Supreme Court – Page 7 – The Wrongologist

Monday Wake Up Call – November 30, 2020

We’re back from our turkey-induced coma, but it’s hard to start a new week without our usual Sunday humor:

Yummy Thanksgiving pie:

Looking forward to the Inauguration:

This Thanksgiving, Biden thanked all the front line workers for all they have done. Trump thanked all of his lawyers.

Wrongo hadn’t realized that Trump has now spent more than an entire year of his term on a Trump property (418 days), and 307 days playing golf. Imagine how much more damage he could have done if he wasn’t so lazy.

Why is it so difficult for Americans to understand the threat to our society from Covid? From the WaPo: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In nine states, more than 1 in 1,000 people have now died of coronavirus-related causes, while daily covid-19 deaths nationwide are climbing to levels not seen since early in the pandemic.”

A few long-reluctant Republican governors recently adopted statewide mask orders and stricter social distancing measures. But not all: For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), last Tuesday extended an executive order that bans city and county governments from enforcing mask ordinances or limits on restaurant capacity. South Dakota’s governor Kristi Noem (R) is still resisting any kind of mask mandate. Nebraska’s governor Pete Ricketts (R) again stated his opposition to mask mandates, while Nebraska’s rural hospitals are nearly at capacity, as are bigger cities, like Lincoln.

White, rural American states are late to the pandemic’s deadly impact – partly due to how physically distant their residents are, by definition. But rural states have the smallest margin for error in terms of health care infrastructure. Their lack of ICU capacity combined with their relative inability to handle delivering the new vaccines when they become available, may see rural Trump-loving Americans take a much harder hit than they expected from Covid.

The exact criteria for who will be first in line won’t be defined until immediately after a vaccine is authorized. But the pressure’s on: The WSJ reported that United Airlines is already flying doses of Pfizer’s vaccine to points around the country in order to be prepared for distribution, if Pfizer wins government approval.

Think about the enormous pressure there is on the FDA to approve use of these vaccines. That approval starts with a meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC). The FDA has scheduled a Committee meeting on Dec. 10 to discuss the request for emergency use authorization of Pfizer’s vaccine.

As of now, the FDA hasn’t made the names of Committee members’ public. But imagine if there are a few Committee members who disagree that the vaccine should be made available immediately.

This recently happened with an Alzheimer’s drug. The FDA’s review division reported that the drug’s effectiveness data was “extraordinarily persuasive”. But many on that drug’s Advisory Committee rejected the study, saying that the data showed the drug offered no significant improvement to patients.

Now, the FDA is not required to follow the recommendations of its outside advisors, but it often does. So what happens if the Pfizer Committee has a split decision?

Finally, the Supreme Court’s decision in a Covid case about whether or not a state official could close down places of worship in order to stop the spread of a deadly disease, seems out of step with where we are in America. They ruled that restrictions previously imposed on New York places of worship by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) during the coronavirus pandemic violated the First Amendment.

That’s a huge shift since Coney Barrett joined the court. In a similar case earlier this year, the court declined to lift pandemic restrictions in California and Nevada when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was alive.

But the longer term issue isn’t the possible infringement of individual religious liberty. It’s how the American Right wants to expand it so that religious people can ignore just about any law they don’t like.

The problem with this decision is that it expands an individual right to a communal right. A religious person should be able to follow their faith, but once you start giving religious communities separate rights, you’ve weakened the rule of law.

Your exercise of a right shouldn’t impose unreasonable burdens on others. But Conservatives want to treat religion as having a higher level of rights then others’ individual rights, and this isn’t right.

Time to wake up America! The fault lines of our society have been exposed by Covid and the Republican response to it. To help you wake up, listen to a cover version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” by cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his siblings. He became an instant sensation after his cello performance at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle. Watch it, you won’t be dissapointed:

Nevada Is The Key

The Daily Escape:

Change of seasons, Groton MA – November 2020 photo by scojo415

As Wrongo writes this, there isn’t a winner in the 2020 presidential election. Of the 538 electoral votes, the candidates have been awarded 478 of them, with 60 still up for grabs in five states. Currently it’s Biden with 264 and Trump with 214 electoral votes.

