And so it has happened, as we knew it would. The Supreme Court decision, coming on the heels of the brilliant presentatio by the January 6 Committee, presents the Democrats with an opportunity, if they have the courage and the wit to seize it. An all-out assault on Trump and the Supreme Court – statehood for DC, enlargement of the court, an all court press to defend individual rights and the elements of democracy. Does Biden have the stomach and the focus and the intelligence for it? Somehow, I doubt it, nothing less will do. Forget gas prices. This is existential.
We shall see.
25 comments:
Agreed that Biden doesn't have much stomach or focus or intelligence. Raymond Geuss (I'm currently reading "Not Thinking like a Liberal") would detest Biden.
However, the guy has won a lot of elections and I suspect that none of us here (nor Professor Geuss, who is a very entertaining writer) has ever won any. So if Biden is focusing on gas prices, it's because he senses that that is going to win Democrats votes in the midterm elections.
When you're on against fascism or something like it, you vote for Biden or Macron or Patricio Aylwin, the first democratic president elected after the Pinochet dictatorship, a very cautious, prudent, at times wishy washy fellow who had even supported the 1973 coup, with decades of political experience, who successfully oversaw a far from perfect, but real transition from dictatorship to representative democracy.
S.W
I would agree that Biden, and his team, probably believe that focusing on gas prices and inflation will help win elections. No matter how popular the right to abortion is, people will always be swayed by their economic security. Even with the FED releasing a paper changing the conversation on inflation ("Who Killed the Phillips Curve?" David Ratner & Jae Sim), the vast majority of Americans believe that inflation is cause by monetary pressures (and for whatever reason the presidency). It is a tough realization, but in order to win in November you cannot focus solely on abortion. Because people who are pro-choice will vote blue no matter what anyways, so in order to actually win you have to pander to the "moderates" who have no real politics besides their bank accounts.
Approximately 16-20 million young people will be eligible to vote in the 2024 election. Democratic social media influencers need to begin their work now and hammer away for the next 30 months. I'm not sure their attention span can last that long, though.
I'm not sure of the utility of firing on Biden over nonsense like "intelligence", etc. Fox and News Max will happily fill that niche and we don't need own goals. This is a walk and chew gum situation. The Jan. 6 hearings have achieved more traction then expected and there's more to come. The president can't be seen ignoring the economy. Until today's ruling there was noting solid to deal with.
Over the next few months there are going to be real horror stories. Women dying of sepsis because doctors were afraid to treat them, women arrested because of a miscarriage, people getting hauled into court because they gave a friend a ride or loaned them some money.
The real problem is getting the Democratic consultants up to speed. Too many of these folks are fee-taking parasites who haven't a clue how to actually run a viable campaign.
Too many of these folks are fee-taking parasites who haven't a clue how to actually run a viable campaign.
Could be true, and the practice of running political ads w/ that ghastly ground-bass "music" underneath them is ridiculous. One of the most stupid, irritating, and counterproductive practices in the annals of modern campaigning, it infantilizes people by assuming they are incapable of listening to a simple string of sentences w/o "music" underneath, which, far from reinforcing the ad's message, distracts from it and simply communicates the message that the consultants who put these ads on the air are idiots.
I don't necessarily disagree with Sr. Wallerstein, but here's how the Democrats have responded so far.
‘Leave it to Democratic leadership to bring a sing-along to a gunfight where Republicans are using Bazookas and Jet fuel to torch our rights’
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/democrats-roe-v-wade-singing-b2108959.html
In the meantime, Clarence Thomas is already urging the SCOTUS to reconsider contraception and gay rights. The joke's on him, though, as he sets the precedence for people like Senator Mike Braun to overturn the right to interracial marriage.
Anonymous @10:50 p.m. said:
In the meantime, Clarence Thomas is already urging the SCOTUS to reconsider contraception and gay rights.
More technically, what Thomas wants is for the Court to throw out the entire doctrine of what is known in U.S. const. jurisprudence as substantive due process, reconsidering all the decisions that have relied on that doctrine wholly or partly. (What Thomas thinks about Loving v. Virginia, the interracial marriage case, is an interesting question. Don't think it was mentioned in his concurrence, though I'd have to double check.)
