newrepublic--2020-10-12--The Great GOP Dystopian Experiment Is Working Exactly as Planned in Florida

BESIDE A TRUMP-FLAGGED BOAT AT A DOCK IN FORT LAUDERDALE—It looms ever closer , like a poorly conceived sequel to a decades-old movie even most of its fans would like to forget .
There ’ s a mostly new cast , many of them as old as the original players ; a ton of money being invested in the production ; and a lot of media effects that couldn ’ t be dreamed of when the first one came out .
It ’ s a slow-moving catastrophe .
It ’ s entirely predictable .
It ’ s Bush v. Gore @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s going to suck .
And of course , it ’ s set in Florida again .
Two decades after the 2000 election , which history may remember as the real beginning of the end of American election legitimacy , the fate of billions of sentient beings on earth may again turn on what happens here .
The stakes are familiar : Florida ’ s considerable bucket of electoral votes has gone to the winner of every election since 1996 .
The two Republican presidents on that list didn ’ t get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but they got Florida and hence official White House portraits .
Winning Florida is so crucial that even Donald Trump probably understands the state ’ s importance .
( The owner of Mar-a-Lago is one of the purest types of Florida Men : a transplanted New Yorker who endlessly bitches about New York . )
The conventional wisdom is that while Joe Biden can win without Florida , Trump ’ s political survival hinges on the state .
Republicans “ understand first and foremost , without Florida , he will be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the state ’ s longtime top Democratic political handicapper , wrote when Trump launched his reelection campaign last year in Orlando .
Schale , who helped try to “ draft ” Biden to run in 2016 , is now running a pro-Biden super PAC , but his opinion is widely shared among politicos of all partisan persuasions .
By one advertising tracker ’ s estimate , political ad spending in Florida had already topped $ 145 million by late August , a full $ 30 million more than in Pennsylvania , the state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Day , nearly one-quarter of a billion dollars could be spent on just the Tampa and Orlando media markets , the largest points on the state ’ s coveted “ I-4 corridor.
” This despite the fact that there are no gubernatorial , statewide , or Senate races on the ballot in Florida this year .
It ’ s all about the presidency .
And , you know , the future of the republic .
Schale believes Biden can win here , and the polls mostly agree , though they ’ ve tightened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ September , Biden had led in eight of that month ’ s polls , Trump had led in two , and they ’ d tied in two .
Biden is , in other words , right around where Hillary Clinton was at the same time in 2016 , before she lost the state by about one percentage point .
“ I am bullish on the state right now , ” Schale told me , while still ominously conceding what most residents innately understand : “ People just think [ Florida ] is more @ @ @ @ @ @

Small wonder, then, that Floridians voted overwhelmingly in 2018 for a constitutional amendment to automatically restore voting rights to most felons who complete their criminal sentences. In fact, that ballot initiative got roughly a million more “yes” votes than Scott, DeSantis, or any other statewide candidate for office garnered that year. When it became law, Amendment Four gave voting rights to as many as 1.4 million Floridians—until DeSantis and the GOP legislature contravened the voters’ will by passing a law requiring felons to pay off all debts, fines, and fees to the court and their “victims” before they could vote. A federal judge tossed that law, but DeSantis appealed the ruling to a Trump-friendly court, where six Republican appointees outvoted four Democratic judges to uphold the de facto poll tax. One of those GOP judges, Barbara Lagoa, refused to recuse herself from the case, despite the fact that DeSantis had personally appointed her to the state Supreme Court in early 2019. Trump, who put Lagoa on the federal bench months later, also added her to his shortlist to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, on the characteristically cynical Republican assumption that floating a Cuban American justice would help clinch the state, which has a sizable Cuban American population, for Trump in November.
In addition to subverting the will of voters and making registration and voting more difficult, Florida Republicans pioneered the art of preemptively blasting elections as “rigged” against them. There was 2000 and the “Brooks Brothers riot” coordinated by recently convicted (and still more recently pardoned) Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone. But in 2018, Scott, too, declared victory in his Senate race before all the votes were counted, then argued to any TV pundit who would book him or his proxies that the only way he could lose was if corrupt local Democratic election supervisors and lawyers “steal it from him in court.” Once again, a successful Rick Scott Hail Mary has been adapted for Donald Trump’s 2020 playbook . “We want to make sure that the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” Trump told White House reporters before jumping on a plane for a rally in Jacksonville, the culmination of months spent bitching that he was powerless to stop some grand sinister electoral conspiracy against him. “The ballots—you know, that’s a big scam.” Only these idiot jamokes would try to argue that an election on their executive watch is rigged against them. But calling the legitimacy of a vote tally into question worked for Scott, and so maybe it can work again.
I can drive past a major intersection in the mostly blue South Florida city where I grew up and see “Pizzagate” and QAnon protesters angrily toting signs. It’s the same street corner where, years before, a rabid local group of Tea Partiers gathered with anti-Obama signs. From here, I can drive 10 minutes south, near my house, to the strip mall where the “MAGA bomber” once delivered pizzas out of his van; or I can drive a half-hour west to Parkland, where a 19-year-old murdered 17 high school students and staffers, including my former wrestling coach, two and a half years ago. “Democrats now need a landslide in South Florida to win the state,” The Washington Post’s David Weigel wrote in August, and it is true. That’s always the Democratic Florida strategy: running up huge numbers in the “blue” south. It’s rarely worked.


newrepublic--2020-10-12--How I Found My Voice as the Only Native Student in My Class

I ’ m a senior this year at a high school in Wake County , which is the largest public school district in North Carolina .
I ’ m also a member of the Lumbee Tribe .
And this year , the Wake County Board of Education officially recognized Indigenous Peoples ’ Day for the first time , thanks in part to a speech I gave last fall .
I have always been the only Native person at my school , or any school that I ’ ve been in .
In that kind of situation , sharing your experience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t easy , especially since I ’ m not really an outspoken person .
But I ’ ve been a member of the Wake County Indian Education Program since my family moved here when I was in second grade , which helps .
Our program is pretty diverse .
Knowing that there are other people like me , and being able to talk to them has helped a lot .
Without them , I don ’ t think that I ’ d have the amount of confidence I do now in my identity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I had the opportunity to speak about recognizing Indigenous Peoples ’ Day in front of the county Board of Education in October of last year .
I spoke along with two other students and a few parents .
I had a video that I had made featuring all of the tribes in North Carolina and a little bit about them .
I was originally supposed to just present the video , but there were some technical issues , so I ended up giving a speech .
“ As one of the only Native @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told the board , “ the role of educating students and teachers about Indigenous peoples , our cultures , and our experiences often falls on me .
If Indigenous Peoples ’ Day and American Indian Heritage Month are officially celebrated in our schools , less of this burden will fall on students like me.
” The wider movement to recognize Indigenous Peoples ’ Day has taken a long time .
North Carolina does recognize it , as a state , but different towns and cities and schools don ’ t , or they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it .
Columbus Day adds to the narrative that American history started in 1492 .
It erases a lot of our culture and our history .
There ’ s also the fact that Columbus and the people who he sailed with were just very bad people .
We didn ’ t hear back from the board after our presentation .
Personally , I was a little on the pessimistic side about what their response would be .
But then , last week , almost a full year later , the board issued the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The board concluded its proclamation by writing , “ All schools in the Wake County Public School System are encouraged to support the well-being and growth of American Indian and Indigenous students every day , and especially recognize the contributions of Native Peoples on Oct. 12 , 2020 , Indigenous Peoples ’ Day.
” ) We found out about it at the same time as everyone else .
It was really surprising—in a good way !

