Month: October 2020

It is clearly inappropriate for senators to ask questions about the potential outcome of a pending case. It is not inappropriate to ask questions about the reasoning behind previous decisions, particularly when the nominee makes every effort to associate herself with the author of those decisions. The failure of this nominee, and many previous nominees, to provide any meaningful information about her judicial philosophy is the principal reason so many confirmation hearings have turned into exercises in the politics of personal destruction; opponents of the nomination on ideological grounds have nowhere else to go. In the long run, it discredits the process and shortchanges the public, particularly in an election year.

It appears that the only kinds of questions Barrett will answer either relate to originalism in general or opinions she actually wrote. The Democratic members of the committee need to work within that framework. There is still some useful information to be unearthed there with the right questions. Just no more tiresome speeches about the value of ACA . . . please!

As I understand it, mailed ballots will be counted last in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That means we won’t know for sure who won the election when we go to bed on November 3, and a Trump tantrum about voter fraud on November 4 is just short of inevitable.

But the results from Florida may well be known by the end of election night. If Biden wins Florida, it will be clear to everyone that the rout is on. The steam will be taken out of Trump’s more violent supporters. There will be fewer Brooks Brothers riots and less violence, and the judicial system will take his complaints about fraud less seriously.

In short, Florida’s system embarrassed the country in 2000. Let’s redeem ourselves and save America as we know it this time.

Barring an improbable shift to populist economic policies, the GOP is doomed to become a permanent minority party in the next decade. As a result, we are starting to see intellectual justifications for minority rule based on the alleged intentions of the Founding Fathers. Do they have any basis in reality?

No, for the following reasons:

1. While it is certainly true that the FFs were not pure democrats, their ideas were extremely advanced for their age, as evidenced in the Declaration and the preamble to the Constitution. Their objective was to provide representation for both the wealthy and the masses, as in the Roman Republic. As a result, there are no restrictions on the franchise in the Constitution, as there might well have been.
2. The other clear template for the new American political system was the British system, in which the House of Commons, not the House of Lords, was the predominant actor even at the time the Constitution was written.
3. If you believe in oligarchy, it is counterintuitive, to say the least, to argue that white Christian voters in relatively poor red states should have more power than voters in more prosperous blue states.
4. The most important point here is that the FFs view of democracy has been superseded by dramatic constitutional changes over the last two centuries. The FFs accepted slavery, a subordinate position for women, and a Senate that was not elected by the people; we don’t. To rely on their views on democratic principles in this day and age in light of our history is consequently ridiculous.

As you would expect, there was plenty of bloviating by senators on both sides of the aisle today. The Democrats did their best to limit their discussion to ACA and avoid saying anything interesting, while the Republicans made the patently false claim that the Democrats were anti-Catholic bigots.

I’m not convinced that Barrett’s vote to kill ACA is set in stone; her comment about Roberts making a deal to save the legislation and the Court’s reputation is consistent with the facts and my own observations. The current case against ACA is so weak that even many conservative legal analysts have called it frivolous. Does Barrett really want to start her career on the Supreme Court by doing untold damage to the country for no obviously good reason? I would think not, but we’ll see.

Confining questions to ACA is an approach that can be described as both safe and cynical. Safe, because it emphasizes a theme that the Democrats want the voters to consider heavily in their decision making process; cynical, because they know Barrett can’t respond to any questions that involving a pending case. Personally, I hope the questions are more adventurous than that; I would ask about originalism, Heller, and Griswold, and even about any commitments made to the People of Praise that might conflict with her constitutional obligations. Will the Democrats oblige me and make the hearings at least a little bit entertaining? I have my doubts; safety first seems to be the order of the day.

Given that the Democratic nominee is a practicing Catholic, there are at least five other Catholics on the Supreme Court, and the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee said nothing about Catholicism in their opening statements, the attempt by GOP committee members to paint Democrats as anti-Catholic bigots seems like a stretch to me. One imagines the few people who could tolerate watching the first day of the hearings felt the same way.

Thom Tillis and the GOP are ripping Cal Cunningham up one side and down the other over his sexting scandal. You might think this is a bit rich for a candidate and a party who have pledged their unconditional support to a man like Donald Trump, but there you have it.

The question for the day is, what does the GOP do about the Trump ethical standard once the man on golf cart is gone? Every time they attack a Democrat over some sort of public or private morality issue, they are going to have Trump thrown back in their face. How will they respond?

My guess is that they will argue that Trump was a special case because his flaws were well known to the electorate, and disregarded. That gave Trump the right to do anything he wanted in office. No one subsequent to him will have the same privilege.

