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2020 General Election, Democracy

Senator Whitehouse tutors viewers watching at home on the dark money scheme not visible at the hearing

Describing (on day two) what was happening at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing as comparable to a puppet theater, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse offered a backgrounder on “a $250 million dark money operation” that led to the Amy Coney Barrett nomination.

“You are not going to understand the real dynamic what is going on here, and you are certainly not going to understand forces outside of this room who are pulling strings and pushing sticks and causing the puppet theater to react,” Sheldon said.

He jabs three Republican members of the committee, Senators Chuck Grassley, Ted Cruz,  and Chairman Lindsey Graham, as well as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for their “hard-to-explain hypocrisy” (though, of course, unprincipled political opportunism and the embrace of raw political power is not all that hard to explain). He also punctures the charade that Republicans have performed each day at the hearing: that Democrats’ attention to Roe v. Wade, Obergefell, and numerous Obamacare cases is inexplicable, since Amy Coney Barrett has pledged to rule fairly, without any bias except a commitment to the letter of the law, in whichever cases she is presented with as a justice.

Senator Whitehouse and his colleagues know that the idea of Barrett as a blank slate is ludicrous, no matter how much Republicans pretend otherwise. These cases have been in the crosshairs of the conservative legal movement, the party’s conservative evangelical base, and Republican elected officials since each of the respective SCOTUS rulings were handed down. The right to abortion, to gay marriage, to affordable healthcare — even when one has preconditions that before the ACA would have precluded having health insurance — are at stake.

In each case, the GOP has fought fiercely to overturn the ‘liberal’ rulings, yet in the hearings this week, Republican senators appeared baffled at the idea that somehow confirming the Notre Dame professor as a justice would lead to any reversals, much less any real world consequences. But of course, Professor Barrett was chosen because there is in her record virtually no wavering from the party line — championed with immense infusions of corporate dollars — on any of these issues (or any others to which the GOP and its donor base are committed).

While illustrating the connections between deep-pocketed right-wing foundations, huge corporations, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the Judicial Crisis Network, the Federalist Society, and the Trump White House, the senator explained the “scheme with the same funders selecting judges, funding campaigns for the judges, and then showing up in court in these orchestrated amicus flotillas to tell the judges what to do.”

The lesson on a very impressive, highly successful decades-long campaign by corporate interests to capture the federal courts is much more illuminating than 28 minutes of Q & A with the nominee would have been.

The transcript is available from the Center for Media and Democracy, but it’s worthwhile to watch the presentation, which included helpful visual aids.

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

The phrase “Court-packing” should not be in the vocabulary of any Democratic candidate

“I’m not a fan of court-packing, but I don’t want to get off on that whole issue,” Biden told CNN affiliate WKRC in Cincinatti. “I want to keep focused. The President would love nothing better than to fight about whether or not I would, in fact, pack the court or not pack the court.”

In this response, Joe Biden used the phrases “court-packing” and (twice) “pack the court.” In doing so, he accepted, wholly, unreservedly the Republican-frame of the question of whether Democrats — if they win the presidency and the Senate — should consider changing the number of Supreme Court justices.

While this is unlikely to have a measurable impact on the trajectory of his campaign, I regard this as an unforced error.

. . . I thought I would become apoplectic when I saw that some Democrats were referring to expanding the Supreme Court as “court packing” or tacitly accepting the use of the phrase when asked about it by reporters. Any Democrat who uses this phrase should be, metaphorically at least, hit over the head with a stick.

The simple fact is that “court packing” is a pejorative phrase. It is nonsensical to use it as a description of something you’re considering supporting or actively supporting. If you decide to support a certain politician you don’t refer to deciding to ‘carry their water.’ Someone who supports expanding the estate tax doesn’t call it the ‘death tax’. This is obvious. Doing so is an act of comical political negligence. But of course the error is far more than semantic. No one should be using this phrase because it is false and turns the entire reality of the situation on its head. — Josh Marshall, the day before Biden made his comment

Although I don’t advocate hitting Biden over the head with a stick, I wish his team would have armed him with another response. The Biden campaign — like the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on day one of the hearing — has maintained superb message discipline. They lost it in this instance.

