Month: June 2021

To modern day Confederate wannabes, the Civil War was an exercise in Yankee imperialism. Southerners were just trying to protect their land and their culture—built on agriculture, free trade, and ideas of honor–from the brutal, aggressive materialism of the North. Slavery had nothing to do with it.

To the authors of the 1619 Project, the Civil War is just the brief interval between the horrors of slavery and the betrayal of Reconstruction. It was a random natural disaster, like a tornado, that shouldn’t interfere with the narrative that all white Americans are evil racist oppressors. Slavery had nothing to do with it.

And so, the two great ideological opponents agree on something! The inconvenient truth is that they are both wrong. The war was indeed about slavery, to the everlasting shame of the Confederates. And the blood sacrifices of the people of the North were viewed as the price of redemption for the nation’s original sin, thus making the concept of reparations superfluous, at least to those of us who are not descended from plantation owners.

Calling Card: Budget cuts.

Factions: CL (budget/economy); Reactionary (all others)

Prospects: Long live the Spirit of 2010! Scott sees a Tea Party revival as the source of his success. In his view, the anger felt by Reactionaries will be manifested in strong opposition to government spending. He’s really the only prospective candidate who cares passionately about the deficit, so he would be the natural beneficiary of the groundswell.

Prediction: Pretender. Do you really think Reactionaries will vote for an ostentatiously charisma-free candidate who looks and acts like a Bond villain because he wants to cut social programs upon which many of them depend? Me, neither.

As any reasonable person would have predicted, the left is frustrated with Joe Manchin. How should they deal with him? The choices are: (a) to rip him in the press and hope that somehow changes his mind; or (b) to get as much as possible out of him today and to make the point in the 2022 campaign that we need more Democrats in the Senate, as the left does not really have a working majority there.

In case you were wondering, the correct answer is (b). Complaining about Manchin doesn’t serve any practical purpose. He is what he is, and the left has no leverage over him, as all of the alternatives in his state are far worse.

Justice Breyer has a new book out. I haven’t read it, but by all accounts, it blisters the left for showing a lack of faith in the Supreme Court, which he promotes as an apolitical institution in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and the rule of law. Based on those premises, one has to infer that he has no intention of retiring on Biden’s watch, as Kennedy clearly did with Trump.

Unfortunately, Mitch McConnell hasn’t read Breyer’s book, either. It is doubtful he would be impressed. McConnell has already made it clear that he will block any Biden Supreme Court nominee in 2024 if he has the chance, based on his new Merrick Garland precedent. You have to believe he will extend the precedent to 2023, as well–why wouldn’t he?

In other words, Breyer may well be leading us into a constitutional crisis over the Court to make a point which has little basis in current realities. That will become more apparent after the Court rules on abortion and guns next year.

Calling Card: Government shutdowns.

Factions: CL (economy); Reactionary (everything else)

Prospects: His anger, sarcasm, and disdain for the Senate leadership play well with the base. His blatant opportunism and previous ostentatious opposition to Trump–not so much. Hardly anyone likes or trusts the guy. Why would they? He clearly would say or do anything to be president.

Prediction: Pretender. His chances died in 2016. Look for him to do plenty of showboating between now and 2024, however.

If you’re an American Christian, you’re probably very angry. You look around and see nothing but deviance, sin, and filth in your country. To make matters worse, the government tolerates it, and even calls you a bigot when you complain. Clearly, something radical needs to be done–fast!

You are effectively asserting a right not to be offended. It is a “right” that doesn’t exist in the Constitution. It has less historical validity than the “penumbral” right to privacy that pisses you off every day of your life. Logically, it should protect your opponents from your views, too, which is hardly what you have in mind. And yet, it drives you to support illiberal political movements, because you think your culture and even your very existence are at stake.

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing oblique references to this “right” in Supreme Court opinions, even from supposedly originalist justices who should know better. It is the ultimate culture war battleground.

Breyer and Kagan are traditional realo liberals. Sotomayor trends more towards the fundis. Roberts–an institutionalist–is a PBP. Alito and Thomas are bomb throwing Reactionaries who barely bother to give lip service to the rule of law. Barrett is a more principled Reactionary. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are. . . well, we’re not totally sure yet. Either PBPs or Reactionaries. Time will tell.

Yes, it is true that Supreme Court justices are more than politicians in robes. Yes, it is true that their varying approaches to jurisprudence matter in both the short and the long run. Yes, it is true that they don’t move in lockstep. Yes, it is true that most of the cases heard by the justices are not “political” in the most narrow sense. The bottom line, however, is that their political opinions largely dictate the outcomes of the most significant cases. If they didn’t, why would Mitch McConnell care so much?

This will become more significant next year. Expect the right to coalesce over abortion and guns. The Court’s direction will become more obvious; the only questions will be how far, and how fast.

Biden to Putin: “The bromance is over! From now on it is just business–not personal. We will make deals with you when we can, based purely on self-interest, but we will resist you ferociously if you step over the line.”