A high turnout election was supposed to favor Democrats, according to the pundits. But we just had the highest voter turnout in a century, with Trump receiving even more votes than last time. And the race is closer than it’s been in a very long time.

There was a point on election night 2020 that Wrongo had the same bad feeling that he had on the Clinton vs. Trump election night in 2016. An awful feeling that everything he thought he knew about the election was wrong. How could so many people who have had 4 years’ experience with Trump and with all of the damage and dysfunction he brought, say “Sure, I totally want that guy to be my president again”?

As of now, Biden seems to have the better chance to win, but it would be the narrowest of victories. He has 264 electoral votes and is leading in Nevada, worth 6 electoral votes. This means the election could come down to Biden flipping Nevada, or Trump holding it. Nevada says there will be no update until Thursday, 10am PST. If Biden holds on to his slim lead, that would give him exactly 270 electoral votes, with no margin for error.

There’s plenty of danger ahead. If Biden has 270 votes, just one faithless Biden elector would mean a 269-269 tie, throwing the election to the House. That would mean a Trump victory, since each state delegation gets one vote each, so the fact that the Democrats once again have more votes, runs up against the Wisdom of the Framers.

Trump is in federal court trying to get Michigan to stop counting votes. He’s also asked the US Supreme Court to intervene in the Pennsylvania vote count, saying exactly what the campaign lost with earlier at the Supreme Court. BTW, ballot-counting in Philadelphia is being livestreamed.

It may be weeks before we know the final results, something that happens routinely in our built-by-hand electoral system. But it seems to be turning into a legal war.

When all the votes are counted, more than 70 million Americans will have voted for Trump. Even if Biden wins, America didn’t repudiate Trumpism. Republicans will keep control of the Senate. And while the Democrats will still control the House, they’ve lost seats.

A long election night was signaled early with Biden’s horrific performance in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, where Biden apparently won by seven percentage points. In 2016, Hillary won it by nearly 30, so the scrounging by Biden for red state electoral votes began early.

It’s worth noting that while Florida went for Trump, they also voted overwhelmingly (61%-39%) for a $15/hour minimum wage. Florida’s “Amendment 2” raises the state’s minimum wage to $15 by 2026.

This shows how politics is shifting in America: The $15 minimum wage is a key part of the Democratic Party’s platform. But, it didn’t help Biden in Florida, where he ran well behind the Amendment with about 48% of the vote. There’s growing evidence that people who hate the cultural left actually like the policies of the economic left.

Democrats believed that donating huge sums of money was a proxy for grass-roots organizing. Most swing state Democratic candidates vastly outraised their Republican opponents, but there’s little to show for it now that the votes are in.

In 2020 Democrats ran to the center, after a primary season trying to run to the left. And it looks like they’ll win the White House, while visibly struggling in both Houses of Congress. How should we grade their results, or the results of the Republicans, if their incumbent president loses?

What should the election post-mortems for each Party say are their strengths and weaknesses, looking towards the 2022 mid-terms and the 2024 presidential election?

What will the Parties say about how the political polling could be so wrong for a second straight time? Will Democrats finally learn not to rely on it?

In closing, change is coming. It’s not as fast as we’d like, but much of that’s on us.

Wrongo is reminded of the Rolling Stones song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” from their 1969 album “Let It Bleed”. Back in the 1960s the song referenced love, politics, and drugs. In 2020, it resonates about how our expectations often exceed what we deserve.

Chorus: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

Just like puppies. They want treats all the time, but it’s kibble that helps them grow, and stay healthy.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – 48 Hours to Go Edition, November 1, 2020

Just 48 hours to go.

Has anyone else noticed that since his impeachment, Trump has lost a step? He no longer speaks about fighting the system, or his accomplishments. It’s all about how he’s been ganged up on, and mistreated. Maybe impeaching him wasn’t a complete failure after all.