Republicans don’t use the phrase “voter suppression” to describe their electoral strategy. Or “court-packing” to describe their packing the federal courts at all levels with Republican lawyers — often regardless of their qualifications, judicial experience, or temperament — whom they expect to be ideological and partisan jurists to rule consistently against Democratic constituencies, issues embraced by Democrats, and Democratic governors and legislators.

But, in addition to conveying the simple rule, Don’t use a pejorative expression flung at you by your political opponents, there’s a more basic issue at work (just beneath the surface). Josh Marshall followed the obvious point with an elaboration that reveals a more fundamental blunder [emphasis added]:

If you decide to support a certain politician you don’t refer to deciding to ‘carry their water.’ Someone who supports expanding the estate tax doesn’t call it the ‘death tax’. This is obvious. Doing so is an act of comical political negligence. But of course the error is far more than semantic. No one should be using this phrase because it is false and turns the entire reality of the situation on its head.

Republicans have pursued an extreme agenda through corrupt means to politicize the courts. That’s the issue staring us in the face (though not, in the midst of an election campaign that will culminate in three weeks’ time, an issue that Biden must address now).

The formula was and is simple: use every ounce of raw political power to stack the federal judiciary with conservative ideologues. Refuse to consider nominations; then rush them through. No nominations within a year of an election; but quickie confirmations within a month of an election. Republicans have taken the constitutional framework and abused it to the maximum extent possible to achieve this transcendent goal. While these are almost universally abuses, none are clearly illegal or unconstitutional. At the most generous they amount to using every tool that is not expressly illegal to maximize control of the federal judiciary.

The untimely death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the final weeks of an election Republicans seem likely to lose has cast the whole drama in clarifying light. Republicans are now on the cusp of securing a 6-3 conservative High Court majority which will act as an effective veto on Democratic legislation using arguments no less facially absurd than the list used to attack Obamacare.

This is all the work of decades. But it is particularly the work of the last decade, 2010 to 2020. And it is all guaranteed, locked in, final on the assumption that Democrats will not even consider much milder and expressly constitutional remedies to repair the damage wrought by Republican judicial corruption. Indeed, conservatives are now reacting with something like apoplexy at the idea all this work, wrecking half the government in the process, could be voided with a simple majority vote to expand the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court. The Republican program is raw power for me, norms and prudence for you. Few things show how much Washington DC remains wired for Republican power than the idea that anyone can with a straight face call the possibility of Democrats taking some remedial action “court packing.”

Joe Biden, take notice.

(Image: Amy Comey Barrett makes her opening statement on day one via PBS/YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Donald Trump

A contagious Trump, back at White House/Walter Reed Hospital Annex, preens and postures as a strongman

NBC News via YouTube.

A sick man with access to the finest, state of the art therapies and exceptional medical doctors, returns to his residence. With all the resources of the federal government available, he is as safe and secure as if he were still tucked into a bed next to the presidential suite at Walter Reed, which is a ten-minute helicopter ride away.

Heedless of anyone else’s welfare, he has revealed (time and time and time and time and time again) — in the face of more than 210,000 American deaths and 7 million infections — his character for all to see.

(Another tell on the man’s character: Neither the White House, nor Trump’s physicians have answered questions about the President’s most recent negative test. While Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is tested everyday, that’s difficult to take at face value. The test is hardly comfortable. I suspect that the would-be strongman has been unwilling to submit to daily testing.)

Sean Hannity, a master of misdirection and duplicity, proclaims a great man — on par with Churchill and FDR.

HANNITY: Remember 1933 during the height of The Great Depression, my father was growing up in those years, on the brink of a World War. Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaiming we have nothing to fear but fear itself. A reminder. 

[CLIP BEGINS]

PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror. Which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. 

[CLIP ENDS]

HANNITY: And on the other side of the Atlantic — 1940 — the great Winston Churchill echoed this fearless call to action. A powerful address. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, there is no survival. Remember this?