The thing is, the proclamation has to be a first step for the schools. The education on Indigenous peoples that we’re given in school isn’t that great, holiday or not, and our schools aren’t really taking steps toward fixing the curriculums, which then makes it feel like it’s my responsibility. But it’s not.
In elementary school, my dad would come to my class to talk with my classmates. Part of the response from them was because they were elementary schoolers, but people would say stuff like, “I have Cherokee blood,” or comment about all Native people riding horses and teepees. One time, my dad asked what anyone knew about Indian people, and someone said, “They didn’t wear clothes,” which, I guess, was kind of funny? I also remember, in third or fourth grade, that we watched a video about Christopher Columbus. It showed him and his men on their boats and how they were sailing to the New World. It ended right before he got here—before they met any of us.
I’m a senior now. I’ve taken American history at several stages throughout my time in school. And I don’t really think that we’ve learned, in any history class, about Native people at any point after the nineteenth century. What we learned about Indigenous people is always super limited and vague. And it’s always past tense, if it’s there at all.


newrepublic--2020-10-12--The All-American Mind of a Militia Member

On June 25 , a man named Adam Fox , upset that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer had shuttered gyms across the state as part of a pandemic lockdown order , started a livestream on a private Facebook group .
“ I don ’ t know , boys , we got ta do something , ” he said .
“ You guys link with me on our other location system , give me some ideas of what we can do.
” Those “ ideas of what we can do ” began to cohere in the weeks that followed .
“ Snatch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fuckin ’ governor .
Just grab the bitch , ” Fox told an informant in late July , according to an FBI affidavit released last Thursday .
“ Because at that point , we do that , dude—it ’ s over.
” Fox is now one of 13 men charged in a series of alleged plots against the state and law enforcement .
Expressions of condemnation and horror , rightly , came swiftly .
“ All of us in Michigan can disagree about politics , ” said Matthew Schneider , the U.S. attorney @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ But those disagreements should never , ever amount to violence.
” In an op-ed for The Washington Post , Professor Kathleen Belew , who has written important work on the history of the militia movement wrote , “ This is a movement expressly dedicated to the violent overthrow of the United States and the destruction of democracy and its institutions.
” In a rare moment of bipartisanship , New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson issued a joint statement : “ This attempted act of domestic terrorism against a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lawful and civil society and we condemn it in the strongest terms.
” In each of these responses , the violence being threatened was not only contemptible—it was alien .
Such a frame is seductive but misses the true danger of militia groups .
They do not exist outside and in opposition to American democracy ; they are its intimate products .
Understanding that requires we abandon many of the superficial images and accounts coming out of Michigan—of impoverished men deep in the woods holding meetings in underground rooms—which suggest a false sense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have spent years trying to understand men like Fox by spending time with them in my research .
In that time , I have been able to see their participation in the militia movement not as a single moment but as the outcome of a long process .
At the collective level , that process involves the historical development of American democracy alongside racism enforced through a continuous relationship between state violence and private violence .
At the individual level , it looks like militia members building , over the course of their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ engaging in violence , as well as an understanding of their violence as legitimate , through their interactions with—and the support given to them by—a range of government and law enforcement agencies .
In such ways , the stories of militia members teach us about the important and troubling connections between private and state violence that have marked American democracy from its founding to the present .
We can see the biographies of these individual men as stories about American democracy .
I have known Mark Romano , which is the pseudonym I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 15 years .
Back when we first met , Mark was a member of the Minutemen , the right-wing militia that patrolled the U.S.-Mexico border looking for “ illegals.
” I spent months watching Mark as he prowled the border in camouflage , with an M-4 rifle , two handguns , and approximately 100 rounds of ammunition .
“ I try to only use hollow points , ” he once told me about the bullets known for their capacity to expand and fragment in the body and commonly used by police officers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ”

Many of Mark’s childhood friends came from military families, and military recruiters were frequent visitors to his high school. After graduation, he jumped at the chance to become a Marine. There, he excelled. A month after receiving his military-issued M-16, he scored “high shooter” in his platoon’s qualifying exams. “That was a major accomplishment to me,” he recalled in one of our interviews. His time in the Marines overlapped with the first Gulf War, which President George H.W. Bush repeatedly referred to as a war for freedom and democracy. In the military, Mark gained a sense of himself that would set him on the trajectory that followed: a proficiency with firearms and a deep hatred of Muslims.
This is a familiar story. These elements—militarism, whiteness, masculinity, and racism—form the bedrock of not only the militia movement but its intimate connections with American democracy. All 13 of the people facing state and federal charges in Michigan are men; all are white; some spent time in the military, including the alleged founder of the Wolverine Watchmen, Joseph Morrison, who was a Marine. And while their stated goal was to use private violence against the state, these men had support across various levels of government: Just a few months ago, one was sharing the stage with county sheriffs during an “anti-lockdown rally” critical of Whitmer. Shortly after some of them participated in armed protests at the Michigan state capitol while wearing camouflage and carrying guns, President Trump himself offered his endorsement, “Liberate Michigan!”
Mark’s decision to join a militia group and patrol the border was motivated by this dynamic—to be apart from the state but also its ally. He was called to duty not only by Republican presidents like the Bush administrations but also Democratic ones like Bill Clinton. It was Clinton, after all, who initiated some of the most massive border militarization campaigns in U.S. history and helped promote an understanding of unauthorized immigration as a matter of national security. When Mark joined a militia, it wasn’t because he was opposed to the ideals espoused by our elected representatives; it was precisely because of his intimate support for them. But as the case in Michigan teaches us, militias do not target government officials indiscriminately—it matters enormously that Whitmer is a woman, a Democrat, and promoting a set of public health measures that require these men’s obedience.


newrepublic--2020-10-13--The Town That Went Feral

The Town That Went Feral

In its public education campaigns , the U.S. National Park Service stresses an important distinction : If you find yourself being attacked by a brown or grizzly bear , YES , DO PLAY DEAD .
Spread your arms and legs and cling to the ground with all your might , facing downward ; after a few attempts to flip you over ( no one said this would be easy ) , the bear will , most likely , leave .
By contrast , if you find yourself being attacked by a black bear , NO , DO NOT PLAY DEAD @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if that ’ s not an option , fight it off , curved claws and 700 psi-jaws and all .
But don ’ t worry—it almost never comes to this .
As one park service PSA noted this summer , bears “ usually just want to be left alone .
Don ’ t we all ?
” In other words , if you encounter a black bear , try to look big , back slowly away , and trust in the creature ’ s inner libertarian .
Unless , that is , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of western New Hampshire .
Because , as Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling ’ s new book suggests , that unfortunate animal may have a far more aggressive disposition , and relate to libertarianism first and foremost as a flavor of human cuisine .
Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont , a Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner .
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear : The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town ( and Some Bears ) sees him traversing rural New England as he reconstructs a remarkable , and remarkably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This is the so-called Free Town Project , a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town , Grafton , and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment , part beacon to the faithful , Galt ’ s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem .
These people had found one another largely over the internet , posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards .
While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic , certain beliefs united them : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good ; that “ statism ” in the form of government interference ( above all , taxes ) was irredeemably bad .
Left alone , they believed , free individuals would thrive and self-regulate , thanks to the sheer force of “ logic , ” “ reason , ” and efficiency .
For inspirations , they drew upon precedents from fiction ( Ayn Rand loomed large ) as well as from real life , most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ None of those micro-nations , it should be observed , panned out , and things in New Hampshire don ’ t bode well either—especially when the humans collide with a newly brazen population of bears , themselves just “ working to create their own utopia , ” property lines and market logic be damned .
The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious , poignant , and deeply unsettling .
Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization , with all its “ discontents , ” as a compromise product , the best that can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ indifferent nature ” on one hand and our vulnerability to one another on the other .
Hongoltz-Hetling presents , in microcosm , a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of “ freedom , ” both individual and economic , is in fact a recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once .
In a United States wracked by virus , mounting climate change , and ruthless corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation , the lessons from one tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with streaks of independence , ” Hongoltz-Hetling observes , “ New Hampshire is among the fussiest and the streakiest.
” New Hampshire is , after all , the Live Free or Die state , imposing neither an income nor a sales tax , and boasting , among other things , the highest per capita rate of machine gun ownership .
In the case of Grafton , the history of Living Free—so to speak—has deep roots .
The town ’ s Colonial-era settlers started out by ignoring “ centuries of traditional Abenaki law by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and other speculators.
” Next , they ran off Royalist law enforcement , come to collect lumber for the king , and soon discovered their most enduring pursuit : the avoidance of taxes .
As early as 1777 , Grafton ’ s citizens were asking their government to be spared taxes and , when they were not , just stopped paying them .

Nearly two and a half centuries later, Grafton has become something of a magnet for seekers and quirky types, from adherents of the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to hippie burnouts and more. Particularly important for the story is one John Babiarz, a software designer with a Krusty the Klown laugh, who decamped from Big-Government-Friendly Connecticut in the 1990s to homestead in New Hampshire with his equally freedom-loving wife, Rosalie. Entering a sylvan world that was, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, “almost as if they had driven through a time warp and into New England’s revolutionary days, when freedom outweighed fealty and trees outnumbered taxes,” the two built a new life for themselves, with John eventually coming to head Grafton’s volunteer fire department (which he describes as a “mutual aid” venture) and running for governor on the libertarian ticket.
Although John’s bids for high office failed, his ambitions remained undimmed, and in 2004 he and Rosalie connected with a small group of libertarian activists. Might not Grafton, with its lack of zoning laws and low levels of civic participation, be the perfect place to create an intentional community based on Logic and Free Market Principles? After all, in a town with fewer than 800 registered voters, and plenty of property for sale, it would not take much for a committed group of transplants to establish a foothold, and then win dominance of municipal governance. And so the Free Town Project began. The libertarians expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom” entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to “traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the “victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism.” (“Logic is a strange thing,” observes Hongoltz-Hetling.)
While Pendarvis eventually had to take his mail-order Filipina bride business and dreams of municipal takeovers elsewhere (read: Texas), his comrades in the Free Town Project remained undeterred. Soon, they convinced themselves that, evidence and reactions to Pendarvis notwithstanding, the Project must actually enjoy the support of a silent majority of freedom-loving Graftonites. How could it not? This was Freedom, after all. And so the libertarians keep coming, even as Babiarz himself soon came to rue the fact that “the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.” The precise numbers are hard to pin down, but ultimately the town’s population of a little more than 1,100 swelled with 200 new residents, overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and plenty of guns.