We’ll see in two days if the blame game was a winning strategy:

It may be hopeful news or maybe just a deep fake, but several outlets are reporting that Trump has canceled his election night party. The party was to be held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, but instead, he’ll party at the White House.

But here’s a good reason to be nervous. Forbes reports that the Post Office is failing to deliver on time in key places:

“Battleground states in the presidential election are suffering from some of the worst ballot delivery delays in the country….and with state laws or court rulings requiring mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, several states face a particularly high risk of voters having their ballots arrive too late to count, potentially impacting close races.”

Every Vote should be counted! Shouldn’t the Supreme Court support that?

Since January, the GOP has filed more than 230 lawsuits about voting:

Not all the gravestones are about Halloween:

The ghost of elections past:

Associate Supreme Court Justice Amy Barrett

The Daily Escape:

Cape Cod pond with red shack – October 2020 by Michael Blanchette Photography

Amy Coney Barrett is now a Supreme Court Associate Justice.

It is the first time in 151 years (since Edwin Stanton in 1869) that a justice was confirmed by the Senate without the support of a single member of the minority party. Even Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVA), who backed Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 (and Barrett for her circuit court seat three years ago), didn’t support her this time.

As Marsha Coyle noted on PBS, the Supreme Court went 11 years until 2005 without a change in Justices. In the next four years, the Court saw seven new Justices. Now we’ve seen three more in just four more years.

Justices are staying on the Court longer. In the 19th Century, the average tenure of a Justice was less than 10 years, due mainly to shorter life expectancy. Now that it’s becoming increasingly common for them to serve into their 80s, Justices are serving for 25 years, or more.

All of this is background to what we’ll have to get used to from Amy Barrett in the next few decades, including this quasi-campaign event:

There were understandably a few negative reactions:

Whatever happens going forward, please, please let’s not call her “ACB” as if she is some great legal mind akin to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett is to RBG what Clarence Thomas is to Thurgood Marshall; a facsimile of a Supreme Court Justice.

The NYT has a series of articles on How to Fix the Supreme Court that are worth your time. In one article, Emily Bazelon says this:

“….Republican dominance over the court is itself counter-majoritarian. Including Amy Barrett, the Party has picked six of the last 10 justices although it has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections…”

The Republican Party doesn’t represent the majority of Americans. So it tries to achieve its goals by other means, even if that means perverting the intent of our Constitutional system.

We know that clear majorities of Americans favor reproductive rights, limiting political donations, stricter gun control and reversing climate change. But since the GOP controls the courts, it hopes to prevent these viewpoints from ever becoming law.

Movement conservatives are using a theory of judicial construction (Originalism) that didn’t exist until about 40 years ago. And they’re using it to overturn long-standing precedents, while also inventing novel constructions not found in the Constitution when it suits them (see Shelby County vs. Holder).

Among the options addressed in the Times’ article are: (i) Dividing the work of the Supreme Court into two parts, Constitutional issues and all others that concern interpretation of existing laws and statues. This would establish a Constitutional Court, an idea that several other countries have instituted (among them, France, Germany, and South Africa); (ii) Term limits for Supreme Court Justices; (iii) Adding more Justices to the Supreme Court; and (iv) Expanding the lower Federal Courts.

The Framers rejected the idea of a judicial retirement age. It was envisioned that a lawyer would need a lifetime of experience to become fully versed in the precedents that would govern their decisions as a Supreme Court Justice. But now, we have Amy Barrett serving as a Justice at age 48. The youngest Supreme Court judge ever was Republican Joseph Story, who was 32 when James Madison appointed him.

OTOH, term limits almost certainly require a Constitutional Amendment, since it would create an involuntary retirement from the Court.

Biden has said he will convene a commission to study Supreme Court reform. That kicks the can down the road. This is probably a good idea for now, until we see the decisions made by the current conservative majority in a few of the signature cases coming up this term. There is now a 6-3 MODERATE conservative majority on the Court, and depressingly, a 5-4 REACTIONARY majority on the Court.

