BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

Either that or they get off on power, and FUGM in one of the highest stages in the world.

Democracy Isn't About to Die according to Timothy Noah at The New Republic.

In 2024, Republicans will try again, more shamelessly than before. But they won’t win, because we aren’t going to let them. So stop hanging crêpe, liberals, and show you’ve got some fight in you. As ever, democracy’s fate lies in democracy’s hands.

Rather than wring your hands about democracy’s imminent demise, I advise you to write a check to the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, which raised a record $4.5 million last year and is looking to raise at least $15 million this year. Here’s the web page for donations. While you’re at it, consider donating to the Brennan Center, which does excellent work to fight voter restrictions. Here’s the relevant web page for Brennan.

I’ll wait.

There. Doesn’t that feel better than keening and whingeing? It wouldn’t kill you, either, to go door to door for some Democratic candidates for state legislature, especially if you live in one of the 30 states where Republicans have legislative majorities. That’s way too many.

Let’s run a reality check. Trump did not win his war on American institutions; he lost reelection. He went to truly appalling lengths to try to overturn the results, but he never got close. [examples omitted] That’s why Trump resorted to supporting a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. Trump’s irresponsible incitement before the riot and his refusal to stop it after it began remains a scandal for which he must be held accountable. Seven people died, including three police officers, and 150 police were injured. It was horrific. But nobody for a moment believed the attack would prevent the proper counting of electoral ballots, and as I wrote in November, the January 6 defendants, now babbling to judges about how sorry they are and how they were duped, are an insult to the very idea of revolution.

But all these assaults against democracy are a sign of Republican weakness, not Republican strength

https://www.nytimes....896ed87b2d9c72a

Two misfortunes have befallen Stephen G. Breyer during his long Supreme Court career. One, which became apparent about halfway through his nearly 28-year tenure, was that it was his fate to be the quintessential Enlightenment man in an increasingly unenlightened era at the court. The second happened during this past year: the demand from the left that he step down and open his seat for President Biden to fill.

Justice Breyer’s belief in the power of facts, evidence and expertise was out of step in a postfactual age. The protections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer necessary in the South? The Constitution’s framers meant to give the populace an individual right to own a gun? Or, more recently, the federal agency charged with protecting American workers was likely powerless to protect the workplace from a deadly pandemic?

Really? Of course, Justice Breyer was on the losing side.

To my second point, it’s not that requests for him to step down were unreasonable. It’s that they became so vociferous, so belittling, really. It’s as if this distinguished public servant could be shoved out of the way, obscuring any idea of who he is and what his time on the court has meant. That is a loss not only for him — and he certainly deserves better — but also for the rest of us, because his career has much to teach us about the state of the court today.

At 83, Justice Breyer is a decade older than the next oldest justice, Clarence Thomas, and a generation older than the youngest, Amy Coney Barrett, who turns 50 on Friday. Like five of his colleagues (Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Barrett, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh), he was once a Supreme Court law clerk.

But there is a difference. He clerked for Justice Arthur Goldberg during the Supreme Court’s heroic age, the period under Chief Justice Earl Warren when the court seemed to be pushing — or dragging — post-World War II America into recognizing the equality of the races and the rights of criminal suspects. The other five came of age in the subsequent era of judicial retrenchment, that era now reaching a climax.

Although the labels often affixed to Justice Breyer are “pragmatist” and “seeker of compromise,” it has always seemed to me that these, while not inaccurate, miss the mark. They discount the passion beneath the man’s cool and urbane persona, passion that I think stems from his early encounter with a court that understood the Constitution as an engine of progress.

That passion was obvious in his astonishing 21-minute oral dissent from the bench in 2007 from a school integration decision that, early in Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, marked a significant turn away from the court’s commitment to ending segregation. The law professor Lani Guinier, in a famous article in The Harvard Law Review the next year, celebrated that dissent as “demosprudence,” a way of speaking law directly to the people in the expectation that they will then speak back to the lawmakers.

His passion was obvious this month, too, when the court heard a challenge to the Biden administration’s Covid vaccination rule for businesses employing 100 or more people. Justice Breyer radiated fury as he addressed Scott A. Keller, the lawyer representing the business plaintiffs.

“I mean, there were three-quarters of a million new cases yesterday,” the justice said, his voice rising. “New cases. Nearly three-quarters — 700-and-some-odd thousand, OK?” He continued that the number was 10 times as high as when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration “put this rule in. The hospitals are today, yesterday, full, almost to the point of the maximum they’ve ever been in this disease, OK?”

Noting that the standard for granting an injunction of the sort the plaintiffs requested required a showing that the court’s intervention was in the public interest, he asked: “Is that what you’re doing now, to say it’s in the public interest in this situation to stop this vaccination rule, with nearly a million people — let me not exaggerate — nearly three-quarters of a million people, new cases every day? I mean, to me, I would find that unbelievable.”

Of course, that’s what the court did, and of course, Justice Breyer dissented.