newrepublic--2020-10-13--Making the Supreme Court Safe for Democracy

The death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has sent the already fraught politics of Supreme Court confirmation into crisis .
But the panic that followed the news of Ginsburg ’ s death , given the heightened stakes of the 2020 election , has served one useful purpose : It ’ s made it clearer than ever that Supreme Court reform is an urgent democratic cause , one that requires rethinking the federal judiciary from the ground up .
The mandate for this reconsideration could not be more glaring .
President Donald Trump has nominated ardent conservative Amy Coney @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is seizing the opportunity to consolidate right-wing control of the institution for generations .
Democrats have decried Republicans ’ decision to fast-track Barrett ’ s confirmation prior to the election—an act of brazen hypocrisy , given Republicans ’ refusal to consider Merrick Garland ’ s nomination in 2016 on the grounds that an election-year confirmation would deprive the American people of the opportunity to exercise their democratic will .
Still , McConnell ’ s shameless power grab has inadvertently triggered a once-in-a-century opportunity to truly confront @ @ @ @ @ @ @ court ’ s incredible power has done to the workings of American politics .
As with other structural challenges , however , success can only be achieved if Democrats play their hand more astutely than their opponents do .
Ginsburg became iconic for her extraordinary feminist accomplishments as advocate and judge .
Yet the timing of her death was catastrophic , casting a pall on her legacy .
In 2013 , with the Democrats still holding both the presidency and the Senate , Ginsburg made a bet on her own longevity .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us to pay the Republicans their winnings .
But rather than criticize Ginsburg for her decision , it is far more productive to ask how best to reimagine the Supreme Court in her honor .
No one should be surprised , after all , that Ginsburg held fast to power that no judge in a democracy should have .
Thomas Jefferson pointedly observed in the first decade of the nineteenth century that treating the Supreme Court as “ the citadel of the law ” would encourage those losing power by democratic means to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a stronghold.
” Jefferson all but sketched McConnell ’ s quest for judicial power centuries in advance .
McConnell is banking on the right ’ s demonstrated ability to maintain political control from the Supreme Court ’ s commanding heights—to the point that he ’ s prepared to lose his own Senate majority to consolidate right-wing judicial rule .
Democrats can either play into McConnell ’ s strategy or make a better move .
Reviving their best traditions , the left should not aim merely to reverse McConnell ’ s successes .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lock in a broken status quo—preserving the standing of Supreme Court justices as royalty but vying to confirm left-leaning monarchs rather than right-wing ones .
Instead , Democrats should work to undo the long-running transformation of our democracy into glorified judicial politics—a conversion Democrats helped to bring about over the course of the past century .
This may mean storming and occupying the citadel of law .
But it would end the high court game of thrones in order to reimagine the core mission of the judiciary in American democracy .

Our political system reoriented itself in compliance with this new consensus on high court sovereignty. Granting constitutional writ to the laissez-faire vision of freedom of contract meant not only that employers enjoyed a new uncontested power; the Supreme Court itself did as well. The court’s authoritative interpretation of the Constitution may have always been politics by other means, but thanks to the newly entrenched power of judicial review, the court itself was now at the center of national politics. Then as now, it was not obvious how those who disliked the emergent juristocracy could or should respond.
Harvard Law School professor James Bradley Thayer offered a brilliant democratic solution to this dilemma, one that defined the first half of the twentieth century. When the Supreme Court began perverting the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to protect African Americans from local majorities, Thayer surmised that a frontal attack on judicial authority made as little strategic sense as telling Americans that apple pie was not really their birthright. Instead, fresh back from a trip to England where he witnessed the birth of popular democracy, Thayer hoped to see Americans reach the same set of outcomes not by getting rid of the Supreme Court, but by reinterpreting its role in the American constitutional system. Thayer proposed that judges who were never elected could invalidate only laws that were genuinely beyond the pale.
“It is a common opinion that courts should declare laws unconstitutional when they think them so,” he wrote in The Nation in 1884. But the “judicial function,” he explained, was instead to “determin[e] whether the Legislature has transgressed the limits of reasonable interpretation.” The question, in other words, wasn’t whether the Supreme Court liked a given law, or even whether it read the Constitution to forbid it, but whether the legislature could conceivably reach a different view. Without rejecting what Marbury had come to mean, Thayer attempted to make judicial power safe for democratic self-rule.


newrepublic--2020-10-13--No One’s Hands Are Clean at the Justice Department

Last week—as we close in on an election that will hopefully make Donald J. Trump a single-term president—we learned new information about one of the most dismal chapters of this period from a New York Times report on the administration ’ s short-lived “ family separation ” policy .
That is how we have come to refer to the policy that was in place from April through June 2018 , when the Justice Department , under then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions , implemented an unprecedented policy of “ zero tolerance ” for illegal entry into the country that resulted in several @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after attempting to cross the southern border .
A federal court halted the effort after a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union , and following widespread public outrage , Trump reversed course and signed an executive order ending it .
A court has since been overseeing the reunification of the families that were affected—a process that remains incomplete even to this day .
The Times ’ story concerned a draft report by the Justice Department ’ s inspector general that contains new details about the despicable seriousness of purpose with which Sessions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the policy—including a call that Sessions had with the five U.S. attorneys along the border in which Sessions told them bluntly , “ We need to take away children.
” On another call a week later , Rosenstein made clear that it did not matter how young the children were .
The Times also quoted a curious line from the draft report , ostensibly styled as an overarching conclusion about the behavior of department officials : “ The department ’ s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations.
” This would represent a puzzling and incongruous takeaway—one that seems to treat family separation as a failure of bureaucratic planning and competence—from an investigation that , according to the Times , corroborated the widely available public evidence that top administration officials affirmatively “ wanted ” family separations to happen “ because they believed it would deter future illegal immigration.
” In fact , there has been a considered effort by former administration officials to rewrite this recent history so that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ competence instead of what it really was—a grotesque failure of moral conscientiousness .
An acceptance of that effort may presage a broader failure to bring moral clarity to a much-needed post-Trump reckoning of government misconduct during his presidency .

Indeed, there is a good case to be made that the Justice Department’s integral participation in the family separation policy can be traced, at least in part, to the failure to seriously discipline lawyers in the department’s Office of Legal Counsel who prepared the George W. Bush–era “torture memos,” which were used as the authority to allow the CIA to engage in the use of tactics like waterboarding and sleep deprivation on suspected terrorists. When the news of those memos became public—and in fact for years after, until a law was passed under Obama and over the objections of most Republicans—it was routine to hear political pundits debate which torture techniques were truly objectionable (waterboarding, perhaps, was not great, but was sleep deprivation really all that bad?).
Obama famously announced, before taking office, that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” on the question of torture, and although this may have been defensible as a general guiding principle, it became clear—as even the most modest efforts at accountability failed—that it was a mistake. The Justice Department, for instance, conducted a criminal investigation into the deaths of two detainees who died while in custody, but it concluded that charges were not warranted, apparently on the theory that those involved had acted in accordance with legal advice from the Justice Department.
As the torture era demonstrated, controversial government policies usually have the hands of lawyers all over them—bureaucrats know that a legal opinion will go a long way to relieving them of responsibility if a policy comes under scrutiny in the future—even if it is not obvious to the public at the time. The fallout for the people who crafted and signed off on the torture memos was, however, practically nonexistent. The most infamous and flawed of the memos was written by John Yoo, but many other Bush administration lawyers reached the same conclusion, and Yoo got off with a slap on the wrist from the Justice Department’s ethics office that was so light that he managed to portray it as vindication and has continued to serve as an influential legal commentator in conservative circles. He is a professor at Berkeley Law School.


newrepublic--2020-10-13--Mitch McConnell’s Election Dreams Are Voters’ Waking Nightmares

