We all have blind spots; some of ours are greater than others. If you happen to be someone in the public eye, it’s more likely that other people will happen to see yours.

Each of us needs one or several people who can help us identify our blind spots and warn us when they seem to be leading us into a danger zone.

There may be no one in the world of politics who consistently gets duped more often than Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins. She seems to be about as well-intentioned as any Republican can be. She hopes for the best, so much so, that there are many times when she thinks that the better angels will visit upon the shoulders of someone who clearly has no intention of taking a compassionate or reasonable path. While often being naïve in judging the intentions of judicial nominees, she can be a savvy politician when dealing with the likes of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia on possible bi-partisan agreements (this plays into his blind spot on bi-partisanship). She also knows well the playing field of her home state of Maine and consistently wins reelection by substantial margins in a fairly progressive state.

But nowhere has her blind spot been more apparent than in her assessment of Supreme Court nominees. A backdrop to this is that Collins is clearly pro-choice on the abortion issue, and she has wanted Supreme Court nominees to be committed to preserving the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

She was completely duped by Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Collins is quoted in Rolling Stone as saying the following about the leak of the Roberts Courts decision in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe, “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.” Perhaps it would be, but clearly the two of them would not be the first individuals to walk into the office of a senator and fudge the truth. Like most others who come to visit Collins and other legislators, visitors generally say what they think will give them the greatest advantage.

Gorsuch told Collins that Roe was “the law of the land.”  Regarding Kavanaugh, Collins asserted that he “said under oath many times, as well as to me personally many times, that he considers Roe to be ‘precedent upon precedent’ because it had been reaffirmed in the Casey v. Planned Parenthood case.”

According to Rolling Stone magazine, “Collins expressed shock and deep concern when a draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services decision indicated the justice would likely vote to overturn Roe was leaked to the public.” She felt that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had misled her.

One of the most important assets that a politician can have is a strong BS detector. Not telling the truth, embellishing the truth, misleading others are all essentially components of the currency of politics. Why should nominees for the Supreme Court be any different? They want to both advance their own careers as well as the beliefs they have on issues that are likely to come before the Court.

This summer our non-profit worked with an outstanding group of high school interns. One of them, Corvin Haake, suggested that a president withdraw a judicial nominee if that nominee refuses to directly and honestly answer questions when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Clearly, a nominee must be told in advance by the president that they must answer questions directly or their nomination will be yanked. It would thoroughly change the way in which Supreme Court justices are selected and could be a major first step in elevating the level of honesty in politics.

Maybe Susan Collins could lead the movement, by acknowledging that she has a blind spot when it comes to assessing nominees. She needs ones who would be honest, and so do the American people. She can make lemonade out of a personal lemon she has.

The nomination process is a bullshit-a-rama. We need to find a way to changed it. Senator Collins, please lead the charge!

The post Rescuing Susan Collins – Make Judicial Nominees Speak the Truth appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Like many progressives, I would be delighted to have a Green New Deal as well as a host of other progressive programs that would immediately and directly help the American people. However, this is not going to happen anytime soon. Joe Manchin has shown that he can single-handedly prevent it now; he has in the past. His help from Republicans will grow exponentially if they reclaim one or both houses of Congress this coming November.

All the same, political power in the United States is distributed in a way that gives Republicans far more influence than they are warranted. They hold half the seats in the U.S. Senate despite the fact that their senators represent only 43% of the population, compared to the Democrats 57% In other words, 43% of the American people are represented by the 50 Republican senators; the remaining 57% by the 50 Democrats. That is clearly unfair.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, five million more Americans (3%) voted for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, and yet the Democrats have only a few more seats than the Republicans. Once again, this is unfair, especially as we will shortly have new elections for the House with hundreds of districts that are gerrymandered.

The Supreme Court is heavily weighted towards Republicans, in a particularly pernicious way since five justices were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote. They became presidents only because of the antiquated Electoral College.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito were appointed by President George W. Bush who lost the popular election to Al Gore by 500,000 people. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were appointed by Donald Trump who lost the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton by three million popular votes.

Over half (5 out of 9) of the justices who were appointed by semi-illegitimate presidents. This has been a grave and great injustice and needs to be corrected.

These problems of disproportionate power in the hands of Republicans exists in all three branches of our government. This is why we need a recalibration of how power is distributed in Washington and in our states. Recalibration is different from retribution. Changes should not be designed to make it “the Democrats turn.” Instead, it should be time for “fairness to prevail.”

Here’s how we would do it in three steps:

1. Either abolish the Electoral College or codify the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in which the electors in all states are bound to vote for whomever one the national popular vote, not the vote in their state. This would be fair because our presidents would be elected solely on the basis of the vote of the people – the people who he or she represents.
2. Outlaw gerrymandering, the practice of dividing geographic areas into legislative districts in a way that gives one party an advantage over another. By outlawing gerrymandering, the number of seats from each party from each state would come close to reflecting that party’s percentage of voters in the state.
3. Institute some permanent and temporary changes to the Supreme Court:
   1. Permanent: Put term limits on how long a Supreme Court justice can serve, perhaps twenty years.
   2. Temporary: Because the court is currently leaning so far to the right, allow President Joe Biden to nominate three additional justices to the Supreme Court, temporarily constituting the court with ten members. Each of Biden’s nominees would be linked to one of the three Trump appointees. They would leave the Court when that particular Trump appointee no longer serves. The president at that time will then select one nominee to replace the two. When all six of the Trump and Biden appointees (exclusive of Ketanji Jackson Brown) are no longer on the court, it will be back down to nine members.

It is fair to ask how could this come to be. Why would Republicans accept these three changes, all of which would help Democrats, at least in the short run? These would be difficult changes to enact under any circumstances.

Naturally, there is no guarantee that Republicans would accept any of these changes. However, if the American people knew that Democrats were going to take a temporary pass on the most impactful items in their legislative agenda in order to spend several years focusing on recalibrating our democracy, it is possibly that many independents would join Democrats and a few Republicans to get this done. No guarantees, but the idea of advancing and simplifying democracy has a natural appeal to a great many voters. It’s worth a try because Manchin and the Republicans are not going away.

The post Recalibrating our Political System appeared first on Occasional Planet.

You probably did not think that a key reason why the current Supreme Court is so out of whack with much of America is because of gerrymandering. This is so because the makeup of every Court is determined by the two other gerrymandered branches of government, the executive and legislative.

