The 6-3 right-wing majority on the Supreme Court is poised to hear the president’s appeal of any voter decision that goes against Mr. Trump, a man who has repeatedly announced that his loss could only be the result of massive voter fraud (that there has never been any evidence for).

If the margin of Trump’s loss is large enough, as one-sided as it should be, even in this zombie apocalypse we are living in, the 6-3 majority will have a difficult job finding even convoluted legal grounds to rule that he is still president. That’s why massive voting in person is so important right now.

It’s encouraging to see the record-shattering early voting across the country in the face of an uncontrolled pandemic. I felt fine waiting 52 minutes yesterday to cast my vote, (all of us wearing masks, keeping 6 feet apart and disinfecting our hands after touching anything) happy to do it, even though my vote was cast in an “anarchist jurisdiction” Trump should lose by a ton of votes.

Amy Coney Barrett bent over backwards yesterday to demonstrate her judicial impartiality, recusing herself from rushing in to break the court’s tie in an emergency Republican appeal of the Pennsylvania lawsuit decided against them by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and overturn its ruling. This case is intimately related to Trump’s federal lawsuit to limit voting in Pennsylvania, a case thoroughly disposed of by Trump appointee J. Nicholas Ranjan. Ranjan went into great legal detail when he dismissed the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee’s case to limit voting during a pandemic. He returned again and again to the baselessness of their claims, the tenuousness of the few claims that were arguably based in law or fact, and the lack of evidence for them they presented.

The Supreme Court could have overturned the lower court anyway, and possibly even Judge Ranjan scholarly and thorough record of the reasons he dismissed the case (though procedurally there won’t be time to appeal that one in the Supreme Court before the election), if Amy Coney Barrett had decided she could be impartial about it and that there was no way her action in breaking a tie in Mr. Trump’s favor would have appeared inappropriate. That the fate of this ruling was left up to the conscience and discretion of one rushed Trump lifetime appointee is worth being chilled about.

Her decision yesterday is of small importance, really. The Federalist Society majority are saving bigger fish to fry, having ordered the segregation (“separate but theoretically equal” [1]) of all ballots that come in after the polls close on election day. [They didn’t order that, see footnote] Samuel Alito recently reassured his fellow-travelers that the validity of these legally submitted ballots may be re-litigated after the election.

We turn in this perilous moment to the New York Times for some characteristic, though unintended, humor. As much as I respect the Times for some of their invaluable reporting, I also hate them for their sometimes absurdly prissy insistence on a “respectability” that amounts to non-reporting. Both quotes below are from this article on the Supreme Court, which I read while waiting on line to vote yesterday.

Even 20 years later, Democrats still harbor bitter memories from the court’s 2000 decision, given that it ended a hand recount that aides in the Gore campaign believed might have delivered a different result.

Hah! Of course. Only Gore aides believed a full count of the votes cast might have delivered a different result. Like a result based on the actual vote total in Florida, if the recount hadn’t been stopped by order of the Supreme Court just in time? Like an electoral result unaffected by the Roger Stone-engineered Brooks Brothers Rioters who stormed in to violently disrupt the Dade County recount? Like if there had been no interference at other polling places where suspiciously punched “hanging” and “dimpled” “chads” were mysteriously found on Gore ballots during hand recounts? Predictable bitterness by the losers, one supposes, — well, easy enough to understand. Here’s a byte for you:

After an intense recount process and the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, Bush won Florida’s electoral votes by a margin of only 537 votes out of almost six million cast and as a result became the president-elect.

Wikipedia

300 of these 573 Florida votes against popular vote winner Al Gore, MORE THAN HALF of Bush’s margin of victory (out of about 6,000,0000 votes) we can see on the table Wikipedia provides, were cast in tiny Liberty County, Florida where Bush voters cast 1,317 votes and Gore voters 1,017.

Makes you kind of think, doesn’t it? How much easier is it to engineer this kind of 54.65% to 42.20% electoral mini landslide using the inconceivably fancy algorithms of 2020? It was done in several states Trump needed in 2016, engineering surgically precise county by county margins of well under 1%.

Not to worry, though, Bush v. Gore was a one off. The Justices who wrote the 5-4 Bush v. Gore decision [2] giving the presidency to future war criminal, and later painter of wonderful animal portraits, George W. Bush, were explicit. The decision would not be cited as precedent– in fact, almost no part of it has ever been cited– except once by a member of that 5-4 majority, Clarence Thomas, and the other day by Kavanaugh.