American democracy has never been in a particularly healthy place , so it did not come as much of a surprise when , as early voting for the 2020 election kicked off this week , disastrous accounts began to roll in : In California , the state ’ s Republican Party placed more than 50 deceptive ballot boxes—many labeled as “ official ” —in Los Angeles , Fresno , and Orange counties .
( The party has pledged to continue the practice despite a cease and desist order . )
In Georgia , singer Johnta Austin recorded himself and his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a stunning 11 hours to fill out their ballots in person .
Elsewhere in the country , ballots are going out without return envelopes and with the wrong names attached .
And on late Monday night , a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling that held that the one-per-county limit placed on absentee ballot drop-off locations by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott was , in fact , legal .
Civil rights groups and members of the state ’ s Democratic Party , including both the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sued the state , arguing that Abbott ’ s proclamation would make it overly difficult and dangerous for some voters , especially in larger districts , to drop off their ballots .
The court dismissed these concerns and framed Abbott ’ s rule instead as a form of voter access expansion , with Judge Kyle Duncan writing , “ The fact that this expansion is not as broad as Plaintiffs would wish does not mean that it has illegally limited their voting rights.
” The three judges who ruled on the case—Duncan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing in common : They were all among the hundreds of judges nominated by President Trump and shepherded through the Senate confirmation process by Mitch McConnell .
What the 2020 election has accentuated most is that the long-term goal for the GOP is not to test how far it can go to restrict voter access within the bounds of United States law .
Instead , Republicans hope to rewrite these laws entirely to enforce generations of minoritarian rule .
They have spent the last decade wielding their power within state governments with this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were often blocked by federal courts , they were not deterred .
They just turned their focus to the bench the moment Trump took the presidency .
It was an investment that is now paying off .
In Texas , this means that vulnerable voters will be left in the lurch .
In a state where Latinx residents make up 40 percent of the population but , as of September , 56.1 percent of all Covid-19 deaths , these same voters will now be expected to either vote in person or file their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out as an unnecessary health risk .
The alternative could be to participate through mail-in voting , but Abbott has so far refused to expand the state ’ s vote-by-mail deadlines or logistical infrastructure .
The plaintiffs in the case will now have to either accept the one-box-per-county rule or appeal the full Fifth Circuit panel of judges to hear the case—an unlikely prospect given the court ’ s conservative title .

American democracy has never been in a particularly healthy place, so it did not come as much of a surprise when, as early voting for the 2020 election kicked off this week, disastrous accounts began to roll in: In California, the state’s Republican Party placed more than 50 deceptive ballot boxes—many labeled as “official”—in Los Angeles, Fresno, and Orange counties. (The party has pledged to continue the practice despite a cease and desist order.) In Georgia, singer Johnta Austin recorded himself and his fellow voters as they waited in line for a stunning 11 hours to fill out their ballots in person. Elsewhere in the country, ballots are going out without return envelopes and with the wrong names attached.
And on late Monday night, a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling that held that the one-per-county limit placed on absentee ballot drop-off locations by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott was, in fact, legal. Civil rights groups and members of the state’s Democratic Party, including both the Mexican-American and Black legislative caucuses, had sued the state, arguing that Abbott’s proclamation would make it overly difficult and dangerous for some voters, especially in larger districts, to drop off their ballots. The court dismissed these concerns and framed Abbott’s rule instead as a form of voter access expansion, with Judge Kyle Duncan writing, “The fact that this expansion is not as broad as Plaintiffs would wish does not mean that it has illegally limited their voting rights.”


newrepublic--2020-10-13--The Obscenity of Amazon Prime Day in a Pandemic

This year , in the lead-up to Amazon Prime Day , Forbes reported that Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife , Mackenzie Scott , had respectively gotten $ 8.8 billion and $ 3 billion richer over the course of a week , thanks to a rebound in Amazon share prices .
Because Bezos ’ s fortune has grown so astronomically throughout the pandemic—that is , during the same cataclysmic event that destroyed the economy and put as many as 40 million people out of work—updates on his snowballing wealth are at this point hardly shocking ( if no less nauseating ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ annual shopping event that lines his already overstuffed pockets could potentially be a matter of life and death for those lower down on the company ladder .
According to at least one estimate , Amazon is expected to rake in close to $ 10 billion in sales from this year ’ s Prime Day , which usually takes place in July but was rescheduled this summer because of the pandemic .
( How thoughtful ! )
Its workers , of course , won ’ t be sharing in that bounty unless you count @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Prime Day also comes right on the heels of a new disclosure by the company—following pressure from workers and labor unions—that nearly 20,000 of its employees have tested positive for Covid-19 to date .
As CNN reported , Amazon workers scheduled for Prime Day shifts said they were worried about crowded warehouses and the strain of extra work ; one union in the U.K. warned that the increased staffing required by the event could lead to further Covid-19 outbreaks .
( Amazon , for its part , dismissed this rather feasible scenario as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s professed observance of safety guidelines , Amazon ’ s warehouse conditions , particularly during the pandemic , have been questionable enough to have generated multiple worker protests and work stoppages over the past several months .
In September , an investigation in Reveal by journalist Will Evans further found that injuries in Amazon warehouses have been on the rise since 2016 , partly as a result of the use of new warehouse robots ( which were , ironically , supposed to reduce instances of human injury ) and , as it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Though Amazon has claimed in the past that injuries at its facilities don ’ t increase during busy periods , documents obtained by Evans indicate otherwise .
“ For years , the internal data show , injury rates have spiked during the weeks of Prime Day and Cyber Monday , contrary to Amazon ’ s public claims , ” Evans wrote .
“ Those two weeks had the highest rate of serious injuries for all of 2019.
” And there aren ’ t many promising signs that things have improved much for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ week , workers at an Amazon warehouse in Oklahoma told Vice that the company was denying or ignoring pregnant employees ’ requests for lighter work or other accommodations , even when those requests were accompanied by doctors ’ notes .
The stress of physical labor and the possibility of miscarrying eventually forced some of those women to quit , which in turn left them in dire financial straits .
“ They treat us like nothing , ” one worker told Vice .
“ Me and other pregnant women want to start a petition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like bodies instead of people.
” At the same time , the ongoing hardship wrought by the pandemic—and employers ’ indifference to it—has also prompted a surge of worker militancy , not least of all at places like Amazon , and Prime Day is an occasion for that , too .
Amazon warehouse workers in Germany went on strike on Tuesday , and a few days ago , a group of protesters—including former Amazon employee Chris Smalls , who was fired from a New York warehouse for organizing a walkout in March—gathered in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Angeles mansion to call for higher pay for workers and steeper taxes on the company and its founder .
“ The richest man in the world made $ 88 billion in the course of the pandemic .
It ’ s time to fight back , ” Smalls told CBS News .
One billion dollars—let alone 88—is already an incomprehensible sum ; for context , consider that one million seconds constitutes a little over 11 days , whereas one billion seconds amounts to more than 31 years .
There ’ s an argument to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it simply shouldn ’ t exist .

This year, in the lead-up to Amazon Prime Day, Forbes reported that Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott, had respectively gotten $8.8 billion and $3 billion richer over the course of a week, thanks to a rebound in Amazon share prices. Because Bezos’s fortune has grown so astronomically throughout the pandemic—that is, during the same cataclysmic event that destroyed the economy and put as many as 40 million people out of work—updates on his snowballing wealth are at this point hardly shocking (if no less nauseating). But this year, the same annual shopping event that lines his already overstuffed pockets could potentially be a matter of life and death for those lower down on the company ladder.
According to at least one estimate, Amazon is expected to rake in close to $10 billion in sales from this year’s Prime Day, which usually takes place in July but was rescheduled this summer because of the pandemic. (How thoughtful!) Its workers, of course, won’t be sharing in that bounty unless you count some mandatory overtime. This year, Prime Day also comes right on the heels of a new disclosure by the company—following pressure from workers and labor unions—that nearly 20,000 of its employees have tested positive for Covid-19 to date. As CNN reported, Amazon workers scheduled for Prime Day shifts said they were worried about crowded warehouses and the strain of extra work; one union in the U.K. warned that the increased staffing required by the event could lead to further Covid-19 outbreaks. (Amazon, for its part, dismissed this rather feasible scenario as “scaremongering.”)