Twelve of the last fifteen justices have been appointed by Republican presidents, and that is not an accident. With our Constitution, it is virtually impossible not to have partisan Supreme Courts when we choose our presidents and legislators in ways that are mired in a deep gerrymandering pie, or cesspool.

Here’s how it works:

The U.S. Senate is perhaps the most insidious form of gerrymandering that we have. A good working definition of gerrymandering from Merriam-Webster is “the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections.” At the time that the American constitution was created, there were no political parties. But there were political interests. The most significant of these interests was what powers would individual states have as opposed to the federal government.

For example, who would be responsible for determining whether a road should be built, or whether it would be legal for a sixteen-year-old to drink whiskey? Who would be able to levy taxes, or even tariffs? At the time that the constitution was being written, there were two key interests within the states that created the groundwork for gerrymandering:

1. The smaller states such as Rhode Island or Delaware did not want to be overpowered at the federal level by larger ones such as New York or Virginia.
2. The states where slavery was legal and was commonly used wanted to have equal power to the states that did not have slavery.

Many of the founding fathers were leery of direct democracy, meaning direct votes by the people. In order to prevent runaway “popular democracy,” the founders created a Senate to go along with the House of Representatives in the Congress. The Senate was undemocratic in two ways, both of which impacted the Supreme Court.

1. Initially, Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not the people. This would be a way of better ensuring that the interests of the states, as opposed to the people, were represented in the Senate. This was clearly undemocratic, and in 1917, the 17^th Amendment was passed, allowing the people to vote for their Senators. But at that time, “the people” were essentially only white males.
2. Each state has two senators. That ensures that there is equal representation among all the states in the Senate. At the same time, it ensures that at least one house of Congress does not include equal representation of the people. For example, California has a population of nearly 40 million people while Wyoming has less than 600 thousand. For each person in Wyoming, there are over 60 in California. What that means in the Senate is that each person in Wyoming has as much power as 60 people in California. That is terribly unfair, and it means that states like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, etc. have far more power in the Senate than states like California, Texas and New York. The same is true for southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina which are relatively small by population. Additionally, these states are no longer politically competitive. Conservative Republicans win virtually all state-wide elections including for the Senators.

Right now, the U.S. Senate is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. But Democratic Senators represent nearly 57% of the population, whereas Republican Senators represent around 43%. If the Senate was democratic, the Democrats would have a large majority. But in today’s real world the Democrats will probably lose seats in the 2022 mid-term election and once again be a minority.

We should also point out that the House of Representatives is gerrymandered in a different way. Take Missouri for example. It has eight Congressional seats. Recently, the state has voted between 50% – 60% Republican. Even at 60%, Republicans should get only five of the seats. However, they get six and some tried to get them seven. Why does it come out this way?

It is because in Missouri the districts are drawn by the state legislature. The Missouri General Assembly is currently veto-proof Republican. What the legislature has done is to draw two “minority majority” districts. This means districts in which some minority constitutes a majority of the voters. In Missouri, it is African-Americans. One district is in the eastern part of the state, St. Louis, and the other in the western part, Kansas City. None of the other districts is competitive.

Similar to the legislative branch, the executive (presidency) is deeply influenced by gerrymandering. The way in which the founding fathers took care of that was by creating the Electoral College. The E.C. is not really a college. It is a barely known organization that only exists every four years, when there is a presidential election. The number of representatives that each state has in the E.C. is somewhat based on population, but not entirely. What is important to know is that when the Electoral College works properly, the electors from each state vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state. In other words, the electors in Alabama vote for whomever carried the state and the electors in California vote for whomever won that state.

Where it gets undemocratic is let’s suppose that Candidate A carries Alabama by one million votes and loses California by a 400,000 votes. You might think that Candidate A would be ahead at that point, because she has 600,000 more votes than Candidate ‘B.’ But with the Electoral College, Candidate ‘B’ is ahead with 55 Electoral Votes from California as opposed to Candidate ‘B’ who has the 9 Electoral Votes from Alabama.

The fact that a candidate can lose the popular vote and still be elected president through the E.C. is not just hypothetical. It has happened five times in our history. The two most recent are the two most consequential. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote from George Bush by over a half million votes. However, Bush won the Electoral vote when the Supreme Court made a decision that gave Bush Florida’s electoral votes. That would not have mattered if the decision had been made by the popular vote.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than three million votes. However, Trump narrowly won “battleground states” such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and that propelled him to an Electoral victory.

It’s possible that two of our worst presidents ever were elected by the Electoral College than the popular vote. These two presidents are also responsible for five of the current six conservatives on the Supreme Court. Bush nominated John Roberts and Samuel Alito; Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

This is how the Supreme Court became impacted by gerrymandering. Without a gerrymandered presidency and a gerrymandered Senate, the Supreme Court would have been more balanced and reflective of the values of the American people.

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court itself has recently refused to overturn the creation of gerrymandered districts by the states.

The political ramifications of the gerrymandering dynamics is that Republicans are helped in all three branches. Theoretically, the three branches of government are supposed to restrain one another through a system of checks and balances. But that does not work when all three branches are dominated by one party, and that particular party is intent on thoroughly dominating government and extending very few levers of power to minority parties.

How can this change? At the moment, it’s difficult to conceive. Trump Republicans have a number of plans to further a radical right agenda in America. For our government to become more balanced it will require challenging victories by non-Republicans in congressional and presidential races. Stay tuned to see if that happens.

The post The Gerrymandering Virus – It’s Everywhere! appeared first on Occasional Planet.

(* Entities and characters alluded to here are entirely fictional, and are here imagined for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to actual events or persons alive or dead is entirely coincidental.)

In a flurry of activity, the US Taliban, once known as the Supreme Court of Our Lands, has announced another in of its nation-altering faith-based decisions. Rock and roll will no longer be tolerated.

Rock and roll has been on shaky ground ever since Colonel Parker signed Elvis back in the mid-1950’s. For context, see Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, currently in cinemas. Elvis shook his hips and the country went bananas.

Chuck Berry and Little Richard, back in the day, pushed those boundaries further. Would it be possible to be black and equal with Elvis, under the law, they posited?

The country’s highest courts at the time didn’t deem it the moment to weigh in on rock and roll, just yet. There was enough going on with the assassination of President Kennedy and the ever-opening chasm in our national schism called the Vietnam War.

Our courts’ decisions then, or non-decisions in fact, meant that we had to bear with Elvis through a decline in his powers until he became a pastiche of what he once was. Over time, his bellbottoms grew wider, his sideburns broader, his metal-studded belts wider and his waist – well broader again. Under Elvis’s reign, rock and roll took a tumble. And so the superstar Las Vegas show came to be.

