This is what the Federalist Society was founded to do, march carefully curated Culture War-based cases into a Supreme Court with a majority Federalist Society membership to reshape American society back to the way it was in 1868. Of course, their preferred body of law stops in 1788 when the Original Constitution was adopted, before those pesky wartime amendments trying to guarantee so-called federal rights of citizenship to former slaves and everybody else in the country against the incursions of their sometimes repressive states.

But declaring state laws that remove basic privacy rights constitutional, laws that forbid the victims of rape from seeking medical abortions legally, requiring the rapist’s baby to be carried to term by the victim and born, that make no exceptions when the life of the mother is in danger, could these pious, unappealable, filibuster-proof 51-49 confirmed motherfuckers be any more audacious?

One looks in vain for a coherent “ideology” among these culture warriors. At the same time six religious fanatics overturn the federal right to privacy and bodily autonomy (under the rationale that states know best), we have States Rights, cited so often by right wingers, struck down when these states “infringe” an important principle recognized in 1788, in 1868, that under the Second Amendment Americans have the recently enumerated right to bear guns wherever they go, and any kind of damned gun they want. Black klansman Clarence Thomas made that clear in his recent striking down of New York State’s gun laws requiring special circumstances for a concealed carry permit for a deadly weapon.

Imagine if those demented patriots on January 6th had all been able to exercise their sacred Scalia-created federal right to carry concealed firearms wherever they chose to carry them. Pence and Pelosi would be dead, martial law declared by Trump and guys like me would be writing blahgs from the crowded trains to MAGA reeducation centers (best case scenario…).

Oh, yeah, suck on your alleged rights to a so-called Miranda warning, skels. You look guilty anyway!

If you had any doubt about the war that we are currently in, a war as implacably cold as any cold war in history, where one side, armed and angry, has the presumptive right to make the other side, the 70%, do what they say on fear of death, well, if 50 million more of us don’t get out and vote in 2022, and put a filibuster-proof majority (52 actual defenders of democracy) in the Senate, while maintaining the House, I’ll be seeing y’all in the camps.

That’s the most anodyne way I can say it, no point picturing guys like me swinging from ropes in front of righteously hopped up mobs. How depressing is that image in the land of the free and the home of the heavily armed?

Hate, rage and incoherence can’t win. Half of you who took no side in Trump v Biden, we’re counting on you. Democratic debate or simple hatred, democracy or allegiamce to a debunked autocratic lie, pick a goddamned side.

e.

I have been saying (and writing) that 110,000,000 eligible US voters sat out the 2020 presidential election. I was repeating unverified information from a trusted source (Mary Trump, I think). I prefer multiple sources to confirm facts.

The other day I did the math. Adding Trump’s 74,000,000, Biden’s 81,000,000 and 110,000,000 gives us 265,000,000, an unlikely number of 18 years plus in a nation of 334,776,423, (as of Trump’s 76th birthday last week.)

National Public Radio reported it was a mere 80,000,000 who took no side in Biden v Trump. I stand possibly corrected. Here’s their story, with the various rationales for abstaining from our democratic duty to hold our nose and vote every few years:

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/15/945031391/poll-despite-record-turnout-80-million-americans-didnt-vote-heres-why

My math, using the 110,000,000 number, gave me about 20% of the U.S. population under 18, which seemed very low.

Quick check with the US Census, and, yep, just over 20% under 18.

By comparison, the younger population under age 18 numbered 73.1 million, or 22.1% of the U.S. population in 2020, a 1.4% decrease from 74.2 million in 2010

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/united-states-adult-population-grew-faster-than-nations-total-population-from-2010-to-2020.html#:~:text=By%20comparison%2C%20the%20younger%20population,from%2074.2%20million%20in%202010

So the number of eligible voters who sat out Trump v. Biden was likely around 100,000,000 friends of democracy. God damn.

On the other hand 26,664,746 more votes were cast in 2020 (67% of eligible voters) than in 2016 (55%) meaning possibly 130,000,000 Americans sat out 2016. The 2020 increase broke 11.2 million more for Trumpie and 15.4 million more for his Democratic opponent. Hence the drive in every Republican state to nullify the votes of non-Republicans in the name of Election Integrity (and the hothouse grown Independent State Legislature Doctrine.)

Get out and vote, citizens.

Chris Hayes with an excellent essay on the power of live, sworn testimony to topple corrupt, powerful bullies. A witness from the Army spoke the words above to lying, bullying demogogue Joe McCarthy on June 9, 1954, back in more innocent days when lies debunked were accepted as lies, and lying was still considered bad, wrong and disqualifying for an office of public trust.

Joseph Welch’s words to destructive Senator Joe McCarthy ended McCarthy’s reign, McCarthy was censured and finished drinking himself to death three years later. McCarthy’s unscrupulous, evil gunsel Roy Cohn begat ratfucker Roger Stone, forming a straight line from Nixon to Trump. I find the history fascinating.