Category Archives: current events

This “close” election set me to wondering

A lot of relief today, among people I know, that this, eh, close election appears to be over. Sekhnet is downtown now happily photographing some of the street celebrations out there in New York City, a flagrant “anarchist jurisdiction” that, for whatever reason, just doesn’t like Donald Trump. Turns out winning by 4,000,000 or more votes makes it a close election, too close to call for days, an electoral squeaker, in these Exceptional United States of America. I looked up “popular vote” margins for winning presidential candidates. You can see the chart here.

Trump’s 2016 margin of victory, in the “popular vote,” minus 2,868,686, is more than five times lower than the previous record negative vote margin, George W. Bush’s −543,816 in 2000. Same with the percentages, Trump’s −2.09% popular vote margin easily eclipsed the 0.51% loss Bush experienced in 2000.

Trump’s 46.09% of the POPULAR vote was the lowest total since Clinton in 1992 and Nixon in 1968. Recall though, Clinton ran in a three party race, with a wealthy outsider garnering millions of votes and Nixon faced a challenge from the racist right in George Wallace, who got a nice chunk of votes in several states Tricky Dick barely won. In a two party election, you have to go back to Woodrow Wilson in 1912 for a “winner” getting a lower percentage of the actual cast ballots (whoops… actually, you have to go back to James Buchanan in 1856 [1]).

I know, my mind just goes there, looking backward for some kind of seemingly tangible perspective. Believers of every stripe often look to history for support of their theories. An impressively deceptive “non-partisan” documentary about the safeguard of democracy that is the ingenious Electoral College, featuring discredited right wing voter fraud conspiracy theorist Hans von Spakovsky [2], notes, citing the historical record, that without the Electoral College there would have been no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation, probably no free Negroes in the United States today! The Electoral College, our safeguard against tyranny! Ask the ghost of the great Republican Honest Abe!

In 2020 you can access reliable facts in seconds, one thing that makes it so maddening that an unending stream of easily disprovable “alternative facts” (lies) can catapult an unhinged demagogue to 70,000,000 popular votes after the historical disaster that was his mad, narrowly engineered 78,000 vote Electoral College presidency.

Lincoln did win in 1860 with a lower margin of the popular vote than even the man formerly known as The Donald got in 2016. Honest Abe only got 39.65%, you can look it up, though, equally verifiable– he won the Electoral College handily, with 180 out of 303 Electors. In 1864 he was reelected with a solid majority of all votes cast, as well as the Electoral College.

It doesn’t take long, a few minutes of tapping and a little reading, to find out how this happened. The Democratic party, like the Baptist Church at the time, was divided into a Northern anti-slavery faction and a Southern pro-slavery one (in the church the argument was whether the Lord our God and Jesus Christ loved or hated slavery). As a result of this sectional rift two opposing Democrats ran against Lincoln and his brand new Republican party in 1860. There was also a fourth presidential candidate, a man from Tennessee, who got a sizable number of votes. None came close to Lincoln’s large plurality. The decisive Electoral College vote Lincoln got that year made the idea of any kind of recount moot, it was not remotely close. The states that hated Lincoln simply seceded, fought a long and bloody war (a war they insist to this day — not without a lot of evidence— they never lost) and one of their’s eventually killed the Great Emancipator. The rest, as they say, is history.

Another factor that should be considered about the 1860 election is something democracy-loving extremists like Hans von Spakovsky and Steve Bannon must salivate about when they read it, Lincoln was simply left off the ballots in 10 of the 11 states that would secede from the Union shortly after Lincoln was elected president.

Yes, I know, it does seem impossible to understand. It seems like something every “Red State” [2] should have done in the lead up to the 2020 rematch, just leave Biden/Harris off the ballot– et, voila, 100% Trump vote in those states. I wouldn’t put it past ’em, since the ends clearly justify the means for their kind, but I now understand why it would have been impossible. A few moments of diligent tapping gave me the answer about Lincoln being left off all those Southern ballots. There is a procedure in every state for getting your party’s candidate on the ballot– there was nobody (who wanted not to be lynched) to do that for Lincoln in the South in 1860.

Getting on the ballot is a state issue. In South Carolina there were no ballots; the people didn’t vote for any Presidential candidate — Electors were chosen by the legislature, which included no Republican member. As for the other southern states: who was going to organize the Republican Party in the South in 1856 or 1860? The once-influential southern anti-slavery, even Abolitionist opinion in the South had long since been driven out or intimidated into silence by the hostility of the pro-slavery majorities. To campaign for an anti-slavery party was to put oneself at considerable personal risk.

On December 7, 1860, Georgia Gov. Joseph Brown, in an open letter to the people of his state, called for secession, because, in part, if Lincoln were allowed to appoint “Judges, District Attorneys, Marshals, Post Masters, Custom House officers, etc., etc.,he will have succeeded in dividing us to an extent that will destroy all our moral powers, and prepare us to tolerate the running of a Republican ticket, in most of the States of the South, in 1864.” (my emphasis). [http://www.civilwarcauses.org/jbrown.htm]. A Republican presence was simply intolerable.

BTW: The Democrats had also become a Sectional Party in 1860. Northern Democrats (Douglas), Southern Democrats (Breckenridge), were the principal fragments of the crumbling structure. (Which left poor Bell as the last truly National Democrat!)

There’s a, probably apocryphal, story that Lincoln received only 9 votes in some Southern county. When a Northerner expressed incredulity at the total, a Southerner replied, “Yes, and when we find the SOB who voted 9 times, we’re gonna hang him!”

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[1] whoops:

The 1912 United States elections elected the members of the 63rd United States Congress, occurring during the Fourth Party System. Amidst a division between incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft and former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, the Democratic Party won the Presidency and both chambers of Congress, the first time they accomplished that feat since the 1892 election.

[2]

Note also what bullshit this Red State/Blue State reductivism is. There has never been a state, anywhere, that is 100% Nazi or 100% anti-Nazi — no place in the USA where the Klan has zero support and other places where it has 100% support. As our recently defeated president pointed out: there are good people, very fine people, on both sides (as well as some very bad ones.)

Sometimes “Red” or “Blue” states change color based on the thinnest of margins. The idea that there is a noisy group of Jews demonstrating loudly in “Jews for Hitler” t-shirts somewhere doesn’t mean that everyone in that state, city, town, street, or even house, agrees with the strong opinion of the arguably self-destructive Jews with the proud t-shirt.