The chances that even this Court will do it in the wholesale and drastic fashion that Thomas wants are slim to none, istm.
LFC—
Interesting stuff. I have some reading to do.
—Anonymous @10:50 p.m.
aaall said...
Over the next few months there are going to be real horror stories. Women dying of sepsis because doctors were afraid to treat them, women arrested because of a miscarriage
From 2021, 'US women are being jailed for having miscarriages'
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
—Anonymous @10:50 p.m.
Anon, I recall that one of those cases from Kern County was dismissed. Anyway, those DAs were jumping the gun. Just wait.
LFC, part of the current right wing jihad on gay and trans folks was likely in anticipation of today's decision. You are way too optimistic. If the next two election go south, everything is on the chopping block including social Security and Medicare. LGBTQ folks will be toast.
J. Thomas's antipathy for substantive due process would not affect the holding in Loving, declaring laws which prohibited interracial marriage unconstitutional. Loving was based on the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Substantive due process had nothing to do with the decision. Loving is safe.
Query:
Regarding Justice Thomas’ threat to revisit Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down a Connecticut law prohibiting married couples from purchasing contraceptive devices at pharmacies, aside from the uproar reversing the decision would result among millions of married (and unmarried) Republicans and Democrats, what form of contraception have he and Ginni been using? J. Thomas has one child from h30is previous marriage. He and Ginni have not had any children, and they have been married since 1987, when he was 39 and Ginni was 30. According to Anita Hill, he considered himself a stud. Abstention does not seem likely. I suppose its possible that he has had a vasectomy. Other medical issues could also be possible.
At 74, his continued tenure on the S. Ct. will hopefully be short-lived.
I haven't followed this whole issue with the detail most of you have, but it seems a bit far-fetched to me that they will ban contraception. They're not so politically clumsy.
Even Pinochet didn't ban contraception although he did abortion.
Abortion seems to be the issue that the far right has latched onto to gain mass support among social conservatives for their neo-liberal class agenda.
At present abortion in Chile is only legal in the case of rape, severe fetal damage and a risk to the mother's life.
The draft for the new constitution legalizes abortion without any details or specifications.
The draft will be ratified or rejected by a referendum on September 4. Current polls shows that the approval and rejection options are basically tied.
Rightwing pro-rejection propaganda focuses in on the clause that legalizes abortion, claiming that it approves abortion until the 9th month of pregnancy, when it in reality
congress will have to legislate the details of legalized abortion.
However, the point is that the rightwing, whose basic agenda is economic, pro-capitalist, pro-profits, uses abortion as one of their issues to attract support from
low income and middle income people.
s.w.
In the U.S., the anti-abortion movement began as a grass-roots movement among people who were opposed, for religious and other (moral etc.) reasons to abortion. It was eventually embraced by evangelicals like Jerry Falwell whose concerns were mostly culture-war social issues, not economic ones.
Conservatives whose primary interests were economic (pro-business anti-regulation etc) have often not cared much about abortion. It's not so much a case of the Right latching onto abortion as the issue to advance support for its economic agenda among social conservatives; rather a case of these people all (eventually) finding themselves in the Republican camp. Dedicated anti-abortion people in the U.S. are one-issue voters: they vote on the abortion issue, period.
Initially abortion was a Catholic issue with the first organizations coming out of the Church in the 1960s but rooted a couple of decades earlier (see also The Cardinal, 1963). It became an Evangelical thing as a placeholder for the segregation in the private Christian schools that arose after Brown and the civil rights laws of the 1960s. The key issue here was the Green v. Kennedy decision over tax exemption. By the mid to late 1970s Movement Conservative cadres like Falwell, Weyrich and Viguerie realized that opposing Roe had the legs that defending segregation could never have.
BTW, West Virginia v. EPA is next. I guess non-delegation will rule.