For now, all we can do to change the Court is vote out of power those Republicans who denied Obama an appointment, only to cram three Justices through on Trump’s watch. We start by flipping the Senate in November.

Republicans are doing everything they can to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in the courts. The good news is that stopping them is easy: VOTE.

May the confirmation of Barrett be the last thing that the national Republican Party ever accomplishes.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 18, 2020

If confirmed, Amy Coney Barrett’s first major case on the Supreme Court could be Trump’s plan to remove undocumented immigrants from the Census count. This will cost states like California, Illinois and New York multiple Congressional seats, and billions in federal funding:

“The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will review President Trump’s attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants when calculating how congressional seats are apportioned among the states.”

A three-judge panel in New York said that Trump’s July 21 memorandum on the matter was “an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to” him by Congress. It blocked the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau from including internally generated information about the number of undocumented immigrants in their reports to the president after this year’s census is completed.

The census does not ask a citizenship question, so how the Census Bureau would come up with the immigration status of people counted is as a practical matter, suspect.

The Supremes put the case on a fast-track, saying that they will hold a hearing Nov. 30. By then, it will likely again be a nine-member court, assuming Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed. It’s unclear how the case will divide the court. But the Census is yet another issue that has been transformed from a largely bureaucratic exercise into a partisan battle.

The decision to hear the case follows the Supreme Court’s earlier decision that the Trump administration could stop the Census count of Americans immediately, instead of on October 31.

This newest controversy involves the Constitutional mandate that apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives be based on the “whole number of persons in each State.” That has been interpreted to mean every resident, regardless of immigration status. But this summer, Trump issued a memorandum that said: “It is the policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status.”

Trump directed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to provide him with two sets of numbers, one that includes unauthorized immigrants and one that does not, “to the maximum extent feasible and consistent with the discretion delegated to the executive branch.”

Thus, the need for a decision about the Constitutionality of counting every person. We’ll see what happens. On to cartoons:

Coney Barrett says she’s a neutral arbiter of the law. Tell that to the Elephant:

Amy Coney Barrett keeps her opinions close to the robe:

It’s a felony to intimidate voters or obstruct voting. Coney Barrett says she can’t say if that’s illegal. The Constitution states that Congress shall determine the date of the election. Coney Barrett says she can’t say whether or not a president could unilaterally postpone an election.

A competent judge should have acknowledged explicit text in federal statutes and the Constitution itself, while reserving the right to apply it to a specific set of facts that might be presented to her.

Our Election Day fear:

Voting no longer takes just a few minutes:

Saturday Soother – October 17, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Hiram, ME – October 2020 photo by alexishowardphoto

Wrongo and Ms. Right are camped out on Cape Cod for a week. We’re trying to stave off the approaching cold and dark that will be soon be upon us. Also, we wanted to smell the salt air for a few days at least, in our Covid-filled 2020.

And every single person we’ve had to make small talk with in the past two weeks has said this exact sentence: “It gets dark so early now”.

The two things that dominated the week were the Amy Coney Barrett hearings and the continued growth in Covid cases as we run up to the election. Starting with the Barrett hearings, how is it believable that we have a process where aspirants to hold a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court pretend to have never given any thought to fundamental questions that absolutely every American adult has an opinion about?

She’ll be confirmed, and then we’ll move on to some fresh new Republican outrage.

Wrongo has said for months that this is the Covid election. No one wants to see more cases, but with incompetent presidential leadership, this is where we are with 17 days left until the election:

According to the NYT, over the past two weeks, new cases have increased in 43 states, plus DC and Guam. Deaths are increasing in 23 states. But Trump wants us to talk about whether Twitter is burying a story about Hunter Biden.

He’s bet his re-election on saying the pandemic is no big deal. Sadly for Americans, he’s wrong (again).

