vox--2020-12-15--Why Trump’s attempt to steal the election was too much even for Republican judges

On Monday , members of the Electoral College formally cast their votes for the next president .
Though these votes will not be officially counted until January 6 , when Congress meets to formally declare the winner of the presidential election , there ’ s not a lot of suspense here .
President-elect Joe Biden won enough states to carry 306 electoral votes and the presidency .
The dog that did not bark throughout this interminable post-election period is that the judiciary , despite being controlled by Republicans at the federal level , left Biden ’ s victory untouched .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ superlawyer who oversaw much of his party ’ s efforts to preserve Biden ’ s win , Trump and his allies filed at least 60 post-election lawsuits .
They ’ ve lost 59 of these cases , and their one victory involved such a minor matter that it had little impact on the final vote tallies .
If you ’ re the sort of person who is inclined to trust Donald Trump , you ’ re probably very surprised by these developments .
After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fill Ginsburg ’ s seat with someone who would help him steal the election .
The election , Trump claimed , “ will end up in the Supreme Court , and I think it ’ s very important that we have nine Justices.
” The Court did hand down several pre-election decisions that likely diminished Biden ’ s vote count around the margins by making it harder for voters to cast a ballot by mail ( mail-in voters were especially likely to support Biden over Trump ) .
And before the election , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flank endorsed radical doctrinal changes that would have made it easier for Trump to steal a closer election .
But the justices have largely stayed away from post-election lawsuits .
A much-hyped case seeking to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying Biden ’ s victory ended in a one-sentence order telling Trump ’ s allies to go pound sand .
A similar case brought by the state of Texas was denied because “ Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.
” So what ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump so wrong about his chances of seizing power by convincing the courts to overturn the election ?
The answer is that Trump ’ s post-election lawsuits failed for a variety of interlocking reasons .
First , Trump and his allies just didn ’ t have very good legal arguments .
In some cases , they brought penny-ante claims that couldn ’ t have changed the result of the election even if they prevailed .
In others , they made factual claims that relied entirely on speculation — or even relied on conspiracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some cases , Trump or his allies made legal arguments that were the exact opposite of the arguments they made in other cases .
There are no good legal arguments that could have justified tossing out the election results , and the clownishness of Trump ’ s legal strategy only drew attention to the weakness of his claims .
To be sure , judges are not immune to motivated reasoning , and it ’ s easy to find cases where highly partisan judges reached dubious conclusions that benefited their political party .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s would-be allies on the judiciary very little to work with if they hoped to craft a pro-Trump opinion that didn ’ t sound ridiculous .
There are judges who place a thumb on the scales of justice , but even the most partisan judge can ’ t make a mouse weigh more than an elephant .
Second , Biden won a commanding victory over Trump .
The president-elect won by a 4.5 percentage point margin , the largest victory since Barack Obama ’ s landslide in 2008 , and the second-largest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Biden won 306 electoral votes , meaning that partisan judges would have had to overturn the results in three states to steal the election for Trump .
In many of the pivotal states , Biden ’ s margins were harrowingly close — such as the tipping-point state of Wisconsin , which Biden won by only about 20,000 votes .
But that ’ s many times more than the 537 votes that separated Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore when the Supreme Court threw the election to Bush in 2000 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ who might have been inclined to swing the election to Trump if it had been closer did not lay the groundwork for such a move .
A couple of pre-election rulings certainly sparked concern from many legal observers : Shortly before the election , several justices endorsed a theory that could have forced a handful of key states to toss out certain late-arriving ballots — even though those ballots were lawfully cast under existing election rules .
But in the states that decided the election , Biden won by comfortable enough margins that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ late-arriving ballots .
Trump reshaped the Supreme Court in his four years , but the kind of radical break from existing election law that could have overturned the results takes years of judicial labor , and it takes a majority determined to transform the law .
Though Chief Justice John Roberts has authored several important decisions diminishing voting rights , and he ’ s joined several others , he has recently signaled that he thinks his more conservative colleagues are going too far .
Meanwhile , conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Roberts ’ s cold feet and Barrett ’ s late arrival matter because the law is an iterative process .
A conservative majority typically moves the law to the right in incremental steps — handing down one decision that may limit voting rights around the margins , and then citing that decision in a future case to limit voting rights even more .
Over time , a determined majority can bring about revolutionary change , but that process typically takes years .
The Court ’ s current majority simply hasn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( if it were so inclined ) for the kind of radical decisions that could have handed Trump a second term .
Let ’ s examine each of these factors in turn .
In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights , Harvard Law professor Michael Klarman lays out a useful framework for understanding how politics shapes judicial decision-making .
Such decision-making , he writes , “ involves a combination of legal and political factors , ” and “ when the law is clear , judges will generally follow it , unless they have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In cases where the law is “ indeterminate , ” by contrast , judges will generally make political choices because they have nothing else to go on .
But if existing law requires a particular outcome , only the most political judges are likely to disregard it .
One sign that the law was not on Trump ’ s side is that the sort of high-powered Republican lawyers who would ordinarily represent a GOP president in a case of national importance largely sat out the post-election litigation .
Instead , Trump was represented @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hold a press conference in the parking lot of a landscaping company .
At one court hearing , Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani admitted that he did not understand the term “ strict scrutiny , ” a basic legal term that is taught to all lawyers during their first semester of constitutional law .
And Giuliani was only in court in the first place after several of the Trump campaign ’ s lawyers abruptly withdrew from a case .
As it turned out , many of Trump ’ s lawsuits involved small-potatoes claims that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if Trump did prevail .
Or they involved speculative claims of wrongdoing based on minimum evidence , or some combination of the two .
To give one example , a suit filed by the Trump campaign in Georgia alleged that one of the campaign ’ s poll watchers observed an election worker place a stack of 53 ballots on a table .
