Tonight, the White House is going to rub America’s nose in their successful corruption of the Supreme Court.

Mark my words: The pictures of a corrupt president on the White House lawn politicizing a SCOTUS appointment 8 days before an election will live in infamy.

1/
Trump cannot help but see Coney Barrett being illegitimately pushed through as a victory because his disordered mind sees every time he successfully cheats as proof of his power.

But the public won’t see that.

It won’t see that today and it won’t see it tomorrow.

2/
The public will see it as the distilling image of the reduction of the Supreme Court to an illegitimate political body no longer a coequal branch.

It will see it as the moment SCOTUS became a wholly owned subsidiary of an unpopular president and even less popular Congress.

3/
The move to ram through Coney Barrett’s appointment is short-sighted, rash, and poised to boomerang both politically and practically.

It is an overreach far more likely to ultimately wipe out years of Republican efforts to stack the courts than extend them.

4/
It is a move a younger Mitch McConnell wouldn’t have made.

A younger McConnell would have been more pragmatic about the risk-reward.

He would have seen the likelihood of backlash and likely consequences and been more measured.

5/
But there is a subtext to this.

Mitch McConnell is dying.

Both politically and physically, Mitch McConnell knows both he and his power are drifting closer and closer to the horizon.

McConnell is 78 years old. Time tends to shine dimly on an eighth decade post polio.

6/
The move to cram through Coney Barrett is a product of two things:

1) Trump’s slavish compulsion to serve a primitive, disordered id

2) McConnell’s recognition that his days at the head of the chess board are drawing near to their end and this may be his last big move

7/
Trump will take his doomed victory lap and bask in the brief narcissistic fuel today.

It will do nothing to save him from a wallowing depression after being unequivocally rejected a mere week from now.

8/
McConnell will smugly crow about the feat thinking that this is where his future biopic will cut to the credits no matter what may come.

He will gleam and smirk in the belief that this is his career’s high water mark while any future defeats accrue to whoever comes next.

9/
This will all be short lived. Be angry but not in despair.

The move to rush through Coney Barrett is craven, corrupt and contemptible but it is not canny.

It has only a thin veneer of the mercenary-but-effective politics McConnell has played for years. It isn’t shrewd.

10/
It risks the whole board to merely briefly queen another pawn.

It is reckless and short-sighted.

It is the kind of rash move a careful man only makes when he knows they have few “another days” to live and fight for.

11/
This is Mitch McConnell’s unsaid swan song.

It will burnish only an irrelevant last few pages of a corrupt man’s hagiography.

Meanwhile, the Congress that marches on without him as Majority Leader - and eventually, without him at all - will erase its impact.

12/
And in the not-at-all-distant months and years ahead, the single searing image of what led to the reformation of our judiciary will be the ceremony on White House grounds tonight.

A corrupt president on the eve of being deposed.

A craven Senator desperate in his last hours.
13/
A nominee so disingenuous in her alleged moral turpitude and so thirsty for dominion over others’ lives that she would knowingly delegitimize the Supreme Court so as to join it.

Record and remember the image this evening.

14/
History will remember it as of the same type as Joseph Welch asking “Have you no sense of decency?” to the bullies of government.

Tonight, it will be a question un-asked but answered.

They have no decency.

15/
Trump and McConnell will peacock tonight.

Icarus and Icarus wheeling over a crowd.

Foolish, indecent men at their closest to the sun; smug in their soaring; soon to plummet back to earth in a fatal tangle of wax and feathers.

Mark the moment. It is the apogee before a fall.
//

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More from @TheRealHoarse

24 Oct
The most important thing we can do in the remaining 10 days is get out the vote.

It is a well-established principle that people will keep a commitment made to someone else more often than ones made only to themselves.

1/
Don’t assume people who appear to oppose Trump will definitely make the time to go vote.

Some just don’t see it as important enough. Some will put it off and then not follow through.

2/
There are disarming ways to bring it up.

Could be no more than casually saying:

“Can’t believe the election is a week away. I need to get my vote in. You voted yet?”

3/
Read 7 tweets
24 Oct
Parents fleeing violence and poverty with their children walked thousands of miles to our border.

Once there, they were given a choice:

Be dropped off somewhere in that same dangerous country with nothing; penniless and homeless; knowing no one; with their kids or without.

1/
They were being deported into even greater hardship and peril than they left.

Many people we have deported fled danger and were killed upon their return.

Our government asked them:

Do you love your kids so much, you’d leave them?

2/
What would you do?

Faced with a decision of taking my son into the deepest of dangers where I didn’t know if I could even feed him - or - let him go so he would at least be safe.

The cruelty of forcing that choice is immeasurable.

3/
Read 7 tweets
23 Oct
Alright, let us begin.

The final debate of the 2020 election cycle.

My final live-tweet of an event in this presidential term.

There will be much drinking and little spell-checking.

Refresh your beverages. We have miles to go before we sleep.

1/
While tonight’s moderator, Kristen Welker, settles in...

It has been a long four years. I have done many of these. Debates, press conferences, rallies.

No matter what may come, tonight feels like the closing of a chapter.
We have been through much, I’m not going to lie, the realization that this was the last of these before the election left me a little wistful today.

For the youngsters, that’s an olde tyme word meaning “full of wist”.

I don’t know what “wist” means.
Read 45 tweets
22 Oct
I talk about Trump’s narcissism all the time. His dysfunction has never surprised me. Not once.

Still, sometimes it is just so glaring and so nakedly on display, it’s just.. wow.

Take the opening to this interview, his eventual storm out and handling after.

1/
Trump adamantly insists Stahl was “nasty” to him.

She was completely calm and emotionless. Never changed her tone. Was perfectly pleasant even when correcting false claims.

He truly experiences someone calmly not allowing him to lie as them being mean to him.

2/
He truly experiences someone not allowing him to put forward the facade he wish were true as them attacking him.

And that’s because it truly hurts him.

And if someone hurt him, it must be because they are bad.

And he believes that so fully, he thinks all will see it too.

3/
Read 8 tweets
21 Oct
The total measure of the two men running for president can be taken by just watching their reactions to spontaneous things.

Joe Biden kisses a hurting young man on the forehead like I would with my son. No forethought. Just nurturing instinct.

1/
Trump is incapable of even faking empathy or caring or compassion.

Notice he never spontaneously laughs. You’ve never seen him suddenly react with any emotion at all - other than anger.

He can process injury alone.

He can only hope to fake everything else.

2/
He doesn’t feel any of those things.

He just attempts to mirror what they look like when other people appear to feel them.

And he can’t do that instantly because it isn’t reflexive; it is feigned.

3/
Read 5 tweets
21 Oct
There was a reference in the Steele Dossier to Trump having secret dealings with China including efforts to use bribes to facilitate deals.

Now, news has broken of Trump having a bank account in China.

1/
For perspective, Trump apparently has known bank accounts in only two other countries: UK and Ireland.

It isn’t like the guy has foreign accounts all over the place. He generally uses Western banks.

So, we have a Steele Dossier item alleging Trump paid bribes in China.

2/
And we now have an undisclosed bank account in China.

And, lastly, we have reporting from earlier this year about Trump trying to have the law which makes it illegal for U.S. businesses to break U.S. bribery laws even in other countries.

3/

nytimes.com/2020/01/15/bus…
Read 10 tweets

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