Rain today, no walk. As I was lying in bed, I found myself thinking about this election cycle’s favorite meme, “white suburban college-educated women.” To hear the commentators tell it, this crucial block of voters is the key to the outcome of the election. What proportion of the electorate, I wondered, actually is white suburban college-educated women? So I spent a little time after I got up googling and here is what I came up with. These numbers are not precise and in one case I was forced to guess but I think they are reasonably accurate.
Fully fifty percent of Americans live in the suburbs. (Who
knew?) Sixty percent of Americans are white non—Hispanic and (this is the guess)
I am going to suppose that actually 70% of suburban Americans are white. Back
when I was young it would have been much larger but the suburbs have been
changing and I think this is perhaps even somewhat of an overestimate. Still,
that means that 35% of Americans are white non-Hispanic suburbanites. A bit
more than half of that group or women, so let us call that 18%.
Well, about 35% of adult white women have college degrees
so, putting this altogether, 6% of the electorate is white college-educated
suburban non-Hispanic women. The polling results vary but they all agree that
there has been a massive shift in this group toward the Democrats, a shift that
is widely touted as the key to Biden’s potential victory. Let us suppose that
the shift has been 20%, which is truly massive. Well, 20% of 6% is 1.2% so all
the fuss is about a 1.2% shift in the American electorate toward the Democrats.
These are dangerous times and I will happily take anything
we can get in the way of a movement of votes away from Republicans and toward
Democrats but 1.2% is not exactly a landslide or an earthquake. It is more like
a gentle tidal shift.
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The Amy Comey Barrett hearings are scheduled to begin on Monday. On Friday it was reported that the Supreme Court, after an extensive period of deliberation, declined to grant review of a federal judge’s suspension of an FDA rule requiring that women wishing to purchase the anti-abortion pill must purchase it in person at a medical facility, rather than obtaining it via the mail. Justices Alito and Thomas dissented from the refusal to grant review. Given the time that it took the Court to decline review suggests that the Court split 4-4, with J. Roberts joining Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor. Confirmation of Barrett would undoubtedly mean a 5-4 vote approving such a restriction, and probably approving in the future a state law which bans the sale of the pill altogether in that state, and then likely overturning Roe v. Wade – which Barrett will avoid addressing during her confirmation hearing, saying something about respecting stare decisis.
“Anti-abortion pill”??? My keyboard keeps mis-typing.
Barrett's writings, from what I gather at second hand [this is an important qualification of course], apparently show that her views on stare decisis are not all that far from Thomas's, and Thomas's views on stare decisis are pretty radical, i.e. he thinks that clearly "wrong" precedents don't deserve weight and shd be tossed, irrespective of the standard set of criteria that his colleagues wd at least go through the motions of considering (i.e. how long the precedent's been around, whether overturning it wd cause havoc in that area, etc etc.) So a pledge from Barrett to respect "settled law" is not something I wd put any reliance on, frankly. Not that any of this matters to the predictive question of whether she's going to be confirmed, which as of now it looks like she is.
"Well, 20% of 6% is 1.2% so all the fuss is about a 1.2% shift in the American electorate toward the Democrats."
Two possible reasons: (1) a 10% difference in total vote, e.g., 55 to 45, is considered a landslide; (2) if that 1.2% previously voted for Trump, and simply didn't vote at all, Trump's total would be reduced by that amount and Biden would gain nothing. But if that 1.2% Trump vote swung to Biden, it amounts to a 2.4% shift in the total vote
--a sizeable portion of a landslide.
While we're on the subject of the Supreme Court, I somehow only realized yesterday that California v. Texas is scheduled for oral arguments on November 10, 2020--that is, after Amy Coney Barrett will probably be confirmed and seated.
While the Supreme Court won't necessarily strike down all or most of the ACA during the midst of a pandemic, it certainly could. I assume its ruling would come some months into 2021.
The lawsuit is one of the first in the history of the Supreme Court to involve mathematics. The central question is the meaning of “0.” When the Republicans passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Cat in 2017, they set the shared responsibility payment which supports the individual mandate to zero. The Texas attorney general and 19 other attorneys general argue that a 0 tax is not a tax, because it does not generate revenue. Since J. Roberts’ majority opinion sustained the constitutionality of the AFCA on the basis that the individual mandate was a tax, and not a “taking,” if there is no tax, Roberts’ opinion is nullified.
The Appellants, led by California, have included a portion of Gödel’s Incompleteness Proof in order to stymie the Court’s less mathematically oriented members, all of whom were Republican appointees and have no idea who the hell Gödel was. I suspect that Judge Barrett also knows nothing about the Incompleteness Proof, and rather than admit her ignorance, will vote to sustain its constitutionality.
The Republicans passed an Act, not a Cat. My damned keyboard keeps making me look foolish. (Now, now, no remarks that I do not need a malfunctioning keyboard to look foolish.)
I don't deny that "suburban college-educated women" may be a smaller demographic than the media suggests. But it seems like there's a decent amount of guesswork involved in arriving at your 1.2% number: "Let us call this ..." "let us suppose...," etc.
It seems that white suburban women would be more likely to constitute a higher percentage of REGISTERED VOTERS than a percentage of the POPULATION as a whole -- though to be sure, this is guess work on my part, too.
My nephew in New York called me to ask if it is permissible to open carry AR-16 assault weapons in Michigan. I asked him what he was talking about. He said that he had seen news footage of Michigan citizens walking in the street carrying assault weapons. I said that I knew that Michigan was an open carry state, but was unaware if that included assault weapons. So, after we finished the call, I checked on the internet. And lo and behold, he’s right. Only 7 (plus D.C.) states ban the sale of assault weapons: Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, D.C., and Hawaii. Since Michigan is an open carry state, it is apparently legal to walk around hoisting an AR-16 assault weapon. And this is apparently true in another 46 states.
My fears of bloodshed after the election have increased exponentially.
Another 44, not 46 states. Two less states is not comforting.
Oh Lord, could things get any worse? It turns out Barrett believes that gun ownership is a fundamental right under the 2nd Amendment.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/10/politics/barrett-second-amendment-supreme-court/index.html
You may think this is nothing new, since didn’t the Court already hold that this was the case in District of Columbia v. v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008)? No, not quite. In the case discussed in the above link, Barrett dissented from a 7th Circuit decision which upheld the constitutionality of a federal and Wisconsin law which prohibited convicted felons from owning firearms. Makes sense, no? If a person has committed a felony, even an unarmed felony, do we want to allow them to possess firearms after they have served their sentence? Barrett disagreed with the majority, arguing that the right under the 2nd Amendment was a fundamental right which cannot be infringed on. So, how could a Justice Barrett make things worse than they already are? Because she could expand the majority opinion which J. Scalia wrote in Helle, which only dealt with the right to own a handgun for self-defense. In fact, Scalia included qualifying language in his opinion. Being an originalist, he interpreted the opening phrase of the 2nd Amendment, “A well regulated Militia,” to mean that the kinds of arms which citizens are entitled to own under the Amendment are the kinds of weapons they had back when the Amendment was adopted. He wrote: “We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller [a prior S. Ct. decision] said ... that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” ... We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’”
Scalia therefore left room for Congress to pass legislation banning such “dangerous and unusual weapons” as assault weapons. Congress’s effort to do so in 2015 fell short of the necessary votes. Barrett, however, in her expansive view of the rights protected by the 2nd Amendment may be willing to go even further than Scalia and hold that legislation restricting the right to own such weapons as assault rifles is unconstitutional.
You have assumed that since 35% of adult white women have college degrees, 35% of suburban white women have college degrees. The correct percentage is probably at least double that.
As I have indicated above, the confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court are scheduled to begin tomorrow. The statement which Judge Barrett will be delivering before the Judiciary Committee as the hearing commences was released today, and it is worth reading in advance. Judge Barrett devotes a good part of her statement to discussing her family and her view of the importance of family, which is all well and good. I do not believe one can draw any conclusions regarding how she would rule on such cases as Roe v. Wade or Casey v. Planned Parenthood merely because she is proud of her family, which she has the right to be. From what she has written, she has a wonderful family, a devoted husband, who have been exceptionally kind in adopting two Haitian children, victims of the Haitian earthquake. They also have a son who suffers from Down syndrome. Her commitment to her children and her family is honestly commendable and should not be the target of any criticism.
After graduating from Notre Dame Law School (which she pointedly notes, that if confirmed she will be the only Justice who did not attend an Ivy League Law School), she clerked first for Judge Silberman on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then for Justice Scalia, whose judicial philosophy of textualism she agrees with and has adopted. She writes: “A judge must apply the law as written, not as the judge wishes it were. Sometimes that approach meant reaching results that he did not like. But as he [Justice Scalia] put it in one of his best known opinions, that is what it means to say we have a government of laws, not of men.” (I frankly am not aware of any decision, by Justice Scalia or otherwise, in which the Justice states that a textualist reading of the law in question leads to a result that the Justice does not like. Usually its the opposite.)
We are all familiar with that phrase, that we are a government of laws, not of men. It has been stated in numerous decisions, by the Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and is often repeated in the news reporting on such decisions. The phrase was originally used in a Supreme Court decision by Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, in which Justice Marshall created the important doctrine of judicial review – that it is the Supreme Court which has the final say regarding what the law is, and consequently has the power of ruling that a statute which has been passed by Congress, and therefore has the approval of the representatives who were elected by the people, is nonetheless unconstitutional, notwithstanding that the statute represents the intention and desires of the people.
When a Justice says in an opinion that, “We are a nation of laws, not of men,” s/he usually means that the party to whom the Justice is directing the statement has gotten the interpretation of the law (whether it be the Constitution or a statute) wrong, and I have gotten it right; my interpretation is what the law actually says, not what you say it says.” The statement is often included in a dissent. But the assertion is often an over-simplification, since language is not mathematics, and often contains ambiguous and vague terms that are subject to different interpretations. So the person to whom the statement “We are a nation of laws, not of men,” can just as legitimately say the same thing regarding his/her interpretation, as against the judge who first invokes it.