The poll watcher then left the room , but when he came back , the stack of ballots was gone .
And this was somehow evidence that the state might be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fact that there are any number of legitimate explanations for why these 53 ballots were moved , Biden won Georgia by nearly 12,000 votes .
So this small stack of ballots wouldn ’ t have changed the result even if they were improperly counted .
In other cases , the Trump campaign alleged minor acts of misconduct by election officials , and then demanded ridiculous remedies for these minor acts ( acts , it ’ s worth noting , that often were not even illegal ) .
Consider , for example , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the case for which Giuliani made his disastrous court appearance .
The Trump campaign claimed that some Pennsylvania counties told voters who cast defective ballots how to fix them , while other counties did not .
They also accused election officials of not giving the Trump campaign ’ s poll watchers sufficient access to the ballot-counting process .
For these minor alleged violations , the campaign sought what Judge Stephanos Bibas , a Trump appointee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit , described as “ breathtaking relief @ @ @ @ @ @ @ results or else declaring the election results defective and ordering the Pennsylvania General Assembly , not the voters , to choose Pennsylvania ’ s presidential electors.
” That ’ s like if your neighbor allows one of her trees to encroach on your property , and so you seek a court order requiring the entire neighborhood to be burned to the ground .
In any event , this combination of weak legal arguments and demands for outlandish relief left even the most partisan Republican judges with very little to work with .
A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Trump ’ s favor simply as a matter of arbitrary judicial fiat , but it would have been nearly impossible for such a judge to disguise the fact that they were handing down a political decision .
So , while judges are political actors and politics frequently shapes judicial decisions , the law still matters .
And even when judges do make political calculations , their political interests do not necessarily align with those of the leader of their political party .
Compared to a sitting president who is literally trying to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ look like paragons of the rule of law — even if they are doing nothing more than rejecting frivolous lawsuits .
And that perception both enhances the prestige of the judiciary and helps inoculate judges against claims that they are too political .
As Maya Sen , a professor at Harvard ’ s Kennedy School who studies the judiciary , told me , by rejecting Trump ’ s lawsuits , “ conservative judges are coming out looking like big heroes on this.
” They benefit from fawning media coverage that “ declares that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the courts are the institutional bulwark that is saving democracy.
” Biden ’ s victory is too big to be overturned A big reason many Democrats feared that Republicans on the Supreme Court might interfere with an election and award the presidency to the GOP is because , in 2000 , Republicans on the Supreme Court interfered with an election and awarded the presidency to the GOP .
But the facts underlying Bush v. Gore ( 2000 ) , the case that installed George W. Bush as president , are also very different @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In 2000 , the winner of the election hinged on which candidate won a single state : Florida .
Initial tallies , moreover , showed Bush leading Democrat Al Gore in that state by just 1,784 votes — though that lead had shrunk to 537 votes when the Bush decision effectively ended a recount of Florida ’ s votes .
In 2020 , by contrast , Biden won enough states that Trump would have had to flip at least three of them to win .
And none of those states were anywhere @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2000 .
The closest state that Biden won in 2020 , at least in terms of the number of votes separating him and Trump , appears to be Arizona .
But Biden still beat Trump by over 10,000 votes in Arizona .
The fact that Biden leads in so many states creates a kind of prisoner ’ s dilemma for judges who may want to throw the election to Trump .
Suppose , for example , that judges in Pennsylvania , Georgia , and Arizona all wanted to overturn the election results in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in concert , then Trump would have 279 electoral votes and would win the presidency , but if only one or two states flipped , then the judges who flipped those states would have gone out on a tremendously partisan limb for nothing .
According to Sen , research shows that judges typically care a great deal about their reputation within the legal profession .
A judge who overturned an election would risk burning that reputation to the ground .
Perhaps a sufficiently partisan judge would be willing to take this reputational hit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an outcome they prefer , but why light your good name on fire so that Joe Biden can win the Electoral College by a slightly smaller margin ?
The Supreme Court hasn ’ t laid the groundwork for a decision overturning Biden ’ s victory The Supreme Court ’ s conservative majority was fairly hostile to voting rights even before Justice Ginsburg ’ s death .
And it ’ s likely grown only more hostile now that the liberal Ginsburg has been replaced by the conservative Barrett .
Yet while the Roberts Court @ @ @ @ @ @ @ diminishing voting rights , none of these decisions opened the door to the kind of sweeping , post-election attack Trump has engaged in .
Many of the Roberts Court ’ s voting rights decisions have allowed states to erect obstacles between voters and the franchise .
The Court ’ s decisions in Shelby County v. Holder ( 2013 ) and Abbott v. Perez ( 2018 ) , for example , dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act , which prevents states from enacting election laws that discriminate on the basis of race .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ decisions by enacting laws that make it harder for voters to cast a ballot .
As former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams explains , these laws are often designed to make voter suppression look like “ administrative errors ” or “ user error.
” Think of voter ID laws , which disenfranchise voters who lack a photo ID , or state election procedures that allocate more voting machines to white neighborhoods than to Black neighborhoods .
These sorts of policies do not strip away the right to vote entirely — a person impacted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an ID or wait in an hours-long line if they are determined to vote — but they do deter voters who may lack the means or the patience to do so .
In 2020 , however , voters were unusually motivated to turn out .
Biden won over 81 million votes , more than any candidate in American history .
Many states also saw enormous spikes in absentee voting due to fears that voters could become infected with Covid-19 while waiting in line on Election Day .
Decisions like Shelby County and Perez @ @ @ @ @ @ @ easier for states to place hurdles between voters and the polls .
Once voters clear those hurdles and cast their ballot , however , the Roberts Court ’ s previous decisions haven ’ t laid the groundwork for lower courts to toss out tens of thousands of ballots and award the election to the losing candidate .
