Good morning, everyone….we’re jumping into it this morning!
Tom Ridge, former Republican governor of Pennsylvania and the former head of the Department of Homeland Security writes, for the Philadelphia Inquirer, that he is voting for Joe Biden.
I will cast my vote for Joe Biden on Nov. 3. It will be my first vote for a Democratic candidate for president of the United States. But it is not the first time I have said “no” to Donald Trump. I urge my fellow Pennsylvanians to join me.
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So here we are in 2020. And do we ever have complex problems that demand thoughtful, intelligent leadership. We are getting none of it. I cannot help but compare our current situation dealing with a global health pandemic to my time leading the Department of Homeland Security following the 9/11 terror attacks. There are many similarities to our national response. Those similarities, however, do not include presidential leadership.
Many of us remember when President George W. Bush, with megaphone in hand, stood on the rubble in lower Manhattan and told his fellow citizens and the world that those responsible for the brutal carnage of 9/11 would be held accountable. His remarks unified the country and his appearance on the mound at Yankee Stadium days later put an exclamation point on the message that America was resilient and would overcome.
Compare and contrast that with the crisis of today. Imagine the impact of President Trump traveling to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back in February, and talking plainly about the challenge Mother Nature intended to throw at us, and how this country, working together, public and private sector, would confront it with all the fortitude and resources we could bring to bear. Then imagine him meeting with journalists the next day, appearing with a face mask, and calmly walking through the steps that his fellow citizens could and should take to do their part to combat this new challenge. Imagine the difference in attitude and outcomes. Perhaps I have more trust in Americans being able to handle the truth than the president.
Erwin Chemernisky writes for the Los Angeles Times that, yes, the Senate Democrats should participate in the process of Amy Coney Barrett’s inevitable ascension to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Since the hearings for Barrett don’t have even a semblance of open inquiry, should the Democrats even participate in this charade? I’m sure they are tempted to boycott the hearings as a way of protesting the stunning hypocrisy of the Republicans’ rush to confirm Barrett when just four years ago they blocked the confirmation of Judge Merrick Garland on the pretext that a president should not be able to pick a Supreme Court justice in an election year.
Refusing to participate might convey that message, but it also could make them seem petulant and failing at their duties. Instead, Senate Democrats should view the hearings as an important opportunity to demonstrate how Republicans are packing the court with justices on the far right-wing fringe.
The Democrats need to approach the hearings strategically. It is a mistake to think that anything they say or ask has the slightest chance of blocking Barrett’s confirmation. It also is a mistake to think that Barrett is going to say anything meaningful. She is sure to repeat the platitudes all nominees fall back on, saying she is open-minded, will respect precedent and cannot discuss any issue that might come before the court.
What message then should Democrats seek to convey with their statements and questions? They should constantly remind everyone that this is an unprecedented power play by the Republicans. Just four years ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said, “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” Many other Republicans, including ones on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the same thing. Their words should be quoted often.
Emma Green of The Atlantic writes about the “farm systems” of the conservative legal movements.
The strategy of the conservative legal movement is basically a long game of cultivating personnel. “You know the saying that Hillary Clinton had in her book, ‘It takes a village to [raise a child]’? The Republican version of that is ‘It takes 30 years to grow a Supreme Court justice,’” Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale, told me. Starting in the 1980s, a group of conservative intellectuals, including the future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, began developing networks to train and connect young law students inclined toward a conservative judicial philosophy. This elite class of lawyers then fanned out across firms, think tanks, academia, and government, creating a “conveyor belt of bright, qualified, conservative judges,” Balkin said.
Amy Coney Barrett is a luminary of this movement. Unlike the other justices currently on the Supreme Court, she never attended an Ivy League school, but she scored two of the top clerkships available to promising young conservatives, working for Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Scalia on the Supreme Court, where she was one of the justice’s favorite clerks. Scalia’s methods of judicial interpretation were a huge intellectual influence on Barrett. “She’s committed to tethering herself to the text, history, and tradition of the Constitution and [trying] to discern its original understanding,” O. Carter Snead, a professor of law and political science at Notre Dame and Barrett’s former colleague, told me.
Elie Mystal of The Nation on the politics and the history of “court-packing.”
Expanding the number of justices (dubbed “court packing” after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s failed attempt to stack the court with justices amenable to New Deal policies in 1938) is the most direct way to address the structural imbalance brought about by Republican manipulation of the nomination process. Democrats could, through legislation that passes both chambers of Congress and is signed by the president, add additional members to the court, and then fill those newly added seats. Perhaps the Democrats could add four justices to balance out the four Republican who shouldn’t be there. As I wrote back in February, I favor a plan that would add 10 justices to the bench.