No place in the United States is purely RED or BLUE. If Biden winds up winning any of his Electoral College states by even single digit vote totals, after all the millions of dollars worth of legal challenges and all the ballot recounting, does that mean all the people who voted against him in that state suddenly turned blue? Come on.

The NY Times did a nice feature, a few days before the election, about how this idiotic “dichotomy” is reflected on the very misleading and influential maps we are all seeing all the time. Check this graphic out (the interactive map show is pretty cool too):

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Invitation to Commit Violence in the name of Liberty and Justice

It was really not surprising, horrific as it also was, to hear unhinged fascist Steve Bannon call the other day for the decapitation of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray. Their heads, he stated, on his podcast and via Twitter, should be on fucking pikes. For the capital crime, presumably, of treason to the Leader. In Bannon’s view, Fuhrerworte haben Gesestzeskraft — the Leader’s word has the force of law, (as long as Bannon gets to have a say in who the Leader is and what he says).

The blowhard was slapped hard by Twitter after posting these incendiary opinions. Banned from the social media app. He is awaiting acquittal, conviction, or some kind of plea deal, in the fraud case against him for allegedly (and most likely) fleecing gullible, trusting, sincere Trump supporters of millions of dollars for his personal enrichment in a fake Build That Wall crowd-funding scheme. He exploited the patriotism of those low-information supporters too uninformed to realize that Mexico had already fully paid for the Southern Border Wall that has solved virtually every one of our great nation’s problems. As promised by the Promise-Keeper-in-Chief.

Is it reasonable to fear some kind of mass violence by Trump’s fired up, heavily armed supporters? Probably, the president is keeping all options on the table, his tweeted commands are routinely obeyed by groups of diehard Trump activists who don’t shrink from violence. Bannon (Sloppy Steve, who was pushed out of the Trump administration when he took too much credit for being Trump’s brain) was on Fox on Election Day, keeping the troops fired up with deliberate, provocative misinformation, infuriating lies, if you will. This snapshot is about all you need for the gist of his “argument”, I wasn’t able to watch more than a moment of it.

The beauty part, of course, is that evidence is no longer necessary to prove your case– you just have to tell your followers clearly how they are being abused and by whom.

If evil people are openly trying to steal an election, suppress your vote, cheat to win– isn’t it only right to go out with baseball bats, at minimum, and smash them in their smug faces? I mean, isn’t it?

Here are some more thoughts from historian Heather Cox Richardson, about how Trump, Bannon and their ilk, exploit and stoke misinformation, expressed with a bit of optimism about the sudden spine of the mass media and of prominent Republicans publicly abandoning Trump that may have been premature.

First of all, much of Trump’s power during his term has come from his ability to dominate the public narrative through threats or rumors. From his insistence that he had hired detectives to investigate President Obama’s birth certificate, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s laptop, he has gathered power by warning that something untoward was looming just over the horizon. But yesterday, after all the hype about expected violence at the polls, there was remarkably little trouble.

Trump’s attempt to control politics by controlling the narrative continued early this morning, as the Department of Justice sent an email to federal prosecutors telling them that, while the law prohibits sending armed federal officers to polling places, it did authorize them to monitor “voting fraud” by sending armed federal officers to the places where election officials were counting ballots. About a half hour later, Trump called a press conference in which he declared victory and claimed that the ongoing counting of legally cast ballots must be stopped. Counting the ballots, he said, was the Democrats’ attempt to “steal the election.”

But Trump’s power is wavering, and he can no longer control the narrative. As he spoke, NBC News and MSNBC cut in to note that he was lying. After he finished, other media outlets also pushed back. On ABC News, Terry Moran said: “This isn’t law, this isn’t politics, this is theater,” Moran said. “And let’s be blunt: it’s the theater of authoritarianism.” Throughout the day, Trump tweeted angrily about the on-going counting of ballots; Twitter hid many of the tweets behind warnings that they were spreading disinformation.

Republican leaders have been surprisingly quick to turn on the president. Last night, the Fox News Channel was the first to call the state of Arizona for Democratic candidate Joe Biden which, according to Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, led Trump to call Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox News Channel, to demand a retraction. Murdoch, who has said for months that Trump would lose the election, refused.

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She provides us another important story that slipped through the cracks, as the high-powered shit hoses were flooding the zone in every way Trump and his allies have become so proficient at in our rightful terror over being terrorized by a terroristic party of violence- threatening extremists.

Another news story dropped quietly yesterday while people were distracted with the election. The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security issued a report challenging Acting Director Chad Wolf’s actions this summer when he sent law enforcement officers from the department to Portland, Oregon. The report challenged the deployments’ legality on a number of fronts, and concluded that the issue is open, unresolved, and urgent. The Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney, Chad Mizelle, an ally of senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, rejects the inspector general’s findings.

Of course, if he gets a moment, Trump knows exactly what to do. You fire the damned Inspector General, screw him, traitor! Put his head on a goddamned pike next to Fauci’s, Wray’s, Mueller’s, Comey’s, Sessions’s, Lindsey Graham’s (no, wait, Graham defended him yesterday), Omorosa’s, Hillary’s, Obama’s, Tillerson’s (who’s the fucking moron now, Rex?) those five fucks who raped the woman in Central Park and got away with it, Joe Biden’s, Hunter Biden’s, Stephen Colbert’s, Rosie O’Donnell’s, Oprah’s, Mary Trump’s, Giuliani’s, etc.

In our divided, fearful world, at this moment of disorienting uncertainty, billions of us increasingly facing imminent death and destruction, we can only go one of two ways — toward greater humanity or greater inhumanity. Sadly, the impulses seems to be solidly divided 50/50 at the moment.

I could seriously use a nice a nap, couldn’t you?

An anxiety-ridden nail-biter election, somewhat explained by historian Heather Cox Richardson

We are told by the mass media that this election is too close to call right now, very few votes separate the candidates in several “key” “battleground” states. It is not really that close an election, one candidate is about 4,000,000 votes behind the other.

It is only “too close to call” because of a brilliant device, the Electoral College, created, in large part, to preserve the Great Compromise with slaveholders in less populace states (at the time slaves were not considered humans, though a political deal decreed slave men counted for 3/5 of a man — recall the Three-fifths Compromise — for purposes of representation in Congress and Electoral College votes. Slave majority states like South Carolina got a great boon from this deal.). The Electoral College keeps the final decision about the presidency out of the hands of the riffraff, particularly the descendants of former slaves. It should be gone, for many reasons, but it is still the law of the land, as the Framers designed it as part of their Great Compromise with the beneficiaries of the Peculiar Institution (presumably, according to a pious Originalist like Antonin Scalia or Amy Coney Barrett, after direct consultation with the Old Testament God and Jesus Christ Himself).