Similarly , in the lead-up to the 2020 election , at least four members of the Court embraced a theory known as the “ independent state legislature doctrine.
” Briefly , this doctrine declares that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only the state legislature — is allowed to decide how states conduct federal elections .
As Justice Neil Gorsuch put it in a recent opinion , “ the Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges , not state judges , not state governors , not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.
” Before the 2020 election , the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that certain absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day may be counted .
Under the independent state legislature doctrine , however , this state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because the state supreme court isn ’ t the state legislature and therefore isn ’ t allowed to decide how Pennsylvania conducts its election .
Several members of the US Supreme Court warned before the election that they might order these late-arriving ballots tossed out after the election is over .
In the end , however , none of this mattered — at least to the outcome of the 2020 election — because Biden won Pennsylvania by a large enough margin that these late-arriving ballots didn ’ t matter .
American democracy is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will be taking up residence at the White House next month is not a reason to heave a sigh of relief and assume that American democracy is safe .
A total of 126 Republican members of Congress — a majority of the House GOP caucus — backed a frivolous lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden ’ s victory and hand the election to Trump .
The idea that presidential elections only count if a Republican wins is now shockingly normalized within the GOP .
Many Republicans who share this disdain for democracy , moreover @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them are likely to push legislation that will make it harder to vote in their states — some Georgia Republicans are already calling for legislation banning ballot drop boxes and limiting who is allowed to vote by mail — and to enact rigid gerrymanders seeking to lock the GOP into power .
And the courts are likely to bless such efforts .
The embrace of the independent state legislature doctrine by four members of the Court may have profound implications for future elections if Barrett provides the fifth vote to enshrine this doctrine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s conservative majority use the doctrine to eliminate state governors ’ power to veto election laws ?
Or eliminate state courts ’ ability to enforce their state constitution ’ s voting rights protections ?
If that happens , that means that in states like Pennsylvania , Michigan , and Wisconsin , which have Republican legislatures and Democratic governors , the governor could lose their power to veto voter suppression laws or gerrymandered congressional maps .
Worse , the Constitution permits state legislatures to decide how members of the Electoral College are chosen in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ uses a popular election to choose electors .
But state legislatures could conceivably vote to simply gift their electors to the Republican candidate — and if the independent state legislature doctrine becomes the law of the land , neither Democratic governors nor state courts may be able to stop such a proposal from becoming law .
As of now , it ’ s unclear whether the Court will take the independent state legislature doctrine to such a radical extreme .
Gorsuch , after all , wrote that state legislatures “ bear primary responsibility @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the word “ primary ” suggests that he may still allow state governors or state courts to play some limited role in shaping state election rules .
At the very least , however , Democratic governors in several key states are likely to have a much weaker hand to play against Republican legislatures .
Meanwhile , a case pending before the Supreme Court could potentially dismantle what remains of the Voting Rights Act , ending robust safeguards against racist voting laws and allowing states to target Black and brown communities that overwhelmingly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mentioned above , the law is an iterative process .
Each Supreme Court decision limiting voting rights becomes a precedent that can be cited to justify additional limits .
We honestly can not know what sort of attacks on voting rights will come before the Court in a few years , after the Court ’ s new majority has handed down its first round of voting rights decisions .
But there is reason to worry given the conservative majority ’ s record on the issue .
In a high-turnout election , Republican voter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ closing down polling places in Black neighborhoods or restricting who is allowed to vote by mail — matter less than they do in an ordinary election .
But Democrats won ’ t always get to run against a galvanizing figure such as Donald Trump .
By not overturning an election that Biden won by more than 7 million votes , the courts did the least they could possibly do to respect democracy .
The fact is that Trump asked the courts to do too much , too fast , in an election that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The courts held steady , but the fact that the judiciary decided not to join a lawless attack on the 2020 election is no reason for celebration .
Biden may have won the presidency , but the future of democracy in the United States still looks grim .

Well, it’s done.
On Monday, members of the Electoral College formally cast their votes for the next president. Though these votes will not be officially counted until January 6, when Congress meets to formally declare the winner of the presidential election, there’s not a lot of suspense here. President-elect Joe Biden won enough states to carry 306 electoral votes and the presidency.
The dog that did not bark throughout this interminable post-election period is that the judiciary, despite being controlled by Republicans at the federal level, left Biden’s victory untouched. According to Marc Elias, the Democratic superlawyer who oversaw much of his party’s efforts to preserve Biden’s win, Trump and his allies filed at least 60 post-election lawsuits. They’ve lost 59 of these cases, and their one victory involved such a minor matter that it had little impact on the final vote tallies.
If you’re the sort of person who is inclined to trust Donald Trump, you’re probably very surprised by these developments. After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, Trump strongly implied that he would fill Ginsburg’s seat with someone who would help him steal the election. The election, Trump claimed, “will end up in the Supreme Court, and I think it’s very important that we have nine Justices.”
The Court did hand down several pre-election decisions that likely diminished Biden’s vote count around the margins by making it harder for voters to cast a ballot by mail (mail-in voters were especially likely to support Biden over Trump). And before the election, much of the Court’s right flank endorsed radical doctrinal changes that would have made it easier for Trump to steal a closer election. But the justices have largely stayed away from post-election lawsuits.
A much-hyped case seeking to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying Biden’s victory ended in a one-sentence order telling Trump’s allies to go pound sand. A similar case brought by the state of Texas was denied because “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”
So what’s going on here? Why was Trump so wrong about his chances of seizing power by convincing the courts to overturn the election?
The answer is that Trump’s post-election lawsuits failed for a variety of interlocking reasons.