(Continued)
So, when Judge Barrett refers to this statement and attributes it to one of Justice Scalia’s “best known opinions,” wouldn’t it be helpful to know precisely the opinion she is referring to, what the case was about, and what position did Justice Scalia take in the case? Well, Judge Barrett does not tell us the name of the case, although she does seem to imply that there is just one case in which Justice Scalia made the statement because “he put it in one of his best known opinions,” presumably assuming that the cognoscenti will know specifically the name of the single case she is referring to.
In point of fact, a bit of legal research reveals that Justice Scalia actually used the statement in a total of three cases, in two of which he used the statement in a dissent (Morrison v. Olson (1988) and Zuni Public Schools v. Dept. of Education (2007)) and used it in a concurring opinion in the third (Lawson v. FMR LLC (2014)). Of the three cases, the case that had the most significance from a constitutional standpoint was Morrison, which involved a major question regarding the separation of powers which is an integral part of the Constitution. (The other two cases involved the interpretation of federal statutes.) In Morrison the Executive was challenging the constitutionality of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 which provided for the appointment of an independent prosecutor by a Special Division of the judiciary to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the Executive. In so doing, the legislation took the appointment of the special prosecutor out of the hands of the Attorney General’s office, which is a part of the Executive. The specific facts of the case involved the appointment of a special prosecutor by the Special Division of alleged wrongdoing by administrators of the EPA (specifically by Ted Olson, who later became Solicitor General, and after leaving government was the principal attorney arguing in in Obergefell v. Hodges that state laws which prohibited gay marriage violated the Constitution). At issue was a challenge to subpoenas which were issued by a grand jury at the request of the special prosecutor, who had been appointed by the Special Division, i.e., by a court. (Sound familiar?) The majority opinion sustaining the constitutionality of the Ethics in Government Act was written, surprisingly, by Justice Rehnquist, joined by J.’s Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens and O’Connor. There was a sole dissent – by Justice Scalia, in which he wrote in the opening sentence of his dissent: “It is the proud boast of our democracy that we have ‘a government of laws and not of men.’ Many Americans are familiar with that phrase; not many know its derivation.” J. Scalia maintained that the statute violated the separation of powers, by violating Article II, §1, cl. 1, of the Constitution, which states: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” He then argued that the decision to prosecute was solely an executive function and could not be given to the judiciary, whose job is to oversee the Executive’s performance of a prosecution. He stated, in the colorful language he was known for, that sometimes a statute came to the court in sheep’s clothing, “[b]ut this wolf comes as a wolf.”
(Continued)
So, what does what I have written have to do with Judge Barrett. First, I find it curious that she suggests that J. Scalia used the phrase “we are a nation of laws, not of men” in only one opinion, yet she does not identify the opinion. Why? Why didn’t she just indicate she was going to state in her opening remarks, “As Justice Scalia put in one of his best known opinions, in his dissent in Morrison v. Olson, ....” Why is she being so coy? And does she agree with J. Scalia’s opinion that the special prosecutor statute was unconstitutional. (She clerked for J. Scalia from 1998-99, ten years after Morrison was decided.) Does her coyness suggest an evasiveness that will color her answers during the confirmation hearing.
And one more thing. The phrase “we are a nation of laws, not of men” was invoked by J. Roberts in his principal dissent in Obergefell. J. Scalia concurred in that dissent, so, strictly speaking it should not be one of J. Scalia “best known opinions” in which he, himself used the phrase. J. Scalia, did write a separate dissent in Obergefell, in which he did not use the phrase, but in which he did write, “I join The Chief Justice’s opinion in full.” His dissent, however, actually paraphrases the sentiment that the phrase is intended to convey, stating, for example: “[T]he Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking evn a thin veneer of law. Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it ws the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its ‘reasoned judgment,’ thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect.” That is, a nation of men and women, not of laws.
I could offer Marxism 101 debunked, and I have offered it before. We could just, I suppose, agree to look at it from the viewpoint of the worker, you tell me.
Since the election is coming up, I have a thought or two about it.. from more of the 'centrist' or 'independent' or 'moderate' pov..
The debate performance was ridiculed, but the Rose Garden ceremony that some desribed as a superspreader for a deadly virus also didn't help Trump. What had been a steady national lead for Biden in the high single digits during the late summer has expanded to 12 points in early October. On the other hand, I think Trump is holding the vast majority of his 2016 supporters. Independents, in particular, show signs of defecting. Trump won the group by four points in 2016. There are tricky issues, for the Biden-Harris 2020 election ticket. President Trump and Republicans have used these issues, in particular. Mr. Biden, who has a substantial lead in the polls, has run as an unapologetic centrist. Supposing that the left, views him as an imperfect steward for the party, there are worse fates than losing the left. There is *losing*. Fracking, or that is to say, a ban on fracking, is *losing*. Taxes, is *losing*. The Green New Deal, *losing*. Expanding the size of the Supreme Court, *losing*.
It's effectively a bit more because they're a segment whose vote isn't being suppressed.
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