For those who may not know what aaall is referring to re West Virginia v. EPA, the case has significant implications for how much latitude an executive agency has in issuing regulations to fulfill its statutory functions. In the specific case, the State of West Virginia is challenging a rule which the EPA issued pursuant to the Clean Air Act regulating the emissions from power plants, specifically coal burning plants. The rule has serious implications for climate change and air quality generally. Several states in addition to W. Va. are challenging the rule.
Aside from the specific lawsuit, the case has wider implications for the regulations issued by all executive agencies. The statutes creating the agencies specify what their objectives are supposed to be. But, ultimately, it is the President who, as the Chief Executive, is responsible for whether the agency is properly exercising its authority under the statute in question. So the President has the authority to delegate his power to the agency, within certain parameters to insure that the agency is not overstepping its authority. Generally, those parameters have been fairly liberal. It is expected, however, that this conservative S. Ct. is going to cut back on those parameters. This will have serious implications for all executive agencies which issue regulations to enforce statutes, and likely weaken their power, which is what Republicans and businesses want.
Hooray for stomach and focus and intelligence. How about letting everybody in DC be on the supreme court?
'Clarence Thomas is already urging the SCOTUS to reconsider contraception and gay rights.'
So to speak. Although, no other justice joined Thomas’ concurring opinion. I see there reference from Marc Susselman to 'J. Thomas's antipathy for substantive due process', and I have some antipathy myself, when it comes to how substantive due process is less concrete. The idea of due process -- the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment packs a lot of important concepts into one sentence. Among them, this. They say that it protects certain rights from government interference that are not necessarily listed in the Constitution. Substantive due process has come to include a wide variety of cases, and various labels have been applied to the rights protected. I can go back to this:
Marc Susselman said...
'J. Thomas's antipathy for substantive due process would not affect the holding in Loving, declaring laws which prohibited interracial marriage unconstitutional. Loving was based on the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Substantive due process had nothing to do with the decision. Loving is safe.'
But one might see this as importing into equal protection analysis the doctrines developed in substantive due process.
Without dragging Clarence Thomas into this, I gather the impression that when it comes to the Court’s willingness to recognize privacy interests as independent constitutional rights, the Court remains ambivalent about whether a fundamental right to informational privacy, for example, exists.
Sure, the Supreme Court has drifted further to the right than most Americans not just on abortion access but on several other hot button political and social issues. Although, I figure that people are broadly supportive of the court and believe in its “legitimacy”. And I recall not so long ago, how the court sided with the liberal position in a lot of these really important cases, with Roberts frequently siding with the court’s four liberal justices.
Even if we say, that Roe is actually a pretty popular Supreme Court opinion, there is also the average Republican voter’s position. I muse that courts and legislatures have the power to change laws, and thus, one might emphasize that in other words, they can do little.
MS, good summary. The only upside is that consumer, environmental, reproductive rights, and firearm safety organizations might be able to put together an effective coalition by November.
We are now well into the Second Gilded Age. If the courts aren't fixed and this decision reversed then serious global warming is locked in. Too many of our ruling class actually seem to believe this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1XwDHiGdL0
Life looks different when one has a compound in New Zealand or Patagonia. When you have everything, watching the world burn is the last frontier.
aaall,
I just watched the movie clip you linked to and did not recognize it. Google informs me that the movie is "Kingsman: The Secret Service." I have never seen it. My local library has the DVD, and I intend to borrow and watch it. Thank you for the link. I am always interested in watching movies with a good cast, and seeing Michael Caine and Samuel L. Jackson together should be very entertaining.
The VA doesn’t currently provide abortions or abortion counseling to female veterans. Perhaps this is something that could change if Biden and the Democrats moved on it. There are VA hospitals and clinics throughout the country, and if they’re federal facilities, perhaps their federal status would take them out of the purview of the states, regardless of where they’re located. There are a lot of pre-menopausal female veterans who are affected by what the gang of six has done.
Fritz, it's the Hyde amendment. To deal with that we need more Democrats. Lots more Democrats. Biden is president in a presidential system. There is no "Biden and the Democrats" with the current numbers. The only times we have had significant social legislation pass is 1933 - 38 and 1965 - 67 when a Democratic president had overwhelming majorities.
MS, you'll really enjoy the Elgar themed scene.
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