On the other hand, Elvis’s decline opened the door for the British Invasion of American popular music. The Beatles came in, the Rolling Stones came in, Gerry and the Pacemakers came in. (Is it Pacemakers or Peacemakers – YouTube is still divided.)

The Supreme Court of our Lands hadn’t figured on that, truly.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Detroit loomed large in popular music. We had the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Martha and the Vandellas, Gladys Knight & The Pips and Marvin Gaye.

Our top courts eyed intervention with this large presence of Motown in our popular imagination. It was tricky there for a while until, with the arrival of Lionel Richie, the danger subsided.

Lionel Richie gave the Talibanists here at home time to regroup.

And so, for decades, popular music enthusiasts in the US thought they were home scot-free. Rock and roll morphed and splintered, and gave rise to an enormous myriad of forms, southern rock, country rock, disco, house, heavy metal, soft rock, independent, hiphop, rap, electronic … well, the whole shebang of popular music that has been our life since the boy from Tupelo’s first appearance on Ed Sullivan’s influential TV music show way back when.

Turns out, in the past decades, we were lulled into thinking that rock and roll was our right.

We rocked, bopped and discoed to the Doors, Bruce Springstein, John Melenkamp, the imported Rolling Stones, David Bowie (another import,) Bon Jovi, Prince, Carlos Santana, Donna Summer, Sister Sledge, Gloria Gaynor, Michael Jackson and the Village People.

We could never have enough music in our lives, we thought. Little did we know that we were, in fact, living in a rock and roll golden age.

Ominously, unnoticed, a misogynist real-estate upstart with an oversized ego announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee on Larry King live in October 1999. How many rock and rollers were watching Larry King in October of that year? Not many.

The real-estate upstart-in-question never dreamed of winning the presidential election. But surely, he thought, he could attract attention to his business ventures with a populist-based political message that went something along the line of Drain the Bayou. At his first attempt at the presidency, nothing. On his second try, bingo!

Whoever could have imagined that this bloated egocentric parvenu would one day mean the end of rock and roll?

Somehow, this nouveau riche wannbe convinced enough people to vote for him, and he was elected the president of the land.

Once President, he was confused, having never anticipating winning, unsure of his charge, and wide open to the influence of his followers on the far right. Under their direction, he – through another twist of fate – came to be be in a position to load the Supreme Court of Our Lands with faith-based fellow adherents. Faith-based fellow adherents is not entirely accurate as our US, democratically elected Supreme Ruler had no principles at all, as far as could be noted.

Thus, we – the United States – left the middle road behind.

And here we are.

Just this past week, we allowed our newly imposed Supreme Leader’s chosen religious leaders to rule that we would no longer have rock and roll in our lives.

I guess our moment of pseudo-freedom was good while it lasted.

All of those songs erased in an instance from YouTube is shocking. The immediate disappearance of rock and roll from our playlists is unprecedented. Now, it appears that we will be prosecuted if we attempt to cross state lines to hear the rock and roll that was once embedded in our lives. Nashville is closing its doors. L.A. will no longer be L.A. without its music industry.

Without precedent, rock and roll is now, at seemingly just a moment’s notice, gone from our lives, Our lives are so hugely different from what they were just weeks ago that it’s hard to fathom. Will we ever return to what we once were? As of this writing, that is completely unsure. Will we ever be able to hear a rock and roll song again? As of this writing, I honestly don’t know.

The post In life-altering decision for the nation, the US Taliban bans rock and roll * appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The history of the Republican Party over the past seventy years includes battles between the moderates within the party against the extremists to the right. During most of the second half of the 20^th Century and some of the 21^st Century, the moderates were able to seize the presidential nomination. But the far-right Donald Trump steamroller movement seems to have almost crushed the remaining elements of the moderates.

In 1952, the Republican Party was divided between the moderates favoring General Dwight Eisenhower and the deeply conservative (though barely extremist) element favoring Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Eisenhower won the nomination in 1952 as well as the presidential election. The same thing happened four years later in 1956.

The GOP nomination in 1960 went to Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon. At that time in his life, he was actually quite moderate, in part because he was constantly currying the favor of Eisenhower. It was not a certainty that Eisenhower would endorse Nixon until a day before the convention. Nixon was opposed by progressive New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, but the former vice-president won the nomination, carrying all eleven states with primaries as well as every other state that did not have a “favorite son” running. Nixon’s ease with winning the nomination did not carry over to the election as he was edged by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

1964 was the first year in which a true right-wing extremist won the Republican nomination. The nominee was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, as he defeated Rockefeller on the strength of his appeal to many voters who were angry about the progressive turns in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Goldwater became famous for uttering in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater wanted to undo much of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as well as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But he carried very few moderate Republicans and was soundly defeated in November. That election, 1964, was the last time that Democrats won in a landslide.

1968 was one of the strangest and most disconcerting years in American history. Lyndon Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not seek renomination. Two other individual seemed to be likely candidates, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. Kennedy was assassinated right after the California primary in early June. Johnson’s vice-president Hubert Humphrey ran as the “proxy Johnson” candidate. He did not enter any primaries, but with the help of Johnson in garnering support from the “party regulars,” Humphrey was able to win the nomination at the disjointed convention in Chicago where on-going violence was taking place in downtown.

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon was able to make a comeback, in large part because of the support that he had given Republican candidates across the country over the previous six years. He was opposed by newly elected governor of California Ronald Reagan and New York’s long-time governor Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon won ten of the twelve primaries and 61 % of the delegate votes. His politics fell somewhere between the progressive Rockefeller and the conservative Reagan. He won the election against Humphrey and third-party candidate Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Nixon governed moderately for his first several years, but as his anger rose, he became more and more conservative.

Even though the Watergate break-in occurred in 1972, it did not impact Richard Nixon’s reelection that year. He carried every state other than Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He had no opposition in the Republican primary that year, and his election race against Senator George McGovern of South Dakota was a breeze for him. But he was initially worried that he would have to run against popular Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. The fact that McGovern bested Muskie for the Democratic nomination was due in part to the Nixon “plumbers” who created false and misleading information about Muskie, and they eventually trapped him into appearing very unpresidential in a press conference.

Once Nixon won reelection, his primary focus was on the Watergate cover-up. This brought out a great deal of anger and meanness on his part. It also was consistent with his notion of an “enemies list” and crafting domestic policies to undermine Johnson’s Great Society. By the time that Nixon resigned in August of 1974, his governance was quite conservative.