First, Trump and his allies just didn’t have very good legal arguments. In some cases, they brought penny-ante claims that couldn’t have changed the result of the election even if they prevailed. In others, they made factual claims that relied entirely on speculation — or even relied on conspiracy theories incubated on social media. In some cases, Trump or his allies made legal arguments that were the exact opposite of the arguments they made in other cases. There are no good legal arguments that could have justified tossing out the election results, and the clownishness of Trump’s legal strategy only drew attention to the weakness of his claims.
To be sure, judges are not immune to motivated reasoning, and it’s easy to find cases where highly partisan judges reached dubious conclusions that benefited their political party. But Trump’s lawyers gave the president’s would-be allies on the judiciary very little to work with if they hoped to craft a pro-Trump opinion that didn’t sound ridiculous. There are judges who place a thumb on the scales of justice, but even the most partisan judge can’t make a mouse weigh more than an elephant.
Second, Biden won a commanding victory over Trump. The president-elect won by a 4.5 percentage point margin, the largest victory since Barack Obama’s landslide in 2008, and the second-largest victory of the 21st century. Significantly, Biden won 306 electoral votes, meaning that partisan judges would have had to overturn the results in three states to steal the election for Trump.
In many of the pivotal states, Biden’s margins were harrowingly close — such as the tipping-point state of Wisconsin, which Biden won by only about 20,000 votes. But that’s many times more than the 537 votes that separated Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore when the Supreme Court threw the election to Bush in 2000.
Finally, members of the Supreme Court who might have been inclined to swing the election to Trump if it had been closer did not lay the groundwork for such a move. A couple of pre-election rulings certainly sparked concern from many legal observers: Shortly before the election, several justices endorsed a theory that could have forced a handful of key states to toss out certain late-arriving ballots — even though those ballots were lawfully cast under existing election rules. But in the states that decided the election, Biden won by comfortable enough margins that his victory was assured even without these late-arriving ballots.
Trump reshaped the Supreme Court in his four years, but the kind of radical break from existing election law that could have overturned the results takes years of judicial labor, and it takes a majority determined to transform the law. Though Chief Justice John Roberts has authored several important decisions diminishing voting rights, and he’s joined several others, he has recently signaled that he thinks his more conservative colleagues are going too far. Meanwhile, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court just a week before the election.
Roberts’s cold feet and Barrett’s late arrival matter because the law is an iterative process. A conservative majority typically moves the law to the right in incremental steps — handing down one decision that may limit voting rights around the margins, and then citing that decision in a future case to limit voting rights even more. Over time, a determined majority can bring about revolutionary change, but that process typically takes years. The Court’s current majority simply hasn’t had enough time to lay the groundwork (if it were so inclined) for the kind of radical decisions that could have handed Trump a second term.
Let’s examine each of these factors in turn.
Trump’s legal arguments are abysmally weak
In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Harvard Law professor Michael Klarman lays out a useful framework for understanding how politics shapes judicial decision-making. Such decision-making, he writes, “involves a combination of legal and political factors,” and “when the law is clear, judges will generally follow it, unless they have very strong preferences to the contrary.” In cases where the law is “indeterminate,” by contrast, judges will generally make political choices because they have nothing else to go on. But if existing law requires a particular outcome, only the most political judges are likely to disregard it.
One sign that the law was not on Trump’s side is that the sort of high-powered Republican lawyers who would ordinarily represent a GOP president in a case of national importance largely sat out the post-election litigation. Instead, Trump was represented by the sort of lawyers who would hold a press conference in the parking lot of a landscaping company. At one court hearing, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani admitted that he did not understand the term “strict scrutiny,” a basic legal term that is taught to all lawyers during their first semester of constitutional law. And Giuliani was only in court in the first place after several of the Trump campaign’s lawyers abruptly withdrew from a case.
As it turned out, many of Trump’s lawsuits involved small-potatoes claims that wouldn’t matter very much even if Trump did prevail. Or they involved speculative claims of wrongdoing based on minimum evidence, or some combination of the two.
To give one example, a suit filed by the Trump campaign in Georgia alleged that one of the campaign’s poll watchers observed an election worker place a stack of 53 ballots on a table. The poll watcher then left the room, but when he came back, the stack of ballots was gone. And this was somehow evidence that the state might be improperly counting ballots.
Even setting aside the fact that there are any number of legitimate explanations for why these 53 ballots were moved, Biden won Georgia by nearly 12,000 votes. So this small stack of ballots wouldn’t have changed the result even if they were improperly counted.
In other cases, the Trump campaign alleged minor acts of misconduct by election officials, and then demanded ridiculous remedies for these minor acts (acts, it’s worth noting, that often were not even illegal).
Consider, for example, Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar, the case for which Giuliani made his disastrous court appearance. The Trump campaign claimed that some Pennsylvania counties told voters who cast defective ballots how to fix them, while other counties did not. They also accused election officials of not giving the Trump campaign’s poll watchers sufficient access to the ballot-counting process.
For these minor alleged violations, the campaign sought what Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, described as “breathtaking relief: barring the Commonwealth from certifying its results or else declaring the election results defective and ordering the Pennsylvania General Assembly, not the voters, to choose Pennsylvania’s presidential electors.”
That’s like if your neighbor allows one of her trees to encroach on your property, and so you seek a court order requiring the entire neighborhood to be burned to the ground.
In any event, this combination of weak legal arguments and demands for outlandish relief left even the most partisan Republican judges with very little to work with. A politically motivated judge conceivably could have ruled in Trump’s favor simply as a matter of arbitrary judicial fiat, but it would have been nearly impossible for such a judge to disguise the fact that they were handing down a political decision.
So, while judges are political actors and politics frequently shapes judicial decisions, the law still matters. And even when judges do make political calculations, their political interests do not necessarily align with those of the leader of their political party.
Compared to a sitting president who is literally trying to depose a lawfully elected government, judges look like paragons of the rule of law — even if they are doing nothing more than rejecting frivolous lawsuits. And that perception both enhances the prestige of the judiciary and helps inoculate judges against claims that they are too political.
