BREAKING NEWS: Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Vote TODAY

WASHINGTON — Federal actions to enforce voting rights for minorities have declined sharply since the Supreme Court struck down the core of the 1965 Voting Rights Act five years ago, the federal Commission on Civil Rights says in a sweeping new report on voting issues. Even enforcement of the act’s remaining provisions has dropped markedly, the report states.

In an interview before the report’s formal release on Wednesday, the head of the commission, Catherine E. Lhamon, called the present state of discrimination against minority voters “enduring and pernicious,” and said it was poorly addressed under federal law.

Today's events will decide whether or not I become an assassin.

Today's vote was on a vote to proceed to the actual vote. Collins in going to announce her final vote later this afternoon. I bet she votes yes, along with Flake and that democrat I forget his name. More than likely he will be confirmed despite his lies and his erratic partisan behavior, which will more than likely play out during his lifetime of being on the supreme court. Ain't life grand with Trump as President?

What is really the most tragic consequence of his confirmation is his seat is usually the deciding factor in all the major big decisions. Including voting rights lawsuits. We can kiss any future elections goodbye if there are any (and there always is) voting rights issues to come before the court. Already voting rights have been falling with the supreme court we got, adding Kavanaugh to the mix, just cements it in stone for years to come.

It has been difficult to precisely measure the ideology of federal appeals court judges such as Kavanaugh, mostly because of the large number of courts and the wide variation in issues considered by them, so there is some debate over just how conservative he will be when he reaches the highest court in the land. But every available measure, and the entries on his résumé, indicate that Kavanaugh will be conservative, and perhaps very much so. Judicial Common Space scores, for example — which use the ideology of nominating politicians for measuring the ideology of appeals judges — put him adjacent to the arch-conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, as seen below. And Kavanaugh did little during his confirmation hearing to disabuse observers of this possibility — at one point, he called the allegations against him (which he vehemently denied) “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”

Wherever Kavanaugh ends up within the court’s ideological spectrum, he will quickly get to work. The court is currently working through a “quiet docket,” one that lacks the kinds of cases that would match the drama of the confirmation process. But larger issues will eventually bubble their way up through the judiciary — hypothetically, and most prominently, abortion rights and Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act and maybe even a case related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in Russian interference in the 2016 election. How Kavanaugh’s conservatism and Roberts’s concern for the image of the court might interact remains to be seen. The laws of the land will be shaped by it.