It Shouldn’t Be This Close

 

Jay Michaelson: ‘While You’ve Been Watching the Election, the Supreme Court Is Set to Transform “Religious Freedom” and America’

 

From The Daily Beast:

The Supreme Court is not accountable to public opinion. But to give you a sense of how out of step this conservative-packed, minority-party-packed, and religious-extremist-packed institution really is, consider this week’s major case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, about whether taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies should be able to discriminate against would-be parents.

A poll released last week says 70 percent of Americans say no. Of course, taxpayer money shouldn’t be given to organizations that discriminate, regardless of those organizations’ religious affiliations. If you take government money, you should play by the same rules as everyone else.

And yet I’ll eat a bug if the Supreme Court agrees.

Why? Because a majority of the court’s members have now been vetted by religious fundamentalists with a pipeline to the White House. And while the public’s focus is understandably on abortion rights, that battle is just one skirmish in a much larger Kulturkampf (culture war, a 19th century German term invoked by Justice Scalia back in 1996) about the relationship between church and state.

Here’s how Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas and Barrett (and sometimes Chief Justice Roberts) see the Fulton case, based on their past votes and writings: this is about religious freedom. Never mind the prospective parents — Catholic, gay, Jewish, interracially married — turned away by an agency for religious reasons. The real victim is the agency.

 

Read the full article.

 

Tom Nichols: ‘A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath’

 

From The Atlantic:

[N]o matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor — his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms — and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.

Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.

To be clear, I never expected a Biden landslide in a country as polarized as the United States. I was a wet blanket even among my Never Trump comrades, holding out only the modest hope that Biden would recapture the states Clinton lost in 2016, and possibly flip Arizona. But I expected the margins in all of those states — and especially in Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania — to be higher. I suspected that Biden had no real chance in places such as Texas or Georgia or even North Carolina, all states in the Trumpist grip.

Nor was I among the progressives who believed America would repudiate Trump’s policies. For one thing, I am a conservative — and I know my former tribe. Trump voters don’t care about policy. They didn’t care about it in 2016, and they don’t care about it now. The party of national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after living under the most indecent president in American history.

 

 

Read the full article.

Nicholas Goldberg: ‘Even If He Loses, Trump Has Won’

 

Cartoon by Shadi Gahnim for The National

From the Los Angeles Times:

Even if Joe Biden ultimately becomes president — and he appears, as I write this, to have a pretty strong path to 270 electoral votes — millions and millions of people will have again pulled the lever for Trump.

For the United States to have elected Donald Trump once can perhaps be written off as an aberration, a dreadful mistake. Maybe voters in 2016 — a more innocent time! — thought he wouldn’t really follow through with his irresponsible campaign promises, or that he’d be sobered by the awesome responsibilities of the office or held in check by others.

But for tens of millions of people to double down and vote for him again in 2020 is entirely different. It is an assertion by those voters that, yes, this is who we really are — and that what the United States has become over the last four years is really what we want it to be. Their votes send a message to the world that this bizarre and untrustworthy man didn’t weasel his way into the most powerful job in the world by fooling the great American people. Rather, he was — and remains — the conscious choice of too many.

That does not bode well for the months and years ahead. Even if Trump is gone, Trumpism, I’m afraid, is not going away.

Read the full article.

Frida Ghitis: ‘Justice Barrett Could Now Be Part of Trump’s Firewall’

 

From CNN.com:

...Trump made it clear he wanted to fill the empty [Supreme Court] seat before Election Day, presumably because he expects his nominee to side with him if the election ends up being decided by the court. If that was not enough to place [Amy Coney] Barrett in an awkward position from the start, the [confirmation] ceremony [at the White House] on Monday night went a long way toward politicizing the one institution that is meant to remain above politics. 

The Supreme Court derives much of its power from the perception that it is largely independent of politics. The over-the-top event had the look of a Trumpian campaign stunt more than a Supreme Court swearing in. Barrett, Trump and their spouses waved from the balcony, evoking the image of Trump's dramatic face mask removal on a White House balcony upon returning from the hospital. 

That resonance to Trump's campaign grandiosity, the partisanship that marked Barrett's appointment and Trump's own statements about the role of the court in the upcoming election, are evidence of the blatant politicization of the Barrett nomination, undercutting the court's credibility. America stands on a knife's edge; the President is sharpening that knife. 

 

Read the full article.

Ezra Klein: ‘The Fight Is for Democracy’

Cartoon by Bruce Plante for the Tulsa World

 From Vox:

In American politics in 2020, both sides doubt that abiding by loss is the surest path back to power. This is an election — and more than an election, it is a politics — increasingly defined by a fight over what the rules of the game should be.

Democrats see a political system increasingly rigged against them and the voters they represent, and they are right. They are facing an Electoral College where a 2- to 3-point win in the popular vote still means Republicans are favored to take the presidency. They are vying to win back control of a Senate where Republicans have a 6- to 7-point advantage. The simple truth of American politics right now is this: Republicans can lose voters, sometimes badly, and still win power. Democrats need landslides to win power.

It gets worse. Democrats fear a doom loop. They are faced with the reality that when they lose power, Republicans will draw districts and change rules and hand down Supreme Court decisions that further weaken their voters, that pull America further from anything resembling democracy. Democrats have watched it happen in recent years again and again.... Losing begets losing, because in the American political system, electoral winners have the power to rewrite electoral rules.

But Republicans also see their position as desperate. They know their coalition is shrinking. They know that they are winning power but losing voters. They see a younger, more diverse, and more liberal generation building against them. They fear that Democratic efforts to expand the franchise and make voting an easily exercised right rather than a politically metered privilege will spell their long-term demise. They believe that mass democracy is inimical to their interests, and they state that fact baldly....

America is not a democracy, and Republicans want to keep it that way. America is not a democracy, and Democrats want to make it one, or at least more of one. 

 

Read the full article.

 

 

 

It’s International Lesbian Day!

  

It’s International Lesbian Day (no, really)! As an observance, it’s worth noting that until very, very recently, being a fictional sapphic (non-100%-heterosexually identified) woman on a TV series brought with it an extremely short life expectancy. If a character on a TV show was a sapphic woman, the chances of her being ultimately killed off — by sometimes offhanded means — were enormous. Among cultural critics, this came to be known as “the dead-lesbian trope.” The frequency of this stereotype reached a tipping point a few years ago, and after LGBT+ viewer outrage, TV creators (some of whom are sapphic women themselves) are now making a more concerted effort to see that their lesbian/bisexual/trans characters survive beyond the series finale. 

Still, it’s worth looking back on the U-Haul load of fictional sapphic characters who met untimely ends and brought public dissatisfaction with the dead-lesbian trope to a head.  Starting in 2016 and expanded over the years, the website Autostraddle came up with a list of 212 such sapphic characters who shuffled off their cathode-ray coils too soon.  The article is worth a browse.