It will not be cited again, at least not until really, really needed by those who would vote 6-3 in a hypothetical Trump v. Biden. Kavanaugh has already expressed a fascistic willingness to avoid the suspicious appearance of impropriety that continuing to count millions of votes AFTER election day would surely cause. As the dim-witted, ideologically pure, unappealable lifetime political hack wrote the other day, he would manfully prevent:

“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.“

Every American knows that runs scored after the eighth inning of a baseball game are never counted, it would flip the outcome of the game and cast suspicion on the entire sport of baseball!

The New York Times, with a puckish punchline:

In an odd coincidence, Justice Kavanaugh worked on the recount litigations in Florida, on the Republican side, as a young lawyer. So did Justice Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts.

Odd coincidence, indeed! As odd as the coincidence that all three were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote! Can you believe it?

[1] CORRECTION:

The Supreme Court did not order the segregation of mail-in ballots postmarked on or before election day, but received after. It was ordered by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar. She did this so that any disputed vote total from Pennsylvania can be shown in two parts — as counted on Nov. 3, and the votes tallied afterwards. Her idea is to preserve the integrity of the votes, rather than have all results thrown out, and Republicans send a Trump slate of electors to the Electoral College as a result of this dispute. She’s hedging Pennsylvania’s (and our) bets if the Supreme Court decides to back a Republican move to have the votes thrown out in their entirety for not following the Supreme Court’s later ruling. If the vote total is thrown out, state legislatures are free to choose which candidate to throw the state’s electoral votes to.

I stand by the fact, of course, that every member of the current 6-3 right-wing majority is a tested, ideologically-driven party zealot chosen, after careful vetting, for his (and now her’s, too) unflinching willingness to do whatever their party requires. The current court’s unified hostility to voting rights is well-documented (see, for example, Shelby County v. Holder== we have a black president, proof that racism is dead and laws against racist voter suppression are no longer needed, long live the future white president!)

[2]

Ah, for happier, more bipartisan days!

That 5-4 majority was composed of the nominees of Republican Presidents George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. The four in the minority had been nominated by three presidents: Republicans Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush, and Democrat Bill Clinton.

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The mass media that in the lead up to the 2016 election gave a billion dollars of free publicity to the truculent blimp who became America’s 45th president is at it still. And why shouldn’t they be? Wasn’t it Reagan who said “the business of America is business”?

The bottom line is a sacred thing in a profit driven culture — it is certainly more important than fairness and accuracy in reporting, critical analysis, reasoned debate. Unrestrained lust for advertising dollars is a bad substitute for judgment, discretion, concern for the harmful public effects of open, notorious collusion with those who have the most money to spend and the fewest scruples about what they’re buying. The crazed pursuit of ever more wealth for the already wealthy exerts a downward momentum of its own, even when no foot is on the gas.

I remember the night in 2016 when Bernie Sanders won numerous primaries. Instead opf broadcasting his speech in front of a fired up crowd, the corporate media had its cameras trained on the empty Trump podium waiting for their meal ticket to show up and make some attention-grabbing remarks. A lingering. longing shot of the empty podium with the Trump sign on it, a perfect symbol for what has gone wrong in America.

I recall the head of CBS, a smug asshole who’d later have to leave the network in disgrace (with a nice chunk of his $100,000,000 severance package, as I recall) after numerous complaints emerged that he’d molested female subordinates, saying he might not agree with Trump’s politics (whatever those might be) but he sure had to love what Trump did for the CBS bottom line. True that, multimillion dollar golden parachutes for sexual abusers do not grow on trees.

John Starks was on the foul line about to shoot two, during crunch time in a playoff final game the Knicks were in, when the network abruptly cut away to watch a helicopter shot of a phalanx of cop cars following a white SUV in which OJ Simpson, with a fake beard and a satchel of cash, was fleeing with his buddy and wheelman Al Cowlings after somebody hacked OJ’s ex-wife and a friend to death outside her home. Why were we suddenly watching that slow motion car chase instead of the NBA finals? Somebody at network made a ratings decision, based on eyeballs and advertising dollars.