The night of Election Day, Heather Cox Richardson laid out a bit of our history of the best, most accomplished and most well-born of us keeping the final say in our democracy out of the hands of the crude, dumb majority, entrusting democracy, instead, to the best people, our most refined people.

I have to admit I was not surprised to learn that quintessential American hypocrite Thomas Jefferson, Author of Liberty and enlightened Renaissance Man, played an outsized role in creating an ugly, unintended invitation to future tyranny. Too soon to know if Trump’s lawyers will, against all the odds, find a way to use the Original Intent of the Framers as the last word on who wins and who loses the presidential sweepstakes, no matter how many votes are cast. The facts might make you scream, but, today, a little screaming is probably good for you.

In 2018, for example, people in Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to felons. This would have added about 1.5 million people back to the rolls, many of them African Americans. But the Republican legislature passed a law saying the former felons could not vote unless they had paid all their court fines and fees. A federal judge said that law was essentially an unconstitutional poll tax, but an appeals court overturned that decision. Five of the six judges who upheld the law were appointed by Trump.

Today, as well, there are problems with ballots. This summer, the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a major fundraiser for the Republican Party and a key ally of Trump, changed the rules for mail delivery, slowing it significantly. It turns out that more than 300,000 ballots were checked into the USPS mail system but not checked out of it. U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan ordered the USPS to sweep 27 processing centers for the missing ballots, but USPS officials refused, saying they already had a system in place and that changing it would be disruptive. Sullivan has called the parties in tomorrow morning to discuss the issue.

The problem of voter suppression is compounded by the misuse of the Electoral College. The Framers originally designed delegates to the Electoral College to vote according to districts within states, so that states would split their electoral votes, making them roughly proportional to a candidate’s support. That system changed in 1800, after Thomas Jefferson recognized that he would have a better chance of winning the presidency if the delegates of his own home state, Virginia, voted as a bloc rather than by district. He convinced them to do it. Quickly, other state officials recognized that the “winner-take-all” system meant they must do the same or their own preferred candidate would never win. Thus, our non-proportional system was born, and it so horrified James Madison and Alexander Hamilton that both wanted constitutional amendments to switch the system back.

Democracy took another hit from that system in 1929. The 1920 census showed that the weight of the nation’s demographics was moving to cities, which were controlled by Democrats, so the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives refused to reapportion representation after that census. Reapportioning the House would have cost many of them their seats. Rather than permitting the number of representatives to grow along with population, Congress then capped the size of the House at 435. Since then, the average size of a congressional district has tripled. This gives smaller states a huge advantage in the Electoral College, in which each state gets a number of votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives.

These injuries to our system have saddled us with an Electoral College that permits a minority to tyrannize over the majority. That systemic advantage is unsustainable in a democracy. One or the other will have to give.

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Fake News — we keep breaking COVID-19 records after massive in-person voting in all states

Look, I’m not saying this latest spike in Covid-19 infections and deaths has anything to do with the president making it clear that our possibly fraudulent mail-in votes were not guaranteed to be received in time to be legally counted, no matter when we mailed them. I went to the polls early, in person, as did Sekhnet, as did many people I know. We were taking no chances leaving things in the sweaty hands of the creepy Louis DeJoy. Millions who voted against Mr. Trump did the same (along with most of the 70,000,000 Trump supporters who also voted in person). Depending on where you live in the USA, this in-person voting was relatively safe (as in NY City where every precaution was taken) or potentially very risky (as in virtually any state that was up for grabs).

Because the president made the safe way to vote during an airborne pandemic, like the safe way to interact in public, a wedge issue to drive Americans apart, a few million Americans, maybe tens of millions of Americans, stood on lines in places where people don’t cotton to wearing masks. In Texas, for example, the law allows election officials to choose whether to wear masks and also allows them to force voters to remove masks in the polling place if they want to vote. That’s called democracy, down in the great state of Texas.

I’m not saying there’s any connection between the president’s depraved indifference to the lives and deaths of millions of his citizens and the spikes in Covid-19 infections and death nationwide, I’m also not saying there’s not any connection. A few numbers, during these aggravating days of counting and recounting.

Election day (I think, or maybe the day after):

Wednesday, as Mr. Trump demanded the counting stop (except in Arizona, where he is behind, and had a crowd in Maricopa County chanting “Count the votes! Count the votes!” In another state his impromptu mob chanted “Stop the count! Stop the Count!”)  die Lügenpresse kept flagrantly counting so-called Covid cases and reported:

and the latest totally fake record (until tomorrow):

Speaking of numbers, Mr. Trump’s lead in Georgia was 50,000 votes yesterday evening when my cousin called from a suburb of Atlanta. By the time we got off the phone an hour later, the lead was about 40,000 votes. I watched the lead decline over the course of the next 30 hours or so, checking my phone regularly, like I was checking the boxscore of an important baseball game in progress. By midnight tonight, Mr. Trump’s lead was under 2,000 votes:

at around 3 a.m. it was less than half that

At 4:00 a.m. Mr. Trump’s lead was 463 votes. If Mr. Biden gets the 16 electors from the great state of Georgia, the ballgame is over, Joe Biden, with a razor thin 4,000,000+ popular vote lead and at least 270 Electoral College votes (according to the Associated Press and Fox News– though not most of the others which would have him at 269 with Georgia’s 16), is the 46th president of the United States.

Update, at 4:53 a.m. (ah, who can sleep these days?) Mr. Biden up by almost 1,000 in the great state of Georgia.

In other fake news:

https://twitter.com/Sifill_LDF/status/1324515166961176576

What’s with the sniffing?

Disappointing, even horrifying, as it is that this election is too close to call (as a corrupt Postmaster General openly defies a federal court order to produce at least 300,000 “lost” ballots in swing states in time for counting [1], with Mr. Trump’s active support) — scary as the seeming end of the Age of Reason is — I couldn’t help noticing the president’s pronounced noisy nasal inhalations as he spoke at 2:20 a.m. claiming victory and announcing that he’ll be going to the Supreme Court, while accusing Democrats of a major fraud on our nation.

I have inserted the loud inhalations through the nose, the same ones we heard from Mr. Trump during his debates with Hillary.

President Donald Trump:

“This is a major fraud on our nation. (SNIFF) We want the law to be used in a proper manner. (SNIFF) So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. (SNIFF) We want all voting to stop. (SNIFF, SNIFF) We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4:00 in the morning and add them to the list, OK? It’s a very sad (SNIFF)— it’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment. And (SNIFF) we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.”

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The party of Trump NEVER takes its foot off the gas

It was after 2 a.m. of a long day after many long days for a 74 year-old who just (we are told, though actual evidence still is lacking) got over COVID-19, I can understand if he might need a little “pick me up” before he addressed the nation.

I don’t condemn anyone for using intoxicating drugs, unless they do something dangerous like getting behind the wheel of a car afterwards. In the larger scheme of things, what difference does it make if the guy toots a few lines of a stimulant that picks him up, keeps him alert as a few Diet Cokes? But still, what the hell is up with nobody even noticing that in certain high stakes moments, the guy suddenly sniffs like a dachshund on the hunt? He doesn’t usually breathe like a coke fiend, or someone who just snorted Adderall [2]. I’m just sayin’.

I’m trying to stay positive, but I have less reason for optimism today than I did yesterday. McConnell and Lindsey are both doing cocky victory laps after easily defeating well-funded challengers. It looks like the Grim Reaper is likely to remain in his post as Obstructor-in-Chief. Meaning that even if Biden ekes out a win, he’ll be immediately thwarted, 51-49 (or better) in terms of lawmaking. Is the bright side supposed to be that Nancy Pelosi is almost certainly retaining her gavel to continue do her legislative wizardry?

In other news:

U.S. Coronavirus Infections Top 92,000 on Election Day as Death Toll Rises

The United States confirmed more than 92,000 new coronavirus infections on Election Day — one of the highest one-day tolls for any country during the pandemic. Over 1,100 COVID-19 deaths were reported across the U.S. on Tuesday as hospitalizations reached their highest level since mid-August. Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb warns the U.S. should expect to see over a thousand daily deaths from COVID-19 for a “sustained period of time.”

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[1]

[T]he U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday refused to comply with a federal court order to sweep mail processing centers and deliver mail-in ballots that may have been unaccounted for. The order came after USPS announced over 300,000 mail-in ballots nationwide couldn’t be traced for delivery. USPS had until 3:30 p.m. Eastern to conduct the checks and make sure all ballots could be delivered before polls closed. Instead, USPS said it would maintain its own inspection schedule. The order affected facilities in 12 postal districts across 15 states, including battleground states like Arizona and Pennsylvania where mail-in ballots must be delivered by the end of Election Day in order to be counted. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is a Trump megadonor who has come under fire for recent changes at the Postal Service that have caused widespread delays and sparked major concerns over mail-in ballots.

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Today Judge Emmett Sullivan scheduled a contempt hearing. A DOJ lawyer said he’d check the schedule to see when the postal supervisor is available to explain why he is not in contempt of a direct court order.

“You will have to tell him when he’s available,” Emmet (sic) fumed. “It’s up to the court when he’s available.”

No idea why Business Insider refers to federal judge Emmett Sullivan by his first name, but the rest of the story is HERE

[2]

For people diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Adderall helps to improve concentration and focus. As a central nervous system stimulant it can also have the very same effects on people without ADHD.

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Reading Shelby County v. Holder on Election Day

Rather than watch the pundits and prognosticators today, in these sweaty hours before Donald Trump prematurely declares himself the victor and unleashes an army of lawyers to challenge a rigged election, I found myself reading the 5-4 John Roberts decision that in 2013 struck down the enforcement sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was another reminder that, in the unappealable Supreme Court, anyway, the dissent can be 100% vindicated by events set in motion by a wrongly decided opinion (see, for example Dred Scott v. Sanford) and the majority shown to be indefensibly wrong. Oh, well. One more thing that will need to be fixed when we have a semi-responsive democratic federal government again.

Reading John Roberts’s calm, measured analysis, it seems completely reasonable and sound to strike down this law at the request of an Alabama county complaining of the unconstitutional restriction of its right to full legal sovereignty in enacting all state laws. Roberts and his four conservative colleagues overturned the two lower federal courts and ruled in favor of Shelby County, Alabama.

The opinion focuses on the unreasonableness of Congress relying on 40 year-old data to continue to single out and judge jurisdictions that have long ago banned the specific outlawed discriminatory practices complained of in 1965. He bases his finding of unconstitutionality on a complete lack of contemporary evidence for why Congress reauthorized the sections of the Voting Rights Act that select certain states for preclearance of any proposed changes to their voting laws before they go into effect. He rules this an unconstitutional infringement of the Tenth Amendment guarantee of state sovereignty in lawmaking.

When you are done reading Roberts’s measured, reasonable sounding opinion you have barely a whiff of how radical the judicial activism of the 5-4 “Originalist” majority is in Shelby County v. Holder.

Seriously. I hate bland corporatist John Roberts, I know how destructive this ruling has been (up there with its pernicious close 5-4 cousin Citizens United v. FEC which ruled unlimited money spent in political advocacy is protected First Amendment speech), and I’m a lawyer, but his opinion on first reading struck me as reasonable and respectable, based on what he presented. It’s hard to see, from what he lays out, where his judicial reasoning breaks down. (The same goes for Roger Taney’s infamous majority opinion in Dred Scott, accept the premise, innate black inferiority to whites, and there is not a weak link in his legal analysis.)

Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

I cut and pasted various sections of the arguments to include in this post. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of words on my clipboard (most of them by the late, great RGB). I don’t have the strength to go through them at the moment, though many are well worth considering (I’ll post a link back here if I’m able to go through my notes and incorporate some of the more vivid quotes into this discussion). The entire decision is HERE and it is a rewarding read (though not to everyone’s taste).

In her most famous, and widely quoted, line from the dissent Ginsburg writes:

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

Here is the quote in situ (citations removed) — §4(b) sets out the reasons for designating a state as one the Voting Rights Act has to keep a watchful eye on under Section 5.