[CLIP BEGINS]

WINSTON CHURCHILL: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. You ask, what is our aim? I can only say one word — Victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, there is no survival. 

[CLIP ENDS]

HANNITY: And during the bombing of Britain, where was he everyday? Going out, risking his life, being among the people of Great Britain. In times of great hardship you must fight for survival. And that is exactly what the President has done during this country’s battle against COVID-19. 

Not everyone will agree with that assessment. I suppose we might regard the campaign video Trump made immediately upon his return to the White House as a Rorschach test:

I just left Walter Reed Medical Center, and it’s really something very special– the doctors, the nurses, the first responders. And I learned so much about Coronavirus. And one thing that’s for certain, don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines, all developed recently. And you’re going to beat it.

I went, I didn’t feel so good. And two days ago– I could have left two days ago. Two days ago, I felt great, like better than I have in a long time. I said just recently, better than 20 years ago. Don’t let it dominate. Don’t let it take over your lives. Don’t let that happen.

We have the greatest country in the world. We’re going back. We’re going back to work. We’re going to be out front. As your leader, I had to do that. I knew there’s danger to it, but I had to do it. I stood out front. I led. Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. And I know there’s a risk. There’s a danger, but that’s OK. And now I’m better. And maybe I’m immune, I don’t know.

But don’t let it dominate your lives. Get out there. Be careful. We have the best medicines in the world. And there all happened very shortly, and they’re all getting approved. And the vaccines are coming momentarily. Thank you very much. And Walter Reed, what a group of people. Thank you very much.

A KFF poll last month revealed the remarkable faith of the Republican base — in spite of all evidence to the contrary — in Donald Trump’s commitment to preserving the ACA’s guarantee of coverage for pre-existing conditions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/upshot/trump-pre-existing-conditions-polls.html

Said one voter: “I truly, in my heart of hearts, believe that even though he sometimes says things I don’t like, and acts in ways I wish he wouldn’t, I still think he has everybody’s best interest at heart.”

Will the Republican base — mistrustful of the mainstream media, medicine and science, and the liberal elite — accept Trump’s coronavirus worldview? Perhaps so. But that base, by November 3, may be considerably smaller than it was in November 2016.

Time will tell.

2020 General Election, Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

An increasingly authoritarian GOP has a plan to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump

President Donald Trump on the November 2020 election:

● “The only way we’re gonna lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. The only way we’re gonna lose this election. So we have to be very careful.”

● “So this is a disaster waiting to happen. The only hope we have, really, other than going through a long unbelievable litigation at the end after it’s over, is we’re gonna win. We’re not going to lose this except if they cheat. That’s the way I look at it.

We can’t let ’em cheat. We can’t let ’em. . . .Our country is at stake . . . Our country is at stake, because these people will destroy our country. We can’t let this happen. And this is a scam. They know it, the media knows it, but the media doesn’t wanna cover it. They know exactly what’s going to happen and so do I. But the Democrats know better than all of us what’s gonna happen.”

● “We’re gonna have a victory on November 3rd the likes of which you’ve never seen. Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so we can actually have an evening where we know who wins, okay? Not where the votes are gonna be counted a week later, or two weeks later. . . .”

[Q: Win, lose, or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the election?]

● “Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster. . . .

We wanna have — get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very trans — you’ll have a very peaceful — There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation. The ballots out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

The relentless campaign to deny the integrity of the upcoming election is part of a larger Republican plan, set out in plain sight, to throw the election to Donald Trump.

In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe the informal rules or norms that serve as the guardrails of our democracy, forestalling a democratic breakdown  – and a Republican Party more than willing to plow through those guardrails to gain political advantage. As the authors explain, “political leaders, and especially political parties,” play the critical roles in preserving democracy. The GOP has shunned this role.

Nearly two decades after the ascendency of Newt Gingrich, after Bush v. Gore, and half a dozen years after publication of Mann and Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, no political observer in 2018 (when How Democracies Die was published) could have been surprised by the indictment of the pre-Trump GOP, and not simply of the party since Trump’s takeover.

The book, which I read in early 2019, is a warning to small-d democrats. I regarded the warning as less urgent, and the threat as less imminent, on that first reading than I do now. I recognized then that the Republican Party continued to trash democratic norms and that Trump had pushed the GOP even further off the rails, but I believed that our institutions would protect us. We were safe from the worst. We would vote Trump out of office, just as we had rejected the Republican majority in the House in November 2018.

But the Republican Party has become increasingly extreme with each year of the Trump presidency. So, the passages that I regarded as perceptive observations have become alarming portents. As our country loses prestige and influence abroad, and as the chaos at home betrays our image as the world’s greatest democracy, our democratic institutions appear less robust than they did even a short time ago.

Shockingly, today the United States of America doesn’t seem a world away from Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary (to cite a few of the countries discussed in How Democracies Die where people still cast ballots, but authoritarians rule). The threat of a free and fair election — offering a judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency — being subverted so Trump can stay in office regardless of the will of American voters is right upon us, here and now in 2020.

Recognition of this impending threat has come in stages.

On August 19, election-law expert Richard Hasen wrote about the broad Republican strategy:

The threat to the 2020 election’s legitimacy finally broke through into everyday conversation last week. People who pay little attention to politics started talking about whether President Trump was looking to mess with the United States Postal Service to slow down the receipt of mail-in ballots.

After reports from NPR and the Washington Post (on August 22 and 23, respectively) that upwards of 500,000 mail-in ballots had been disqualified in the Wisconsin primary jolted me, on August 24 I posted, “Democrats desperately need a Plan B.” If a half million votes could be lost in a single primary, maximal Republican interference in multiple states in a general election could be much more consequential. The GOP is preparing to pull out all the stops to prevent votes from being counted (the successful strategy in Florida in 2000), so Trump doesn’t face a reckoning.

By September 10, when Ronald Brownstein wrote the essay, “Democrats Won’t Cede the Streets This Time,” the previously fantastical idea (an authoritarian leader subverting a free and fair election in the U.S.A.) was widely anticipated. Not only did Democrats expect Trump to try to steal the election, they expected Republicans to employ shock troops (as they had in the well-orchestrated Brooks Brothers’ riot of 2000) to intimidate officials responsible for tabulating votes.

Hasen’s assessment now is that the Republican Party’s plan — to muck up the works and then, when bedlam breaks out, disregard the voters and declare Trump the winner — is “a five-alarm fire” that threatens democratic rule:

With less than six weeks to go before Election Day, and with over 250 COVID-related election lawsuits filed across 45 states, the litigation strategy of the Trump campaign and its allies has become clear: try to block the expansion of mail-in balloting whenever possible and, in a few key states, create enough chaos in the system and legal and political uncertainty in the results that the Supreme Court, Congress, or Republican legislatures can throw the election to Trump if the outcome is at all close or in doubt. It’s a Hail Mary, but in a close enough election, we cannot count the possibility out. I’ve never been more worried about American democracy than I am right now.

I initially shrugged off Trump’s attacks on the credibility of the election because he had done the same thing in 2016 — even after winning (when he claimed that 3 to 5 million illegal votes had been cast, unfairly depriving him of a popular vote victory). I regarded the continuing crusade as just blather and bluster. (And it would be were it not for the complicity of the Republican Party and its leadership.)

I shrugged off Trump’s tweets about postponing the November 3 election, which I took as evidence of his insecurity (after consistently trailing Joe Biden in public polling for more than a year) and his ignorance (of the structure of our governing institutions). Moving the date of the election was not a viable possibility — and so not the way to steal an election.

I never regarded as likely the suggestion that Trump would lose the election, but refuse to budge from the White House.  That’s not where the threat lies, as Barton Gellman explains:

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

The linchpin: “if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them.” Trump is Trump. He sends signals. It is his Republican allies — in Congress, on Fox News Channel, in a handful of legislatures and statehouses across the country, and at the Supreme Court — that could pull off the heist.