What kinds of litigation will arise from the election, and how will these cases be resolved? Here are my predictions:

1. FEDERAL COURT LITIGATION BASED ON THE PANDEMIC THAT IS INTENDED TO LIBERALIZE STATE VOTING REQUIREMENTS: We’ve seen this movie already, and we know how it ends. GOP state governments prevail in these cases.
2. STATE COURT LITIGATION BASED ON THE PANDEMIC THAT IS DESIGNED TO LIBERALIZE VOTING REQUIREMENTS: There are too many different courts and statutes in play here to make any predictions. What I can say with confidence is that the Trump campaign will try to have any cases it loses reconsidered in federal court, because it sees the Supreme Court as its ultimate backstop.
3. CLAIMS BASED ON VOTER INTIMIDATION: This is going to happen; the only question is how widespread and violent the intimidation will be. From a legal perspective, the problem will be in crafting an acceptable remedy. In all likelihood, the judiciary will say that the laws against intimidation should be enforced through the criminal process, and that there is no civil remedy to extend or redo the vote. Intimidation will work, in its way.
4. FEDERAL CLAIMS INTENDED TO STOP THE COUNTING OF VOTES: This is where the real action will be. Trump’s attorneys will craft frivolous due process/equal protection arguments based in some way on Bush v. Gore and hope that the Supreme Court will save their client’s bacon. Will it work? With Alito and Thomas, yes. With the liberals, obviously not. With Roberts and the Trump appointees, probably not, but there will be plenty of drama, and we won’t know what will happen until it is over.

Ross Douthat told us repeatedly in 2016 that Donald Trump wouldn’t be the Republican nominee, so it would be reasonable to take his latest predictions with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that he thinks that Trump doesn’t have what it takes to launch a coup if he loses. Is Douthat correct, or should we be worried?

Let’s deconstruct his argument. It really has two parts:

1. Trump has no record of being able to mobilize large numbers of people to perform illegal acts. To use my words, he’s a man on golf cart, not a man on horseback; and
2. The public–even extreme conservatives–won’t respond to him if he tries it.

My reactions are as follows:

1. Yes, Trump is just a man on golf cart under normal circumstances. He wants and needs adulation more than power. Faced with an existential and immediate threat to his identity as a winner, however, he is capable of doing just about anything. His complaints about the DOJ’s failure to prosecute Clinton, Biden, and Obama are just the beginning. I don’t have any confidence that our usually easygoing strongman will just fade away under these altered conditions. He’s going to be laser focused on staying in power to a degree we haven’t seen before.
2. My best guess is that demonstrations on his behalf will be relatively sporadic. I could be wrong about that, however. Trump’s extreme right wing supporters are being told over and over again by Fox News and talk radio that life as they know it will end if Biden wins in November. Some of them are in power at the state and local levels, and many of them are armed. Fears about what they will do are perfectly realistic.

My prediction is that Trump will demand an end to the counting of votes at some point on November 4 if a red mirage is still in place at the time. There will be lawsuits filed on his behalf and Brooks Brothers riots to that end in countless jurisdictions. Trump’s ultimate objective will be to get the Supreme Court to keep him in office. At some point, the Court will, in fact, be forced to confront the issues presented by the election, even if those issues are legally frivolous, which is quite likely.

What kinds of legal questions will arise, and what will happen with them? I will address those topics in my next post.

Bret Stephens argues that the 1619 Project lacks the proper nuances and context in today’s NYT. As you can imagine, I agree completely, and only wish that he had mentioned the number of Union casualties in the Civil War to amplify his point.

The tragedy is that the 1619 Project has simply opened up a new front in the culture war, with Trump supporters arguing that slavery and racism are just an unfortunate blip in our history with little contemporary relevance, and 1619 people saying that they are an overriding theme that dwarfs everything else, even today. The truth is in the middle. As I’ve said before, and I can’t improve on it, racism shaped our country, but does not define it.

Given his exceptionally low ceiling, Donald Trump was always going to have difficulty in November regardless of the circumstances. But consider what he’s done to sabotage his own efforts since then:

1. He told the elderly, a key group of supporters in 2016, to get on with life with the virus and thereby risk death for the sake of the economy;
2. He disparaged the use of masks, which help to permit something like normal economic activity;
3. He demanded that states open up, when it was obvious that the problem was consumer confidence, not regulations;
4. He behaved obnoxiously at a debate in an effort to show that Biden was weak and incompetent;
5. He refused to participate in a virtual debate, thus throwing away an opportunity to take the momentum back; and
6. He impulsively took responsibility for cutting off negotiations on a virus bailout package that would have improved the economy and his chances of winning in November.