If the reaction by the anti-maskers (mostly Republicans) stay as they are currently, with some states encouraging residents to go maskless, then the projected number of deaths by February could be close to 400,000.

But if everybody stopped being stupid and wore masks and skipped large gatherings and kept a safe distance from others, then we could see the number of deaths be closer to 300,000.

Finally, a reason for hope: The Democratic candidate fundraising platform ActBlue just reported its most successful fundraising quarter in history. They raised $1.5 billion in three months from individual donors. That total includes some of Wrongo’s and Ms. Right’s money:

“From July through September, 6.8 million donors made 31.4 million contributions through ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s favored online donation platform, averaging $47 per donation. More than 14,223 campaigns and organizations benefited from the surge in donations, the largest single quarter in the platform’s 15-year history, according to figures shared first with POLITICO.”

In September alone, ActBlue processed $758 million. This doesn’t mean that the fight against Citizens United shouldn’t continue, but it does mean that energized voters can compete with the Big Money when it really counts.

Two years ago, no one thought Democrats had much of a chance of flipping the Senate. Now, with competitive races in North Carolina, Georgia (two), South Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, Arizona, Maine, Iowa, and Colorado, there is better than 50% chance of turning the Senate blue. Since Democrat Doug Jones will almost certainly lose in Alabama, if the Dems can flip five red seats, they will have the Senate to go with the House and the White House.

Voting can change the world. Those over 45 years old made our current, crumbling world. People younger than 45 have the power to remake it, if they turn out by November 3.

On to the weekend. After another rock ’em sock ’em week, you definitely need some Saturday Soother time! Let’s start by brewing up a cup of Colombia Hacienda Casablanca, ($20/12oz.), said to be bright, juicy, and cocoa-rich. It comes to us from Toronto’s Stereo Coffee Roasters.

Now settle back and listen to a classic played in a different way. Here is Debussy’s “Clair de lune” played on solo Harp by Mali Llywelyn. Here, she’s playing at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London in November 2017:

This will both relax and inspire you.

Ending Republican Hypocrisy Regarding the Courts

The Daily Escape:

Sleepy Hollow Farm, Woodstock VT – October 2020 photo by Kyle Seymour Photography

The Senate started its confirmation hearings on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett on Monday. There is little doubt that she will be confirmed on a Party-line vote by Republicans sometime before the presidential election on November 3.

There are legitimate questions to ask about the ideological balance on the Court, which will be 6-3 in favor of the conservatives, a ratio that is likely to last for a decade or more. The WSJ had a piece asking “Is the Supreme Court Too Catholic?” The religion of individual justices is of supreme indifference to Wrongo, but after Barrett is confirmed, the Court will have six Catholics, two Jews and one Anglican.

Of the current crop of Catholics on the Court, only Justice Sotomayor was appointed by a Democratic president. It is assumed by Republicans that the justices’ Catholicism is a proxy for their presumed (or long hoped-for) willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Another legitimate question is how Democrats should deal with the hypocrisy shown by the Republicans’ about-face on whether a new justice could be confirmed in the last months of a president’s incumbency. Four years ago, the Republican narrative was that Obama was picking a fight by moving to fill a Supreme Court vacancy after Justice Scalia died in February that year.

With a Republican now in the White House, it has become acceptable to jam through a Supreme Court justice nomination within days of the election. While that process conforms to the Constitution, it wasn’t what Republicans did when Obama was president.

Many Democrats are talking about expanding the Court, adding an even number of additional justices to help restore some ideological balance. The Republicans call this “court packing”. It’s worth remembering that FDR’s attempt to pack the court in 1937 was a political disaster for his Party. So Biden and Harris have been unwilling to say much on the subject.

