We’ve all heard that it’s better to deal with the devil you know rather than the one you don’t. In the United States, we have a system in which the nine individuals set policy for one of the three branches of government and they don’t have to tell us a damn thing about themselves when applying for the job.

Imagine any other job interview in which you didn’t have to answer the questions thrown your way. What if you could respond to a possible employer with words to the effect of “I don’t want to answer your hypothetical question about what I would do in that situation because I might actually be called upon to answer it when I’m on the job.”

This is the way that the Senate Judiciary Committee has operated with Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s first nominee for the United States Supreme Court. But this is not a Trumpian – Republican-controlled Senate problem. This is a structural and procedural issue in governance that has existed through most of our history.

The mythology of our judicial system is that the bench is populated with judges who bring no pre-conceived notions to their jobs. Year after year, generation after generation, members of the elite Senate Judiciary Committee has continued to perpetuate this myth.

It’s a charade. Senators may ask Supreme Court nominees what their views are on Roe v Wade, or on affirmative action, or executive privilege, or virtually anything else of importance that might come before the Court. But the history of responses, and now the expectations of responses, is that the nominees are going to stonewall the questions. We learn nothing.

CNN reports:

Gorsuch declined to explain his legal views or offer an assessment of past Supreme Court cases. He said he decides disputes based only on the facts and the law. “There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge,” he asserted. “We just have judges in this country.”

Gorsuch’s assertion that there are no Republican or Democratic judges is laughable when we look at perhaps the most important decision of modern times, Bush v Gore. It was a straight party-line vote, with Bush getting the votes of all five justices appointed by Republican presidents and Gore getting the votes from the four justices appointed by Democrats.

The Members of the Supreme Court tell us how it’s all about the law, not about the people who appear before the court. How can you possibly separate the two, especially when so many laws are poorly crafted, nefariously intended, and the brainchilds of legislators who shame the idea of the democracy that our founding fathers created?

Let’s be for real. The situations that come before the Supreme Court are tricky and they deserve the best kind of deliberation possible. Yes, the justices must take into consideration the laws and historical precedent, but equally important are the particular people involved in the case, and what the expected outcomes of their decision would be in contemporary society. The Justices need to apply a balance of reason and empathy to every case before them.

This is why Supreme Court nominees must not be approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee when they don’t answer questions such as what their views are on abortion, euthanasia, affirmative action, the powers of the presidency, and more. Since the justices are nominated by partisan presidents, we should come to expect that the nominees will hold partisan views. That’s okay. What’s not okay is for us to not know how far to the left or right their views happen to be.

Neil Gorsuch might be the best we can get from Donald Trump. But senators are being asked to vote for him largely sight unseen. Democrats don’t have to oppose him because of the injustice done to Merrick Garland or because we’re about to learn more regarding Trump and Russia. Democrats have the opportunity to set a new standard for approval, one that will apply to their nominees as well. What better time than now to cut the BS and allow Senators and the American people alike to be informed voters. Make Gorsuch sit until he answers the questions.

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Republicans like to talk about honesty; frequently that means being brash and politically incorrect. It’s incumbent for Democrats to see honesty as telling the truth.

There are lies and then there are evasions. No one is better at that than Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s “explainer-in-chief.” She can go hand-to-hand with Rachel Maddow for the better part of an hour and rarely say anything that is true, but her audience (the Trump audience) either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care.

I was quite disappointed by what I heard from a Democrat on Maddow’s show on Thursday, December 29. The guest for the segment was Kelly Ward, and the substitute host was Ari Melber.

Ms. Ward had just been tapped by Democrats and Barack Obama to become the point person in the Democrats’ effort to counter the inevitable gerrymandering of Congressional and state legislative districts that Republicans will try to do following the 2020 census. Gerrymandering is the process of manipulating the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favor one party or class. Both parties have engaged in it through the years, but in recent times, no one has been as effective as the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party in drawing districts in 2012 following the 2010 census.

An example of a gerrymandered district is Florida’s 5^th Congressional District, shown below. Districts are supposed to be “compact and contiguous,” meaning that they should come as close as possible to resembling a rectangle with near-equal sides as possible. Obviously Florida’s 5^th does not do that.

Before anyone gets too bent out of shape by what the Republicans have done, they should first recognize that this is a district that was created with the collaboration of Democrats. In fact, it is actually a district that has been represented by a Democrat, Congresswoman Corinne Brown. It is one of those “minority majority” districts that Republicans and Democrats alike have favored in recent years. As originally constructed, it wound from African-American neighborhoods to Jacksonville to other African-American neighborhoods in Orlando.

