These people screwed up everything in 2016, they've changed nothing and expressed no contrition.
Nonetheless you are still beneath them. You're not allowed to criticize them. They are certain their contempt for you is justified because all the other people like them share it.
Political journalism exists at the top of society, sharing substantial responsibility for the awful state of affairs we live in.
But the only criticism it takes seriously is internal criticism, so this culpable elite has become yet another unaccountable priesthood.
There are real people's lives and wellbeing on the line, but how dare you suggest that political journalism act as anything but a cozy New York/DC social club. Sure, Smug here glibly supports lawlessness, disinformation, and xenophobia - but he's in the club. You're not, peon.
Anyway, the dynamic is familiar enough. Fraternity members always end up convinced that bravery means standing with their brothers, not standing up to them.
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Imagine a world in which decisions that completely warp the politics of the nation, like Citizen's United, and dispense with decades-old achievements on rights and justice, like Shelby, come five or six times a year.
That's the world ahead of us if we don't expand the courts.
People simply do not understand how bad it will get. It won't be a marginally more conservative court. Conservatives ALREADY have controlled the court for nearly 50 years.
It will be a court that will remake America in the image of far-right fever dreams.
It may not happen immediately - I suspect they'll save the very worst until a period of divided government, when Democrats will have no opportunity to respond. Given that liberals will never again win a voting rights case, divided government will come soon.
So what is Democrats' plan to address the 6-3 court, which will be more effective at advancing far-right policy aims than any Republican presidential administration in history?
I mean, is the plan just to go to hearings, be polite to Barrett, and then let her ban abortion, eliminate the Voting Rights Act, wipe out the EPA, strike down Biden's covid measures, end birthright citizenship? And then to say "Please, give money! Go to ActBlue dot com!"
The worst thing is, I'm positive that a lot of Senate Democrats think that, by being trolled and heckled into giving up without a fight, they've actually won.
This is false. Give up the pathetic belief that speaking out will invariably backfire.
She's an access journalist who reliably foregrounds Trump's own bogus narratives and whose "critiques" of those narratives are carefully framed to be visible primarily to the already-converted, and often require close reading to detect. People are tired of it.
A lot of elite pundit types think the rest of us are too stupid to understand what she's doing, but we do understand it. We just don't care. It's a parlor game for New York and DC elites, not us, and it has consistently helped Trump by hiding the truth about who and what he is.
Fitting that the Barrett nomination coincide with the election. This is why we had to endure years of corruption, racism, and disease under a visibly unfit president. It's why 200,000+ Americans had to die.
It wasn't random chaos, it was for a reason - a plan. THIS is the plan.
The master narrative of the Trump years is this: Mitch McConnell was willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to win the courts. And in the end that's exactly what's he done: he's helped reduce American institutions to rubble in order take and keep his ultimate prize.
McConnell's judicial spoils were won at an unthinkable price, both in human lives and damage to our civic fabric.
Now Democrats can either accept that his plot succeeded and let him keep his winnings. Or with a simple majority, they can undo his victory and close this chapter.
One group I don’t envy, if Barrett gets in and the court is left at 6-3, is law professors. They’re going to be stuck trying to explain why all the core legal principles of our nation sum up to “Republicans are always right, even about controversies that haven’t happened yet.”
Conservative judges, originalist judges, textualist judges - you may not like these things, but you can argue in front of them and hope to win if you have the better case.
But GOP judges... it doesn’t matter how good your case is, just which side you’re on. It’s not acceptable.
If you can reliably predict how politically charged cases will turn out without knowing anything about either:
-the facts of the case
-the relevant law