“The Constitution provides that there must be a Supreme Court, but it does not set the number of justices — that number is set by Congress. The Judiciary Act of 1789 originally established a six-justice Court, and this number vacillated considerably during the nation’s first century. The number of justices briefly grew to 10 during the Lincoln administration, before finally settling at nine under President Ulysses S. Grant.
If Democrats control the White House and the Congress, in other words, they can pass a law adding seats to the Supreme Court. If Biden is president, he could then quickly fill them (with the consent of the Senate). And four new seats could give Court a Democratic-controlled majority, despite another Trump pick.
It’s a risky play. At the height of his popularity, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed expanding the size of the Supreme Court to 15 in order to neutralize five reactionary justices who frequently undercut the New Deal. It did not end well for him. Many historians cite the court-packing plan as the event that shattered Roosevelt’s political coalition and left him unable to pass liberal bills through Congress.
But these are very different times. In 1937, when Roosevelt proposed packing the Court, every one of the Court’s nine justices could claim that they got there fair and square. No one was on the Supreme Court because one political party invented a fake rule, applied it harshly to a president they loathed, and then immediately scrapped that rule when it was inconvenient.
Trump’s two previous Supreme Court appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, also share a dubious distinction. They are the only members of the Supreme Court in history to be nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country. If Trump fills the Ginsburg seat, fully one-third of the Court will be controlled by judges with no democratic legitimacy.”
“The Senate and Electoral College systematically underweight the votes of people of color — and the judiciary operates directly downstream of those biases. Washington, DC, home to the largest plurality of Black Americans in the country, is excluded entirely from federal representation. The filibuster has historically been used to block or delay anti-lynching laws and civil rights legislation”
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“Since 2000, 40 percent of presidential elections have been won by the loser of the popular vote. A 2019 study found that Republicans should be expected to win 65 percent of presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote, and could potentially win while losing the popular vote by as much as 6 percentage points. And this November, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver calculates that Democratic nominee Joe Biden only has a 6 percent chance of winning the Electoral College if he wins the popular vote by 0 to 1 points, a 22 percent chance if he wins by 1 to 2 points, and less than a 50 percent chance if he wins by 2-3 points.”
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“The Senate is even more extreme. In a 2019 Data for Progress analysis, Colin McAuliffe found that the Senate has a 3 percentage point tilt toward Republicans (double the 1.5 percent skew in the Electoral College). And that is probably an understatement — Silver recently calculated that the Senate is “effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole.” As my colleague Matt Yglesias points out, in 2014, Republican candidates won 52 percent of the popular Senate vote and gained nine Senate seats; in 2016, Democrats won 54 percent of the vote and gained only two seats; and in 2018, Democrats won 54 percent of the vote and lost two seats.
“Because the president appoints federal judges and the Senate confirms them, these biases are also reflected in the judiciary, where the Trump administration has already filled federal court benches with an unprecedented number of young, highly ideological conservative judges, including two Supreme Court justices.
It’s important to underscore the mechanism that generates and sustains this partisan bias: US political institutions systematically underweight the interests of nonwhite Americans.”
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“Analyzing the results of the 2016 presidential election, statisticians Andrew Gelman and Pierre-Antoine Kremp found that “per voter, whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the Electoral College is taken into consideration, 28 percent more power than Latinos, and 57 percent more power than those who fall into the other category.”
Behind the Senate’s partisan tilt is that it overrepresents people living in small states who tend to be whiter, on average, than people living in larger states. California, which has large Black and brown populations, and Wyoming, a predominantly white state, have equal representation in the Senate, despite the former having over 60 times more people than the latter.”
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“this racial skew distorts policy preferences on issues ranging from gun control to the minimum wage to environmental policy. For instance, 48 percent of Americans believe controlling gun ownership is more important than protecting gun rights; however, when you weigh voter preferences as the Senate does — giving equal representation to each state — support for gun control drops a whopping 5 points, to 43 percent.
Why? Because the Senate overweights the preferences of white Americans, who tend to favor gun rights, and underweights the preferences of Black and brown Americans, who tend to favor gun control. By that same mechanism, McAuliffe finds that support for a $15 minimum wage also drops 5 points (from 58 to 53 percent), and a $100 billion yearly investment in green social housing drops 3 points (63 to 60 percent).”
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“This is the status quo that Just Democracy’s coalition members aim to change — and they have a few proposals to do so.”
“we’ve been in a new situation for 75 years. As soon as the nuclear age began, it was evident that humans had reached the intelligence and capacity to effectively destroy human life on Earth. That’s what we’ve been living with for 75 years. What wasn’t known at the time, but is now understood, is that it was also the beginning of what the World Geological Organization calls the Anthropocene, a period in which human activity is having very significant and deleterious effects on the environment.
So for 75 years, we’ve been living with a unique situation in human history. We have the means to destroy organized human life on Earth. That’s never been true before.”
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“What history teaches us is that we have no idea. There are all kinds of lessons. Just take Germany. In the 1920s, Germany was the peak of Western civilization, in the sciences and the arts. And if you look at political science literature in the 1920s, the Weimar Republic was regarded as the peak of democratic achievement. Ten years later, it was the worst place in human history. And years after that, getting back to where it was.
Those are the lessons of history, namely, we don’t know.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/9/21/21448845/syria-russia-usa-troops-trump
“Already, the current downturn is turning out to be less traumatic for wealthy and well-established people than it is marginalized groups and the poor.
The stock market is soaring, even though millions of people are out of a job. The Federal Reserve has really stepped up in terms of monetary policy to inject liquidity into the economy and keep markets afloat, while Congress hasn’t really kept up its end of the bargain. It passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Securities Act, or the CARES Act, in March, but much of the support from it has dried up, and it’s not clear what, if anything, Capitol Hill plans to do next on the economy.