newrepublic--2020-10-14--The Case Against Packing the Court

The Case Against Packing the Court

One Saturday evening in late December 1936 , Homer Cummings , the attorney general , arrived at the White House bearing memos and briefing books and , over the next hour , proceeded to convince Franklin Roosevelt to pack the Supreme Court .
The idea had been in the air throughout FDR ’ s first term , which was just ending ; it had obvious appeal at a time when the court ’ s conservative majority had knocked down much of the New Deal , overturning acts of Congress at 10 times its previous rate .
At a Cabinet meeting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dismissed court-packing as “ a distasteful idea , ” but a year later , he was ready to part with his hesitations .
He agreed with a comment Cummings made : “ We were probably unduly terrified by a phrase.
” There are few , if any , such fears today .
FDR ’ s failed attempt to expand the court in 1937 stood for eight decades as an object lesson in presidential overreach , but no longer .
Even before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg opened the prospect of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left-leaning activists and lawyers had begun urging an increase in the number of justices .
It began as a call for redress , of sorts , after Mitch McConnell , the Senate majority leader , shut down the confirmation process for nearly a year to deny President Barack Obama ’ s nominee , Merrick Garland , a place on the court in 2016 .
Four years later , “ pack the court ” has become a cri de coeur , an expression of mounting , and wholly justified , anger—not only at McConnell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his muscling Brett Kavanaugh into the next vacant seat , in 2018 , despite credible charges of sexual assault ; and now , his refusal to let the news of Ginsburg ’ s passing settle for even two hours before declaring that President Donald Trump should have his way with the seat she leaves vacant .
It was as if , the day of John Lewis ’ s death , McConnell had launched a campaign to expunge what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 .
By this point , even Bill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hardly a liberal—suggests that if Senate Republicans fill the seat before the election , there will be “ no plausible argument against Democratic court-packing.
” It is clear that if Joe Biden and Senate Democrats take power , they will face intense pressure not just to pack the court , but to do so , as Ian Millhiser of Vox insists , as “ their first action.
” Yet there remains a plausible argument against it , perhaps even a powerful one .
The old , well-rehearsed case against court expansion goes something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plunge it into politics ; it would trigger an endless cycle of retribution , as each successive president packs the court to reset its ideological balance ; it forces an issue that is best addressed by “ Father Time , with his scythe , ” as one senator advised Roosevelt .
None of those arguments is persuasive today .
The idea that Democrats should respect one of the few norms—the number nine , set by an act of Congress in 1869—that the Republican Party has not shattered seems quaint , at best ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quietly and wait for a conservative justice to vacate his seat is asking too much .
If Justices Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch live as long as Ginsburg did , they will still be writing opinions in the 2050s .
Amy Coney Barrett , Trump ’ s nominee , is even younger .

The right’s hostile takeover of the court has led even moderates—who tend to be die-hard institutionalists—to embrace the possibility of court-packing. “Nothing is off the table for next year,” Chuck Schumer told Senate Democrats the day after Justice Ginsburg’s death. But as Schumer no doubt understands, the table is already buckling beneath the weight of all the urgent business that Congress would need to address in the first year, perhaps the first months, of a Biden presidency: a coherent national response to the pandemic and a plan for the distribution of a vaccine; a broad-based economic stimulus package; an expansion of unemployment relief and a renewal of aid for ailing businesses and industries; meaningful steps to address systemic racism; legislation, as Biden has proposed, to promote clean energy and combat climate change.
This, of course, is a partial list, and every item on it will be competing for primacy. The attention of a Biden White House would be stretched across a wide range of immediate concerns—wider, arguably, than any incoming administration has faced since FDR’s. The first 100 days of Roosevelt’s first term saw action on virtually every front: banking, agriculture, wages, public works, unemployment relief, mortgage assistance, monetary policy. Some Democrats, predicting a collision with the court’s conservative majority, had urged Roosevelt to pack the court preemptively, but he brushed that suggestion aside; there was too much else to do.
When Roosevelt finally struck against the court, at the start of his second term, his party held 76 of 96 seats in the Senate; he saw no reason why he could not persuade Congress to expand the court and, at the same time, renew his assault on the economic crisis. Yet his court plan cost him his mandate. It consumed Congress for nearly six months, dividing his supporters and driving some into the arms of the GOP. In May 1937—nearly four months into this war of attrition—Roosevelt proposed one of the most sweeping pieces of legislation of his presidency: a bill to ban child labor in factories and to create a labor standards board that would regulate wages and hours. He did this, in part, to change the subject. The gambit failed. The bill did nothing to draw recalcitrant Southern Democrats back into the fold. “To ask them simultaneously to support a national wages-and-hours law” and the court bill, this magazine observed, “is probably to ask more than human flesh is capable of.”


newrepublic--2020-10-14--Amy Coney Barrett’s Gentle Deceptions

Amy Coney Barrett’s Gentle Deceptions

Still some hours before Amy Coney Barrett would speak before the Senate Judiciary Committee , Senator Marsha Blackburn used her opening statement to wonder aloud : Why hadn ’ t more of her colleagues “ jumped at the chance ” to back such a “ legal superstar ” and “ working mom ” ?
She had an answer .
“ As today ’ s increasingly paternalistic and frankly disrespectful arguments have shown , if they had their way , only certain kinds of women would be allowed into this hearing.
” In this fantasy , senators who opposed the nomination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” of the patriarchy .
Barrett—perfectly composed , as advertised—did her part to appear as an impersonal and pure vessel for the law .
“ Part of the rationale for courts adhering to the rule of law , and for judges taking great care to avoid imposing their policy preferences , is that it ’ s inconsistent with democracy , ” she said Tuesday .
“ Nobody wants to live in accord with the law of Amy .
I ’ m sure not even my children would want to do that.
” As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voters in Georgia formed lines that would crawl on for 11 hours before some could cast their ballots .
A panel of federal judges would soon rule that voters in all of Harris County , Texas , home to more than four million people , only needed one ballot drop-off box .
The long lines in Georgia were owing to the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that rolled back parts of the Voting Rights Act , and in Texas , three of the judges ruling on the accessibility of ballot boxes were appointed by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the mercy of such court rulings , and in an election during which Republicans are racing to get Barrett confirmed before Trump misses his chance .
Somehow , in this mix , Barrett told the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that what Congress does is about “ policy preferences , ” in contrast with what she does as a judge , which is not .
The lie isn ’ t worth pointing out .
But the soft power behind it is : delivered in an even tone , politely firm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ law professors recently told a reporter , “ The great things [ sic ] about Amy is she was never a problem.
” There ’ s a strong conservative women ’ s lineage behind it , the path laid out by the late conservative political operator Phyllis Schlafly , as Sarah Jones at New York argued ahead of the hearings .
The voice and presentation were a strange mix of two things Barrett is not : the kind of woman who cheerfully delegates politics to her husband and a cool-headed jurist guided in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Constitution .
How dare anyone think there were strongly held convictions under there ?
That is the big conceit of the hearings , wrapped in paper-thin layers of motherhood and faith .
It is only more galling because you can clearly find evidence of Barrett ’ s beliefs .
She was a member of a faculty anti-choice group at Notre Dame .
She signed an advertisement stating that the legacy of Roe v. Wade was “ barbaric.
” Yet on Tuesday , Barrett told a struggling Senator Dianne Feinstein that she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ views on abortion .
Feinstein even fed her the “ forthright ” line .
Her disclosure questionnaire for the Senate may not have stated that she had an opinion one way or another on Roe .
But that ’ s only accurate because she did not disclose the ad , placed by a group that wants to criminalize abortion providers , until The Guardian disclosed it for her .

She has other beliefs. In 2016, Barrett waved her hands in a faux-helpless gesture when she referred to transgender girls as “physiologically, a boy” at a Jackson University lecture. Barrett did not stumble at all when she spoke the phrase “sexual preference” in her answer to Senator Feinstein’s question about discrimination. The language would be familiar to groups bringing LGBTQ discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, like Alliance Defending Freedom. Barrett has lectured several times at ADF’s law fellowship program. The group refuses to acknowledge transgender people truthfully, even and perhaps especially in court, where it also misgenders and misnames them. It, too, refers to trans women and girls as “physiologically” male—even seeking to remove a judge who had admonished it for doing so from one of its numerous trans discrimination cases. ADF also sees no legitimacy in what it calls “same-sex sexual attraction.” But Barrett wouldn’t offer an opinion, when asked directly, on cases related to anti-LGBTQ discrimination. As she said at Jackson University, it’s not her job to decide what she calls “policy debates.” Her job, she says, is to decide who decides.
Barrett had clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Her views go much further than his own, wrote Gregory Bassham in Commonweal magazine. Justice Scalia recognized settled legal precedents. Even if he thought they were incorrect by his strict “originalist” reading of the law, Bassham wrote, Scalia recognized that “it would be wholly unrealistic for judges to order a return to bygone days when women had few rights, states were free to ignore the Bill of Rights, the federal government had no obligation to treat all citizens equally, preteen children could be executed, and crimes could be punished by floggings and bodily mutilations.” Barrett has written that while she recognizes this is a difficult question, “I tend to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution than a precedent that she thinks clearly in conflict with it.” It appears she has landed on less “faint-hearted” originalism than her mentor.
It may not matter how successful Barrett’s performance of nonthreatening, perfected femininity is, given how much precedent Republicans are willing to blow past to confirm her nomination. And even if this was a fair fight, convincing anyone that Barrett is who she presents herself to be isn’t the intention. It’s meant to lend others around her plausible deniability, to claim she doesn’t have an agenda and, by extension, neither do they.


newrepublic--2020-10-14--Amy Coney Barrett and the Death of the Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing

The Senate Judiciary Committee had its real first opportunity to closely question Amy Coney Barrett in person during Tuesday ’ s confirmation hearing .
Expectations were hardly high .
Over the past few decades , would-be justices from across the ideological spectrum have largely refused to say how they would rule on pending cases or future legal issues .
Ruth Bader Ginsburg , whose former seat Barrett hopes to fill , once told the committee she would give “ no hints , no previews , no forecasts ” about how she would decide cases if confirmed to the Supreme Court @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Tuesday ’ s hearing was a bewildering endeavor .
At one point , Barrett declined to say whether voter intimidation violated federal law , which it unambiguously does .
At another , she refused to support the peaceful transition of power in the upcoming election .
She resisted efforts to discuss her personal views .
She declined to elaborate or extrapolate her professional stances as an academic .
She refused to opine on real cases or discuss hypothetical ones .
Some , if not many , of these responses are defensible under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nominees .
Indeed , it would be unethical for judicial nominees to tip their hand on deciding future cases to either Congress or the White House , especially if it was implicitly given in exchange for their confirmation .
But others are more inexplicable , and Barrett ’ s refusal to answer them underscore what a futile exercise the Supreme Court confirmation process has become .
Early in the hearing , California Senator Dianne Feinstein asked Barrett if a president could unilaterally delay the upcoming general election under federal law .
The question @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; Trump himself floated the prospect of delaying the November election over the summer .
Though such a move would obviously not be legal or constitutional , Barrett declined to say as much and said she would need to consult colleagues and hold oral arguments .
“ If I give off the cuff answers , I would basically be a legal pundit , and I don ’ t think we want judges to be legal pundits , ” she explained .
“ I think we want judges to approach cases with an open @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Senator Amy Klobuchar noted that President Donald Trump had repeatedly vowed to nominate judicial nominees who fit certain ideological criteria .
“ If I win the presidency , my judicial appointments will do the right thing unlike Bush ’ s appointee John Roberts on ObamaCare , ” he wrote on Twitter in 2016 .
He has also repeatedly pledged to choose anti-abortion Supreme Court nominees who would overturn Roe v. Wade .
“ Senator Klobuchar , I can ’ t really speak to what the president has said on Twitter , ” Barrett @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hasn ’ t privately told the White House how she would vote in potential cases , or been asked by the White House to do so .

When Klobuchar asked Barrett whether she agreed with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s famous dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case in which the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Barrett also turned elusive. “I just wanted to clarify that I had written Kanter v. Barr, and so that’s why I was talking about it,” Barrett replied, referring to a Seventh Circuit gun-rights case in which she dissented. “But since I didn’t write Shelby I can’t really talk about it. So anything I have written about or talked about, I would be happy to answer your questions.”
Even when it came to those writings and discussions, however, Barrett outlined clear limits. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley questioned Barrett at length about her decision to sign an anti-abortion ad in 2006. (She signed a similar one denouncing Roe v. Wade in 2013.) Barrett insisted that she could separate her personal views from her professional views. “I signed that almost 15 years ago in my personal capacity when I was still a private citizen, and now I’m a public official,” she told Hawley. “And so while I was free to express my private views, at that time, I don’t feel like it is appropriate for me anymore because of the canons of conduct, to express an affirmative view, at this point in time.”
Five years ago, the peaceful transfer of power was beyond dispute in American politics. Now a Supreme Court nominee won’t defend it in public.
Her resistance to offering almost any personal or professional views led to uncomfortable places. “Do you believe that every president should make a commitment, unequivocally and resolutely, to the peaceful transfer of power?” New Jersey Senator Cory Booker asked her. “Well, Senator, that seems to me to be pulling me a little bit into this question of whether the president has said that he would not leave office,” Barrett replied, “and so to the extent that this is a political controversy now, as a judge I want to stay out of it, and I don’t want to express a view.” Five years ago, the peaceful transfer of power was beyond dispute in American politics. Now a Supreme Court nominee won’t defend it in public.


newrepublic--2020-10-14--My Life as an Anti-Fascist Catfisher

My Life as an Anti-Fascist Catfisher

The following is adapted from Culture Warlords : My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin .
It ’ s nearly 3 a.m. in Ukraine , but my interlocutor hasn ’ t gone to sleep yet .
His name is David , he lives in Kiev , and he ’ s sending me videos about how to make a gun out of pipes .
He ’ s trying to flirt with me .
He ’ s Ukrainian , but he wants an American wife .
He wants to make a whites-only United States , and he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do that .
I ’ m in character as Ashlynn , and I ’ ve infiltrated the Vorherrschaft Division ( Supremacy Division ) , a chat group composed of Americans and Europeans fixated on disseminating images of terror and discussing the need for a race war now .
I ’ m using the screen name “ AryanQueen ” to say hello to the most violent racists online .
Vorherrschaft is one of several knockoffs of the widely feared white supremacist terror group Atomwaffen Division .
Atomwaffen means “ atomic weapon ” in German @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , organize primarily on the encrypted chat program Telegram , and traffic in the language of terror .
( Another example is the Rapekreig Division . )
I ’ ve decided to use a female identity in hopes of coaxing more information out of participants , and David is ready to oblige .
His screen name is “ Der Stürmer , ” named after the favorite tabloid of the Nazi Party , and he admires Hitler openly—though his truest hero is Christchurch mosque mass shooter Brenton Tarrant .
Like Tarrant himself , David @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He ’ d like to visit me in America , and to establish his bona fides , he tells me he was once part of a group called “ Cherniy Korpus ” —Black Corps—a guerrilla military group that served as a forerunner to the Ukrainian far-right militia now known as the Azov Battalion .
He tells me that he left in order to spread national socialist ideas throughout Ukraine , that he ’ s working an office job to afford ammo .
He wants a white wife with traditional ideals .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ garb and the gun he used on the front lines in the grinding Ukraine-Russia war in Donbass .
I quickly find out that he is one of the administrators of a Ukrainian-language channel I ’ ve been monitoring for just under a year .
Explicitly designed to evoke stochastic terror , it ’ s called “ Brenton Tarrant ’ s Lads.
” He shows me photos of a Ukrainian translation he ’ s made of Tarrant ’ s manifesto , “ The Great Replacement , ” and tells me he ’ s printed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ open-source intelligence website Bellingcat , which closely tracks the far right in Eastern Europe , had published , a few months before , an investigation of the translated booklet , documenting numerous selfies of men in Ukraine and Russia holding copies of the pamphlet—some reading it by the sea ; a group of men holding it up while giving Hitler salutes ; and an extremist anti-gay group that attacked marchers in Kiev ’ s Pride Parade in 2019—encouraging its members to buy copies .
The fish that had landed in my net unwittingly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aiding in the radicalization of potentially thousands of men , disseminating a document that had already inspired copycat terror attacks .
And he was proud of it .

I’ve decided to use a female identity in hopes of coaxing more information out of participants, and David is ready to oblige. His screen name is “Der Stürmer,” named after the favorite tabloid of the Nazi Party, and he admires Hitler openly—though his truest hero is Christchurch mosque mass shooter Brenton Tarrant. Like Tarrant himself, David has a preoccupation with all things American. He’d like to visit me in America, and to establish his bona fides, he tells me he was once part of a group called “Cherniy Korpus”—Black Corps—a guerrilla military group that served as a forerunner to the Ukrainian far-right militia now known as the Azov Battalion. He tells me that he left in order to spread national socialist ideas throughout Ukraine, that he’s working an office job to afford ammo. He wants a white wife with traditional ideals. He shows me some photos of his militia garb and the gun he used on the front lines in the grinding Ukraine-Russia war in Donbass. I quickly find out that he is one of the administrators of a Ukrainian-language channel I’ve been monitoring for just under a year. Explicitly designed to evoke stochastic terror, it’s called “Brenton Tarrant’s Lads.”
I’m using the screen name “AryanQueen” to say hello to the most violent racists online.
He shows me photos of a Ukrainian translation he’s made of Tarrant’s manifesto, “The Great Replacement,” and tells me he’s printed and distributed hundreds of copies. The open-source intelligence website Bellingcat, which closely tracks the far right in Eastern Europe, had published, a few months before, an investigation of the translated booklet, documenting numerous selfies of men in Ukraine and Russia holding copies of the pamphlet—some reading it by the sea; a group of men holding it up while giving Hitler salutes; and an extremist anti-gay group that attacked marchers in Kiev’s Pride Parade in 2019—encouraging its members to buy copies. The fish that had landed in my net unwittingly was surprisingly big: He was single-handedly aiding in the radicalization of potentially thousands of men, disseminating a document that had already inspired copycat terror attacks. And he was proud of it.


newrepublic--2020-10-14--This Supreme Court Was Designed to Kill Climate Policies