Eric Boehlert points out that much of the mainstream press has picked up on calling it court packing, and are asking Biden to weigh in on the subject:

“Biden and Harris Need an Answer on Court Packing” (The Atlantic)
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death Revives Talk of Court Packing” (New York Times)
“How Democrats Could Pack the Supreme Court in 2021” (Politico)
“Harris Dodges Questions on Support for Supreme Court Packing at Debate” (CBS News)

Monday Wake Up Call – October 5, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Fall on the T Lazy B Ranch. Ennis, MT – October 2017 photo by Ed Coyle photography

Lost in the noise on Trump’s COVID diagnosis Friday was that the US Supreme Court agreed to hear two Arizona cases that could end the Voting Rights Act, and hurt the prospects of the Democratic Party. Ian Millhiser wrote the linked article for Vox, and he calls it the biggest threat to voting in decades:

“The specific issue in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) cases concerns two Arizona laws that require certain ballots to be discarded. One law requires voting officials to discard in their entirety ballots cast by voters who vote in the wrong precinct (rather than simply not counting votes for local candidates that the voter should not have been able to vote for).

The other law prohibits “ballot collection” (or “ballot harvesting”) where a voter gives their absentee ballot to a third party, who delivers that ballot to the election office. (Arizona is one of many states that impose at least some restrictions on ballot collection.)”

These cases are being brought under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, (VRA) signed by LBJ, which prohibited racist voting laws that were prevalent at the time. In 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County vs. Holder effectively deactivated the Act’s preclearance regime that required states with a history of racist voting practices to “preclear” new election rules with officials at the DOJ.

And the Court’s decision in Abbott v. Perez (2018) held that lawmakers enjoy a strong presumption of racial innocence so that it is now extremely difficult to prove that lawmakers may have acted with racist intent (for example, in gerrymandering a district) except in the most egregious cases.

These two Arizona DNC cases involve a different element of the VRA, the so-called “results test” that prohibits many election laws that disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.

Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear these cases, the Court’s Republican-appointed majority could potentially dismantle the results test. It might water down that test to such a degree that it no longer provides a meaningful check on racism in elections.

As a federal appeals court said in an opinion striking down the two laws:

“…uncontested evidence in the district court established that minority voters in Arizona cast [out of precinct] ballots at twice the rate of white voters.”

Sound racist to you? Of course!

One reason that people in Arizona may vote in the wrong location is that some Maricopa County voters, for example, must travel 15 minutes by car to vote in their assigned polling location, having passed four other polling places along the way.

In addition, many Arizona voters of color lack easy access to the mail and are unable to easily travel on their own to cast a ballot. As the Arizona appeals court explained:

“…in urban areas of heavily Hispanic counties, many apartment buildings lack outgoing mail services,”

And only 18% of Native American registered voters in Arizona have home mail service. The appeals court also said that Black, Native, and Hispanic voters are:

“…significantly less likely than non-minorities to own a vehicle and more likely to have inflexible work schedules.”

Thus, their ability to vote might depend on being able to give their ballot to a friend or a canvasser who will take that ballot to the polls for them. In any event, a majority of the appeals court judges who considered Arizona’s two laws decided that they violated the Voting Rights Act.

So, now it is appealed to the Supreme Court. More from Vox:

“As a young lawyer working in the Reagan administration, Chief Justice John Roberts unsuccessfully fought to convince President Reagan to veto the law establishing this results test; some of his memos from that era even suggest that the results test is unconstitutional. And Roberts is, if anything, the most moderate member of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.”

This case will be decided by the Court without Amy Coney Barrett. That means it will take at least two conservative justices to side with the three remaining liberal justices, a tall order in these times. Of course, a four-to-four decision would let the appeals court decision stand.

Time to wake up America! Nothing we can do now will change the decision on these cases. That chance was lost in 2016. And the rights of voters of color to cast their ballots is in greater peril now with Ginsburg off the bench.

What we can do today and most importantly on November 3, is to stop the right wing in its tracks.

There can be no further gutting of voting rights in the future.