The Republican Party has moved unwaveringly toward a fulsome embrace of Trump’s authoritarian impulses. At every fork in the road — whether to enable Trump’s authoritarian incursions or to take a principled stand to defend democratic institutions — Republicans in the House and the Senate have chosen the former.

Consider 2020; that is, just the past nine months:

Apart from Mitt Romney (who acknowledges that he has no followers in today’s GOP), Republicans in both the House and the Senate were unanimous in refusing to hold Donald Trump accountable for his shakedown of Ukraine’s President Zelensky. This was a choice. The rejection of principle, in favor of raw political power, with the recent Supreme Court vacancy was a choice. The loudest voices among Washington Republicans have reinforced Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the election; other Republicans remain silent (implicitly standing behind Trump). Everyone — the vocal and the mute — has made a choice. Finally, the namby-pamby statements after Trump’s rejection of the principle of a peaceful transition represent a choice. (Not that a more definitive rejection from today’s Republicans, while still weeks away from the election, would count for much.)

The Republican Party has rejected Congressional oversight, Constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law, the sanctity of the vote and of democratic elections, conservative principles and policy commitments, and much else where this president is concerned. The party has collectively made choice after choice to go all-in with Trump wherever he has led.

In my August 24 post, I raised this question:

But — stop and consider for just a moment all that we’ve witnessed over the past three and a half years — are there any grounds to believe that, say, Mitch McConnell would object to a transparent theft of the election if he thought that he could get away with it?

Consider all of Trump’s enablers. Isn’t the same cynical calculation in play for each of them? If Fox News Channel and the rest of the conservative media universe were on board, nearly half the country would be convinced, if Trump claimed a victory, that Trump had won (or that McConnell had held his majority).

I would not have thought to write those paragraphs at the beginning of the year, much less in early 2019, after first reading How Democracies Die. Even understanding that the GOP was an insurgent outlier, which employed voter suppression as a primary electoral strategy, I would have regarded this contingency as a bridge too far. But here we are.

I’ve written more than once about the go-to play in the Republican Party’s game plan, which Steve Bannon described as “to flood the zone with shit.” Republicans in Washington and state capitals, on FNC and talk radio, in social media and on the streets are always prepared to flood the zone with shit. Lies, conspiracy theories, denials, misdirection, and ceaseless vilification: that’s the route to creating chaos. Republicans are amply prepared to follow their authoritarian leader if, when push to comes to shove, they think they can get away with it.

Near the beginning of Donald Trump’s term, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote:

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share . . . . An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and renewing the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.

Thus far, choice by choice, the Republican Party has failed both critical tests.

The authoritarian threat — as the country’s November election approaches — is nearer, more imminent than I had imagined just months ago. Killing democratic rule is not just an exotic foreign affair, it’s something that could happen here. The contemporary Republican Party has a plan for stealing the 2020 American election — if only a viable opportunity presents itself. It is up to democrats (and Democrats) to make sure that tabulated ballots, not chaos and chicanery triumph.

(Image: The Hill.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

The American COVID-19 death toll on Donald Trump’s watch is more than 200,000 and counting

According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 200,710 Americans have died of COIVD-19, while 6,890,662 Americans have become infected. Tens of thousands of Americans who have survived the virus continue to suffer a range of serious symptoms (including “fatigue, a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, achy joints, foggy thinking, a persistent loss of sense of smell, and damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain”). They haven’t recovered. We don’t yet know whether, or to what extent, they will.

In no other country in the world is the toll of infection, suffering, and death as high as it is in the United States of America.

The President of the United States — who has refused to make and implement a plan to defeat the coronavirus — evinces indifference to this toll, as he campaigns for reelection before thousands of mostly unmasked followers failing to maintain any semblance of social distance, and tells them stories, as he did last night in Ohio:

We now know the disease. We didn’t know it. It affects elderly people – elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems that’s what it really affects. That’s it.