If it sounds like something from “The Godfather,” that makes perfect sense, because Putin is a cross between a KGB agent and an organized crime leader. We have to deal with him accordingly.

I saw Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham call Biden weak and soft on Russia over the last few days. That makes sense, since they fearlessly took on Trump when he sucked up to Putin, and voted to remove him over the Ukraine issue.

No? That’s not how you remember it? How can that be?

The only real question was whether the decision would be based on standing or severability. The Court chose standing, which was prudent from both a legal and political perspective.

Will the GOP continue to tilt at this windmill? I think the leadership would prefer to leave it alone, but some of the state and local folks are too invested to give up, even though it is a proven loser, and they have no plausible alternative.

Blue America isn’t going to take the abolition of abortion rights in red states lying down. You can expect to see people raising large sums of money for poor women to travel to blue states for abortions. Offers of assistance with abortions will appear immediately on the internet, along with information about how to perform a safe abortion at home. It will be the 21st century equivalent of the Underground Railroad.

As with the original version, you don’t think the red states will just acquiesce to this, do you? The great state of Texas, to cite one example, will try to criminalize this kind of behavior, even if the perpetrators live in blue states (think the Fugitive Slave Act here). The result will be massively important litigation revolving around state versus federal control of the internet, the ability of red states to interfere with the activities of people outside their boundaries, and the First Amendment. How will that turn out? We’ll see.

According to the Supreme Court, the issue presented by Hobbs is whether any restrictions on abortion in the first trimester can be constitutional. Unlike most recent abortion cases, this is an invitation to revisit Casey and Roe. Few doubt that the current majority on the Court will do so. How far will they go?

As I see it, here are the possibilities:

1. Keep Casey and Roe in place, but make their legal standards meaningless: In this scenario, the “undue burden” test is implicitly redefined to permit virtually any kind of abortion restriction.
2. Overturn Casey and the trimester balancing test in Roe: Here, the Court decides that the balancing test has no basis in the history and text of the Constitution, but keeps the idea of the right to privacy in place.
3. Overturn both Casey and Roe, but keep Griswold in place: There is still a “penumbral” right to privacy, but it doesn’t include abortion, based on originalist thought.
4. Overturn Casey, Roe, and Griswold: No more “penumbral” right to privacy! States are free to prohibit contraception as well as abortion.
5. Personhood: This is the whole enchilada. The Court not only overturns all of the privacy cases, but finds that a fetus is a person with Fourteenth Amendment protections, thereby effectively banning abortion by judicial fiat in all fifty states without any need for legislation or a constitutional amendment.

What can you expect? Either #2 or #3. I don’t think the majority will be satisfied with #1; #4 would result in a huge political backlash; and #5 is a legal bridge too far, even for this Supreme Court.

So what happens after that? See my next post.

It is 1865. McClellan won the 1864 election after Sherman failed to take Atlanta. The Copperhead faction of the Democratic Party has driven him to seek a negotiated peace with the Confederacy in spite of his promise to continue the war. He offers a ceasefire and the status quo ante, but the South is not interested; for the Confederacy, after all of its losses, it is complete independence or nothing. Under enormous pressure to end the war, McClellan gives in. What happens next?

It would have been very difficult to negotiate a meaningful peace for two reasons: the border states and the territories. The only obvious answer to the border state question would have been a series of referenda, which inevitably would have turned each of them into a Kansas-style battlefield. As to the territories, most of them were physically unsuitable for cotton plantations, but the Confederacy could not have conceded that point without implicitly admitting that the ostensible reason for the rebellion–Lincoln’s position on extending slavery in the 1860 election–was bogus.

In all likelihood, if the two parties had somehow reached an agreement, the outcome would have been continuing strife, miniature civil wars on the borders, and an ever-increasing disparity in population growth and power between the Union and the Confederacy. The South would have been penned into the borders of the Confederacy. The rest of the world had already learned to live without its cotton. Its political system granted too much power to the individual states to be effective, and its infrastructure was in ruins. In the long run, the Confederacy was doomed, regardless of what happened in 1864 and 1865.

Sally Hemings was the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and a slave, which, of course, made her the half sister of Jefferson’s wife. The accounts we have suggest that Hemings and her half sister looked very similar. Jefferson and Hemings had children that could pass for white. But, for all of the remarkable biological similarities between Jefferson’s legitimate and illegitimate families, they had a completely different status under the laws of Virginia. One group of children was free; the other was not.

Did the absurdity of this ever occur to Jefferson? You would certainly hope so.

Citing the outcome of the House and Senate races in 2020, some left-leaning commentators think that Trump should be off limits as a topic of discussion in the midterm elections. Are they right?

It depends on the district, but mostly no. The problem with talking about Trump in 2020 is that the connection between GOP House and Senate candidates and Trump’s pandemic response was very thin. If the candidate in question effectively supported the rioters by denying the legitimacy of Biden’s election, by voting against impeachment, and by rejecting the investigation of 1/6, his complicity in Trump’s efforts to destroy liberal democracy will be clear, and should be discussed openly in 2022.