Sekhnet worked in the mass media and there are certain broadcasts of public significance she must watch. So I found myself sitting with her as the grotesque Vice Presidential debate unfolded. A debate moderator, a seemingly intelligent and likable woman, was asking questions of the candidates. I found several of them, tailored to the individual she was questioning, flat out shit questions, but it was what the network commentator said afterwards that brought the bile up into my throat. I knew I should have been back in the other room playing guitar by then, so it’s my own fault I was still on the couch, watching the post-game show.

“Mike Pence was masterful,” Norah O’Donnell of CBS said of the overbearing robot’s evasive, wooden debate performance. I snarled at Sekhnet who insisted O’Donnell had misspoken. Then O’Donnell clarified her comment. “He didn’t answer a single question he didn’t want to answer.” That is a masterful debate performance in America in 2020 — “I know you are, but what am I?” “Make Me!” “I make you in the toilet every day!” I know you are, but what am I?”

In this land of proud, assertive idiocy I am always relieved to read intelligent analysis of the shit show that we are all the forced audience for. I am so relieved to hear a story told with full context, without the maddening, stupefying false equivalence that makes a claim of climate change hoax, witch hunt, massive voter fraud or COVID-19 hoax just another legitimate point of view deserving of equal time and respect in the public square. I admire the intelligence, care and clarity of people like Bill Moyers, Jane Mayer, Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Shoshana Zuboff, Eric Foner, heroic outliers in an age of corporate conformity. (I realize only four of these are journalists).

Recently I’ve become aware of another talented presenter of thoughtful perspective on current events, historian Heather Cox Richardson, lately author of the nightly news digest Letters From an American. Last night she nailed (and gave the historical background of) something so basic that I need to share it here. You can read her full piece here.

She points out that Norah “Pence was masterful” O’Donnell, who interviewed Kamala Harris on the 60 Minutes episode that Trump had enough of when Lesley Stahl unfairly insisted on asking him questions that offended his delicate sensibilities, posed a pointed and unfair question of Kamala Harris, with no equivalent one for the politely fuming Pence.

O’Donnell set up the question by remarking that Harris is the most liberal member of the Senate (Senators Sanders, Warren and others might disagree) and then asked Harris, point-blank, if she was a “socialist”.

Harris laughed a robust little laugh that chilled my blood a bit, then laughed off the suggestion she was anything like a socialist. I was waiting for the steely follow-up “are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Socialist party?”

Heather Cox Richardson lays out the long, sordid history of making the word socialist a political smear in the United States of America. It has long been a sturdy tool of the anit-labor titans who spend so much money to keep the American populace politically unsophisticated. On network TV we have a respected journalist asking a vice presidential candidate, in effect, “are you a crazed, dangerous, America-hating, vicious, nasty, dogmatic monster who will, as the president claims, destroy our cherished way of life?”

All the monster can do at that point is laugh. The laugh, of course, is not a good look, nor a good answer to a loaded, disrespectful question. The fast moving TV format does not lend itself to thoughtful discussion, of course — it’s all about sound bytes, memes and gotchas.

The historian, after describing the long vilification of “socialism”, dating back to the years right after the Civil War, asks why a similar question was not posed to the masterful Mike Pence. Why wasn’t Pence asked to defend himself against the evidence-based charge that he’s part of a fascist administration. Fair point, no?

“Mr. Pence, a lot of your critics claim that you and the president are corrupt pay-to-play authoritarians who give special treatment to wealthy donors and loyalists while using the power of the state to attack, harass and punish critics real and perceived, that your governing style is fascistic. You dole out generous handouts to the already wealthy while imposing pain and suffering on the vast majority during an economically devastating pandemic, use state violence, backed by the Justice Department, to crush constitutionally protected protests, spread false, incendiary, personal smears against opponents and critics, sow fear and hatred between ethnic groups, retaliate against those carrying out their lawful duties, obstruct investigations, intimidate witnesses, prevent the introduction of evidence and witnesses at your leader’s trial, fire government inspectors and watchdogs, call for the jailing of political opponents, repeatedly lie about a massive, deadly, rapidly spreading public health crisis that has already cost over 220,000 American lives — insanely weaponizing proven safety protocols in defiance of science — designate sanctuary cities as enemy territory– “anarchist jurisdictions” and force these cities to bring court cases to get federal funds already allocated to them, support dictators around the globe, slash regulations that protect the public, spread demonstrably false propaganda while insisting that the free press is the enemy of the American people, as is voting by mail … blah blah fucking blah.”

Ah, you know what they say, the masterful few — “I know you are, but what am I?”