You know, in some states thousands of people – nobody young. Below the age of 18, like, nobody. They have a strong immune system, who knows? Take you hat off for the young, because they have a hell of an immune system.

But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing.

By the way, open your schools. Everybody, open your schools.

The President is lying. Recordings of Bob Woodward’s interviews reveal that in March, six months ago, Trump understood the gravity of the threat the virus posed to Americans, though he deliberately downplayed it in his public statements. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic,” he told Woodard on March 19.

Trump knew the virus was airborne, that it was much more deadly than the flu, and that it affected young and old alike. On March 7, he told Woodward:

“It’s turning out, it’s not just old people. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people.

 

Donald Trump understands the risks the virus poses and, where his personal health is concerned, he respects the simple guidelines for staying safe. Earlier this month in Nevada, before Trump spoke at a rally of unmasked followers crowded into an indoor auditorium, he had this exchange with Deborah Saunders, a reporter with the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Aren’t you concerned about getting COVID though in an enclosed room?

No, I’m not concerned. I’m more concerned about how close you are.

Sorry about that. 

You know why? I’m on a stage that’s pretty far away. And so I’m not at all concerned.

Trump understands social distancing. And – behind him, at stage level – the fans wear masks. It is the thousands of followers in the main auditorium, crowded together unmasked but far from the President, who are most at risk.

And by all accounts, they believe Trump when he tells them the risks don’t exist, or perhaps as a signal of their embrace of their leader, they choose to accept the risks.

When the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Ohio, Jon Husted, modeled a ‘Trump 2020’ face mask before Trump spoke at the rally, he was booed and heckled.

As I noted in a previous post, at a Michigan rally earlier this month, when CNN reporter Jim Acosta asked folks who came to cheer on Trump, why they weren’t wearing masks, they were dismissive. “It’s my prerogative,” “Because there’s no COVID. It’s a fake pandemic created to destroy the United States of America.…,” and “I’m not afraid. The good lord takes care of me. If I die, I die. We gotta get this country moving.…”

A certain number of Trump acolytes will acquire the virus at a rally. Some will become ill, some will die, some will infect others who will die.

Trump knows this. He knows, when he urges, “Everybody, open your schools,” that the virus hasn’t been contained. He knows, when he says, “I want football back,” that a number of Americans will die this fall as a result.  He understands, as he has for many months, when he urges governors to reopen their states to business, that — until the virus disappears (as he promises repeatedly) — Americans will die because they’ve become infected on the job or as customers in face to face interactions unless they take the precautions that he has taken (but which he publicly dismisses).

Trump is shielded from infection, not just at rallies, but in the White House. Here is an exchange during a recent presidential press briefing:

Q But my question is: Why not wear it more often or have the White House staff wear it more often to set an example for the country?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m tested, and I’m sometimes surprised when I see somebody sitting and — like, with Joe. Joe feels very safe in a mask. I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t want to expose his face. I don’t know what’s going on. He’ll be way away from people, nowhere near people — there will be nobody with him. He doesn’t draw any crowds. He’ll have circles. These big circles. They’ll be way far away. There’s no reason for him to have masks on.

We get tested — I’m tested; I have people tested. When people come into the Oval Office, it’s like a big deal. No matter who they are — if they’re heads of countries, they all get tested. So I’m in sort of a different position. And maybe if I wasn’t in that position, I’d be wearing it more. But I’ve worn masks. And especially I like to wear them when I’m in hospital. Not for me so much as for other people. Okay?

The illnesses and deaths of Americans are not just numbers. Individuals with connections to others — people who are parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, neighbors, shopkeepers, customers, colleagues — have lost their lives, one at a time, mostly dying apart from the folks who love them, who will miss them the most. The vast majority of the Americans who have perished as a result of the pandemic, if not for Donald Trump’s fecklessness and recklessness, would still be alive today.

And the spread of infection, the misery, and the death toll continue to increase.