In 1973, after disgraced Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned, Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan became vice-president. He assumed the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation. He was faced with problems of inflation, recession, and an extended energy crisis. He was considered a moderate, in large part because he did not fervently support the right-wing Republican social agenda on abortion, gay rights, etc. Leading to the 1976 election, Ford was seen as vulnerable. He was challenged by the aforementioned former Governor Ronald Reagan of California. The contest was extremely tight as Ford carried 26 states and Reagan 24. Ford won 1,121 delegates and Reagan 1,078. Ford won the nomination, as a moderate, but Reagan had established himself as a national leader and was poised for 1980.

In the 1976 general election, Ford carried a great deal of Nixon’s baggage, including the fact that Ford pardoned Nixon for “all crimes committed or might have been committed.” Ford lost to energetic Democrat, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

Carter had a somewhat sluggish presidency as he faced many of the economic and energy problems that Ford did and he was further burdened by the fact that 51 Americans had been taken hostage by Iran during a califate revolution. The 1980 Republican nomination was going to be a prime plumb and Reagan was poised to secure in on behalf of the conservative wing of the party. He carried 44 states to the six carried by moderate George H.W. Bush, who Reagan accepted as his vice-president. Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide. Four years later, Reagan faced nominal opposition for the nomination and then prevailed in another landslide election, this time against former vice-president Walter Mondale of Minnesota.

The race for the 1988 Republican nomination was largely between two party regulars who fell somewhere between moderation and extremism. Vice-President George H.W. Bush battled Kansas Senator Bob Dole. Extremists to the right were represented by Rev. Pat Robertson of Virginia, but he carried only four states. Dole became quite upset with some of the accusations by Bush, whose campaign was managed by one of the greatest masters of dirty tricks, Lee Atwater. The Bush campaign dispensed of Dole rather early in the primary sweepstakes and went on to carry 42 states.

The Democrats continued a habit of choosing weak presidential nominees, this time former Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Atwater was incredibly skilled in embarrassing Dukakis, portraying Dukakis as being both soft on crime and weak as a military leader. Bush won in the third straight Republican landslide.

When Bush ran for reelection in 1992, he a tougher race. First, Atwater had died the year before from a virulent form of brain cancer, and his Democratic opponent was a strong one, former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Bush was also challenged from the right within his own party by former journalist and Nixon speech-writer Pat Buchanan. Bush carried all 50 states and the District of Columbia and easily dispensed of Buchanan to win the Republican nomination.

In 1988, Bush had campaigned on a very conservative plank, “read my lips, no new taxes.” He had been able to fulfill that promise until 1992, reelection year. The federal government was running short on money and new taxes were in order. He walked back his pledge, albeit with sound reasoning. But it hurt him politically. Clinton was a breath of fresh air, particularly in the debates where he came across as much more human and compassionate than Bush. Clinton won the election in a three-way race in which eccentric businessman Ross Perot ran as an independent.

While Clinton had a difficult time getting legislation through Congress, he was still popular among voters. Two veterans of previous presidential races were the top contenders for the GOP nomination in 1996, Kansas Senator Bob Dole and Virginia journalist Pat Buchanan. In this case, the moderate, Dole, achieved an overwhelming victory, carrying delegates from 46 states, this, despite losing New Hampshire to Buchanan early in the cycle. Dole was a legitimate moderate who knew as well as anyone how Congress operated, something that was tough for Clinton to do. But Clinton started his campaign well before Dole won the Republican nomination and he carried 31 states plus DC for a 379 – 159 electoral victory. Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of over eight million votes.

The fight for the 2000 Republican nomination featured moderate Senator John McCain against conservative former Texas Governor George W. Bush. While Bush seemed to many to be too naïve and inexperienced for the job, he had an extremely skilled campaign staff, and he was able to capitalize on the growing conservative movement in the country. In the primaries, he won nearly twice as many votes as McCain and carried 45 states.

In the November general election, Democrat Al Gore of Tennessee, the sitting vice-president won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. The electoral victor depended on the vote from Florida where there was considerable confusion and malfeasance, particularly with the use of “butterfly ballots” in Palm Beach County. At first it appeared that Gore would carry Florida; then Bush, whereupon Gore conceded. But as the Florida vote tightened up again, Gore rescinded his concession. Virtually all components of the Florida race were thrown into the courts which resulted in numerous precinct recounts. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision that resulted in Bush winning the election. It was a 5-4 decision, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor later said that she thought that she made a mistake in her vote. But Bush won and what happened in the country was quite different from what would have happened with an Al Gore presidency.

Gore graciously accepted the Supreme Court’s decision, and Bush was inaugurated as president. It remains an open question as to what Bush and the Republicans would have done had the Court ruled in Gore’s favor.

It was on Bush’s watch that nine-eleven occurred. Many scholars believe that had Gore been president, he may well have paid more attention to the CIA’s warning about Al Qaeda during the first eight months of his administration and perhaps would have been able to prevent the attack from happening. Had nine eleven occurred on his watch, it is unlikely that he would have invaded Iraq for specious reasons as Bush did.

In 2004, Bush had the most nominal of opponents in the Republican primary. In the general election, he won the popular vote by over three million votes and the determinative electoral count, 285 – 251.

Most people remember the 2008 election because of Barack Obama’s nomination win over Hillary Clinton, and then his win of the presidency. But Republicans had a very competitive race for their nomination. Eventually Senator John McCain of Arizona won the contest, winning the races in thirty-seven states. But former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won eleven contests and nearly five million popular votes to McClain’s ten million. Both McCain and Romney were seen as moderates.

Two other candidates in the race were former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who was on the far-right of the evangelical wing of the Republican party, and Texas congressman Ron Paul who was more of a libertarian than a Republican. In 2008, the moderates in the GOP clearly carried the day.

2012 was another year in which the moderate wing of the Republican Party prevailed. Romney won going away with 42 states and over 52% of the popular vote. His nearest competitor was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum who was an extreme right-wing religious candidate. Also on the race were Ron Paul again as well as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who in many ways was the father of the modern right-wing Republican Party.

Romney won the nomination but lost the general election to Obama. Even though Obama won reelection, he was being stymied with his legislative agenda, particularly with the obstinance of Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

Charles Darwin would have liked the 2016 Republican race, as it was clearly an exercise of survival of the fittest. The fittest won the nomination and eventually the election, but as was clear to many when he first announced his candidacy in June of 2015, Donald Trump was not the fittest to govern.

