of doing something horrific: Don't do something horrific like drugging women and sexually assaulting them and don't associate or be around people whom do such stuff.

but- like with Bernie- I don't think he's the second coming like some people do either, though.

because there weren't any. He's a right-wing Scalia hack of a Justice who was given a seat that should have been given to Garland (or another Obama nominee), but he at least didn't have these kind of personal issues AFAWK. McConnell seemed to know *something* when he reportedly urged Trump NOT to nominate Kavanaugh, which also probably explains why they've had to resort to drastic measures to try to quickly push his nomination through without much debate or discussion. And they almost might have succeeded until Ford's and Ramirez's accusations went public, which is probably what they were hoping hard to avoid, knowing that it would have been harder to get Kavanaugh off the bench once there than it would be to prevent him from getting on in the first place. Politics can get ugly and dirty and everybody does it to some extent but I don't believe that Democrats are using Ford and Ramirez as political pawns. They are (rightly) concerned with somebody like Kavanaugh getting on the bench.

should make it hard to remove an elected POTUS. But, by the same token, perhaps it made it a bit *too* hard?

Of course, I'm not sure that the founders ever contemplated something like a Trump Presidency flanked by a totally compliant majority party (the founders didn't consider parties being a factor) in Congress, which may have been compromised- in part or in full- by a foreign power itself.

Unfortunately, when you point any of this out, you're often called an apologist or a "Centrist" or an "Establishment" Democrat. This is what drives me up the wall about people like Michael Moore, whose books are basically an encapsulation and repetition of all these perceived flaws of the Democratic Party. It's just not that simple.

but he probably had heard/knew things about him that he thought would leave him vulnerable to attack, hence the decision to bum rush the nomination and keep as much information about him secret as possible to derail any possible lines of attack- and it seemed to have been working- up to now.

Expect Trump and his minions to do the scummiest things possible.

and some kind of remedy should be called for. There has to be some kind of response/remedy for the Republicans unilaterally refusing to consider a legitimately nominated Justice for nearly a year on the basis of something that was never a previously recognized norm or precedent (i.e. McConnell Rule). And a suggestion made by a former Senator (Biden) does NOT count as a precedent or a "rule" either because it never actually happened to Republicans. I'm not sure what the best way to handle it might be but there has GOT to be some way to remedy the situation, whether it be adding at least one seat to SCOTUS or somehow removing Gorsuch from the bench and replacing him with a Democratic-appointed Justice once we have another Democratic President (hopefully in 2021). Republicans got one more justice than they should have and that needs to be remedied.

While I get the notion that Senators and House Members are elected to represent their states/districts in Congress and that they have to represent and be primarily responsive to those states/districts, I find it frustrating that, given that some Representatives and, especially, some Senators have an outsized influence on certain issues and matters of national importance, that people not in their state/district cannot lobby them one way or another. The most prescient current example would probably be Collins & Murkowski (re: Kavanaugh). The vote is likely to come down to one or both of them, but those of us living outside of Maine or Alaska will be unable to directly lobby either one of them to vote against Kavanaugh.

Not hard to get a school policy on discipline enacted but try implementing a pro-LGBTQ policy (or even policies that protect students from bullying because we all know that that means that Xtian kids can't bully LGBTQ kids) and the wingnuts lose their minds.