Instead, the Court strikes §4(b)’s coverage provision because, in its view, the provision is not based on “current conditions.” It discounts, however, that one such condition was the preclearance remedy in place in the covered jurisdictions, a remedy Congress designed both to catch discrimination before it causes harm, and to guard against return to old ways. Volumes of evidence supported Congress’ determination that the prospect of retrogression was real. Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

But, the Court insists, the coverage formula is no good; it is based on “decades-old data and eradicated practices.” Even if the legislative record shows, as engaging with it would reveal, that the formula accurately identifies the jurisdictions with the worst conditions of voting discrimination, that is of no moment, as the Court sees it. Congress, the Court decrees, must “star[t] from scratch.” I do not see why that should be so.

We learn from the dissent that states can get out of supervision by the Voting Rights Act by demonstrating, with ten years of a clean record on voting discrimination, that they should he allowed out of the preclearance requirement. They are then released from the law’s oversight. Who knew? There were hundreds of recent instances, cited by Ginsburg in the dissent, where, in recent years, the states that complained of the burden of the Voting Rights Act had been stopped by the Department of Justice from implementing new forms of voter discrimination. There was also massive proof submitted that racial discrimination in voting is alive and well in these jurisdictions and elsewhere. Here’s one vivid 2010 example, from Alabama (citations removed– paragraph breaks inserted):

A recent FBI investigation provides a further window into the persistence of racial discrimination in state politics. Recording devices worn by state legislators cooperating with the FBI’s investigation captured conversations between members of the state legislature and their political allies. The recorded conversations are shocking.

Members of the state Senate derisively refer to African-Americans as “Aborigines” and talk openly of their aim to quash a particular gambling-related referendum because the referendum, if placed on the ballot, might increase African-American voter turnout. Legislators and their allies expressed concern that if the referendum were placed on the ballot, “‘[e]very black, every illiterate’ would be ‘bused [to the polls] on HUD financed buses’”).

These conversations occurred not in the 1870’s, or even in the 1960’s, they took place in 2010. The District Judge presiding over the criminal trial at which the recorded conversations were introduced commented that the “re­cordings represent compelling evidence that political exclusion through racism remains a real and enduring problem” in Alabama. Racist sentiments, the judge observed, “remain regrettably entrenched in the high echelons of state government.”

These recent episodes forcefully demonstrate that §5’s preclearance requirement is constitutional as applied to Alabama and its political subdivisions. And under our case law, that conclusion should suffice to resolve this case.

Within 24 hours of the Roberts 5-4 majority striking down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, states formerly restrained by it — led by the great state of Texas, if I remember correctly, followed by several other Republican-led states, passed new laws to restrict the voting rights of selected racial and ethnic minorities.

Fair is fair, like the 2020 rule of one ballot drop box per Texas county, regardless of population. What’s old is new again. No poll tax (unless you consider an unpaid 8 hour wait to vote a “tax” for a minimum wage worker), no literacy tests (which, back in the late nineteenth century you were exempt from if your grandpappy didn’t have to take one — sorry, former slaves), no other in- your-face specifically identified and banned voter suppression– all made illegal in 1965. “So what is the problem here in 2013, in 2020?” ask Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy.

The problem is that a one vote majority of unappealable partisans, literally members or supporters of an ideologically pure political fraternity (the Federalist Society) can calmly and legally, with the stroke of a pen, strike down the will of the electorate expressed by a united, bipartisan Congress, and an approving president. An unappealable one vote partisan majority. That ain’t really democracy, you know.

Trump v. Biden, cage match

As a particularly monumental Election Day approaches, the president, confident of victory (in the court of Federalist Society-vetted federal appeals court and Supreme Court judges he’s appointed for life, anyway) has already announced that he will file a lawsuit against any electoral decision in Pennsylvania that is not in his favor. Article II, you understand, it let’s him do it, because he’s a big star, and supremely powerful and confident and, when you’re that big, they let you do whatever you want. You can grab ’em by the federal court, and they let you do it.

I’m hoping this historic early voting, and a turn-out on pace to break all records for voting in a presidential election, are strong signs that the nation has had enough of being constantly, roughly grabbed by the pussy. Women — and the majority of white ones unaccountably voted for Trump last time — seem to have woken up. Polls show Biden up 20 points among women this time, a popularity among the majority gender that Hillary Clinton never approached. Polls have been wrong, of course. For one thing, millions won’t admit to pollsters that they plan to vote Klan once inside the booth. Yadda yadda.

It’s possible the courts will decide this election, by disallowing the counting of thousands, even millions, of non-Trump ballots in various states, by pulling an esoteric ruling out of its collective, partisan ass, as the 5-4 Republican majority did in 2000. Bush v. Gore was decided based on an impressively feeble Hail Mary Equal Protection theory that the opinion stated, as applied, was to have no value as a precedent. A partisan majority, history shows us, doesn’t shrink from pulling out a unique, madcap one-off decision, if the historical necessity arises. Here’s a decent discussion of the possibility of another Bush v. Gore in 2020.

It’s tempting to call a determination to have a straight party-line Supreme Court vote on, say, a brand new Executive-created doctrine called “counting only votes cast and counted by close of business November 3, unless those votes are against me, in which case they’re fraud” unprincipled. Samuel Alito and Boof Kavanaugh have already signed on to this idea, as has Clarence Thomas — all are open to post-election review of non-Trump votes anywhere and everywhere — to prevent, in Boof’s unmistakable prose:

“the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of the election.“

Gorsuch hasn’t said where he stands, but he doesn’t really need to. Amy Coney Barrett? Anybody’s guess. Chief Justice and one-time “swing vote” John Roberts? It doesn’t matter anymore, with Amy there.

Tempting to call this hyper-partisanship unprincipled, but there is a powerful principle at work here. Power. Politics is seen by partisan groups like the Federalist Society as a blood sport, you prevail by killing your evil enemies and the ends justify the means. If you join the Federalist Society you commit to defending certain political, ideological positions, they become dogma. Anyone who deviates from dogma is a heretic. Everyone knows that heretics must be excommunicated and burnt at the stake.

With that, here’s a recent photo of a fervent true believer passionately preaching to an adoring crowd at the Federalist Society gala.

You can get a pretty good sense of the high principles that animate an uncompromising, ideologically pure legal mind like Bagpiper Bill Barr’s, and his ilk, from this presentation by John Oliver.

Good luck to us all tomorrow and in the high stakes days that will surely follow.

How Trump v. Biden gets to the Supreme Court

Here is another reason for guarded optimism about the looming rigged election.

Trump v. Biden, decided by the partisan-packed Supreme Court is far from a a certainty. It is not even a likely scenario (though it could happen, of course, a truly sickening thought). There are several specific things that must happen before the tainted 6-3 Supreme Court majority can rule on party lines to appoint Trump president.

