Hysteria is fun. It leads to all sorts of exciting events. Flipped cars, burning buildings, wailing in the streets, frantic cries of “Not my President,” it’s all great. And as every well-intentioned politician knows, one must always have a ready-made source of hysteria.

Thus, here we are today, the Kavanaugh hearings. Today will likely have more grandstanding, protestors screaming, missed handshakes and all manner of obnoxious tweets.

I’m giddy with glee.

But let us cut through the chaos and get to the root of the issue. The Democrats can scream about missing paperwork and unreleased documents all day (and believe me, they’ve been doing their vocal exercises), but the simple truth of the matter is that they weren’t going to vote for the guy anyway.

Donald Trump announced the pick at 9:03 p.m. on July 9, according to whitehouse.gov. The conference ended at 9:18 p.m., also according to whitehouse.gov.

The first Democratic tweet announcing opposition was at 9:25 p.m. July 9 and at 9:46 p.m. July 9 the Women’s March released the following statement that starts as:

“In response to Donald Trump’s nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States, The Women’s March released the following statement…” That XX is not my typo. In their rush to blindly oppose any nomination not made by President Hillary Clinton, they forgot to edit in the guy’s name.

Oops.

This all debunks the wannabe Presidents’ claims. If you can’t read 42,000 pages of released documents in 24 hours, then how did you do it in 7 minutes?

“But William, they knew the shortlist, they did their research in advance!” Fair enough. Though that begs the question: if you did your research, and read his public rulings already, then why are you complaining about a rushed confirmation process (and by the way RBG’s confirmation process so far has been a day faster, ‘natch), since you clearly already had time to read everything and decide your opposition? None of this is important. It’s not the real agenda.

The issue at hand isn’t Brett Kavanaugh. The same stuff would be happening if it was Amy Barret or any other nominee. Yeah, the Democrats care about the Supreme Court, but not as much as they want you to think. Their real prize is a certain oval office, and Kavanaugh is what they feel will get them there.

Sure, they’ll lose this fight. They simply don’t have the numbers. Winning is not the point though. It’s how many outrageous tweets they get retweeted, it’s how many pithy putdowns they can say during the hearings, it’s how many grandstands they can get away with.

So, while they stoke the fires of mass hysteria (if the tax cuts didn’t kill you, Kavanaugh will), let’s remember their real goal. The Democrats have 2020 vision.

Will Outzen is a junior political science major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or wroutzen@eiu.edu.