What do these obvious mistakes have in common? They are all tied in one way or another to his strength narrative. Trump believes that America only responds to displays of strength, even when they are stupid and capricious. Who cares about virus deaths and recession when you can have a preening man on golf cart to keep you “safe”?

We do, as he will discover in less than a month.

I always thought that George W. Bush was a unicorn, because he was both the consummate insider and a perpetual outsider. On the one hand, as a presidential princeling, he had access to a web of establishment connections that none of his rivals could match; on the other hand, he consistently went out of his way to emphasize his disdain for that very establishment, most notably through his choice of religion. This mixture of credentials made him the perfect GOP nominee.

Donald Trump, in his own unusual way, has followed a similar path. He grew up wealthy and privileged in New York City. He managed to leverage his vast inherited wealth into celebrity, and then into political power. He and his father were never viewed as being completely respectable by the financial and cultural elite of Manhattan, however, so he developed a chip on his shoulder that he retains today. In Trump’s eyes, and the eyes of his followers, he will always be a scrappy outsider who built a fortune by outwitting his opponents. That this narrative is completely bogus is less important than the fact that it exists.

And so, you can see the blueprint for the GOP nominee (assuming Trump hasn’t made himself dictator for life) in 2024. He will be a swaggering white man who can both communicate easily with Wall Street types and credibly and vividly express the searing anger of the cultural right towards coastal elites. He will be both Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, but his public face will only be the latter.

While he has some of the same ability to tap into the public’s fear and anger, Trump isn’t really an authoritarian like Hitler or Franco; his business model is the Trump Organization, not the Third Reich. He is driven by a pathetic, childish desire for attention and the fear of being called a loser, not the will to power and fascist ideology. His man on golf cart tendencies really only come into play when he is faced with an existential attack on his identity as a winner. Hence, the hysteria of the last few weeks.

But beware, America! Trump has shown us that the Orban Option is a real possibility here. We now know, if we didn’t already, that a large segment of the GOP electorate is ready to follow a real man on horseback through thick and thin, and that the system doesn’t do enough to rein him in. Impeachment is a broken reed, and the judicial system is slow and unreliable. Danger lies ahead.

I expect an open, committed authoritarian to be on the ballot in 2024, certainly during the GOP primaries, and very possibly during the general election. We will have to hope at that time that Trump’s failures have discredited the authoritarian experiment to the point that it has no electoral future in this country. Have they? I doubt it; he still has over 40 percent of the vote.

Donald Trump’s principal political skill–perhaps his only skill–is triggering the libs. On the other hand, it’s easy to trigger him, too. All you have to do is suggest that he is a bad businessman, and a loser.

With that in mind, I would ask the following questions about his taxes: The NYT story on your taxes indicated that you paid next to nothing in federal income taxes for a period of about ten years, due largely to massive carried-over losses. There are only two possible explanations for this: either you are a terrible businessman; or you and your wealthy friends have rigged the system in your favor, so regular American workers have to pick up the tab for you. Which is it? If the latter, why shouldn’t the system be changed dramatically to assist workers and not plutocrats like you?

Then let the good times roll.

A few reactions:

1. If you’re a Democrat, you think Harris won. If you’re a Republican, you think Pence won. Either way, as predicted, it won’t matter. This election will be decided by facts on the ground and vote suppression.
2. We actually needed the pitch counter for Pence’s lies as much as Trump’s.
3. The “Donald Trump” portrayed by Pence is a fictional character much like Pence himself who exists only in the VP’s brain.
4. Harris wasn’t scintillating, but she was fine. She delivered her talking points clearly and forcefully. Her riffs were less successful.
5. Pence can stuff so many lies into two minutes that it is difficult to know where to start in response. Harris usually countered with standard talking points.
6. Climate change should be a layup for the Democrats. Both Biden and Harris need work on that issue.
7. There won’t be any reason for the candidates to comply with time restrictions until the moderator has the power to cut them off.
8. At least it was watchable. That’s something.

We are told not to worry about voter intimidation because there are plenty of laws which prohibit it. That’s fine in blue jurisdictions. But what about areas where the state and local governments are controlled by the GOP, and the police and the elections supervisors are big Trump supporters? Can we really rely on them to confront right-wing militia groups and enforce the law? And if they don’t, can we expect the judiciary to modify the results of the election after the fact?

As you can see, there are actually plenty of reasons to worry. Reality and paper are two completely different things.