As Maya Sen, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School who studies the judiciary, told me, by rejecting Trump’s lawsuits, “conservative judges are coming out looking like big heroes on this.” They benefit from fawning media coverage that “declares that judicial independence [is] back and the courts are the institutional bulwark that is saving democracy.”
Biden’s victory is too big to be overturned
A big reason many Democrats feared that Republicans on the Supreme Court might interfere with an election and award the presidency to the GOP is because, in 2000, Republicans on the Supreme Court interfered with an election and awarded the presidency to the GOP.
But the facts underlying Bush v. Gore (2000), the case that installed George W. Bush as president, are also very different than Biden’s win over Trump. In 2000, the winner of the election hinged on which candidate won a single state: Florida. Initial tallies, moreover, showed Bush leading Democrat Al Gore in that state by just 1,784 votes — though that lead had shrunk to 537 votes when the Bush decision effectively ended a recount of Florida’s votes.
In 2020, by contrast, Biden won enough states that Trump would have had to flip at least three of them to win. And none of those states were anywhere near as close as Florida was in 2000. The closest state that Biden won in 2020, at least in terms of the number of votes separating him and Trump, appears to be Arizona. But Biden still beat Trump by over 10,000 votes in Arizona.
The fact that Biden leads in so many states creates a kind of prisoner’s dilemma for judges who may want to throw the election to Trump. Suppose, for example, that judges in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona all wanted to overturn the election results in those states. If they all acted in concert, then Trump would have 279 electoral votes and would win the presidency, but if only one or two states flipped, then the judges who flipped those states would have gone out on a tremendously partisan limb for nothing.
According to Sen, research shows that judges typically care a great deal about their reputation within the legal profession. A judge who overturned an election would risk burning that reputation to the ground. Perhaps a sufficiently partisan judge would be willing to take this reputational hit if they knew it would lead to an outcome they prefer, but why light your good name on fire so that Joe Biden can win the Electoral College by a slightly smaller margin?
The Supreme Court hasn’t laid the groundwork for a decision overturning Biden’s victory
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority was fairly hostile to voting rights even before Justice Ginsburg’s death. And it’s likely grown only more hostile now that the liberal Ginsburg has been replaced by the conservative Barrett. Yet while the Roberts Court has handed down an array of decisions diminishing voting rights, none of these decisions opened the door to the kind of sweeping, post-election attack Trump has engaged in.
Many of the Roberts Court’s voting rights decisions have allowed states to erect obstacles between voters and the franchise. The Court’s decisions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Abbott v. Perez (2018), for example, dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents states from enacting election laws that discriminate on the basis of race.
Many red states have responded to such decisions by enacting laws that make it harder for voters to cast a ballot. As former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams explains, these laws are often designed to make voter suppression look like “administrative errors” or “user error.”
Think of voter ID laws, which disenfranchise voters who lack a photo ID, or state election procedures that allocate more voting machines to white neighborhoods than to Black neighborhoods. These sorts of policies do not strip away the right to vote entirely — a person impacted by such a policy can still obtain an ID or wait in an hours-long line if they are determined to vote — but they do deter voters who may lack the means or the patience to do so.
In 2020, however, voters were unusually motivated to turn out. Biden won over 81 million votes, more than any candidate in American history. Many states also saw enormous spikes in absentee voting due to fears that voters could become infected with Covid-19 while waiting in line on Election Day.
Decisions like Shelby County and Perez, in other words, make it easier for states to place hurdles between voters and the polls. Once voters clear those hurdles and cast their ballot, however, the Roberts Court’s previous decisions haven’t laid the groundwork for lower courts to toss out tens of thousands of ballots and award the election to the losing candidate.
Similarly, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, at least four members of the Court embraced a theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine.” Briefly, this doctrine declares that the state legislature — and, potentially, only the state legislature — is allowed to decide how states conduct federal elections. As Justice Neil Gorsuch put it in a recent opinion, “the Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.”
Before the 2020 election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that certain absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day may be counted. Under the independent state legislature doctrine, however, this state supreme court decision may be invalid, because the state supreme court isn’t the state legislature and therefore isn’t allowed to decide how Pennsylvania conducts its election. Several members of the US Supreme Court warned before the election that they might order these late-arriving ballots tossed out after the election is over.
In the end, however, none of this mattered — at least to the outcome of the 2020 election — because Biden won Pennsylvania by a large enough margin that these late-arriving ballots didn’t matter.
American democracy is still in peril
The fact that Biden will be taking up residence at the White House next month is not a reason to heave a sigh of relief and assume that American democracy is safe. A total of 126 Republican members of Congress — a majority of the House GOP caucus — backed a frivolous lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden’s victory and hand the election to Trump. The idea that presidential elections only count if a Republican wins is now shockingly normalized within the GOP.
Many Republicans who share this disdain for democracy, moreover, are state lawmakers. Some of them are likely to push legislation that will make it harder to vote in their states — some Georgia Republicans are already calling for legislation banning ballot drop boxes and limiting who is allowed to vote by mail — and to enact rigid gerrymanders seeking to lock the GOP into power. And the courts are likely to bless such efforts.
The embrace of the independent state legislature doctrine by four members of the Court may have profound implications for future elections if Barrett provides the fifth vote to enshrine this doctrine in law. Could the Court’s conservative majority use the doctrine to eliminate state governors’ power to veto election laws? Or eliminate state courts’ ability to enforce their state constitution’s voting rights protections? If that happens, that means that in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which have Republican legislatures and Democratic governors, the governor could lose their power to veto voter suppression laws or gerrymandered congressional maps.