But instead of organizing around a political solution to the Republican politicization of the courts, some Democrats remain stuck on the old rules of engagement. Some Democrats remain hopeful that Republicans can be shamed into doing the right thing, as if the party that steps over 200,000 dead bodies to carry Trump’s golf bags is capable of feeling shame. Others, including a number of serious legal scholars, have taken to offering an increasingly fanciful set of possible solutions to the likely problem of a court with six conservatives. The idea of term limits—that is appointing Supreme Court justices for a set number of years instead of indefinitely until they die or retire—is incredibly popular. Polls show that 77 percent of Americans favor some form of restriction on the length of service on the Supreme Court.
The problem is, term limits are also flatly unconstitutional, and while there are some very creative plans to get around the Constitution’s pronouncement that Supreme Court justices serve while in good behavior, none of those plans can explain why a conservative-controlled Supreme Court would agree to such limits on their own tenures.
For about 30 years, I have been a pretty loyal reader of The Nation magazine even though I have occasionally not liked its editorial drift. (This is particularly true of the period since 2016). I have to note this, though.
Not a COVID-19 death (Mr. Cohen’s wife states that it was lung cancer) but condolences to his loved ones and colleagues, especially his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and part-owner of The Nation.
Dan Balz of the Washington Post writes about those vague and sinister threats of The Damn Fool about the transfer of power should he lose the presidential election.
The president’s Republican allies in Congress, however, were not necessarily the principal audience for what he said about challenging the vote, nor are they the people whose views he cares about most. Instead, his attempt to discredit mail-in ballots as a way to challenge a possible Biden victory is aimed at rallying his own army of supporters, prepping them to respond, if necessary, with protests or perhaps worse if he challenges vote tabulations — and therefore the results — in the days after the election.
If any people believed that the president was just letting off steam when he declined to pledge a peaceful transfer of power, they can look to something White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said after FBI Director Christopher A. Wray had testified before a Senate committee that he knows of no evidence of “any kind of national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”
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Or look to what White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said earlier. “What we want election night to look like is a system that’s fair, a situation where we know who the president of the United States is on election night,” she said. “That’s how the system is supposed to work. And that’s ultimately what we’re looking for and what we’re hoping for.”
Um...who told Kayleigh McEnany that a “fair” electoral system was one in which we know who the President of the United States is on Election NIght?
We actually did not know the winner of the 1916 presidential election until the Thursday after Election Day. Harry Truman didn’t deduce that he won the 1948 presidential election until the early morning hours of the day after the election. Bush v. Gore was not decided until December 12, 2000.
The presidential election of 1824 was not decided until February of 1825.
Chile...
Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns/New York Times
WASHINGTON — A clear majority of voters believes the winner of the presidential election should fill the Supreme Court seat left open by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to a national poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, a sign of the political peril President Trump and Senate Republicans are courting by attempting to rush through an appointment before the end of the campaign.
In a survey of likely voters taken in the week leading up to Mr. Trump’s nomination on Saturday of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the high court, 56 percent said they preferred to have the election act as a sort of referendum on the vacancy. Only 41 percent said they wanted Mr. Trump to choose a justice before November.
More striking, the voters Mr. Trump and endangered Senate Republicans must reclaim to close the gap in the polls are even more opposed to a hasty pick: 62 percent of women, 63 percent of independents and 60 percent of college-educated white voters said they wanted the winner of the campaign to fill the seat.
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Beyond the coming battle over the court, the survey indicates that Mr. Trump remains an unpopular president who has not established a clear upper hand over Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, on any of the most important issues of the campaign. Voters are rejecting him by wide margins on his management of the coronavirus pandemic, and they express no particular confidence in his handling of public order. While he receives comparatively strong marks on the economy, a majority of voters also say he is at least partly to blame for the economic downturn.
Margaret Sullivan of Washington Post notes that, yes, all of that reporting on Trump’s scandals does changes minds; a few at a time.
For several months this summer, I lived in Trump Country — specifically, in the reddest congressional district in New York state, represented by Chris Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, until he resigned in disgrace last year while pleading guilty to insider trading.
I would drive the short distance to the grocery store a couple of times a week, always passing a Confederate flag flying proudly on my left, while to the right, two huge Trump flags waved from porches. Nailed to a tall tree along the way, a hand-lettered sign urged: “Keep America ‘Great’ 2020.” (I never failed to ponder those quotation marks.)
A neighbor told me he couldn’t countenance Trump but disliked Hillary Clinton so much he voted for Jill Stein. A woman in the supermarket ranted to me that the mandatory-mask order made her feel like she was living in China. A Republican friend insisted that if Joe Biden chose Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, he would feel compelled to vote for Trump even though he doesn’t like his behavior.