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

CDC posts new guidelines Friday afternoon, then abruptly withdraws guidelines on Monday

This is no way to run a public health agency — but in the Trump era, with an election on the line, it’s business as usual. It both generates public confusion and damages the credibility of an authoritative voice. But for the Trump campaign (and FNC, Breitbart, …) destroying confidence in credible sources is a means of abetting confusion, and that is a deliberate strategy.

(Image of Donald Trump flanked by HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert Redfield from March 2020 Bloomberg video.)

2020 General Election, Democracy

For Democrats there is only one thing that matters politically now

I. Does Joe Biden take office on January 20 with a united Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate?

I’m not a political strategist or a pollster. I don’t know how the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the machinations of Mitch McConnell, the calculations of Republican Senators, or whatever Joe Biden and Democrats do or say will affect the outcome of the November 3 election.

But whether or not McConnell succeeds in seating a Trump nominee between now and January isn’t as significant as what happens after January 20.

If McConnell’s gambit fails (and a Trump nominee isn’t confirmed), if Joe Biden is elected and takes office, and if Chuck Schumer becomes the majority leader, then Joe Biden will name the justice to replace Ginsburg. If McConnell corrals Republicans to confirm Trump’s nominee, if Joe Biden is elected and takes office, and if Chuck Schumer becomes majority leader, Democrats will be in a position to increase the size of the Supreme Court to 13.

What’s constant: Biden must win and Democrats must control the U.S. Senate. This is a high stakes election. Nothing has changed with the passing of an extraordinary woman with a monumental legal legacy.

II. A separate point: There is a downside to increasing the size of the Supreme Court.

The move would hardly be unprecedented, nor would it be unjustified, as Edwin Chemerinsky notes:

One way for Democrats to make clear they will not tolerate Republicans trying to fill this seat in advance of the election would be for them to pledge that, if they take the White House and Senate in November, they will increase the size of the Supreme Court to 13 justices.

The number of justices on the court is set by federal law, not the Constitution. Since its beginnings, it has ranged from having between five and 10 members. Since the 1860s, it has remained at nine.

When President Franklin Roosevelt suggested expanding the Supreme Court in the 1930s to overcome court hostility to the New Deal, he was repudiated for trying to pack the court. But the current situation is different. This would be a response to chicanery by Republicans.

What happened with Garland’s nomination was unprecedented, and Democrats rightly believe it was a stolen seat. After Scalia’s death in February 2016, President Obama moved quickly, nominating Garland the next month.

But such a move would pose a risk to democratic governance, as we learn in Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s book, How Democracies Die. They warn (in Chapter 9) regarding a familiar Democratic activists’ refrain:

In our view, the idea that Democrats “fight like Republicans” is misguided. First of all, evidence from other countries suggests that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. . . .

And (to cite their admonition regarding impeachment to make a more general point):

Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic—for they would inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective guardrails.

I get it. But in 2020, two years after publication of How Democracies Die, it’s past time to escalate the fight. Trump and the Republican party have trashed way too many guardrails to overlook. And as Trump has become more aggressively authoritarian, we have learned that for Washington Republicans no outrage is too great to accept. Their only calculation is purest power politics with no allegiance to democratic norms or values. The only reasonable option for Democrats (and democrats) is to push back within Constitutional restraints — even if it’s necessary to make basic changes, where there was formerly bipartisan agreement (such as the size of the Supreme Court or the number of states in the union).

Josh Marshall acknowledges the risk, but comes down on the right side of the issue (by my lights):

We are here because of the Republican party’s increasing unwillingness to accept limits on political action. To up the ante on that tendency, to meet it, is itself a grave threat to democratic governance. But an even graver threat is to remove any mechanism of consequences or accountability. Then there is truly no limit or disincentive to corruption, law breaking and bad action. That reality is precisely the one in which we currently find ourselves.

Democracy, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Attorney General Bill Barr will go to any lengths to do Donald Trump’s bidding

Donald Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, spoke at Hillsdale College yesterday. While his remarks on numerous themes drew a great deal of attention, Dahlia Lithwick focuses on his continuing attempts — with Trump — to undermine confidence in balloting on November 3 (“Bill Barr Would Like to Undermine Your Faith in the Election”).

