The Forest for the Trees

The Republicans are staging a slow-moving coup.

 

 

Is it just me who believes the Republicans are staging a slow-moving coup right before our eyes? Selectively following or ignoring rules for an impeachment, setting their own arbitrary (and fast-changing) rules for consideration of a Supreme Court nominee, voting in jackbooted lockstep again and again to pound the last shreds of Congressional bipartisanship into dust under their feet…. The Democrats respond to each new blow to the system with parliamentary flourishes, Robert’s Rules of Order, and the outrage of a small child being repeatedly smacked by the schoolyard bully. While my heart goes out to that small child, my head is screaming, Do something!

 

While Mitch McConnell’s cosmic villainy might once have been held in check by precedent and custom, his relentless support of Trump’s actions over the last 3 ½ years signals something new and dangerous. If Trump loses the election and goes whole hog in declaring the election a fraud, who in the Republican party will have the courage to take him aside and tell him to take the defeat gracefully for the good of the country? Mitch McConnell? Lindsey Graham? Cory Gardner? Joni Ernst? Jim Jordan? Chuck Grassley? Yeah, right.

 

So, what is going on right before our eyes? What are we beholding, but not seeing? The Republican party is done with compromise. Compromise is for weaklings. It’s my way or the highway, Jack. Exactly what are the Republicans trying to accomplish? It appears they are trying to create a nation in which ignorance is the new knowledge, civic ugliness is our lingua franca, and suppressed voting rights are the standard for our elections. It also appears that they will be willing to risk civil unrest to remain in power. It’s high time for the Democrats to stop bringing their best butter knives to what has clearly become a knife fight. And it’s time to call the Republicans’ actions what they are: an incitement to civil war.

 

Amy Coney Barrett and the Meaning of Free Will

 

 

People speak of Amy Coney Barrett as if she were a Buick being chosen and driven off a dealership parking lot. She’s been identified, selected, and put on the road to the Supreme Court. But there’s an enormous flaw in this reasoning: she’s neither an inanimate object, nor a pawn. She is being chosen—presumably—for her stature as a jurist. A conservative jurist, to be sure. But still, a sentient being, an intelligent jurist who understands the significance of her nomination in this time and place. She must also understand what her nomination would mean to the legitimacy of the Court in these contentious times.

 

Today’s nomination stinks of rank partisanship, anti-democratic court-packing, and the danger of utterly destroying the legitimacy of the Supreme Court for decades—if not forever. If she is seen as a convenient place marker—an inanimate object—who can be relied on to rubber stamp the President as the winner of a contested election, Coney Barrett will be the destruction of the Court and of her own stature as a credible jurist.

 

Coney Barrett is only 45, with plenty of time to be considered for a seat on the Court in the future. The best thing she could do now—for the reputation of the Supreme Court, and for her own place in history—is to decline the nomination. And she should do so publicly and loudly, with a clear statement that three weeks before the election is not the time to rush through a nominee.