I come away from all of this — the past four years of shocking scandals and constant lies, the conversations with voters, the media’s beating-our-heads-against-the-wall coverage of Trump voters who still like Trump — with a changed viewpoint about the needle that supposedly doesn’t move.
Philip Eil of The Week says that the new surge in coronavirus cases nationwide should not all be blamed on returning college students. At all.
...while badly behaved students make good headlines and easy targets for self-righteous moralizing (and, while, without question, these young folks could be making better decisions), the students are not the real problem here. The campus COVID crisis is largely a problem caused, or at the very least abetted, by school administrators. And it further reveals an issue that those of us involved in the academy have known for some time: The folks who claim to be our society's foremost vendors of leadership are often glaringly devoid of it themselves.
Let us recall the situation over the summer as colleges finalized their plans to bring students back in the fall. There was — and still is — no COVID vaccine. Basic public health measures, like masks and practicing social-distancing, had become politicized among the "adults" in our society, inspiring anti-mask marches, and outbreaks linked to defiantly-held weddings and motorcycle rallies. Meanwhile, the president was steadily spewing misinformation at political rallies that were, themselves, glaring violations of CDC guidelines. Across the country, cases were rising at a rate that sometimes doubled what we saw when most of the country was in lockdown during the spring. The COVID death toll, already unconscionably high, climbed steadily higher, often by more than 1,000 people per day.
Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic writes about the rapid surge of COVID-19 cases in Wisconsin.
The outbreak started about a month ago. It seemed, at first, like a product of students returning to college campuses. The University of Wisconsin at Madison brought back tens of thousands of students to campus in August. Within a week of classes starting, more than 1,000 of them tested positive, and the university shut down all in-person instruction.
But those states are not seeing what Wisconsin is now. Cases are popping up in too many places, and among too many different age groups, to be blamed on college kids. In fact, every age group except 18-to-24-year-olds has seen cases rise this week, according to official data. “There’s a surge happening in cases across the state, for the most part,” Ajay Sethi, an epidemiology professor at the University of Wisconsin, told me.
Any coronavirus outbreak is bad news, but a surge in Wisconsin, at this moment, would be particularly awful. The problem is one of both political geography and poor timing. Wisconsin could determine the outcome of the presidential election: The state went for President Donald Trump in 2016 by only 22,748 votes, and both Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have campaigned there this month. The election is little more than a month away, and if the threat of infection scares Wisconsinites away from polling places, the outbreak could play a role in who wins the state.
For some reason, Mr. Meyer does not mention that The Damn Fool recently held one of his infamous campaign rallies in a part of Wisconsin that was already seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases prior to the campaign rally held on September 17 in Mosinee.
It is what it is.
Eric Boodman for STATnews on the difficult and continuing efforts to get people of color to sign up for COVID 19 vaccine trials.
That the communities hardest hit by Covid-19 have also been woefully underrepresented in clinical trials is no coincidence, and in racing to find 30,000 participants who could represent an even broader population, pharma companies have found themselves face to face with health care’s deepest fault lines. Being Black, Latinx, Native American, or Pacific Islander, for instance, means you are more likely to go without health insurance than if you’re white, and that makes a difference. If you want people to sign up as test subjects for experimental vaccines, it helps if they feel comfortable going to a hospital — and are able to take sick leave.
Much has been written on the ever-present specter of the Tuskegee study, which began in 1932, and for good reason. Government scientists recruited hundreds of Black men, falsely promised them free treatment, but instead simply observed without intervention as syphilis destroyed participants’ bodies and lives. Yet the sources of mistrust of Covid-19 vaccine trials aren’t just sepia-toned. The memory of Tuskegee is compounded by instances of racism, alienation, and exclusion all too tangible in 2020.
“This is all playing out in the setting of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor,” said Arleen Brown, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been convening community discussions about the trials. “There was a lot of concern that the powers that be are not going to treat them fairly.”
Finally this morning, Roger J. Kreuz of The Conversation on the fast-changing language, linguistics, and nomenclature of COVID-19.
In April, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary did something unusual. For the previous 20 years, they had issued quarterly updates to announce new words and meanings selected for inclusion. These updates have typically been made available in March, June, September and December.
In the late spring, however, and again in July, the dictionary’s editors released special updates, citing a need to document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the English language.
Although the editors have documented many coronavirus-related linguistic shifts, some of their observations are surprising. They claim, for example, that the pandemic has produced only one truly new word: the acronym COVID-19.
Most of the coronavirus-related changes that the editors have noted have to do with older, more obscure words and phrases being catapulted into common usage, such as reproduction number and social distancing. They’ve also documented the creation of new word blends based on previously existing vocabulary.
Everyone have a good morning!