The Trump-McConnell appointees on the federal appeals courts have been consistently ruling against the extension of vote counting and other measures to make safe voting easier during a pandemic. Their presumption is that to increase the number of votes counted will also increase the margin Trump will lose by. Rule as they may, suppress as many votes as they like (and God bless the lawyers who are fighting back against this in court), unless the election is very close, and unless several other specific things happen, there is no automatic route to the Supreme Court for Trump. As legal analyst Jonathan Diaz explained on CNN the other night (my editorial additions are in parentheses):

The election would have to come down to the ballots in one of the contested “swing” states (as in the Florida recount in 2000). It would have to be so close that the numbers of ballots received between Election Day and the extended deadline could be decisive, (could “flip” the result, as eternal adolescent asshole Kavanaugh wrote the other day). The president would also have to be ahead in that contested state, “notwithstanding those post-Election Day ballots” in order for a challenge to make a difference.

I am remaining positive. I’m focusing on the unlikeliness of all these things happening, that the election, even with the millions of undelivered and invalidated ballots, will not be close enough for the lawyers for these insane and unscrupulous zealots to steal a la Bush v. Gore.

Open, unaccountable corruption is a fearsome thing, terrifying, really. So is the constant lying without consequence, the ceaseless cruelty, the vindictiveness, the rage, the selective use of law enforcement against “enemies” and the rest of the destructive tics of the Trump era. I’m putting my faith in the fact that most Americans are not toxic kool-aid drinking death cult members (though, or course, sadly, many millions are). In zombie movies, in the end the zombies almost never prevail, however bad it looks for most of the flick.

Texas-sized efforts to Suppress the Vote

The Voting Rights Act, which, among other things, makes it a federal crime for anyone to intimidate voters (Amy!), has become very porous since the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). The 1965 law recognized the ongoing need to deal with the new and ingenious forms of legal discrimination devious vote suppressors would devise in the future. Section five of the law required federal pre-clearance for any changes in voting laws that would have a disparate impact on different groups of voters in the state. It is Section Five, this federal review for bias and voter suppression, that John Roberts [1] and the four other right wingers on the Supreme Court did away with in 2013.

In that case the right-wing majority held that, in a “post-racial” society like ours, where racism no longer rages, the 1965 Voting Rights Act no longer requires constitutional pre-clearance before any state can change its voting laws to make them more restrictive. State voting laws are now presumed to be unbiased and in compliance with the Voting Rights Act, no matter how selective they seem or what the history of bias in the state might have been, absent proof of actual bias in a federal lawsuit. The ruling shifts the burden (and expense) for proving bias in election laws onto the citizens and off of the state.

This kind of subtle, yet in-your-face, curtailment of guaranteed rights is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said “the price for democracy is eternal vigilance.” Dig it.

Texas is among the states that have gone to work since the anti-voter decision in Shelby County. The devil, as always, when devils do their devilish best, is in the diabolical details.

Here is Bill Moyers talking to election lawyer Ben Clements and John Bonifaz who are fighting ongoing cases against voter suppression. I’m going to break up this transcript with a few bold-face headlines (with a “fuck you” shout-out to WordPress engineers for their excellent work in making this all but impossible)

BILL MOYERS: I see that you’re involved in a case in Texas involving the Voting Rights Act concerning a safe and secure election during the pandemic. What’s that about?

BEN CLEMENTS: So the case challenges a number of laws and policies in Texas that particularly as they’ve been implemented during the pandemic have made it very, very difficult for people to vote safely. And the key part of the law that we are currently seeking to have the district court in San Antonio strike down is the governor’s mask mandate order.

The governor of Texas issued a mandate in an order last July requiring masks to be worn in almost all public places in Texas with just a handful of exceptions. But one of the exceptions, oddly enough, was for polling places.

So it specifically says that voters are not required to wear masks when voting or when standing in line to vote. Poll workers are not required to wear masks. And so if you want to go vote safely in person you have no choice but to risk being exposed to other voters and to poll workers.

And the secretary of state has issued further guidance saying that the poll workers can require the voter to take their mask off when showing their identification. So essentially, requiring voters to go face to face with a poll worker that does not have a mask on, and you take your own mask off. Now, this is all compounded by the fact that Texas is among the very worst states for providing alternatives to voting in person.

They do not allow you to vote by mail unless you have a medical or other health necessity. And fear of contracting COVID-19, Texas authorities have said, does not qualify. They make it very difficult to vote curbside if you can get yourself into the polls physically, then you’re not permitted to vote curbside.

So for the vast majority of Texans, they have no choice, if they want to vote, but to go do so in person. And as a result of this exemption in the governor’s order, to do so by exposing themselves, potentially for a long period of time because Texas also has very, very long lines in many of their counties and this claim is also under the Voting Rights Act. And particularly, as a discriminatory exemption. Because as we know COVID-19 affects Blacks and Latinos much worse than it does white people in terms of the likelihood of being infected and in terms of the severity and the risk of death if they are infected. And it’s been pretty well documented that that is all of the result of underlying, systemic racism in this country. And particularly in Texas. So we’re awaiting an order from the judge. We’re hopeful that he will order the exemption removed so that people are required to wear masks at the polls.

BEN CLEMENTS: I don’t think there’s any question that on one level, it’s extremely political. I mean, the only justification that the state can come up with for this exemption is their claim that some people just don’t want to wear a mask. It’s not just the poll workers who are exempt. Voters are exempt. And so if you want to go vote without a mask, because you don’t care about possibly infecting other people, you’re entitled to do that in Texas. And the Texas authorities claim that they need to do that because people should have the right to go vote without a mask if they want to. Now, that decision that they are more concerned about protecting the interest of someone who feels that it’s a personal affront to have to put on a mask than they are in protecting those people who feel that it’s not just a personal affront, but a risk to my safety and my health and possibly my life to be exposed to these people who won’t put a mask on, that they have made that choice.

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The position of the good, Republican authorities in Texas, doing their best to get their candidate back into the White House, is that since wearing a mask offends some people, nobody will be required to wear one and if you want to vote safely then — be a pussy, stay home and don’t vote:

“That decision [to not require masks during voting] that they are more concerned about protecting the interest of someone who feels that it’s a personal affront to have to put on a mask than they are in protecting those people who feel that it’s not just a personal affront, but a risk to my safety and my health and possibly my life to be exposed to these people who won’t put a mask on, that they have made that choice…”

That shit speaks for itself.

[1]

BILL MOYERS: How much has the Voting Rights Act been hurt by that decision of the Supreme Court, enabled, inspired by John Roberts? Who, as a young member of the Department of Justice, wrote a memorandum to his bosses laying out a strategy for undoing the Voting Rights Act that he then, once on the Supreme Court, began to implement?

JOHN BONIFAZ: He started very early during the Reagan Justice Department.  He did not want President Reagan at the time to extend the Voting Rights Act.  He lost that battle as a young attorney in the Reagan Justice Department. But then, of course, he ascended to the Supreme Court. And in the Shelby County case in 2013, he invalidated Section 5. And what we’ve seen as a result is a sweeping set of voter suppression laws and restrictions throughout the South, throughout the areas that were subject to Section 5 preclearance, including states like Texas.

BEN CLEMENTS: That decision in Shelby that gutted Section 5 and other decisions in other areas such as Affirmative Action, Justice Roberts has been animated by this idea that racism in this country is not a problem anymore. That we don’t need Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act because those states that used to engage in suppression of non-white people’s votes don’t do that sort of thing anymore. And the very painful irony is in his insistence on gutting these efforts, he has helped usher in a resurgence of systemic racism and and in particular, voter suppression often on racially-based lines as a result of some of his rulings.

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To Worry or Not To Worry

When I used to work as a judicial pissboy in New York City Housing Court, standing in the broken shoes of tenants too shaky to defend themselves from eviction and homelessness, I often found myself trying to reassure the more nervous of them. I did this with the great confidence born of experience and knowledge.

“I know this is very scary to you, terrifying even. Anyone would be shaken up at the prospect of being evicted from their home. It’s natural to be worried, but there is no reason to worry, and I tell you this with complete confidence. Please try not to worry unless I tell you there’s reason to be worried, and there won’t be. I know the outcome of your case because I’ve done this hundreds of times, I’ve had this identical situation many times and never was anyone evicted. Under the law, before you can be evicted, the judge has to (blah blah blah). This will not happen. My role is to get us enough time to get the small grant needed to end the case against you. The grant will come, 100% though it will take time. I will get the time for the grant check to be released, I’ve done it countless times, I’m an expert in getting more time. I can get more time even in the worst case scenario, when the marshall posts an eviction notice on your door– something that won’t happen in your case. I mention this because even if it does happen, I can stop it. There’s nothing legally unusual about your case, it’s very straightforward, a good outcome is a 100% certainty. So I understand it’s hard not to worry, but please try not to worry unless I tell you there’s something to worry about. In this case, you won’t hear that, since there is literally nothing to worry about.”

Sometimes they’d seem reassured, other times I’d get calls every other day from them, beside themselves with terror. My words were probably true, they acknowledged, but, to the nervous ones, there was always a first time, the unforeseen, the terrifying deathlike long-shot that would find them cringing in a doorway, dirty and unhoused, on the coldest day on record. In their worry they could even believe every word I’d said, but, the thought that would have them bolt upright in the middle of the night was “OK, but what if anything happens to this guy? What if he has a stroke and they replace him with someone who has not done this dozens of times?” There is no answer to that kind of worry. It’s not even, strictly speaking, unreasonable. It’s useless though, and constitutes a kind of self-torture. But I can see their point, suppose I’d died and an inexperienced guardian ad litem was appointed?

I once heard of a case where the tenant had not brought up an obvious defense and was evicted. The defense was so obvious that a reasonable judge may even had a duty to bring it up — but this judge didn’t and nobody knew to appeal her silence. The tenant was evicted, though he should not have been, under the law. I questioned the colleague who told me about this case, an Israeli-American lawyer with a substantial Israeli accent. I was surprised to learn that the tenant had been represented by a lawyer. A lawyer who did not raise the obvious, winning defense, the defense that would have prevented his client’s eviction.

“What was the lawyer, a schmuck?” I asked him.

“Schmoke,” he said in a singsong cadence, with a beautiful little shrug, pressing the button for the elevator.

I’m not saying the world is not filled with schmokes, people too stupid to know how stupid they are. The stupider the person, we find, the more confident and unshakable they are in their opinions and beliefs. You can pile all the evidence you like on one side of the scale, you can prove your case, beyond a shadow of a doubt, with no reasonable argument on the other side, and a person impervious to a factual argument will dismiss it with “so you say…” Facing this kind of stupidity is generally not a major problem in life, we can learn to recognize it, remain neutral when stupid people begin to argue and get away from them as soon as possible. The stupidity of others only becomes a problem when they have any kind of power over us.

So if, the other day, when we have the highest number of COVID-19 infections in a single day, and over 1,000 COVID deaths, your candidate boasts confidently “we have defeated COVID, COVID, COVID!” — you might be able to excuse your candidate’s obscene and obvious lie (because he’s protecting the unborn, giving you a million dollar tax break, whatever) but you will have a hard time defending it as a truthful statement. Which doesn’t matter, of course, if everybody else you know is in the same kind of patriotic denial you are. You might all sneer, and laugh and agree “like the man says, just more pure Socialist Democrat Antifa bullshit propaganda– nobody died from COVID-19, ever! We had fifteen cases, it went down to zero, like the president said, done.”

There are millions of unreasonable people in our great land, millions of stupid people, sad to say. They will vote in great numbers for Donald J. Trump, no matter what. He speaks directly to their emotions, he wants vicious revenge on the same people they hate (did you know American citizens of limited income who had at least one immigrant in their household with no Social Security number got nada when those onetime $1,200 relief checks went out? [1]). He announces his vitriol openly, without dancing around the point like some double-talking pussy politician afraid not to be “politically correct”. He’s as true as the North Star the same as he was as a ten year-old millionaire with a fist full of grievances against an unfair world where entitled Negroes, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans get every break — where the white man doesn’t stand a goddamned chance!

As far as I can see, there are millions more Americans who can make a basic cause and effect connection. The president’s mishandling of the pandemic, alone, should cost him the vote of every American who is not either dumb as a pile of turds, too full of hatred to see past his rage, or is making a ton of extra money because of this rich man’s president. The number of American’s with at least some discernment, I have to believe, exceeds the number of people who absolutely don’t give a shit about anything but their grievances. I have to believe this.

The U.S. has 4% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s COVID-19 cases — a 500% disparity. We lead the world by an impressive margin in the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths. This is directly attributable to the president’s abdication of responsibility for a coordinated national response to controlling the pandemic. He put the problem of controlling a wildly spreading, deadly worldwide disease squarely, and ridiculously, on each of the states and the several “territories”.

He appointed a religious fanatic and his own unqualified son-in-law to head the team in charge of the federal response. The unqualified son-in-law brayed like a challenged six year-old about who owned the federal stockpiles of equipment (PPE) desperately needed to control the spread of deadly disease, at a moment when states were competing for a very limited supply of PPE. It doesn’t belong to the states, the young man at the podium insisted indignantly, those are our stockpiles. Our’s.

Thousands upon thousands of American died (and continue to die) brutal, solitary deaths they didn’t need to die, from a disease they didn’t have to catch, in part because one spoiled billionaire, appointed by another, was pouting about who owned what instead of addressing what needed to be addressed to prevent massive exposure and deaths during what his father-in-law correctly called a plague We now know Trump was aware of the severity of this deadly airborne disease as early as February 7th when he told Bob Woodward about it, for the record.

America’s 614 billionaires have collectively increased their wealth, over the course of the pandemic, by almost a trillion dollars. They can vote for whoever the hell they want at this point, you would think. A bunch of vocal, prominent ones, and a cabal of more secretive ones, want their golden boy back for four more years. Why not? They’re making out like bandits. Current technology allows them to engineer razor thin Electoral College majorities to get their candidate into office by margins of 0.02% and 0.07%. The Electoral College is designed to foster minority rule, if it comes down to it.

But these are all dumb, boring facts, and we live in an alternative-fact, faith-based universe now.

So why shouldn’t you be worried?

There has been record early voting for the next president, much of it in person. Young people are voting in record numbers. This appears to be a tidal wave of votes against the wildly incompetent, cruel incumbent, though we can’t really know one way or the other at this point. I know 2016 was a sickening shock to 60% of America, and a seeming proof that the “popular vote” makes no difference in the outcome in our system rigged for the super-wealthy, but the political landscape this time is much different.

For one thing, the president has spent four years actively telling tens of millions of people in “Democrat” states to go fuck themselves, over and over, including during this pandemic. He hasn’t done much for most people in Republic states either, outside of billions of taxpayer dollars to farmers he screwed during his lost trade war with China (I know, I know — we own China now, which is why they are helping Biden…) particularly when it comes to minimizing deaths from this awful disease.

39% love Trump no matter what, they always will. As he said, he could shoot somebody in front of his multimillion dollar tower on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any votes. His lawyers made the same argument in federal court, managing to keep straight faces. They stated that he couldn’t be arrested for shooting somebody in the face on Fifth Avenue

39% love him. At least 50% do not. In this election it appears that much closer to the 60% who hate this guy, for his actual record, for what he has shamelessly done, for what he does and promises to do more of, how he provokes, lays out a feast of divisive hatred at every infectious rally he holds, violating health regulations in state after state, are turning out to vote against him. Millions of first time voters are coming out of their indifference to vote this clown out. Women, who unaccountably voted for this misogynist, white women gave him a majority of his votes (maybe he’s right about them…) against Hillary Clinton, as a group seem to have finally had enough of Trump. At this moment we can’t know how these millions of votes have been cast, but to me the signs look pretty positive.

Can he still win? Yes. The Electoral College, an eighteenth century constitutional compromise to protect the institution of slavery, may be again surgically tweaked to award this modern day would-be slaveholder the presidency again. It can only happen in a fairly close election — assuming the voting machines in multiple states are not hacked and massive numbers of votes flipped. We are told the states are zealous about guarding against this kind of hacking. The courts can rule that any ballot not arriving promptly by 8 pm on Election Day is invalid. They can invalidate millions of legal votes and fights will continue in court over this, but this will only be a factor if the margin of Trump’s defeat is not decisive and undeniable.

The reason Republicans are in court in over 300 cases in 44 states to limit voting is that they know they are going to suffer a major electoral ass whipping, based on their candidate’s record. It appears they are in the midst of this ass whupping, with record-shattering early voting poised to exceed the total votes cast in 2016. It is crucial for the anti-majoritarian tyranny party to win court cases to limit the votes of people rightfully outraged by too many outrages to count. They will be unable to overcome a tsunami of votes, even if the courts refuse the counting of millions of otherwise valid ballots that come after 8 pm on November 3, no matter when they’re post marked.

Trump has already actively sabotaged mail-in voting, used violence against peaceful protests, illegally withheld funds from “Democrat” “anarchist jurisdictions” during the economic hard times brought on by the pandemic, attacked the governor who was the intended victim of a kidnapping, “trial” and execution, exhorted armed followers to show up at polling places to intimidate enemy voters. He’s not a very nice person (I’ll take a higher road than Keith Olbermann, who finally, and repeatedly, referred to our president as a “piece of shit”).

Trump is also an increasingly desperate guy. He’s at least $400,000,000 in personal debt, and facing numerous state lawsuits, and even the possibility of prison time for tax evasion, once he’s no longer president. He constantly calls on violent supporters to not allow a “rigged election” to be called against him. He actively supports killers on the right and dramatically vilifies any hint of violence during lawful protests — gunshots by his supporters are always justified, broken windows are acts of sick and dangerous anarchists.

Are there reasons to be worried? Yes, certainly. If Trump is president on January 21, 2021, this democracy is over. He has openly violated too many laws and norms to count and will, as is his only way, double down on his brazen lawlessness. The laws he has violated, laws like the Hatch Act, that at one time forced people to resign for violating it, will never be replaced. All norms for civility, decency and basic fairness will be permanently cancelled. We will have open oligarchic autocracy and by rights someone like me, opinionated, reasonably well-spoken, a reader of history who thinks he’s so fucking smart, and has a big fucking mouth, will get what he fucking deserves.

But like I told the worried tenants in whose smelly, worn-out shoes I used to stand, now is not the time to worry.

[1] This bit brought to you by the vicious xenophobes who cannot find the parents of 545 children separated from their parents at the southern border, the same folks who wouldn’t renew the CARES Act:

And one of the biggest populations that was excluded was children and adults in immigrant families. And about 15 million, it’s estimated, individuals in immigrant families were left out. And, you know, most of these kids would have been U.S. citizen children. But the exclusions were particularly harsh here, because if just one adult in the family did not have a Social Security number, no one in the family, regardless of citizenship status or green card status, were able to receive the payment. And so, that has huge applications for families in every state.

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