Monday Wake Up Call – September 28, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Dead Horse State Park in Moab, UT – September 2020 photo by schumats1

“Few people have the imagination for reality” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Here are a few stark realities that we couldn’t have imagined even five years ago:

First, a minority faction governing the majority with increasingly unpopular policies imposed through increasingly undemocratic means is not exactly a formula for a stable democracy. This is something that Wrongo wrote about last week. If somehow after the November election, that script is flipped, and we have a majority governing an ethno and religious-purity minority who won’t recognize the majority’s legitimacy to govern, we’re headed for dark times.

Once Coney Barrett’s confirmed, we’ll again be living in a Phyllis Schlafly country. Schlafly’s far-right, anti-feminist ideology rules the Republican Party, and soon, the Supreme Court. But it’s still contrary to American public opinion. A majority of Americans think abortion should remain legal, and 75% support Schlafly’s old enemy, the ERA.

But, unpopular ideologies can prevail whenever we’re complacent about our beliefs.

Second, we have a president who is a faker and a liar. The NYT has gotten its hands on many years’ worth of Trump’s federal income tax documents. You know, the ones he and his attorneys have worked so hard to suppress. From Eric Boehlert:

“In life outside the MAGA bubble, the tax return revelation is a big one because it’s hard to explain why, for the last decade, Trump has written off $26 million worth of dubious “consulting” fees. And it certainly appears the Trump Organization paid Ivanka Trump massive consulting fees for no-show work. All of this coming just five weeks before the election. The Times blockbuster is one of the more seismic scoops in campaign history.”

The Times’ story will most likely be a huge problem for Trump among independents and suburban voters who may have voted for him in 2016. Trump’s “fake news” dismissal of the tax story will only work among his super-loyal followers.

Kevin Drum turned the NYT’s reporting into a graph:

Long story short, since 2012 Trump’s been losing money every year. He’s lost money at pretty much everything he’s ever done. The only exception is The Apprentice and the licensing money it enabled.

From Drum:

“Trump’s ability to squander the money he inherited is breathtaking. He’s also deeply in debt, it turns out, with about $300 million in loans coming due over the next few years. It’s no wonder he’s been so assiduous at trying to turn the Oval Office into his own private ATM.”

That kind of financial exposure makes Trump a national security risk.

Third and finally, here’s Wrongo’s framing of the issues for Tuesday’s debate. This, from Michael Grunwald in Politico: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The US budget deficit tripled this year to $3.3 trillion, by far the highest ever. The US economy shrank at a 31.7% annual rate in the second quarter, by far the worst ever. The trade deficit is at its highest level in 12 years. Consumer confidence is at its lowest level in six years. Unemployment claims, which had never topped 700,000 in a week before March, have topped 700,000 every week since March.

Farm bankruptcies are rising…Homicides are rising in America’s cities after decades of decline, while a series of police killings of unarmed Black Americans has triggered…civil unrest. The West Coast is on fire, and 2020 may turn out to be the hottest year in recorded history. America’s reputation abroad is the worst it’s been since the Pew Research Center began doing international surveys.”

And remember that virus thingy that Trump says isn’t a big deal? It has already killed 200,000+ Americans and is still spreading in 29 states.

Biden ought to just read that as his opening statement in tomorrow night’s debate, and then just say:

“Do you think you’ll be better off with four more years of these disasters that Trump has brought us? “

Time to wake up America! We have to imagine realities that would have been fiction just a decade ago. Once we wake up to how terrible our present state is, we need to vote in overwhelming numbers to gain sufficient political control to deliver a progressive future for all.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 27, 2020

Trump has announced that Amy Coney Barrett is his nominee to the Supreme Court. She will make the sixth Catholic member of the court.

This highlights the impact that Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society has had on the makeup of the Court. Leo selects Trump’s judicial nominees. In addition to his role at the Federalist Society, Leo is a board member of Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center. Attorney General Bill Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone have also been board members.

No one should object to Catholics, or even to having a majority of them on the Court. But, the Court, like the Electoral College, have become the last bastions of power for the minority in America. As currently constituted, they will block the rise of a broad coalition of diverse progressives from power for at least another generation. On to cartoons: