Dems need to cancel Trump's cheesy SCOTUS reality show

You know the old saying that when you're a carpenter, every problem looks like a nail. But when you're a failed-casino-magnate-turned-TV-reality-show-star-turned-inexplicably-president-of-the-United-States, every problem looks like next week's episode of "The Celebrity Apprentice."

Take picking a new Supreme Court justice, for example. Introducing your nominee at a dignified Rose Garden announcement is maybe something that worked for those 44 boring dudes in the "old America." In Trump's America, we wait for the February rating "sweeps" to begin and take this thing prime-time, 8:02 p.m., baby -- and that's just the beginning.

Why not take two respected jurists from the U.S. Court of Appeals and make them both travel to Washington, to heighten the suspense? You know, kind of a "Bachelorette" thing. Honestly, it wouldn't have surprised me to tune in tonight and learn the actual pick was coming at 8:57, after clips of Trump going out on "dates" with potential High Court picks, asking their thoughts about Griswold v. Connecticut or campus speech codes while soaking in a hot tub or on a moonlight Potomac cruise. I thought maybe there'd be highlight reels of the judges, like the Heisman Award show. Or that it would be like LeBron's "The Decision"? -- "Judge Hardiman is taking his talents inside the Beltway."

Anyway, like Season 8 of "Big Brother," the whole thing was kind of an anti-climax, which probably dragged down the ratings. The president's nominee -- Judge Neil M. Gorsuch from the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver -- is who you thought he was. A heaping slice of white, male, conservative bread from the president who just picked the most male, whitest cabinet since the 1980s. A decent, ethical man with conservative views on hot-button issues like "religious liberty" (which too often is code for sanctioning discrimination), who would likely uphold the court's current bias toward "corporations as people" and away from actual people. But for those who don't share his rightward-tilting philosophy, Gorsuch is probably about as a good a man as one could hope for out of the Bannon-Trump administration.

And yet Senate Democrats must do everything in their power to make sure Gorsuch never sings one note with the Supremes.

That problem is that this has been one process that you can't trust. And when I criticize the process, I'm not referring to Trump's co-opting of tawdry reality-show production values to disrobe the nation's highest court of its dignity, as he attempted tonight, nor the fact that the president's prime-time Judgapalooza clearly aimed to divert attention away from the disastrous roll-out of a Muslim ban cloaked as "immigration policy." Even though both of those things are real and problematic.

But the two bigger issues are these:

First. it's time for the Democratic Party to grow a spine and join the war that Republicans started last spring -- their assault on American democratic (with a small "d") norms. This runs deeper than Donald Trump. When then-President Obama nominated Merrick Garland last year to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, it was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his GOP minions who tossed more than two centuries of tradition and American-Exceptionalism-style good government out the window -- denying Obama's legitimacy to make that appointment by refusing to even give Garland a hearing.