His dissenting opinion, written with Justices Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, wasn’t particularly showy. It was, one might say, Breyeresque, using data, logic and the language of administrative law — a subject he taught for many years at Harvard Law School — to arrive at its central argument:


That this argument failed to carry the day speaks volumes not only about how out of step Justice Breyer is with the court’s trajectory but also how out of step the majority is with the kind of fact-based analysis that he has brought to the problems the court is charged with solving.

In recent months, Justice Breyer has been mocked on the left for clinging to a romantic vision of the Supreme Court as an institution apart from politics. Surely, that argument has gone, if he could only get over that fiction and understand the political moment, he would hang up his robe.

That mistakes the man. He cut his eyeteeth in politics, working for Senator Edward Kennedy as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. I’m sure he, along with the rest of us, has watched with clear eyes and a heavy heart as politics swamped the institution he loves.

His understanding of politics — that the only way to make a difference is by staying in the game — led him to stay on the court as the diminished liberal side’s senior associate justice, a role that will now pass to Justice Sotomayor. Although he will reportedly remain on the court until the end of this term, he chose to announce his plan to retire now, just after the court finished assembling the cases it will hear and decide through late June or early July. This suggests he has the months ahead fully in view and has decided that he has made all the difference he can make.

Now it’s time to let someone else try.

Robert Reich has an entertainingly vituperative opinion on the two in the Guardian / Observer here.

So, sir, how are we "not going to let them"?


Oh, that's interesting. "Do what we've always done, and don't rock the boat." That's always worked well before.

And, Mr. Noah, how do we know the things being tried aren't going to work?


Ah, because it didn't last time. When led by the least competent, most "what do you mean, the rules apply to me?" "leader" since - well, okay, I know the English readers are waving their arms furiously right now. But not counting Clownshoes Churchill?

One who deliberately selected for personal loyalty and omertá, and got yes-men whose competence is shown in those omitted examples.

And yet, you can see where one or two more yes-men, willing to risk prison or reputation if it failed, could have pulled it off. And we're not pressing hard enough on the people responsible, nor are we pushing hard enough on the things that made it possible to make it significantly more difficult.

Which gets me to the Atlantic's "crêpe-hanging": "what does the next coup plotter learn from this? It's possible if you're actually competent." Oh, and "don't worry if it fails as long as you have the right fall-guys." I hate to invoke Godwin, but Munich, 1923.

I remember all the stories on Daily Kos through 2016, when it was clear, at least if you were looking through Democratic-party-blue sunglasses, that things were good and would stay good. There was only a 10, 15% chance of losing the presidential election. I see a lot of that in Noah's article. "We're not going to let them." How? "By following the rules like good little Democrats and counting on Tradition and History to save us." Never mind the *obvious* changes from the before time, not least the ones referenced by BK and ACB.

"Give us money." "Stump for candidates in traditionally R ridings." (that you may think are doing the wrong thing, but what are you gonna do? Vote for the greater evil? *) "Don't worry about the other side doing blatantly unethical things, potentially illegal and unconstitutional things, left and right, they don't matter that much." (Oh, no, not each one. But they are myriad. 1000 x 0.001% is a very interesting equation, isn't it? And funny that, it costs the Democratic Party much more money to fight each one of them in court than it costs the Republican Party to do them.) Oh, and especially "Don't worry. Everything will be just fine."

Also, who rates to be hurt if he's wrong? I mean, a 60-year-old white cis hetero male with 30 years in political journalism. Comfortable living in DC with a Georgetown professor. Obviously, he, his wife, and his "up to four mostly-grown children" will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes...

He's right about one thing, though.


Oh don't mind me, just looking at thousands of years of history about what happens when the traditionally powerful start feeling weak and confined by current laws. Just looking at a hundred years of history about what happens when the people of a country in the Americas democratically elect the "wrong" people. No need to worry, right?

* Please note, I know a number of things they could do. And many of them are worse for them in the long run than "accepting what the Democrats are willing to give them, even if that's nothing." But that goes back to my previous comment where "they aren't actually listening to their progressive base, or their Black base, or..." because they assume those are in their pocket no matter what they do, because there's nowhere else to go.

If they don't want a 7-2 Supreme Court, Breyer needs to retire now, because July will be too late. That's bad for Breyer; it's bad for America; but it's the best possible solution.

If you believe that, you're more innocent than is safe these days.

If you don't believe that, but are saying it anyway, you're part of the problem.

If you believe that it is actually possible for the Democrats to do what the Republicans manage to do, without it being a massive election hit in November from the "totally logical and obvious" responses from McConnell et al, I am truly surprised.

I see the Usual Suspects starting with that "we have time" argument. History shows that things take longer than they should, and "magically" we run out of time.

Having said that, given that the current problem actually *is* "if all the Democrats and Independents vote together." Currently, there are two that are pulling a power play. Resolving the power play *takes time*.

Maybe we need, as a nation, to address the fundamental issues that are getting, you know, tens of millions of people to feel a certain way.

From Anthony Fauci is up against more than a virus

The US is in a Cold Civil War. Is Trump Lee or Davis?

The progressive tax on ads proposal from @paulmromer strikes me as far and away the most compelling policy response to the dueling concerns about misinformation & censorship in digital media.

https://adtax.paulromer.net/