After Abraham Lincoln won the hotly contested four-way race for president in 1860, eleven southern states, standing on their constitutional right to own, sell and keep slaves, seceded from the United States. Lincoln, who won a plurality of the votes and the Electoral College, had not been on the presidential ballot in ten of those slave states. Check that shit out. The candidate the southern states hated WAS KEPT OFF OF THEIR BALLOTS. He won anyway.

No wonder they were mad enough to go to war.

Because since its abolition the idea of slavery increasingly provokes almost universal revulsion, history had to be tweaked a bit over the years to refocus the reasons for secession on States’ Rights and issues with taxation. On the other hand, the drafters of the Declarations of Secession were quite explicit about their defiance of those hostile to slavery. Here is the argument for secession that South Carolina, the first state to secede, promulgated on Christmas Eve, 1860:

… the government of the United States and of states within that government had failed to uphold their obligations to South Carolina. The specific issue stated was the refusal of some states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and clauses in the U.S. Constitution protecting slavery and the federal government’s perceived role in attempting to abolish slavery.

The next section states that while these problems had existed for twenty-five years, the situation had recently become unacceptable due to the election of a President (this was Abraham Lincoln although he is not mentioned by name) who was planning to outlaw slavery. In reference to the failure of the northern states to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act, South Carolina states the primary reason for its secession:

“The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.^[2]“

Further on:

“A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”

The final section concludes with a statement that South Carolina had therefore seceded from the United States of America and was thus, no longer bound by its laws and authorities.

source

As a nation we have had a deep history of ugly, often deadly, partisan skullduggery around elections. It may be hard to top just leaving a candidate you hate off your state’s presidential ballot, though Hans Von Spakovsky and friends are surely well aware of this inspired move and no doubt wistfully approve. American elections have always been nasty affairs.

The seamy journalist (James Callendar) who smeared second president John Adams on behalf of (and paid by) third president Thomas Jefferson later turned on Jefferson (for nonpayment, the rumor goes), publishing scurrilous stories that the Author of Liberty had a longtime slave mistress named Sally and had fathered several children by her. Callendar, a man with a drinking problem, was found not long afterwards drunk and drowned in shallow water somewhere. Nothing to see here. Jefferson’s secret would be well protected for almost two hundred years.

Over the decades countless people were literally murdered for the capital crime of trying to vote, or registering others to vote, in regions traditionally hostile to the idea that certain people be allowed to vote. Violence is a fearsome weapon to deter most things. Would you drag yourself inside to vote after being beaten bloody by a mob while the police stood by, expressionless?

Most of the action to suppress the vote in the US is not done by violence, thankfully, it is done, with even greater effectiveness, by men in robes. Just yesterday, Brett “Boof” Kavanaugh wrote, with characteristic flair, these inspiring and staunchly nonpartisan words explaining a decision that prohibits the counting of votes RECEIVED after election day, no matter when they were postmarked:

“…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. And those States also want to be able to definitely announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter.”

source

Suspicions of impropriety, you say? Historian Heather Cox Richardson, who quoted the above language, couldn’t restrain herself from pointing out:

This is the argument Trump has been making to delegitimize mail-in ballots, and it is political, not judicial. Absentee ballots do not “flip” an election; they are a legitimate part of an election that cannot be decided until they are counted. And the idea of calling an election on the night it is held is a tic of the media. In fact, no state certifies its election results the day of the election. Some take weeks.

source

Bear in mind, there is no canon of ethics for Supreme Court justices, as we were reminded recently, during the rush to install another Federalist Society justice before Election Day. Supreme Court justices are bound only by their own conscience, or, if they’re partisan ideologues, political expediency.

So in the case of Pennsylvania, where mail-in ballots postmarked by election day that arrive after election day can now be counted, because the Supreme Court was deadlocked 4-4 and so the lower court ruling stands. Amy Coney Barrett can decide to cast a tiebreaker about voting in Pennsylvania, after a quick, emergency rehearing of the argument to give legal cover for her knowing, informed and impartial vote on the merits. Say it with me, kids “USA! USA!!!”

You may have a Trump mega-donor appointed Postmaster General who then not only quickly removes high speed mail sorting machines in heavily Democratic voting districts but orders those complicated machines taken apart and stripped for parts so they cannot be reinstalled in time to effect the voting — and issue warnings that mail will be slow to be delivered, while at the same time promising improved service — and… hah, nothing you can do about it, without the votes to impeach the man– absent enough evidence to indict him for any of the actual crimes he appears to have committed.