“The rich experience these recessions much differently than the rest of us,” Bharat Ramamurti, managing director of the Roosevelt Institute’s corporate power program, told me. “The pain is much more time-limited, it’s not as deep, and as a result, they recover much more quickly, and then they’re in a position to take advantage of the fact that other actors in the economy are still struggling and can use that to further consolidate their control and their power.””
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“After returning from recess in September, Senate Republicans put forth a “skinny” stimulus to counter a much more ambitious package proposed by Democrats in the House in May. But even the GOP’s bill failed in the Senate — as Vox’s Li Zhou explained, in part because it was more of a messaging bill than a sincere effort at helping the American public. The economy isn’t as bad as some of the doomsday predictions, so some lawmakers seem to have decided more assistance isn’t necessary.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21417526/coronavirus-economy-recession-recovery-cares-act-unemployment-joe-biden
“At least 50 journalists in the US have been arrested during Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the US, while dozens of others have also been injured by rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas.
The US Press Freedom Tracker has collected nearly 500 incidents from 382 reports, from the unrest in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd‘s killing by police in late May, to demonstrations in more than 70 cities across 35 states since.
At least 46 journalists were arrested between the end of May and the beginning of June, according to data collected by the organisation. Dozens of others reported injuries from law enforcement, firing “less lethal” projectiles, tear gas canisters and other weapons into crowds or directly at reporters during demonstrations, even when they had identified themselves and shown credentials, the organisation reports.
Two reporters have suffered permanent eye injuries.”
“The Republican Supreme Court power grab after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death should be shocking, given the naked hypocrisy involved. The only reason it isn’t is that we’ve come to expect this from Republicans — and not just under Trump.
Republicans shut down the government in the 1990s and impeached President Bill Clinton over far less than what Trump has done in office. Under Obama, they fanned the flames of birtherism, held the global economy hostage to force spending cuts, and elevated obstructionism to the level of governing principle.
At the state level, they have rewritten electoral rules to block Democrats from voting and seized power from Democratic governors after they have won elections. Just this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed a bill that would effectively criminalize anti-police violence protests — and protect drivers who ran over protesters with their cars.
This kind of radicalism is not at all normal — at least, when compared to center-right parties in other advanced democracies.
Experts on comparative politics say the GOP is an extremist outlier, no longer belonging in the same conversation with “normal” right-wing parties like Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Instead, it more closely resembles more extreme right parties — like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey — that have actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.”
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“Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have shown disdain for procedural fairness and a willingness to put the pursuit of power over democratic principles. They have implemented measures that make it harder for racial minorities to vote, render votes from Democratic-leaning constituencies irrelevant, and relentlessly blocked Democratic efforts to conduct normal functions of government.”
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“For Republicans, the process of moving toward anti-democracy has taken decades rather than a single election. There was never a single unified GOP plan to lock out Democrats, akin to the way that Fidesz intentionally remade the Hungarian political system after winning the country’s 2010 election. There is no authoritarian plot behind the GOP’s recent maneuvers, and no secret plan to end elections or declare martial law.
What there is, instead, is systematic disinterest in behaving according to the democratic rules of the game. The GOP views the Democrats as so illegitimate and dangerous that they are willing to employ virtually any tactic that they can think of in order to entrench their own advantage. This is perhaps the party’s core animating ideology, at every level: we must win because the Democrats cannot be given power.”
“Most states currently draw congressional districts, determining the areas that each elected official represents based on total population, including unauthorized immigrants. Current maps are due to be redrawn across the country in 2021 after the results of the 2020 census come in, and the stakes are high: Each redistricting has a lasting influence on who is likely to win elections, which communities will be represented in Congress, and, ultimately, what laws will be passed.
President Donald Trump’s attempt to exclude unauthorized immigrants would reduce the counts in areas where foreign-born populations have traditionally settled — primarily Democrat-run cities — and therefore undermine their political power relative to more rural, Republican-run areas. But it could also impact red states with large immigrant populations, including Texas.”
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“The administration argued Tuesday that by law, the president has the final say over who must be counted in the census.”
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“on September 10, a panel of three federal judges found that Trump’s memorandum skirted the federal government’s constitutional obligation to count every person, no matter their immigration status, in the census every 10 years.”
“when the United States walks away from cooperative bodies — from the Paris climate accord to the WHO — it leaves behind a vacuum. China has hastened to fill it, and that, more than anything, is bolstering Beijing’s rise and influence. It gives China a chance to be a good guy — say, pledging $30 million to the WHO when the US threatened to withdraw, a fraction of the money the US provides annually. The Trump administration, in abandoning institutions for being too China-centric, is allowing them to become just that. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Again, this is not to say the US doesn’t have legitimate criticisms of the WHO, or China. But by refusing to work within the system, it is actively ceding leverage and losing credibility. Last week, in a discussion with reporters about the implications of the US leaving the WHO, Elizabeth Cousens, the president and CEO of the UN Foundation, said that even as the US is trying to push the WHO to reform, it’s “losing influence in that conversation because they’ve stepped off the field.””
“Imagine a dog. She spends her entire life in an iron crate so small that she cannot turn around. Her tail has been cut off so that other dogs in cages jammed up against hers won’t chew it off in distress. When she has puppies, the males are castrated without painkillers. They are left close enough for her to nurse, but too far away for her to show them any affection.
Fortunately, this dog is a fictional creation. We have laws preventing people from treating pets this way.
Unfortunately, we are doing this to animals that are very similar to dogs. This is an all-too-real description of how we treat some of the millions and millions of pigs we raise for meat on factory farms.
So why do we treat the animals we eat in ways we would never, ever treat our pets?”