He won the nomination against fifteen other candidates who took the stage on at least one of the televised Republican debates in the 2016 cycle. Most Republicans thought that Trump’s candidacy was a “joke,” but as more and more of the other candidates dropped out of the race, Trump became more of a concern, and then a favorite. The other candidates learned rather quickly that it was not wise for them to cross swords with Trump. He had ways of humiliating others while responding to attacks on him with more vicious rebuttals on his opponents. He dispatched in quick order with some of the previously favored candidates such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, Santorum, Paul and Huckabee. Even before the primaries began, well-known Republicans such as former New York governor George Pataki, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, former Texas governor Rick Perry, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Some of those who dropped out were moderate (Kasich and Bush) but most were extreme right-wingers. The last person standing before Trump clinched the nomination was extreme right-winger Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Trump attacked Cruz by insinuating that his father had been part of a conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, and that his wife was unattractive. When the Republican delegates assembled in Cleveland, Trump had nearly three times as many delegates as Cruz. Trump organized the convention to in many ways be a “hate-fest” as he and his supporters lambasted Republicans who did not agree with him as well as anyone with a ‘D’ (Democrat) after their name.

If the Trump – Clinton race has occurred in virtually any other democracy, Clinton would have won solidly, with nearly three million more popular votes than Trump. But this is the United States, and it has the anachronistic Electoral College. In that arena, Trump prevailed 306 – 225, and thus was declared the next president of the United States.

By 2020, Trump was so popular within the Republican Party that his only opposition was the not-well-known former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, a genuine moderate. In the primaries. Weld won only 2.35 % of the vote while Trump essentially won the rest. Trump won the nomination and then went on to lose the general election to former vice-president and senator Joe Biden of Delaware by seven million popular votes, and in the Electoral College, 306-225, the same margin by which he had won four years previously. However, now, twenty months after the election, Trump still does not understand that he lost, nor do many of his supporters. That in itself exemplifies how far to the radical right the Republican Party currently sits.

The main difference in the 2022 Republican Party is that it’s virtually impossible to find a moderate Republican. Where are the Dwight Eisenhowers, Nelson Rockefellers, Gerald Fords, George H.W. Bushs, Bob Doles, John McCains and Mitt Romneys of the Republican Party? It seems that somewhere between the time that Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination in June of 2015 and the time that he won the nomination in July, 2016, it became virtually impossible to be a moderate in the GOP without getting verbally demolished by Trump.

Following the testimony of White House Chief-of-Staff aide Cassidy Hutchinson before the January 6 committee on June 28 of this year, it seems that Trump is not a shoo-in to win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But the mostly likely opponents are current “Trumpsters” such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, former vice-president Mike Pence of Indiana, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. If there is a well-known moderate in the party, it would be Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney. In reality, her views on most issues are strongly conservative. Where she differs from the others is in her integrity, as show so vividly in her role as vice-chair of the Jan. 6 committee.

As we see from the chart above, Republicans have won eleven of the eighteen races since 1952. Had the winner been based on the popular vote, the split would be nine each. The Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last eight elections (W. Bush in 2004). Theoretically the Democrats should be on a roll.

But Republican extremists seem to have captured the party, though it was only ten years ago when the party nominated a moderate (Romney in 2012). Under fair and equal rules, the Democrats may have a bright future. However, the conservative Supreme Court is actively undermining democracy, and at the present time, all bets are off.

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We are now at the end of Women’s History Month after recognizing Black History Month in February. The United States Senate, appropriately, is now on the precipice of confirming the first Black woman to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. When Senator Booker told Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that he couldn’t help but look at her and see his own mother, I knew exactly what he meant. I saw my own mother, a Black woman, and I thought about her and what it might’ve meant to her as a little girl to have seen this moment.

Booker said “I’m not gonna let my joy be stolen, because I know – you and I – we appreciate something that we get that a lot of my colleagues don’t. I know Tim Scott does…And I want to tell you, when I look at you, this is why I get emotional. I’m sorry, you’re a person that is so much more than your race and gender. You’re a Christian, you’re a mom, you’re an intellect, you love books. But for me, I’m sorry, it’s hard for me not to look at you and not see my mom, not to see my cousins, one of them who had to come here and sit behind you. She had to have your back. I see my ancestors and yours. Nobody’s going to steal the joy of that woman in the street, or the calls that I’m getting, or the texts. Nobody’s going to steal that joy. You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.”

Senator Booker cried, Judge Brown Jackson cried, I cried, and I imagine millions of Black people in America cried as well. This should be a moment of national solidarity and great celebration, as a Black twitter user said “If Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson gets confirmed she’ll be the first Black Supreme Court justice since Thurgood Marshall to serve. And before you try to correct me with your thinky thoughts, I know what I tweeted. Thanks for understanding in advance.”

So why doesn’t any of this feel celebratory? Why does it feel like some of my joy has been stolen?

Black History month is something like a dark joke (no pun intended) among many Black Americans. We’d gladly tell you that February is an opportunity for White people to learn about what we already know (and then promptly forget in time for next February). It’s become as commercialized and hollowed out as every other holiday in America and so we’ve even developed our own traditions, like the collective gritting of teeth when coworkers inevitably say something along the lines of “at least you get a whole month!” and of course the corporate apology for the ill-thought racist product. The curriculum offered to children in school (more on that later) is so reductive that it usually consists of a listing of inventors, a poem from Langston Hughes, watching the “I Have a Dream Speech”, and some discussion of the civil war but generally not it’s cause (slavery). There’s a Frederick Douglass speech titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” where he calls out the contradictions of a freedom centered holiday in a nation which at the time had over 3 million enslaved people. I’m reminded of that every year in February, and I’m reminded of it now with the President’s well-meaning gesture of nominating Judge Brown Jackson by the end of February.

I can’t say I’m as familiar with the dynamics surrounding Women’s History month, but I’m sure similar ironies and contradictions present themselves. What do I mean by contradictions? Consider the last several years which nonetheless has very public acknowledgements of Black History.

In 2005, many residents of almost entirely black neighborhoods in New Orleans were left scrambling after the worst Hurricane the region had seen in living memory. Many died without assistance during the flooding, and many of those who didn’t were met with silence from the federal government.

In 2012, Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida and Barack Obama was pilloried for displaying a semblance of sympathy for an unarmed teenager who was killed by a racist.

In 2014, Ferguson Missouri was consumed by protests and police aggression after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. A no-fly zone was instituted by the governor, to keep the cameras from showing the despair of the people on the ground. Eric Garner, another Black man, was strangled to death by police in New York City for allegedly selling individual cigarettes. Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old, was shot for holding a plastic toy rifle. Meanwhile in Nevada, a white rancher named Bundy claimed to “know a lot about the negroes” including how “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”  All while pointing dozens of actual loaded rifles at federal law enforcement.

In 2015, a white supremacist domestic terrorist killed 9 Black parishioners in South Carolina. He did it to start a “race war”. When he was captured, the police delivered him to burger king for a hot meal before delivering him to prison. A 5-year-old survived by laying in the blood on the floor pretending to be dead.

In 2016, the man who had popularized the racist myth that the first Black President was illegitimate because he wasn’t an American citizen was elected President himself and his party won a majority of the popular vote in Congress the same year, many of them not condemning the myth and others having trafficked in it themselves with no consequence from the voting public.

Then there’s everything that’s happened since. These past two years especially have made the contradictions clearer than they’ve ever been, beginning with the international outpouring of righteous indignation at the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But as time went on, the government’s resolve weakened and the patience of the white public which has since soured on the idea that Black Lives Matter with the media glad to write stories making imaginary links between a nonexistent defunding of police and crime. Now just 2 years shy of the anniversary of the murder and the outrage, we’re confronted nationally with a wave of white parents successfully lobbying government at all levels to erase Black people from history. To quote Senator Booker, God Bless America.

So, we arrive in February once again, the Judge is nominated, the kabuki begins and the insincere niceties are written everywhere that they can be read. Then we entered March, and that was forgotten. If you watched the confirmation, you know what I’m talking about. There’s only so many times you can see someone accused of being soft on child pornography and pedophiles. There’s only so many times you can see someone’s intelligence and credentials questioned. There’s only so many times you can watch someone be talked over, shouted down, disrespected, and condescended to. There is only so much one can withstand and still maintain their joy.

Judge Brown Jackson will become Justice Brown Jackson, and the swelling pride I feel because of her success is shared by many other Black Americans. But the joy that Sen. Booker feels I reckon still escapes most of us, it certainly has escaped me. Sen. Booker is known for being this generation’s happy warrior, it is in his nature to see our better angels first. There is a liberal tendency to cope with these moments by imagining the “end of history” and the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice or the increasing diversity or the passion of the next generation. It should be said this is a step forward and it speaks of the progress that might be possible, though not inevitable.

As Booker and Brown-Jackson and myself and the 40 million Black people living in America must know, this nomination changes the racial composition of the Supreme Court, but it does not change the soul of America.

The post Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Confirmation Should’ve Been a Celebration appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Mr. President,

Every day the President is confronted with major issues that affect the life and prosperity of our nation and our planet. The decisions that the President makes often are collaborative with input needed from many players and the Constitution provides that some decisions require consent from another branch of government. However, there are moments when the decision belongs to the President and the President alone and these issues are often of the greatest consequence and shape the very identity of our nation. You are now faced with such a moment as Justice Breyer has announced his intention to retire from the United States Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has been at times the solitary mover of progress and it has often been the roadblock to advancement. It is the one branch of government that does not find itself accountable to voters, to the media, or to the wrath of political donors. The Supreme Court is accountable only to the Constitution of the United States of America and has the ultimate authority over what that Constitution means. This should mean that the awesome task of nominating and confirming a Justice should be taken seriously and not treated as another partisan exercise. However, this has not been the case in the last several nomination battles as Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett have been confirmed in a process that has been totally outside of regular order. Furthermore, organizations like the Federalist Society have removed all pretense of judicial impartiality by poisoning the process with right-wing ideology disguised as constitutional reasoning. Regrettably, politics has become part of the process and will remain part of the process until the political will exists to enact the reforms necessary to restore public faith in the Supreme Court.

It is vital that we engage with reality as it exists, not as we wish it existed. The reality is our system of government is threatened by forces who do not believe in representative government or American democracy. The reality is that these forces are poised to gain a meaningful amount of political power over the next year and will exert that power to meet their ends of disrupting American democracy. The reality is that it is not guaranteed that these forces can be defeated without extraordinary action. Therefore, I am presenting an extraordinary action that could prove immeasurable in preventing our slide towards illiberal democracy.

Nominate Vice President Kamala Harris to fill this Supreme Court vacancy. The obvious should be stated that Harris is qualified for this position, she understands the constitution to be a living document, and she generally can be counted on as a liberal vote despite justified criticism of her past positions on criminal justice. There is something that is perhaps less obvious that must be said, the public generally does not expect nor at this current moment desire to see you seek re-election to a second term as President. It is assumed then by the public and by our party that the next Democratic nominee for President will be Vice President Harris. I believe given the increased risk of permanent and irreversible damage to the American system should authoritarian forces be successful in electing their candidate for President, it would be worse than irresponsible to have Vice President Harris lead our party into a general election.

The Vice President was unable to continue her 2020 campaign for President into 2020, dropping out well before her home state’s primary who’s polling placed her outside any hopes for victory. Vice President Harris, despite having a lower profile than yourself has been rated as significantly more unpopular by virtually every pollster. Candidly, I would not be surprised if the Vice President were the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in 20 years. Some of the opposition she faces is because of her race and gender, undoubtedly it must be in a country with as much fraught racial history and racism denialism as ours. However, it would be dishonest to suggest that all of her opposition comes from misogynists or racists.

This is not meant to disparage or attack the character of the Vice President; she would be a champion for the rights of so many and would likely establish a legacy rivaling the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should she be nominated and confirmed. The Supreme Court allows an individual to make changes to our society not possible from the White House or Congress, it would not be a demotion but a vote of confidence in the Vice President’s ability to interpret law.  However, it is my sincere belief that she would be unable to win a general election for President of the United States even in the most favorable of circumstances. Nominating Vice President Harris would not only fulfill your promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, but it would also allow you to pick a successor who would have a greater chance of success in a campaign for President. It is my hope that you would select Rep. Karen Bass of California or Rep. Barbara Lee of California or Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin to succeed the Vice President. These distinguished women have shown themselves to be dedicated public servants, empathetic campaigners, and more than capable of being President of the United States. Furthermore, they have been champions of your agenda as President and progressive causes throughout their careers.

You have often stated that we are in “a battle for the soul of America”, I would counter that for the last 60 years we have been in “a war for the soul of America”. It is imperative that we are all doing what we can to pull this country back from the brink if it can in fact be pulled back. I do not know that the Vice President would accept a nomination to the Supreme Court, but I believe that she should be asked. Mr. President, ultimately the choice of a Supreme Court nominee is yours and I hope that you will consider all of your options.

