To cram through a Ginsburg replacement, GOP needs the vote before election. The lame duck project - a defeated Senate majority pushing through a nomination by a repudiated President - sounds ruthless now. It will look nakedly illegitimate after 11/3- and legitimacy matters
This project looks likely to collapse of its own cynicism
In 2016 Merrick Garland fight, McConnell did not say, “I’ve got the votes, so No.” He felt the need to devise *justifications.* He cannot have cared himself, but he felt he needed them, to create at least a veneer of legitimacy. Post-election 2020, he won’t have that. So ...
... if McConnell cannot confirm immediately, he soon bumps into serious trouble. Not enough trouble maybe to deter him personally. But other senators could flinch- and so by the way could the nominee, who may not wish to enter judicial history in this disturbing mode.
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Every dictator who ever seized power justified his coup as an official act for the good of the state.
Between November 2020 and January 2021, Donald Trump attempted a coup d'etat. Fortunately, power is harder to seize in the United States than in other countries. Fortunately too the outcome of the 2020 election was too clear to be subverted. Fortunately also ...
Fortunately also Trump's coup was countered by constitutionally loyal Republicans like his own vice president. Fortunately finally, the would-be coup-makers were unusually stupid, crazy, lazy, and inept. But still - Trump as president attempted a coup d'etat.
The defendant's presence at his criminal trial is not an inconvenience or imposition, as Trump's partisans complain. The defendant's presence is a *right,* guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. 1/x
The right to be present at one's trial is precious. But it is not absolute. The Supreme Court has ruled that presence at a trial can be forfeited by persistently bad behavior. 2/x
In Illinois v Allen (1970), the Supreme Court considered three options for dealing with "disruptive, contumacious, stubbornly defiant defendants": binding and gagging them, holding them in civil contempt, or temporarily removing them from the courtroom until they behave. 3/x
No big deal, just the second-largest newspaper in French Canada caricaturing Jews as vampires. lapresse.ca/actualites/car…
The Jew as vampire is one of the deepest myths of western culture. The 1922 film Nosferatu that inspired the La Presse cartoon also inspired Nazi cartoonists of the Third Reich anumuseum.org.il/blog/myth-vamp…
La Presse has removed the image, here's a screen shot. It substitutes Benjamin Netanyahu's face in an iconic still from the 1922 movie, Nosferatu. That film was riddled with antisemitic images and themes and directly inspired antisemitic cartoons in the Nazi press of the 1920s and 1930s.
Why was the Alger Hiss case such a big deal? The secrets Hiss betrayed to the Soviets were not so important. (He gave them, eg, blueprints for a new design for a Navy lifeboat.) It was Hiss's career trajectory that alarmed: the potential for a Soviet asset as secretary of state.
The Hiss case convulsed the country. But we've now had eight years of people with deep connections to the ex-KGB dictator in Moscow arriving at the very highest levels of US politics, media, and government - and that's become business as usual.
One conservative radio host used to - maybe still does - open his interviews by asking guests whether they believed Alger Hiss was guilty. Today, the answer might be, "Hiss was just a little ahead of his time."
News reports don't get more disturbing than this, from @propublica about the president of Mexico. propublica.org/article/mexico…
The @propublica story deals with Lopez Obrador's first run for president, in 2006. Lopez Obrador lost, a result he never accepted and tried to overturn. When he ran again in 2018, Lopez Obrador promised "hugs, not bullets" for the cartels.
@propublica As president, Lopez Obrador has shown favor to cartel criminals in many ways - perhaps most notably, by pressuring the Trump administration to release a former Mexican defense minister arrested in the US for drug corruption. Lopez Obrador then bestowed a medal on the ex-minister