Worse, the Constitution permits state legislatures to decide how members of the Electoral College are chosen in that state. Currently, every state uses a popular election to choose electors. But state legislatures could conceivably vote to simply gift their electors to the Republican candidate — and if the independent state legislature doctrine becomes the law of the land, neither Democratic governors nor state courts may be able to stop such a proposal from becoming law.
As of now, it’s unclear whether the Court will take the independent state legislature doctrine to such a radical extreme. Gorsuch, after all, wrote that state legislatures “bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.” His use of the word “primary” suggests that he may still allow state governors or state courts to play some limited role in shaping state election rules. At the very least, however, Democratic governors in several key states are likely to have a much weaker hand to play against Republican legislatures.
Meanwhile, a case pending before the Supreme Court could potentially dismantle what remains of the Voting Rights Act, ending robust safeguards against racist voting laws and allowing states to target Black and brown communities that overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.
And, as mentioned above, the law is an iterative process. Each Supreme Court decision limiting voting rights becomes a precedent that can be cited to justify additional limits. We honestly cannot know what sort of attacks on voting rights will come before the Court in a few years, after the Court’s new majority has handed down its first round of voting rights decisions. But there is reason to worry given the conservative majority’s record on the issue.
In a high-turnout election, Republican voter suppression tactics — whether it’s closing down polling places in Black neighborhoods or restricting who is allowed to vote by mail — matter less than they do in an ordinary election. But Democrats won’t always get to run against a galvanizing figure such as Donald Trump.
By not overturning an election that Biden won by more than 7 million votes, the courts did the least they could possibly do to respect democracy. The fact is that Trump asked the courts to do too much, too fast, in an election that he lost by too many votes. The courts held steady, but the fact that the judiciary decided not to join a lawless attack on the 2020 election is no reason for celebration. Biden may have won the presidency, but the future of democracy in the United States still looks grim.


2020 in 20 charts

2020 was such a terrible , bad , no-good year that even complaining about it got old .
A pandemic knocked the world to its knees , killing 1.6 million people so far and leaving untold suffering in its wake .
Social distancing kept us inside , away from our friends and loved ones .
Businesses shut their doors .
Economic inequality grew .
Still , not everything was bad .
It ’ s been a very good year for bread , hand sanitizer , and pets .
Also , greenhouse gas emissions declined in the United States .
Earlier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still made jokes — we joked that nature was healing itself .
Here ’ s a roundup of some of the most important 2020 trends , in charts .
Twenty of them !
1 ) The coronavirus continues to wreak havoc on the US It ’ s been nearly a year since the first confirmed coronavirus case hit the US .
Now , more than 16 million Americans , or nearly 5 percent of the country ’ s population , have had the virus , and about 300,000 have died , more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far .
The response to the virus — which first tore through large cities , then devastated rural areas , and is now spreading everywhere — was disjointed and inconsistent , and marred by an administration that didn ’ t take it seriously .
Now the United States is averaging more than 200,000 new cases each day , or more than 10 times the number of daily cases this spring .
India , a much more populous country , registers around 30,000 per day .
China , where the virus first originated , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to flatten the curve worked — for a while The virus has been a public health nightmare , with hospital emergency rooms inundated with sick patients and health care workers struggling to get personal protective equipment to keep themselves and their patients safe .
An early effort to “ flatten the curve ” went viral and helped prevent the medical system from being overwhelmed .
Communicated as a chart , the idea of flattening the curve encouraged people and governments to adopt protective measures like self-isolation and closing schools and businesses to keep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But the US never went further to fully suppress the virus , leaving new daily Covid-19 cases at a dangerous plateau in the spring , with a surge in the summer .
As many states have reopened businesses , the new surge of cases this fall and winter is threatening once again to overwhelm the health care system if the US doesn ’ t take serious precautions .
From conception to distribution in less than a year , the development of the coronavirus vaccine has been the fastest in history .
Until now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the mumps vaccine , which took four years .
( For comparison , more than three decades after the first vaccine trials began , there ’ s still no AIDS vaccine . )
Typically , vaccine development takes at least a decade , and that ’ s sometimes only after the disease has been spreading for millennia .
4 ) Voter turnout was the highest in more than a century Nearly 160 million Americans voted in the 2020 presidential election , or about 67 percent of the voting-eligible population , according to data @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pandemic had the potential to keep people from voting , mail-in and extended in-person voting options enabled more of the population to vote than had in more than 100 years .
High voter turnout rates were due to several factors , including an election that people perceived as very important , a highly partisan race in which few people claimed to be undecided , and omnipresent “ get out the vote ” messaging .
Much of the spring and summer was dominated by Black Lives Matter and anti-racism protests , in response @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
These protests took place in more locations and over more days than 2017 ’ s Women ’ s March and 2018 ’ s gun violence protests .
They were also highly attended , with an estimated 15 million to 26 million Americans saying they joined these protests in June alone .
Anti-racism protests continued into July , so real turnout could have been higher .
( Turnout for the civil rights protests of the 1960s were in the hundreds of thousands , for comparison . )
This year ’ s anti-racism protests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more enduring ” than any other on record , according to Erica Chenoweth , a Harvard Kennedy School professor who co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium .
The protests and high voter turnout happened amid increased polarization — the kind that means one party not only disagrees with the other ’ s politics but also hates them as individuals .
Spurred on by systemic inequality , vociferous politicians , and social media that ’ s geared toward increasing user engagement , people are more likely to feel coldness toward the opposing party than warmth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time in the past 40 years .
A so-called political stress indicator , which incorporates measures of wage stagnation , distrust in government , and inequality , has been on the rise in a way that ’ s similar to what the country saw before the Civil War .
The pandemic exacerbated long-term trends toward inequality , with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer .
These trends were on display in numerous ways .
For example , the rich could ride out the pandemic in the luxury of their homes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jobs that put them at greater risk of catching the disease .