Sincerely,

Reece Ellis

St. Louis, Missouri

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Following the oral arguments on the Mississippi Abortion Law on December 1, many legal scholars have said that five of the six conservatives on the Supreme Court (all but Chief Justice John Roberts) seem inclined to overrule Roe v Wade.

If the Court overrules Roe, it could be a case where pro-life proponents including the likely five justices who vote to do so (Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas) may want to be careful about that for which they wish. The reason is because the decision would likely be handed down in late June or early July of 2022, and mid-term elections would be just a few months later in November.

As of now, should Roe be overturned, approximately half the fifty states have laws in place that would ban virtually all abortions. That means that tens of millions of women who currently have limited rights and resources to receive an abortion would be shut out of that choice in their state of residence. And since so many of these states are adjacent to one another in the South and the Midwest, women would be many hundreds of miles away from a clinic in a state where abortion would still be legal and accessible.

Progressives have been reluctant to talk about why abortion should be safe or legal, other than the basic issue of women’s rights. Rarely do choice proponents mention how difficult it can be for a woman, or a man, to be a parent when they lose a job, they are still in school, they have a life planned in professions where they cannot easily be removed from a prescribed path. Rarely do they talk about the economics of parenthood. Rarely do they talk about while adoption is an excellent alternative, it’s not for everyone. Rarely do they talk about all the pain and agony that a woman must endure when she is in the midst of an unwanted pregnancy. Rarely do they talk about how many of the women with unwanted pregnancies are actually girls, often victims of rape or incest.

Simply put, pro-choice proponents have not been pissed off enough, at least not publicly so. But if Roe is overturned this coming summer, millions of women and men who conveniently thought that this issue would fade away will be confronted with a singular commonality about their choice of abortion: massive inconvenience and expense. It may be that there are as many reasons for a woman to opt for an abortion as there are women, but virtually all will be united in wanting to get the federal government to reinstate their right to control their bodies.

If this happens, pro-choice candidates will get unprecedented numbers of committed and effective volunteers. The airwaves will be saturated with commercials on both sides of the issue, but for those who are pro-choice, it will be something new. The myopic vision of many who are pro-life will be unmasked as it becomes more clear that they have no right to be involved in a decision about something that they don’t own. It will be recognized as the worst kind of over-reaching.

If next summer and fall we see a mobilized pro-choice movement unparalleled since anti-Vietnam and civil rights efforts of the ’60s and ’70s, Democratic candidates could have the support to win in states and congressional districts that are presently considered deep red. Joe Biden will still have two years left in his presidency and he might have more workable majorities in both houses of Congress.

Eventually, Supreme Court vacancies will occur when we have a Democratic president and a Senate that has reformed its rules to better allow the will of the majority to prevail.

It has happened in our nation’s history that government has moved aggressively to protect civil liberties, most particularly in the sixty’s decade of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps, just perhaps, overturning Roe will have the unintended result of expanding human rights. For that, we will all be far better.

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For the past year, I’ve sat through a lot of anxious liberal pearl clutching commentary about the danger of a stolen Presidential election. “This time was practice, next time they’ll get away with it” or some variation of this is usually what I run into the most. What it ignores is the fact that we don’t have to wonder what would happen if the right decided to steal a Presidential election in this country. It literally already happened, just over 20 years ago when George W. Bush was selected President. That year Bush and Vice President Al Gore contested the perpetual battleground state of Florida and though many years have passed since, the details of that campaign are still shocking to many. The Governor of Florida was John Ellis Bush (Jeb!), the brother of the Republican candidate. The Secretary of State, Florida’s Chief Election Official, was Katherine Harris who also served as campaign surrogate for Bush. Then of course there was a conveniently badly designed ballot that likely caused perhaps more than 1,000 accidental votes for Pat Buchanan that were meant for Al Gore.

This should’ve been an easy decision for the Supreme Court. The recount should have continued, and the final results honored, which several audits after the fact suggested a narrow Gore victory. However, the court stopped the recount and Bush became President not by his 537 vote margin in Florida but by a 1 vote margin in the Supreme Court. The justices who eventually sided with Bush in Bush v. Gore were either appointed by Bush’s father or another Republican President. George W. Bush went on to launch an illegal war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and displaced millions more.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson. This will almost inevitably decide the fate of Roe v. Wade, likely ending with the partial or complete overturning of that decision. Legal abortion will not be the only lightning rod the court touches in the next term, and if the conservative bona fides of the majority are to be believed then we are about to enter a radically more conservative judicial environment than at any point in living memory. However, that doesn’t need to be true, the solution is right in front of us: Expand the Supreme Court.

This has largely disappeared from political discourse, but it is an idea worth returning to, especially when one considers that the most prominent argument of the opposition doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

“Republicans will pack the Court when they win again.”

This underestimates the difficulty Republicans might have winning elections in a world with full enforcement of the voting rights act, no Citizens United, and the prohibition of hyper partisan redistricting. This is a foregone conclusion in an expanded Supreme Court with a liberal majority. Can Republicans win an election on a level playing field? Not with their current coalition, in fact expanding the Supreme Court may be the only way to get the GOP to rethink its Trump orientation which has never achieved majority support. Some people might argue that there would be voter backlash to expanding the court, I would expect as much as well. However, there would perhaps be a more engaged and less apathetic voter base for Democrats, if they saw the party leave everything on the field to defend the progressive gains of the last half century instead of accepting defeat.

Furthermore, if the Democrats add 6 seats to achieve a 9-6 majority and Republicans add 4 more to get a 10-9 majority that’s a good thing. If your goal is fewer knee-jerk reactionary decisions, more judges is better. If a majority decision needs to find 10 votes instead of 5, they necessarily will end up a little more moderate to hold the coalition together. We saw this happen in the 5-4 court where a number of decisions had to become more moderate for Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kennedy to deliver the swing vote.

There’s also the question of “So what if they do?”. What if Republicans win, and invalidate the changes to the court and repack it? What if the court becomes a political tool? I only have two questions, how is a 10-9 conservative majority any worse than a 6-3 one and isn’t the Court already a plainly political tool? Our current reality is we lose, a lot, on issues of monumental importance. Institutionally we are fucked, to say it politely, by the Senate. There is a bias built in to favor rural representation and Democrats, partly due to their own failures and partly due to trends outside of their control, will not be competitive with white rural voters for decades save for a major realignment. Republicans appear to be at worst even money to recapture both chambers of Congress next November. Should they retake the Senate, it is more likely than not that they would expand that margin in 2024 when West Virginia, Ohio, and Montana will have their Democratic Senators for the first time face the high turnout Republican electorate of a Presidential year. This could mean a decade, but perhaps longer, of Republican dominance in Congress. If we don’t level the playing field now, the chance could be lost.

