“In appointing dozens of reliable conservatives … Mr. Trump has made it more likely that appeals come before judges with legal philosophies sympathetic to Republicans on issues including voting rights.”
While the discourse whirls around the topic of packing the courts, the courts remain busy — as they have for years — at the task of packing the electorate.
A four-justice bloc of the Supreme Court was willing to overrule Pennsylvania’s highest court on a matter of Pennsylvania election law — and Amy Coney Barrett may join the Court by next month.
This is, as the dog in the burning house says, fine.
This is—*should* be—proof of the folly of the “wait for the Court to go too far” approach counseled by some re: reforming the judiciary. Come 2021, it’s plausible that we won’t be waiting for the Court to do its worst; we’ll be wondering how to cleanup the damage.
.@AdamSerwer: “The Republican political project has gone beyond shaping policy to rigging the electorate.… The conservative justices [have chosen] to help the Republican Party … by inhibiting voters’ ability to make a different choice.”
🎯: “The message is clear: There is no constitutional amendment, no federal statute, no state law, no half-baked legal philosophy … that will prevent the conservatives on the Court from upholding Republican efforts to sever Democratic constituencies from the franchise.”
People talk about right-wing judicial shenanigans around the election with Trump in mind—but it seems just as likely that judicial mischief could decide whether Dems flip the Senate.
Presuming that the rule of law holds and a free and fair vote count proceeds, we’ll publish this through January 20, 2021. If that presumption proves false … well, we have much bigger problems than a newsletter.
As if to prove my point in the newsletter that the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court have taken a side, this news comes about its latest foray into stifling votes:
What has me livid about the president’s coronavirus pageant is that the infections he insists on causing won’t _stay_ on the White House grounds. People who work around him have to come back into our communities — and shop in our grocery stores, and send kids to our schools.
He’s putting all of us in D.C. and its environs at risk. He’s putting the work we’ve done to combat the spread of the coronavirus at risk. He’s putting our ability of kids to see their friends at risk. And he’s doing it for insane, bulls–– reasons.
Recall the Maine wedding cluster of infections? Tracers identified 8 resulting deaths — none involving people who attended the wedding.
It’s no wonder the White House refuses to allow contact tracing. We might learn that Trump’s idiocy killed people. wcvb.com/article/8th-de…
Trump finds every hole in our systems, every gap in our norms, every spot where our supposed “guardrails” are made of papier-mâché.
Caring for the commander in chief in a military hospital means that as a patient, they can order whatever the f– they want. So here we are.
Anyhow, he’s going to hotbox the entire White House permanent staff — not the political flunkies who signed up for this ride, but the household workers, groundskeepers, and others who expect a president to show even a modicum of care for their welfare. Spare a thought for them.
Anyway, I now care as much about how well he fares through this disease as much as he apparently does.
We’ve long known he lacks all ability to learn and keep other people’s interests at heart, but Jesus Christ almighty — this is galaxy-brain irresponsibility EVEN FOR HIM.
Can a president be impeached for reckless disregard for human life, just to get that on the record? Asking as someone who would *really* like this nightmare to end someday.
The DHS whistleblower complaint, if accurate, shows how the department under Trump has functioned as an autocrat’s security service — ignoring threats to the nation’s interests to focus, instead, on threats to the president’s fragile dignity.
What seems even worse: the apparent use of DHS to harass political enemies of the president — while also deflecting scrutiny from his GOP’s extremist sympathizers.
(That posture — deflection of scrutiny from the GOP’s extreme-right sympathizers — is consistent, as I argued last month, with a long-running pattern of Republican behavior.)
So Trump essentially said to Microsoft, if I read this correctly, “you didn’t build that” — that somebody else, namely himself, made that value happen.
If I recall, Republicans flipped their honking lids when President Obama said — in a normal, non-insane context — that government services help to build value.
Republicans also blew their tops when @SenWarren — whose remarks from years ago inspired Obama’s comment — talked to debate viewers about how government services create private wealth.