And as Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham pointed out , while the Dow Jones Industrial Average rebounded to pre-pandemic highs , enriching shareholders in America ’ s biggest companies , searches for local food banks or food pantries also grew .
The pandemic made many retail employees into essential workers , whose jobs at grocery stores and pharmacies put them at risk of contracting the virus .
But while the companies they worked for made an enormous amount of money @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a study by the Brookings Institution .
The analysis of 13 essential retail companies found that they made an extra $ 17 billion — 39 percent more — in 2020 compared to the year before .
Meanwhile , retail workers only saw their wages rise by about $ 1 per hour , an increase of just 10 percent .
9 ) Unemployment rates were the highest since the Great Depression Many Americans went through the pandemic without work at all .
In April , unemployment rates in the US neared 15 percent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when a quarter of the working population didn ’ t have a job .
The unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent in November , which is more typical of a normal recession .
People have been talking about the promise of working from home for as long as there ’ s been an internet , and the practice has been slowly ticking up for years .
However , stay-at-home orders made remote work a reality for a much wider swath of the population .
Estimates vary , but this summer , more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worked predominantly from home , according to a survey across industries by IDC .
After the pandemic , the firm expects working from home to be double its pre-pandemic rates .
The numbers may be higher when you look at those who might work from home some of the time in a hybrid work model , which is expected to dominate office work going forward .
Humans ’ new work-from-home situation was good news for pets .
Not only did being home mean more time for walks , it also meant many people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for pets suddenly were flocking to shelters to find a quarantine companion .
In 2020 , shelter animal adoption rates — the share of dogs and cats adopted relative to those turned in to the shelter — were consistently higher than in 2019 , according to data from nonprofit Shelter Animals Count .
The adoption rate reached 95 percent in March .
The number of animals adopted actually declined , but fewer were taken to shelters in the first place .
“ We ’ ve seen an incredibly compassionate response from people willing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adopt vulnerable shelter animals during this period of uncertainty , ” ASPCA president and CEO Matt Bershadker told Recode .
“ This unprecedented response from communities across the country to support their local shelters reflects widespread appreciation of the invaluable role pets play in our lives.
” Early in the pandemic , Americans had to contend with the twin forces of boredom and scarcity .
We were isolated at home and we didn ’ t have the same access to commerce that we usually did , so we turned to Google to entertain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t buy .
The top trending searches on Google for “ how to make ” this year paint a pretty accurate vignette of what life was like for many Americans during the pandemic .
We were making elaborate and trendy foods , trying to figure out the best background for video calls , and learning how to make masks that were newly mandatory and in short supply .
One fun trend not included here was the top trending beauty search — how to cut hair at home — which led to lots of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) Big Tech got even bigger , even as the rest of the economy flailed A long-awaited report from House Democrats released in October found that Amazon , Apple , Google , and Facebook all engaged in anti-competitive behavior .
The report was just the beginning of upcoming antitrust regulatory proceedings against Big Tech companies , and soon thereafter , the government filed a lawsuit against Google and then Facebook .
Still , the prospect of further regulating or breaking up Big Tech has done little to blunt their economic prospects .
While @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the coronavirus , the biggest tech companies raked in enormous profits , and their stock prices hit record highs .
As of early December , Amazon ’ s and Apple ’ s stocks were up nearly 70 percent since the beginning of the year , while Google ’ s and Facebook ’ s stocks were up more than 30 percent — much higher than the S & P 500 index , which is made up of the 500 biggest US companies and only went up around 13 percent .
14 ) It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Amazon has had an especially good year as online shopping became a safer retail option and , in some cases , the only one available .
In the third quarter , Amazon raked in a record $ 6.3 billion in profit , three times what it made just a year before .
Amazon , of course , is the poster child for e-commerce , which it leads by a wide margin in the US .
Census Bureau sales data illustrates how the already fast-growing e-commerce segment saw giant gains , increasing nearly 40 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earlier .
Online shopping made up 14 percent of all retail sales in the US last quarter as in-store retail flagged .
As governments across the country shut down or restrict nonessential retail for a second time this winter , these trends could be exacerbated .
16 ) Amazon is still terrifying the competition ( and everyone else ) Other companies are taking note of these e-commerce trends and how they benefit Amazon .
Again this year , a growing number of public companies — 227 so far — have mentioned Amazon in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their annual 10-K financial filings , where companies state the most significant risks to their business , according to information from the financial data platform Sentieo .
17 ) We all streamed together Spending more time at home during the pandemic meant streaming a lot more video .
At one point , Netflix downgraded its streaming quality in Europe so it didn ’ t break the internet .
Time spent watching Amazon , Netflix , Hulu , and YouTube grew tremendously during the early part of the pandemic , according to data from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ theaters closed and streaming platforms became the only places to watch movies — some of which skipped theaters entirely .
The pandemic ’ s effect on the economy varied by industry .
Airlines , unsurprisingly , did poorly as consumers followed stay-at-home orders and didn ’ t travel .
On the other hand , the air freight and logistics industry , which includes package delivery , saw its stock rise 51 percent this year .
Software companies like Zoom also performed well , as Americans increasingly relied on software to do just about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ industries through early December illustrates that while the stock market has largely recovered its losses from the pandemic , that recovery is uneven .
Despite America ’ s best attempts to the contrary , US greenhouse gas emissions went down drastically this year , to their lowest level since the 1980s , according to data from BloombergNEF .
The 9 percent drop was the biggest on record .
The Trump administration has been disastrous for the environment , pulling the US out of the Paris accord , an agreement meant to stem the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than 100 environmental rules .
But the pandemic was stronger .
Emissions from transportation dropped the most , due to Americans being stuck at home .
BloombergNEF expects emissions to climb again next year .
Global warming is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive .
In 2020 , there were also more of them .
