing a keg stand. I could keep going but I just won’t.
I now have a particular disdain for Sen Lindsay Graham of South Carolina. If I didn’t already have a problem with his ardent Trump support in the past his antics during the confirmation really places him in a whole new category. He wants you to believe that this woman who is ridiculously qualified for this job is somehow too soft on pedophiles and war criminals to qualify for SCOTUS. I will say this, I left the military in part because I learned after the fact that I am actually a pacifist and that there were certain military assignments that were incompatible with my calling as a Christian. I imagine that Brown may have faced this conundrum as well in her legal career. I will give you a prime example. The military reserves the right to place you on assignment anywhere in the world including duty stations that house war criminals. A war criminal is anyone the military reserves the right to torture information out of utilizing any means necessary. As a soldier in the military, your duty to the military is supposed to supersede your personal values. That was one of the prime reasons I knew I couldn’t continue a career in the military. When it came down to it, if I ever got stationed in Guam or Guantanamo Bay, my calling as a Christian and a physician would come first and foremost. There would be no way in the world I would stand by and allow human beings to be treated inhumanely or killed in the name of obtaining ‘critical’ information or obtaining the advantage on the enemy. But that’s choosing duty before God and career before conviction. The reality for most Christians is that your loyalty to Christ will conflict with your loyalty to most other institutions at some point in time and you will just have to walk away from the big titles or altogether in order to preserve your integrity.
At one point Sen Graham asked Judge Brown if she agreed with the beliefs of the client she was defending. The sheer ridiculousness of that question nearly made me lose the ability to continue standing in my patient’s room as I was speaking to her family member about her discharge plan. What a prick (the Senator, not the family member). I obviously do not adopt the beliefs of every patient I treat. I have saved the lives of many jerks who would loudly and proudly support legislation preventing people like me from having professional degrees and getting loans to live in the nice neighborhoods where people drive around in golf carts. I can promise you if that turdwad keeled over from cardiac arrest in front of me I would fight like hell to bring back his pulse, not because I give a darn about his crappy political career but because I ultimately answer to King Jesus for absolutely everything that I do. I suspect that if more Christians functioned like they actually believed that they are accountable to Jesus above all else then very few would dare to even participate in such public freak shows in the first place. I’m not judging Tejani for doing it. She is probably actually called to endure it. I, on the other hand, am called to be snarky.
All joking aside…I have no following but if I did, I would want the powers to be to know that there are serious Americans out there that are exhausted by the public spectacle. Trump and his disciples of fake news hysteria need to ‘just die and let die’ if that’s a thing. Please take the extremists of your parties out for regular cathartic activities like sumo wrestling matches and wipe out. Meanwhile, let the sane middle of the road politicians who actually want to reach across the aisle run this country effectively do so with reasonable gusto. Like my favorite Veggie Tales creator once said, ‘Let’s make politics boring again.’ Who’s with me?
Addendum 4/3/22: Because I am on the spectrum of type A, I feel the need to add that I read part of a transcript for Judge Brown's confirmation hearing and she was asked if she holds a position on whether or not people possess natural rights. She replied that she held no position. Inalienable rights is a founding principle of this country That was a perfectly good and reasonable question with a concerning and unsatisfactory answer. Just clarifying that I am not 'Team Tejani' by any stretch. I just don't like open cruelty no matter who it's directed against.
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