Charles Koch , better known for funding climate denial and efforts to kill climate policy since the 1990s , has also been a major donor to the Federalist Society that Barrett and countless other conservative jurists have cycled through .
His advocacy group Americans for Prosperity has led well-funded charges in support of all of Trump ’ s Supreme Court nominations , including Barrett .
The same donors and dark money outfits that have funded climate denial—the Searle Freedom Trust , Sarah Scaife Foundation , and Mercer Family Foundation—have given generously to the Federalist Society , too .
Right-wing donor-advised @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of bodies like the Judicial Crisis Network , which organize a flood of amicus briefs to put cases in front of the Supreme Court .
Seeded by a munitions and chemicals empire , the Olin Foundation has been central to the Federalist Society ’ s success and instrumental in backing a movement within law schools known as “ law and economics , ” to ensure that laws protect efficient markets above all else .
In a recent Yale Law Journal article , legal scholars Jedediah Britton-Purdy , David Singh Grewal , Amy Kapczynski @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a “ twentieth-century synthesis ” that “ simultaneously recognizes and embraces the fact that law makes markets , while demanding that the satisfaction of markets becomes the aim of politics.
” Efforts to overtake economics with right-wing ideas proceeded parallel to efforts to realize those ideas through the law .
The University of Chicago , George Mason University , and the University of Virginia , where Barrett taught , are some of the top examples of universities with both law schools and economics departments reflecting the “ free market ” ideology of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Buchanan .
With ample funding , they created positions for right-wing legal scholars and programs that served as feeders to prestigious clerkships .
( The Olin Foundation , for example , funded the fellowship position Barrett occupied at the George Washington University Law School . )
Right-wing donors sponsored seminars and training aimed both at changing the ideological makeup of law schools and filling the ranks of the judiciary branch with friendly faces .
A paper last year from economists Elliott Ash , Daniel Chen , and Suresh Naidu found that widely attended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ starting in 1976 and funded by the Olin Foundation and corporations including Standard Oil of Ohio and U.S. Steel—substantively pushed judges ’ rulings to the right .
Those who attended were less likely to rule in favor of union and environmental regulations ; the paper ’ s authors attributed between 28 and 42 percent of the rise in judicial conservatism to the seminars alone .
Law and economics has now become a core piece of the curriculum taught to first-year law students across the country , a key component of how lawyers are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ legal questions , including on climate and the environment .
A growing number of the field ’ s members are trying to push against that trend .
Corinne Blalock is the executive director of the Law and Political Economy Project , a network of law students , lawyers , and law professors looking to challenge law and economics ’ hegemony and reimagine the role of the courts in a democratic society .
Well-meaning law students looking to have a positive impact on the world , she explains , are now largely guided toward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some sense with the downstream effects of rules written in more closed fields where law and economics dominates .
Helping interpret or even write those rules upstream , though , is just as important as defending against their effects .
“ You wouldn ’ t have to have a radical bankruptcy professor at your school .
ConLaw and poverty law and clinics are where we talk about justice .
One thing we ’ re trying to push back on is this idea that going into bankruptcy isn ’ t about social justice , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the courts appealing venues for the right is what can make them a less promising venue for progressives , and climate activists in particular .
The right ’ s judicial activism has origins in the backlash to the New Deal , wherein generations of business interests continually argued that the Roosevelt administration—bolstered by strong legislative majorities—overstepped the bounds of the Constitution .
True to its origins , then , shifting the courts right has been a means of insulating the rules that govern the economy from majority rule .
As with legal challenges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Power Plan , courts now often check elected governments ’ ability to write policy , in practice concretizing existing power imbalances or even returning to past eras when those imbalances were more stark .

Charles Koch, better known for funding climate denial and efforts to kill climate policy since the 1990s, has also been a major donor to the Federalist Society, which Barrett and countless other conservative jurists have cycled through. His advocacy group Americans for Prosperity has led well-funded charges in support of all of Trump’s Supreme Court nominations, including Barrett. The same donors and dark money outfits that have funded climate denial—the Searle Freedom Trust, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Mercer Family Foundation—have given generously to the Federalist Society, too. Right-wing donor-advised fund DonorsTrust has been a major benefactor of bodies like the Judicial Crisis Network, which organize a flood of amicus briefs to put cases in front of the Supreme Court. Seeded by a munitions and chemicals empire, the Olin Foundation has been central to the Federalist Society’s success and instrumental in backing a movement within law schools known as “law and economics,” to ensure that laws protect efficient markets above all else. In a recent Yale Law Journal article, legal scholars Jedediah Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, and K. Sabeel Rahman describe this as a “twentieth-century synthesis” that “simultaneously recognizes and embraces the fact that law makes markets, while demanding that the satisfaction of markets becomes the aim of politics.”
Efforts to overtake economics with right-wing ideas proceeded parallel to efforts to realize those ideas through the law. The University of Chicago, George Mason University, and the University of Virginia, where Barrett taught, are some of the top examples of universities with both law schools and economics departments reflecting the “free market” ideology of men like Friedreich Hayek and James M. Buchanan. With ample funding, they created positions for right-wing legal scholars and programs that served as feeders to prestigious clerkships. (The Olin Foundation, for example, funded the fellowship position Barrett occupied at the George Washington University Law School.) Right-wing donors sponsored seminars and training aimed both at changing the ideological makeup of law schools and filling the ranks of the judiciary branch with friendly faces. A paper last year from economists Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu found that widely attended “Manne Seminars”—two-to-three-week boot camps starting in 1976 and funded by the Olin Foundation and corporations including Standard Oil of Ohio and U.S. Steel—substantively pushed judges’ rulings to the right. Those who attended were less likely to rule in favor of union and environmental regulations; the paper’s authors attributed between 28 and 42 percent of the rise in judicial conservatism to the seminars alone.
Law and economics has now become a core piece of the curriculum taught to first-year law students across the country, a key component of how lawyers are taught to interpret a wide range of legal questions, including on climate and the environment. A growing number of the field’s members are trying to push against that trend. Corinne Blalock is the executive director of the Law and Political Economy Project, a network of law students, lawyers, and law professors looking to challenge law and economics’ hegemony and reimagine the role of the courts in a democratic society. Well-meaning law students looking to have a positive impact on the world, she explains, are now largely guided toward public interest law, which deals in some sense with the downstream effects of rules written in more closed fields where law and economics dominates. Helping interpret or even write those rules upstream, though, is just as important as defending against their effects. “You wouldn’t have to have a radical bankruptcy professor at your school. ConLaw and poverty law and clinics are where we talk about justice. One thing we’re trying to push back on is this idea that going into bankruptcy isn’t about social justice,” Blalock tells me.


newrepublic--2020-10-14--Hunter Biden and the Hunt for a New “Hillary’s Emails”

With less than three weeks to go until the election , The New York Post published what it apparently thought would be a bombshell report .
The tabloid newspaper claims it obtained a cache of emails by Hunter Biden , the Democratic nominee ’ s controversial son , including one that suggests the younger Biden arranged a meeting between his father and a Ukrainian oligarch with whom Hunter had a business relationship .
Biden has previously denied discussing his son ’ s business dealings while in office .
The story is less persuasive than its full-court-press treatment indicated .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is murky , at best ; they also happen to run straight through some of President Donald Trump ’ s closest allies and fixers .
The Biden campaign directly denied that any such meeting took place , citing official schedules from the time period in question .
If nothing else , the Post story serves as a dry run for processing any other October surprises that the Trump campaign may try to launch out of desperation .
Think of it as a trial balloon for a sequel to the follies of four years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tranche of controversial emails that are apparently still giving off heat , and an altered path for the nation—except this time , the old adage about farce following tragedy seems to apply .
According to the Post , this new batch of emails is purported to have come from a copy of a laptop hard drive obtained by an unnamed Delaware computer-repair store in April 2019 .
The Post claims the laptop includes intimate photos and videos of Hunter Biden , in addition to the purported emails .
( It published a photo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it attributes to the copy . )
The Post also recounts that the store owner no longer has possession of the laptop because FBI agents confiscated it after he alerted them to its apparent existence .
It ’ s worth noting at this point , however , that the Post did not confirm whether the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden at all .
“ The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client , ” the Post claims .
“ The shop owner couldn ’ t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation , named after Hunter ’ s late brother and former Delaware attorney general.
” How did the Post learn about the laptop at all ?
According to its own report , the owner made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Robert Costello , the attorney for Trump confidant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ former adviser to President Trump , told the Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided the Post with a copy of it on Sunday , ” the Post said .
The report does not mention that federal agents arrested Bannon for his role in an alleged scheme to defraud Trump supporters in August .