Democrats liked the “sure seat,” and Republicans liked that Democratic voters were concentrated in single districts, making most adjacent districts clear for Republicans. However, Democrats objected, and on July 11, 2014, Florida Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis ruled that this district, along with the neighboring District 10, had been drawn to favor the Republican party by packing black Democratic voters into District 5. On August 1, Judge Lewis gave Florida’s state legislature an Aug. 15 deadline to submit new congressional maps for those two districts.

As it turns out, with the boundaries redrawn for the 2016, the 5^th is still represented by an African-American, albeit Al Lawson rather than Corinne Brown.

Ward, the woman tasked with opposing future Republican gerrymandering, was asked by Melber:

Yet, the flip side, which people who are in the Democratic party sometimes talk about, and certainly a lot of progressive reformers talk about it, just adding more gerrymandering isn’t necessarily good. Some Democrats have caught on to that. Take a look at, for example, the Florida fifth district. This is Corrine Brown, drawn obviously in a weird way. That is not contiguous. It doesn’t look like a community. It doesn’t look like something you’d draw for any normal reason and, yet, the Democrat there, Representative Brown, fought to keep it that way after the Republicans redrew it that way. Are you also going to be defending those kind of maps?

Ward responded:

Our goal is to make sure that the process is fair, that Democrats have a seat at the table, and that Democrats can compete on a fair playing field. We have not seen that because of the Republican gerrymandering. Florida is a perfect example of this. The Florida voters passed an initiative giving the legislature boundaries for drawing the maps, and the Republican legislators completely ignored those regulations put on them by the voters and passed what was then later determined to be an illegal map.

In fact, four of the nine seats that Democrats picked up in the House in 2016 were because of redistricting lawsuits that overturned illegal Republican maps, including in Florida. We know that when that happens, Democrats do better. Democrats generally pick up more seats. When the process is more fair, Democrats do better. That is really our goal and that’s what we’ll stay focused on.

Here is video. Kelly Ward does not come on screen until about the half-way point of the clip.

What’s the problem? The problem is that Ward never criticized Florida’s 5^th as it had been drawn for Corinne Brown’s convenience. When Melber asked her, “Are you also going to be defending those kind of maps?” she walked around it, in a Kellyanne Conway fashion.

Progressive Democrats need to have honest answers to today’s problems. We cannot utilize the Republican tactic of diversion if we are to be believed. It will not take long into the Trump presidency for more and more Americans to know that they have been swindled. Democrats need to do three things: (1) provide the public with honest answers, (2) be true to a progressive agenda, and (3) reach out to those voters who were so disaffected from the system that they chose Trump in 2016. Let’s hope that Ward gets that message.

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You may not like what Donald Trump has to say, but you have to admit that there is a certain openness, even rawness, to what he says. Politics is such a canned sport; it’s almost like professional wrestling with everything scripted in advance.

Many progressives have had trouble with the status quo and the platitudes that are the common language of entrenched power. As The Donald has said, he doesn’t have to cater to anyone else because he is worth ten billion dollars. While we are offended by his lack of modesty, we cannot contest that he feels free to speak what is on his mind.

Quite a few politicians build an entourage of staff and supporters before they even flesh out their views on important issues. As campaigns have become increasingly characterized by what money can buy for candidates, rather than on honest answers to tough questions, Trump seems to be succeeding in using money to free himself to give honest answers. His ability to give direct answers may in part be due to the fact that he does not rely on a team of advisors to prep him as to what he can and cannot say when questioned. His views on any number of issues may be offensive to many progressives (and conservatives), but their directness is refreshing. His political persona is interesting enough to suck up enough oxygen in media circles to nearly suffocate all other candidates.

Progressives have traditionally liked straight shooters such as Eugene McCarthy, Jesse Jackson, and now Bernie Sanders. Unlike Trump, these figures on the left are motivated by compassion and empathy. They can make their points without insulting others and are respectful listeners.

Polls have shown that much of Trump’s support comes from people who have been disaffected by politics; people who think that politics is a desert of hypocrisy. Honest answers from politicians appeals to a lot of voters and actually elevates our political discourse. I shudder to think that Donald Trump could win the presidency, but perhaps his bravado will help encourage more progressives to break from the shackles of their handlers, to more frequently throw caution to the wind, and to give us the honesty that most of us expect from our friends.

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