I’d refer anyone to the legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky who wrote “The Case Against the Supreme Court”. He has said,

“Throughout history the court has overwhelmingly favored corporate power over employees, consumers, and the public, and has favored government power over individuals’ rights…I think, too, that the Court’s role has never been clearly enough defined in terms of enforcing the Constitution, protecting minorities, resisting the passions of the majority in times of crisis.”

The Warren Court was an aberration, it is not a coincidence that the vast majority of decisions that we have held up as shining examples of the wisdom of American jurisprudence are from that era. The Court traditionally has not been a friend to democracy, civil liberties, human rights, or really in a number of ways the constitution. This is all to say, the Court as an institution is something badly in need of fixing and it’s shocking that it hasn’t happened sooner.

Of course, this conversation is purely academic. There are not enough votes in the Senate to give the elderly access to dental care, it’s too expensive and after all there is a war machine that needs financing. So, it’s doubtful that there’s enough votes to even have a serious discussion on Court expansion. It’s not just Joe Manchin, it’s also President Biden and most third way types in Congress who balk at expanding the Court. Therefore, we remain on this roller coaster with the operator seemingly unaware that the ride has no brakes and no track after the fall.

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In 2021, as summer ebbs into fall, Democrats are concerned with a number of issues, but perhaps most importantly, abortion. It has become a wildcard issue because the Supreme Court has rendered a decision regarding it that neither is supreme nor courtly.

Bullies and cowards often travel together, and that is precisely how Republicans have acted regarding the latest legislation from the hallowed halls of the capitol of Texas. The Lone Star state has enacted the strictest abortion law in the land. Essentially it outlaws any abortion that would be performed approximately six weeks following conception. That’s the bullying part – exercising arbitrary and capricious power to encroach on a basic human right. And, of course, the Republicans chose to place far more restraints on the women of Texas rather than the men. In case you have forgotten, men don’t need abortions.

The cowardice angle is that the state is relieved of any enforcement responsibilities. Rather than have state authorities monitor abortion clinics for alleged crimes, the state “farms out” responsibility for enforcement to the citizens of Texas, or for that matter, the citizens of any other state who might happen to be in Texas. They are empowered to sue any woman in Texas who chooses to have a prohibited abortion.

The “infraction” is not settled in criminal court; rather in civil court where the “apprehender” or bounty hunter can seek to recover as much as $10,000 from a fine levied on the woman seeking the abortion. In further acts of cowardice, the law states that not only can a woman receiving an abortion be sued, but any other person who is “complicit” with her can as well. This could be the receptionist at the abortion clinic, the Uber driver who gives her a lift to the clinic, and any healthcare professional who works or volunteers at the clinic.

Indeed, Americans live in a strange country when the supreme court of the land, operating under the jurisdiction of the world’s oldest and presumed fairest constitution, cannot find one, much less dozens of reasons, to rule this sham of a law unconstitutional.

Almost all conservatives vehemently oppose abortion. Is there anything that draws a similar opposition from progressives?

How about gun control? Just as conservatives see abortion as an issue if life, progressives see unfettered gun rights as a matter of life, and death. Ever since 1973, when abortion became legal in the United States in the Roe v. Wade ruling, conservatives have been successful at chipping away at abortion rights to the point where now in Texas, over 85% of what were legal abortions are now against the law. Dozens of other states are fashioning similarly draconian laws.

During that same forty-eight-year period of time since Roe v. Wade, progressives have been trying to chip away at gun rights in the interest of gun safety. In 1973, Richard Nixon was still hanging on to his presidency with its law and order mantra. The rate of violent crime in the United States was growing rapidly. Conservatives favored stricter laws against gun crimes. Some progressives favored stronger penalties as well, but most wanted to deal with the root of the problem, the presence of guns, legal and illegal, on the streets and in the homes of Americans.

How much progress have progressives made in reducing the number and the of guns in America and the power of the types that are legally permitted? The answer is virtually none. In 1994, with Bill Clinton as president, the Democratic Congress passed a ten-year ban with the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act. It did outlaw some powerful weapons, but there was the sunset provision, limiting the restrictions to ten years before the law had to be renewed.

Conservatives were outraged that the bill passed. Less than two months after the bill became law, the first nail was hammered into its coffin as Newt Gingrich and the conservative Republicans took over Congress. By the time that the ten-year life of the bill was over in 2004, Republican George W. Bush was president, and he was in a position to veto any extension of the law. Since that period, gun laws have not been strengthened; they have been weakened.

So, suppose that progressives wanted to counter the strength of guns in America in a fashion similar to what Republicans have done with abortion. If there was to be symmetry in their strategy to what Republicans did, they would choose to not have any have any government agencies or officials involved in enforcing the laws.

Instead, they would set up a bounty system similar to what Texas Republicans have done to curtail abortions. Progressives would pass a law that would enable citizens to monitor the presence of weapons, particularly assault weapons, in the streets, workplaces, schools and homes of America.

That way, progressives could try to be like conservatives and bully their foes. They could establish un-armed posses to travel throughout America, to wherever guns are present. They could courteously go to gun stores, gun shows, bars, gang hideouts and wherever else there might be high concentrations of guns and please ask the owners (legal or illegal) to surrender their weapons in return for a summons to appear in court. This method by progressives to deal with guns would have a parallel construction to how conservatives in Texas are currently dealing with abortions.

Conservatives would be pleased with these parallel laws. All that they would have to do would be to take a picture of a woman about to have an abortion, along with anyone assisting her, and issue a warrant for their arrest. They show up in court and their work is done and they are richer.

Progressives would simply take pictures of people with guns and find a way to serve a warrant on the gun owners and be sure to say ‘please’ when they do so.

This is what conservatives call fair. They can act like bullies and prevent a woman from having control of her body while the other side must forcefully try to confiscate powerful firearms.

Yes, the absurdity is very clear to progressives; not at all to conservatives. This is why conservatives are winning so many of the battles these days. They get to use firearms as their weapon of choice; progressives use a basic right on human reproduction. If you can’t see a power imbalance in this conundrum, look again.

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