Barr, like Trump, is no longer content to blame foreigners and malign faceless vote tamperers. He also warned Kass that greedy mail carriers were apt to get in on the action: “A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman, here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.” Just to recap, then: Your mail-in ballot is unsafe because foreigners want to forge it, Democratic governors want to steal it, antifa operatives plan to harvest it, oh, and Dot, your friendly neighborhood letter carrier will also gladly break the law in order to sell it. This narrative need not be provable or coherent; it’s enough that it’s rinsed and repeated on a near-daily basis in the media.

What Barr is actually performing here is the time-honored, Bannon-christened, Putin-sanctioned electoral practice known formally as flooding the zone with shit. What he wants most of all is for voters to doubt the capacity for the November election to be conducted fairly. That is why he told Blitzer that any effort to make voting safer in the midst of a pandemic—and of course that’s what the push for mail-in balloting was attempting to redress—is by definition tantamount to “playing with fire.” Under the pretense of concern for voter confidence, Barr jowlishly invents one reason after another to undermine it. . . .

Jonathan Chait, though he focuses on criminal prosecutions, observes that Barr and Trump are in sync regarding the role of the DOJ (“William Barr Lays Out Terrifying Theory for Corrupting Justice Department”):

Barr’s philosophy of the Justice Department is functionally indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s. The main difference is the level of sophistication in which they are expressed. Trump’s view is summarized by his aphorism “The other side is where there are crimes” — which is to say, by definition, Trump and his allies are innocent and whatever his opponents are doing is illegal. It’s either “lock her up!” or “dirty cops!,” depending on which party is at issue. Barr’s theories have multisyllabic terms and are decorated with historical references but boil down to the same two-track approach to justice.

Bill Barr is the Attorney General Donald Trump has long sought. Trump complained to Don McGahn [as quoted in the Mueller Report, v. II, p. 50], “I don’t have a lawyer,” and expressed the wish that Roy Cohn were his attorney.

Bill Barr will go to any lengths — will “invent one reason after another” and employ “multisyllabic terms that are decorated with historical references” — to do Trump’s bidding.

Blue State Blues, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Us vs. Them law enforcement at L.A. Sheriff’s Department doesn’t inspire confidence

Two Deputy Sheriffs were shot at close range in cold blood in Compton, prompting furious anger from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

The community is also angry. This was an opportunity for LASD to lock arms with the community. Instead, in a series of tweets, the department responded with racist derision (as reported in this morning’s L.A. Times):

Within 24 hours, a longtime Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman posted tweets about the attack that employed racist stereotypes in reference to a reward for information leading to the arrest of the shooter. In one post accompanied by a GIF of a Black man shuffling bills, she wrote: “And here’s the neighborhood homies and enemies ‘bout to come up’ on that $100,000 #REWARD because $100,000 dollas is $100,000 dollas.”

And this:

“My advice to all the ex-girlfriends, side pieces, friends, wifey, ol’ lady, dime, queen, baby momma who know the #ComptonAmbush shooter of 2 LA Sheriff’s about getting that $100,000 #REWARD…,” Navarro-Suarez wrote next to an image of a Black woman saying, “Make that money girl.”

There was also the rough encounter with the diminutive reporter for KPCC, the region’s all news and information NPR station, being roughly jerked around and slammed into the pavement as she was being arrested — apparently for doing her job.

The video doesn’t match the department’s characterization of what happened. And, in another instance of Us vs. Them, Sheriff Alex Villanueva has even gratuitously “singled out Lakers star LaBron James — who has been vocal about systemic racism.”

Columnist Erika D. Smith, casting a wider net of the department’s challenges (“We don’t know much about the ambush of two L.A. County deputies. But we have scapegoats”), adds this:

Through all of this, Villanueva has been stonewalling investigations by L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman, cutting off one of the only avenues the public has for accountability and oversight.

LASD’s motto is, A Tradition of Service. The patterns we’re witnessing are hardly examples of fulfilling that mission.