In sum, the Post says it has a copy of a hard drive purportedly from a computer that may or may not have belonged to Hunter Biden. The Post says it learned about and obtained the hard drive copy from two of President Donald Trump’s closest political allies roughly three weeks before the November election. And the Post says the contents of that copy include what appear to be damaging emails about Joe Biden, who currently leads in the polls against Trump by a significant margin. Those purported emails conveniently seem to support a series of political attacks made by Trump, Giuliani, and their associates over the past two years.
If this was supposed to be some sort of October surprise, it failed. The Biden campaign, for its part, said that no such meeting between him and the oligarch took place. Mainstream news outlets shied away from the story, likely because of its murky sourcing and speculative assertions. And when The Daily Beast interviewed the store owner on Wednesday, after the Post’s report came out, the man gave a series of confused and contradictory answers about how he obtained the purported material. According to the Beast, he also claimed he couldn’t tell who dropped off the laptop in question because of an unspecified medical condition. (In the hours since the Post published its account, the original controversy had been subsumed within a meta-controversy: the decision of Facebook, and later Twitter, to throttle the dissemination of the story on the grounds that it was disinformation.)
We’ve been here before. Trump dispatched Giuliani to Europe last year in an effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens and Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine. At the same time, the president directly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy to aid Giuliani’s efforts to smear his likely opponent in this year’s election. Among Trump’s coercive tools at the time was $400 million in congressionally approved military aid for Ukraine’s fight against Russian-backed insurgents in its eastern provinces. The White House quietly withheld the aid throughout last summer, while Trump and his allies pushed Zelinskiy to publicly accuse Biden of corruption.


newrepublic--2020-10-14--Supreme Court Justices Are Politicians, Too

If you have been watching Amy Coney Barrett ’ s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for insight into how the nation ’ s highest court will interpret the law once she sits on the bench , you should shut them off now .
It is a nominee ’ s job to obfuscate about her beliefs and intentions , the Republicans ’ job to pretend they admire her for her prudence , not her utility to their movement , and the Democrats ’ job … well , no one , least of all they , can agree on what their job actually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the intelligence of any reasonably well-informed viewer .
We won ’ t get an answer to what Amy Coney Barrett wants , so maybe we can look for an answer to the question of why the Republicans want Amy Coney Barrett .
Two Politico stories published last week sum up the stakes of this particular presidential campaign .
The first asked whether Democrats were “ losing the battle over voter suppression , ” describing their efforts to expand ballot access , roll back voter ID laws , limit targeted misinformation campaigns , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by mail .
Reporter Maya King wrote that the Democratic effort to defend ballot access for their Black and Latino supporters involves “ a combination of lawsuits to prevent disenfranchisement and a messaging blitz ” to educate voters on how to ensure that their votes are correctly cast and counted .
Of course , messaging can only go so far to counter , for example , understaffed polling places that open late , broken voting machines , or a national slowdown at the post office .
For that , Democrats are going to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been filed this year than in the last two decades , according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project , which is tracking the cases.
” ( You really do have to feel some sympathy for everyone at the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project .
At this particular moment , it seems a bit like working for the Healthy Crowded Basement Spitting Contests Project . )

In her article, King ably noted the successes and setbacks Democrats have seen in courts across the country. But for some insight into how their efforts to combat voter suppression could play out, it helps to read the other Politico story I mentioned. That one, by Josh Gerstein, was headlined: “The murky legal concept that could swing the election.”
That concept is something called the “Purcell principle,” based on a term coined by law professor Rick Hasen in 2016. The principle, as articulated by Gerstein, is that “federal judges should generally refrain from causing confusion by changing voting rules in the lead-up to an election.” The key word there is “generally.” Because the actual Purcell principle is that judges should do so only so long as it leads to outcomes the judges prefer.
The principle is useful primarily as a reminder of how skilled conservative judges and lawyers are at inventing neutral-sounding terms for their political maneuvering. In principle, Purcell is merely an acknowledgment that state officials know better how to conduct elections in their states than federal judges. In practice, whenever lower federal courts rule that certain barriers to voting are unfair or unreasonable and should be lifted, most of the higher court’s conservatives decide to use the Purcell principle as a rationale to reimpose those barriers. (The principle, as Gerstein details at length, is currently being tested in the Supreme Court, where the eight sitting justices are weighing whether to reverse a Pennsylvania State Supreme Court decision requiring that ballots mailed by Election Day still be counted, even if they arrive after Election Day. The supposedly federalist nature of the “Purcell principle,” along with the fact that it is supposed to address only last-minute rules changes, would conveniently evaporate if the court decided to overturn a state-level court decision made nearly a month ago.)


newrepublic--2020-10-14--America’s Next Top Town Halls Are No Way to Pick a President

One of the few lessons that could be drawn from the first debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden , which occurred approximately 60 years ago , was that the traditional head-to-head format quickly becomes farcical if one of the heads won ’ t shut their trap .
It ’ s hardly unusual for warring candidates to disrespect the rules and interrupt one another , but Trump took that to zany new levels in his first tilt with Biden and made it essentially impossible for anything resembling a “ debate ” to occur .
It was therefore a relief @ @ @ @ @ @ @ diagnosis and subsequent refusal to learn how to use Zoom would prevent the next debate from happening .
But such respites have been typically short-lived in this election cycle and , according to today ’ s news , the two candidates will each participate in dueling town hall events—with Trump on NBC and Biden on ABC , on Thursday night , at the same time .
The process that led to this pick-your-poison moment carries the strong scent of superfluousness .
After all , there was very little left unsaid , unaired , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the first debate ; even those resolutely—and bafflingly—undecided voters have scant morsels to chew on at this point if they ’ re still in need of the one big thing that will settle their raging internal debate .
If you are one of those special brains who still can ’ t pick between The Worst Man Ever and Not The Worst Man Ever , you could at least learn from the first debate that The Worst Man Ever is unhinged .
( To be this person , you would have to have missed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have accumulated over the years . )
Without the frisson of face-to-face confrontation , what ’ s the point of this town-hall showdown ?
That Biden signed up to do a town hall is reflective of the fact that Trump , in opting out of the debate , left him no other choice than to be available on that day for some exercise in journalistic grilling .
All things being equal , Biden would have done the virtual debate that Trump necessitated by getting infected with a deadly disease .
Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a competing town hall event could have been forestalled if he ’ d just agreed to get on a camera in a separate room with Biden for a virtual debate .
As it stands , we ended up in separate rooms on separate cameras anyway .
It ’ s very possible that at the end of the town halls we ’ ll have learned more about the media than we ’ ll have fresh material to evaluate the candidates .
Perhaps the questions asked by voters at the town hall events will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wallace or Susan Page , who moderated the slightly less unhinged vice presidential debate .
Of course , even these town hall questions will be screened and picked by the network , so there ’ s nothing that guarantees it will compare well to the prior debates .
It is certainly hard , if not impossible , for these voter-questioners to badger the candidates into actually answering their questions , in the way one often wishes a debate moderator would , rather than let moments pass and interrogations go unanswered .
In practice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ members of the media to redirect a voter ’ s inquiry at a town hall , or bigfoot them by pushing follow-up questions in a different , unintended direction .
If ABC News wants to spend two hours asking Joe Biden if he ’ d pack the Supreme Court in a million different ways , it ’ ll find a way to do it , regardless of whether there ’ s authentic public interest in the inquiry .
The salient point is that come Friday morning , what transpired the night before isn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the grand scheme of things .
Joe Biden and Donald Trump will have stood in separate rooms , in separate states , uttering familiar talking points .
But presidential debates exist for the specific purpose of allowing viewers to gauge the candidates ’ ability to cope with each others ’ arguments , ostensibly as a small-bore test of their overall presidential fitness—a means to answer that age-old question , “ If Joe Biden can ’ t cope with Donald Trump ’ s tax plan then how will he handle INSERT NAME OF @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presidential mettle-testing has been answered before the town halls air : Trump chickened out , and Biden will benefit by avoiding a potentially more grueling test .

One of the few lessons that could be drawn from the first debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which occurred approximately 60 years ago, was that the traditional head-to-head format quickly becomes farcical if one of the heads won’t shut their trap. It’s hardly unusual for warring candidates to disrespect the rules and interrupt one another, but Trump took that to zany new levels in his first tilt with Biden and made it essentially impossible for anything resembling a “debate” to occur. It was therefore a relief to learn that Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis and subsequent refusal to learn how to use Zoom would prevent the next debate from happening. But such respites have been typically short-lived in this election cycle and, according to today’s news, the two candidates will each participate in dueling town hall events—with Trump on NBC and Biden on ABC, on Thursday night, at the same time.
The process that led to this pick-your-poison moment carries the strong scent of superfluousness. After all, there was very little left unsaid, unaired, or unlearned about the two candidates after the first debate; even those resolutely—and bafflingly—undecided voters have scant morsels to chew on at this point if they’re still in need of the one big thing that will settle their raging internal debate. If you are one of those special brains who still can’t pick between The Worst Man Ever and Not The Worst Man Ever, you could at least learn from the first debate that The Worst Man Ever is unhinged. (To be this person, you would have to have missed the many clues on this point that have accumulated over the years.)