Just a day removed from the filibuster of Patricia Millet, Charles Pierce got it exactly right on yesterdays ruling on birth control and judicial appointments.
There’s a reason why the Republicans blocked the president’s attempts to fill vacancies on the federal Court of Appeals for the DC circuit. They have made it a decades-long project to salt the federal courts with people like Janice Rogers Brown, and they are disinclined to allow anything as trivial as two presidential elections to stand in the way. [...]
When conservative politicians tell you that the DC circuit has enough judges to do the work in front of it, this is what they mean. This ruling is preposterous on its face — Companies do not have a right to freedom of religion. People do. — and intemperate in its language. But it is exactly why Patricia Millett isn’t measuring for drapes in her new office. This has been a long march for these people, and they believe that only their victories are permanent ones.
I’d only add that it’s up to all of us to continuously make this point, because the corporate media certainly isn’t going to cover Republican obstruction in a way that appreciates just how much damage it has done.
The media turns the very real damage of obstruction into an abstraction that they can then sweep under the rug and simply call this “a setback for Obama” rather than a setback for America.