CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--So they went and did it. My guess (and it was only a guess) was right on – the U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and they made sure to do it before the national election was over.
Notice the new wording that we have to use about an election being over. The senate actually held their vote right in the middle of the election, since people had been turning in votes by the millions before Mitch McConnell cobbled together 52 votes. The senator from Maine was allowed to vote No in what has to be called a pathetic display of pseudo-independence. I don’t think it will save her from getting beaten in her reelection campaign. Consider: Maine voters requested just under half a million mail-in ballots, and as of Thursday have turned in more than 80% of them, including 236,325 Democratic ballots and 109,406 Republican.
There are as many as five Republican senators going down in this election, and that was probably the point of forcing the vote prior to November 3. Yes, this vote was an exercise in raw political power, but that’s the point – if Mitch McConnell were really confident of holding control in the senate, he might very well have held off on the vote until after November 3. But if election day results in the now predictable bloodbath for Republican office holders, it would be a lot harder to schedule that vote in the lame duck session.
The vote was also a subtle reminder that McConnell and a few Republicans with an ounce of sanity understand that even if they are still around as of January (McConnell is strongly favored to win), they are going to be working with a Democratic president and a generally pissed-off Democratic majority. They’ll be lucky to get their post office renaming bills passed in the new year.
Control of the senate is critical for many things the Biden administration would like to do in the new year – everything from health care reform to protecting Social Security to reformatting of the Supreme Court.
Just for the record, we’re looking at possible senatorial party shifts in Maine, Arizona, North Carolina, Colorado, and close races in Iowa, Georgia, and perhaps Montana. Given the predictable loss of a Democratic seat in Alabama, the net change could be somewhere between three and five seats for the Democrats, enough to swing control in the senate.
The weekly outrage
If it were not for the fact that this is election week and most people are already locked into their voting choices, it would be the sad duty of journalists and pundits to list the continuing outrages of this presidential administration. One you may not have heard about is the stark politicization of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Just for the record, NOAA acting chief scientist Craig McLean (photo above) was removed from his position when he asked for confirmation that NOAA would continue to adhere to scientific integrity.
Administrators didn’t have to make such inquiries in the past.
Also, a study compares the use of masks to Covid-19 hospitalizations. If Trump had treated the epidemic as a serious issue, worn a mask in public, and advised his followers to do the same, there likely would have been tens of thousands fewer dead.
Enlarging the Supreme Court gains momentum
A few weeks ago, I published a column here in CityWatch calling for an increased Supreme Court of 15 justices. My reasoning didn’t really have much to do with the day to day operations of the court. Rather, it was based on the need to neutralize the radical-right court packing that the Mitch McConnell senate had already accomplished. I also pointed out that this would be a chance to overturn a few of the worst decisions (Citizens United) rammed through over the past years.
But mainly, I argued that we need a better Supreme Court because I don’t want John Roberts to be in charge of my health insurance. Remember that Roberts allowed the Affordable Care Act to remain in existence, but severely cut its ability to provide Medicaid funding to poor people in Republican states. (The new 6-3 conservative majority will just make things worse.) A new Democratic-majority congress and Biden presidency will repair and add to the Affordable Care Act, and we need to know that the next Supreme Court will not attack the new legislation on spurious grounds.
Interestingly, another analysis of the Supreme Court by Michael C. Warnken comes to a similar conclusion on one point. Warnken’s column was published right here in CityWatch a few days ago and is worth reading. Warnken considers the growth of the American population since the last upgrade of the court in 1869 (as I did) and comes to similar conclusions. His analysis includes details of court operations that I would never have known, including administrative oversight functions for the multiple districts in the United States.
We have one disagreement (if it is that) that is worth considering. Warnken considers how a divided congress might come to some compromise, perhaps allowing for Supreme Court appointments by twos, to be meted out over successive presidential administrations. The effect, if I read this correctly, is to maintain the political and philosophical status quo on the court for at least another 6 years or so, and eventually to achieve the administrative advantages of having more justices and districts.
The problem with this is that the status quo has just been violently altered by the McConnell senate: The denial of a seat to Merrick Garland followed by three Trump appointments is anything but neutral. Now is the time to make changes (assuming the congress becomes Democratic in the next session) and there may not be another chance for decades to come.
What’s been missing from American discourse (with a few notable exceptions) is the optimistic hope for a liberal Supreme Court that will protect us individual citizens just as much as it protects corporations, and will not get in the way of the next health care reform bills.
Let’s understand: The appointment and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was both a taunt and an admission. It was a taunt in that it was the use of power after a clear realization that the principles Republicans had claimed in the Garland nomination were being ignored. It was an admission that the Republicans expect to lose control in this election. In essence, they got what they have wanted, which is a clear-cut conservative majority on the Supreme Court, one which can be expected to support the most vile right wing causes even as it undermines every attempt by Democrats to reform our terribly imperfect health care system.
Tension Patrol: Penultimate whistling past the graveyard
A lot of what we have been saying over the past few weeks is somewhere between wishful thinking and relatively good statistical reasoning. If we were only to rely on accumulating polling averages, we would have a pretty good feeling that the Democrats are going to sweep the 2020 elections, taking the presidency, the House, and even a slim majority in the senate. It is, of course, difficult not to dwell on Trump’s surprise win in 2016. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com suggests that things are different this year. Still, it’s normal to be nervous, and it’s useful to continue to engage in GOTV activities. I still laugh at the 2018 pre-election skit from Saturday Night Live that represents what a lot of us are thinking.
Final thought on baseball
The use of relief pitchers at an early point in the game, even when the starter is doing OK, has been a change in the game for those who grew up watching Nolan Ryan and Bob Gibson and decades of Dodger rotations. It used to be the case that pitchers were expected to go the distance if they could. Here’s a statistic from Mike Huber:
“Koufax finished the 1965 campaign with a record of 26-8. His earned run average was 2.04, and he pitched 27 complete games out of 41 starts”
Yeah, that’s 27 complete games in one season.
Here is Vin Scully as we remember him.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw