THE BIG THING
On Thursday Senate Republicans voted Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court out of the Judiciary Committee, sending it to the Senate floor for a full vote. By this time next week, she will be yanking the court so hard to the right that Kevin Costner will be Zaprudering the videotape.
Democrats at least boycotted the committee vote, which technically meant it violated the committee’s own rule that at least two members of the minority party must be present to pass any business on to the full Senate. In honor of their principled commitment to the doctrine of “Fuck You, That’s Why,” Republicans on the committee spent the morning blaming Democrats going back to the Robert Bork confirmation in 1987 for this sorry pass to which they have brought the republic.
Here, for example, is Lindsey Graham (R-Ham Biscuits), the quite possibly soon-to-be-ex-senator from South Carolina, whose rushed and defiant shepherding of Barrett’s nomination may go down as the career equivalent of a Japanese pilot steering his Zero into an American battleship at Midway:
I remember telling Senator Schumer, you’ll regret this. Today he will regret it…Judge Gorsuch was filibustered two or three times, requiring us to change the rules. They started this. Not me. If it were up to me, there’d be a sixty-vote requirement in the Senate today. Denying Judge Gorsuch the votes to go to the floor was just the beginning of the end of a process that had served the country well.
Yep, Democrats just out of nowhere were very unfair to Neal Gorsuch. Nothing precipitated that, they’re just whiners who will upend the entire institution to get their way. This is the fairytale Republicans tell the public. And who knows, maybe they really believe it.
Just for fun, here is Mike Lee of Utah pretending that the Republican obstructionism of the entire Obama presidency never happened:
Every norm broken, every act of escalation, one party - the Democrats - has been the aggressor, in every single instance. At every step along the way, our side has used our constitutional authority, and the other side has abused its authority.
Lee also had the gall to complain that Democrats made no attempt to “turn down the temperature” on SCOTUS nominations in the Trump era. In other words, he was saying that Republicans have the right to break every norm they want, as they did with their unprecedented obstruction of Obama’s judicial nominees, and Democrats should just lay back and enjoy it.
This leads us to the topic of court expansion, which is what you call it if you’re reasonable, or court packing, which is what you call it if you have sold your souls to stack the federal judiciary with unqualified wingnuts and then realized that holy shit, it’s perfectly constitutional for Democrats to cancel you out by using legislative majorities to expand the courts and put more liberals on them.
In short, these are more or less the same thing, but “court packing” sounds much more sinister and illegitimate.
Over at The Atlantic, Adam Serwer has a banger of a piece exploring the issue. The main thrust of his argument is that conservative courts, having swung right despite being built by legislators representing a minority of Americans, are now working to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters so that Republicans will never have to win elections by appealing to majorities ever again:
The logic here is as clear to present-day Trumpists as it was to Democrats decrying “negro rule” in the South: Their inalienable rights can only be preserved as long as the worthy deprive the unworthy of power…Americans who fail to vote Republican are similarly unschooled in the virtues of liberty, and their ability to choose their leaders must be constrained until they are disciplined enough to choose the right ones.
[…]
This political project is authoritarian in nature, as it seeks to win elections by keeping the other side from being able to fully participate.
Part of this project is to portray any Democratic efforts to counter it as some sort of cold-blooded, unprecedented coup d’etat against democracy. When in fact such a counter is intended to shore up democracy by making sure everyone can still participate in it by voting.
The Republican strategy, as Serwer noted, is that they need to hold off the masses while hard-right courts implement conservative political priorities: banning abortion, overturning the right to gay marriage, knocking down any efforts at campaign finance reform, and on and on.
This project can’t happen with a judiciary that has a fairly even ideological balance. Which is why the Republican-controlled Senate held up so many of Barack Obama’s nominees, then rushed to stuff the courts full of ideologues over the last four years, no matter the lack of qualifications of many of them.
There are enough circuit courts, which have over a dozen justices each, that the change to them has not attracted a great deal of public notice. But on the Supreme Court, the margins have been so narrow, particularly on high-profile issues, that every single nomination over the last decade or so has been portrayed as a life-or-death, existential threat to America. The possibility that reproductive rights or gay marriage or even whether the Affordable Care Act will remain a law could hinge on the vote of one ideologue who can justify a decision with an intelligence-insulting argument.
This has turned every SCOTUS nomination into an exhausting, enervating, gut-wrenching rollercoaster ride on which it is possible to say the future of the republic rests. This means passionate protests that raise everyone’s hackles. It means senators and nominees alike turn into frothing balls of rage who threaten retribution on those who oppose them for ideological or moral reasons like some sort of Onion parody made real.
It’s not a sustainable habit. It’s too damaging to the nation’s psyche to go through this war every single time there is a Supreme Court vacancy. But we will if we can’t count on our legislature to even consider nominees who are not unqualified Federalist Society hacks.
Which is why court expansion, especially of SCOTUS, is so utterly necessary at this point to bring some balance back to the judiciary. At some point if we keep down this road, the right will be ruling without the consent of the governed. And that is a dangerous place for a democracy to be.
ONE MORE THING…
If you held a gun to my head to force me to find a positive in Trump’s performance at Thursday night’s debate, the best I could come up with is that he seemed sliiiiightly less manic than he had in the first one.
Of course, I just write this newsletter full of ranting, so I don’t need to pretend to be balanced. So you won’t see headlines like “Trump, Biden Clash in Debate, Show Sharp Differences” like the Washington Post put on its homepage today, or “Trump and Biden Lay Out Starkly Different Visions of America” like the New York Times.
Trump’s “vision” for America is basically a tour through what Twitter wags last night dubbed the Fox News Cinematic Universe, a paranoid freakshow wherein Communist China handed the Bidens $1.5 billion, the country is being overrun by immigrants, the Obama administration committed treason by spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign, and on and on and on and on and on.
It was from deep within this universe that Trump launched most of his attacks on Biden, attacks that grew increasingly weird and incoherent as the night went on. Some commentators noticed this. Others very much did not.
Eleven days. Eleven days. Eleven days.
YOUR TRADER VIC’S BARTENDER GUIDE NOVELTY COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK
No cocktail this week, due to a combination of not having a chance to get over to the ABC store and…well, actually that’s the only reason. Go forth and enjoy sobriety for a week.
YOUR SHEARWATER SONG OF THE WEEK
In honor of the apocalyptic rhetoric about the future of America being on the line that we’re going to hear for the next week and a half — and to be fair, I think that’s right — here is “Rooks,” a song whose lyrics seem to chronicle an apocalypse that takes the planet’s birds first, then the rest of us. Cheery!
Back next week, probably with unintelligible screaming.