So if you sabotage mail-in voting during election, limit drop boxes, and have your party put out fake ones in California, and millions of your enemies stand on line for hours to vote in person during a pandemic (one assumes these are the majority of the record 64,000,000+ early ballots already cast) … uh…

… you need either masses of armed supporters intimidating voters in Democratic leaning areas (which new Justice Amy Coney Barrett was unable to say is illegal), loyal state legislatures ready to pretend voter fraud is widespread and overrule the will of the voters in their states, an infallible partisan super-majority on the Supreme Court, or all of the above. Although corporatist John Roberts is usually hostile to voting rights, (he was one of the judicial surgeons who vivisected the Voting Rights Act which was designed to prevent electoral hanky-panky, particularly the kind practiced by powerful racists) he is unreliable. The far right cannot always count on the loyalty of Roberts, as we saw in the 4-4 tie on Pennsylvania trying to count all its mail-in ballots during a historic and deadly pandemic.

The rule of law, administered by judges of good character, who take their oaths seriously, are bound by ethics rules, offers some protection against some government treachery– though clearly it doesn’t apply in a carefully vetted ideologically right-wing 6-3 Supreme Court — when it comes to things like ensuring voting during a pandemic.

For the rule of law — today’s example, Bagpiper Bill Barr’s crass politically motivated attempt to get the defamation case against alleged rapist Donald Trump dismissed — on the grounds that Trump publicly calling his accuser a liar was part of his official duty as president and therefore covered by the Federal Torts Act, was slapped down by a federal judge.

The New York Times reported this today, in a piece entitled Justice Dept. Blocked in Bid to Shield Trump From Rape Defamation Suit 

They quoted Bagpiper, when DOJ made its absurd and unorthodox move (though it was effective in shielding Trump from an upcoming DNA test), speaking with his well-known candor and dismissive confidence:

“The law is clear,” Mr. Barr said. “It is done frequently. And the little tempest that’s going on is largely because of the bizarre political environment in which we live

but today:

The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to step into the case and defend the president. His ruling means that, for the moment, a lawsuit by the writer E. Jean Carroll can move forward against Mr. Trump, in his capacity as a private citizen.

“His comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that took place several decades before he took office, and the allegations have no relationship to the official business of the United States,” the judge wrote.

source

Judge stating the obvious, yo.

Get out there and vote, friends. We need an irrefutable popular vote victory, in addition to a clear Electoral College margin, to end this interminable national nightmare.

Trump’s lawyers themselves will lawyer up and try to get a case into the Supreme Court, convince the judges they appointed to rule in their favor — one more quid pro quo. It should be noted that even scumbag judges need something to work with when making a ruling. Trump and Barr have not given them much to work with, outside of attitude and a bad smell.

To anyone who came of political age during the last four years, kids in High School, young adults — it was not always like this in our country. There were once two political parties, flawed and unresponsive to the needs of millions of citizens, that were forced to work together and compromise to solve major problems. Today there is only sickening partisan warfare between the parties. This ugly situation has a long and winding history, it is not of Mr. Trump’s making, though he exploits it every day and is the present provocative face of it.

In a post-Trump America, there will be a lot of work to be done, and millions of us will have to be willing to do it, but the division in our nation was not this grim or menacing (not since the eve of the Civil War) and it will be better going forward. It has to. The pendulum of history swings, with agonizing slowness sometimes, but it does swing, based on what millions organize to no longer tolerate.

At the risk of sounding like the didactic old bastard I am, a few examples, a little perspective for those too young to remember anything other than what you see on your phone every day.

Then at least one concrete reason to be optimistic, even in a worst case scenario (for concerned citizens of all ages).

A little history:

In the past there would be no controversy, spread by the president himself, and amplified by loyal spokespeople, about proven safety precautions during a deadly pandemic or the need to marshal the federal government to provide guidance and protective equipment.

Only a party that had shut down the government three times in less than four years would refuse to pass a law to help millions of citizens from falling into poverty after jobs disappear, to prevent an epidemic of homelessness during a raging pandemic that has already killed almost a quarter of a million Americans. At one time a government shutdown was only employed by reckless political bomb-throwers. Now it is a regular annual tactic of the ruling minority-supported party, used to twist arms during budget talks by making the populace suffer.

In a more reasonable age there would be no controversy about the driving force behind the sharp annual increase in killer storms, the looming (and visible) climate catastrophe that only fanatics and fools can ignore. The president and his administration would not normally withdraw from a worldwide agreement to slow the warming of the earth while it denounced the other leaders and the world’s top climate scientists as bunch of job-killing, freedom-hating liberal stooges (and worse). No previous president would mock young climate activists as “terrorists” and crybabies.

Americans never woke up every day to see the headline “the president attacked (insert name here).” American presidents, even the most divisive ones, rarely attacked anyone. No American president would ever call the government infectious disease specialist who’d been heading his pandemic task force “a disaster” for not backing him in his absurd claims that nobody could have done a better job controlling the outbreak than the leader of the nation with the worst infection and death numbers in the world.

Few elected officials would fail to condemn racism or remain coy about an influential “theory” that holds that Democrats and Hollywood elites are satanist, child-raping, blood-drinking cannibals. “I know they feel very strongly against pedophilia,” is something no past president would ever have said by way of his complete response to a question about an insane and widespread conspiracy theory.

You would not see a case in the Supreme Court to abolish a health insurance program that protects tens of millions of Americans from death due to inability to pay for medical care, particularly not during a pandemic. A program the right continually tried to repeal (and missed by one Senate vote when John McCain gave the president a famous thumbs down) since it became law almost a decade ago. The president is currently in court trying to end his predecessor’s government supervised insurance expansion program that he and his party have no plan to replace. During a deadly pandemic. They simply, and sincerely, don’t give a rat’s ass about average Americans dying.

A Supreme Court nominee, being rushed through on a 51-49 party-line vote, literally the week before the election, would not refuse to answer a simple question of law like “is voter intimidation illegal?” She would not gracefully but forcefully demur on the question of whether she’d recuse herself from deciding a 2020 presidential election case, based on an outright hoax (massive voter fraud). The appearance of impropriety — the standard for recusal– is certainly strong, as she’d be a likely vote to in favor of the demagogue who is rushing through her confirmation so she can rule on that exact question and keep him in office, (regardless of the will of the electorate).

None of this shit is normal, boys and girls, though it is the NEW NORMAL, for the moment. Part of how we got here is that an extremely wealthy minority, employing some brilliant and unprincipled operatives, organized, and funded with a shit ton of money, a vast network of often secret influence machines, to achieve policy goals the majority of Americans oppose. The extreme right has fought a highly successful fight against what they see as Majoritarian Tyranny in which government itself is the enemy. Bill Moyers interviews investigative journalist Anne Nelson who lays a good deal of this operation out in discussing her book Shadow Network [1].

Here is a great discussion on the far right’s long, winning battle for control of the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court. Here’s a bit of the background about how ideologically committed Supreme Court nominees have learned to refuse to commit to any judicial, legal or philosophical position whatsoever.

You may have heard of a federal judge named Robert Bork, a haughtily opinionated, very conservative man, nominated by Ronald Reagan, who got “borked” and was not confirmed for a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court. “Borking” is making a potential lifetime appointee to the unappealable Supreme Court unequivocably answer specific questions about his or her judicial record and political philosophy. After hearing those answers from a contentious nominee (think of Antonin Scalia, but openly ill-tempered and without the wit or personality of the original “Originalist”), most Democrats and six Republicans voted against his confirmation. The rejection of Bork, his “borking”, was bipartisan. Reagan’s next nominee, a much less objectionable candidate named Anthony Kennedy, was confirmed unanimously. Those plain facts were not allowed to stand in the way of the handy radical right-wing foundational grievance myth that Bork was unfairly “borked” by Democratic partisans who viciously challenged him left and right.

Here’s a snapshot of our nation today in two titles from the Op Ed section.

Here are three winning “Democratic” ideas (I can’t read David Brooks, so I picked just three obvious ones).

In democracy, every eligible voter must be allowed to vote. The candidate who gets more votes wins.

The federal government must protect all citizens in case of disaster.

When there is demonstrated foreign interference in an American election, electoral vulnerabilities must be quickly and aggressively fixed.

In democracy, rule by the People, the will of the citizens is expressed by voting for representatives who act on our behalf. An open debate on policy ideas followed by widespread voting are hallmarks of a healthy democracy. Democrats support this idea, the president’s party rejects it, sponsoring laws that make voting more difficult in every state they control, bringing court cases to restrict voting in “swing states” they do not outright control, challenging every rule that allows freer access to voting. The conservative Supreme Court, 5-4, recently cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act– and most Red states immediately enacted legislation to make it harder for certain classes of citizens to vote.

The federal government represents all of the people of the nation, it goes without saying. The federal government is the guarantor of all of the rights of citizenship enumerated in the Constitution. When a natural disaster strikes, the federal government moves in quickly to help. It does not dispense aid according to which party the majority of an area voted for. It doesn’t force zero-sum competition between the states for urgently needed supplies. It doesn’t punish jurisdictions run by one party or the other. It doesn’t have an idiot spokesman, like the manifestly unqualified Jared Kushner, nonsensically piping up that the federal stockpiles of supplies needed to halt the spread of a pandemic are “ours” and not for the states.

One last big Democratic idea, then a word about Ayn Rand.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released a five volume report that confirmed what Robert Mueller’s investigation, and a House investigation, found, and what every intelligence agency concluded — Russia sweepingly and systematically interfered in the 2016 election to get Donald Trump elected.

Idea: pass legislation and implement policies to prevent a repeat in 2020. Biden missed a great opportunity at the last debate to mention that Mitch McConnell has blocked even debate on all such measures. McConnell did this as nonchalantly as he vowed to work with Trump’s defense team during the impeachment, to allow neither a witness nor evidence to be presented at the “trial”.

From McConnell’s power-first point of view, why should he? Russia interfered to help his candidate, his party. He’s got a 51-49 majority, why would he do anything to interfere with what promises to be much more sophisticated Russian interference on behalf of his president’s reelection? That would just be stupid.

Ayn Rand was a politically radical novelist, an emigre from the Soviet Union. Her novels were written in service to her feverishly anti-Communist worldview. The individual, she believed, was far more important than any notion of the collective — and the protagonists of her massive novels were living examples (so to speak) of this essential concept. Socialism, she preached in her passionate, metaphorical works of fiction, was the enemy of personal greatness. She fled from a totalitarian state, so her point of view is understandable. But not as a coherent political philosophy.

In the real world Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is Social Darwinism, the perverse notion that it is the absolute natural right of someone with the might to take from the weak whatever they want. Reading Ayn Rand’s gigantic books qualified former Republican House leader Paul Ryan as a Republican intellectual. Her novels were treated by the right as expressions of inviolable universal truth, in the same way religious people venerate their holy books. Put into practice, you get a very ugly society where the weak can go fuck off and die.

A reason for hope, in one of the worst case scenarios for a contested election:

Even if Trump loses the election by a wide margin, and manages to get his many legal challenges, based on widespread election fraud he cannot prove (since evidence of such fraud has never been produced) up to the Supreme Court, and the 6-3 ruling ties up the Electoral College vote and throws the matter into the House of Representatives to decide on a one vote per state basis (a scenario he brought up the other day) — check this out.

Trump correctly stated that, under the current composition of the majority Democratic House of Representative, rendered one vote per state (as the twelfth amendment of the Constitution requires for resolving unresolved presidential elections) Republicans have a 26- 22 majority and so he’d still be president. Robert Reich points out in a neat little video that the House that would vote on this issue would not be the current House but the one in session after the 2020 election. Members of the new Congress would be sworn in on January 3, 2021 and would vote to decide the presidential election on January 6.

There was a big Democratic swing in 2018 when that party recaptured the House and that was before Mr. Trump’s botched pandemic response and an erratic campaign that will not win him many undecided voters. His attempt to stay in power after he loses the popular vote, and ties up the Electoral College with a 6-3 Supreme Court decision, with a favorable narrow House majority will hinge on Alaska and Montana (one representative, one vote each) remaining in his column, along with currently tied Pennsylvania (no vote) and virtually tied Florida (where three Republicans are retiring), and Michigan (Republican by one seat). If those states change column, majority rule in the USA will live to fight another day.

And fight we must, boys and girls.

[1] from the intro to the Moyers podcast:

What is the shadow network behind the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? Who selected and groomed her for this moment? Who’s financing the campaign to get her confirmed? Who’s counting on her to side with President Trump if he’s losing the election and wants the Supreme Court to declare him the winner? For the answers, Bill Moyers talks to journalist and investigator Anne Nelson about her book: SHADOW NETWORK: MEDIA, MONEY, AND THE SECRET HUB OF THE RADICAL RIGHT.

Moyers