2020 ’ s hurricane season now holds the notorious record for most named storms , with 30 of them , including 13 hurricanes and 17 tropical storms .
Twelve made landfall in the US .
The previous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2005 .
Meanwhile , fires devastated the West Coast .
The August Complex Fire became the largest in California history , burning more than a million acres this summer .
Oh , and if 2020 wasn ’ t wild enough : Aliens reportedly exist and the government knows about it .
The former head of space security at Israel ’ s Defense Ministry wrote in his new book that a “ galactic federation ” has been hanging out with astronauts in an underground base on Mars .
Perhaps most surprisingly , Trump has @ @ @ @ @

2020 was such a terrible, bad, no-good year that even complaining about it got old. A pandemic knocked the world to its knees, killing 1.6 million people so far and leaving untold suffering in its wake. Social distancing kept us inside, away from our friends and loved ones. Businesses shut their doors. Economic inequality grew.
Still, not everything was bad.
It’s been a very good year for bread, hand sanitizer, and pets. Also, greenhouse gas emissions declined in the United States. Earlier in the pandemic — back when people still made jokes — we joked that nature was healing itself.
Here’s a roundup of some of the most important 2020 trends, in charts. Twenty of them!
1) The coronavirus continues to wreak havoc on the US
It’s been nearly a year since the first confirmed coronavirus case hit the US. Now, more than 16 million Americans, or nearly 5 percent of the country’s population, have had the virus, and about 300,000 have died, more than any other country in the world by far. The response to the virus — which first tore through large cities, then devastated rural areas, and is now spreading everywhere — was disjointed and inconsistent, and marred by an administration that didn’t take it seriously. Now the United States is averaging more than 200,000 new cases each day, or more than 10 times the number of daily cases this spring. India, a much more populous country, registers around 30,000 per day. China, where the virus first originated, has about 15.
2) Efforts to flatten the curve worked — for a while
The virus has been a public health nightmare, with hospital emergency rooms inundated with sick patients and health care workers struggling to get personal protective equipment to keep themselves and their patients safe. An early effort to “flatten the curve” went viral and helped prevent the medical system from being overwhelmed. Communicated as a chart, the idea of flattening the curve encouraged people and governments to adopt protective measures like self-isolation and closing schools and businesses to keep the virus from spreading too quickly.
But the US never went further to fully suppress the virus, leaving new daily Covid-19 cases at a dangerous plateau in the spring, with a surge in the summer. As many states have reopened businesses, the new surge of cases this fall and winter is threatening once again to overwhelm the health care system if the US doesn’t take serious precautions.
3) A coronavirus vaccine was developed in record time
From conception to distribution in less than a year, the development of the coronavirus vaccine has been the fastest in history. Until now, the fastest vaccine development had been the mumps vaccine, which took four years. (For comparison, more than three decades after the first vaccine trials began, there’s still no AIDS vaccine.) Typically, vaccine development takes at least a decade, and that’s sometimes only after the disease has been spreading for millennia.
4) Voter turnout was the highest in more than a century
Nearly 160 million Americans voted in the 2020 presidential election, or about 67 percent of the voting-eligible population, according to data from United States Elections Project. While the pandemic had the potential to keep people from voting, mail-in and extended in-person voting options enabled more of the population to vote than had in more than 100 years. High voter turnout rates were due to several factors, including an election that people perceived as very important, a highly partisan race in which few people claimed to be undecided, and omnipresent “get out the vote” messaging.
5) A year of protest
Much of the spring and summer was dominated by Black Lives Matter and anti-racism protests, in response to widespread police violence against Black Americans. These protests took place in more locations and over more days than 2017’s Women’s March and 2018’s gun violence protests. They were also highly attended, with an estimated 15 million to 26 million Americans saying they joined these protests in June alone. Anti-racism protests continued into July, so real turnout could have been higher. (Turnout for the civil rights protests of the 1960s were in the hundreds of thousands, for comparison.) This year’s anti-racism protests were “bigger, broader, and more enduring” than any other on record, according to Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium.
6) Political polarization got worse
The protests and high voter turnout happened amid increased polarization — the kind that means one party not only disagrees with the other’s politics but also hates them as individuals. Spurred on by systemic inequality, vociferous politicians, and social media that’s geared toward increasing user engagement, people are more likely to feel coldness toward the opposing party than warmth toward their own more than at any time in the past 40 years. A so-called political stress indicator, which incorporates measures of wage stagnation, distrust in government, and inequality, has been on the rise in a way that’s similar to what the country saw before the Civil War.
7) Income inequality got worse
The pandemic exacerbated long-term trends toward inequality, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. These trends were on display in numerous ways. For example, the rich could ride out the pandemic in the luxury of their homes while the poor were forced to work jobs that put them at greater risk of catching the disease. And as Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham pointed out, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average rebounded to pre-pandemic highs, enriching shareholders in America’s biggest companies, searches for local food banks or food pantries also grew.
8) Wages didn’t rise as swiftly as corporate profits
The pandemic made many retail employees into essential workers, whose jobs at grocery stores and pharmacies put them at risk of contracting the virus. But while the companies they worked for made an enormous amount of money, these employees did not, according to a study by the Brookings Institution. The analysis of 13 essential retail companies found that they made an extra $17 billion — 39 percent more — in 2020 compared to the year before. Meanwhile, retail workers only saw their wages rise by about $1 per hour, an increase of just 10 percent.
9) Unemployment rates were the highest since the Great Depression
Many Americans went through the pandemic without work at all. In April, unemployment rates in the US neared 15 percent — the highest since the Great Depression, when a quarter of the working population didn’t have a job. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent in November, which is more typical of a normal recession.
10) Working from home became a reality
People have been talking about the promise of working from home for as long as there’s been an internet, and the practice has been slowly ticking up for years. However, stay-at-home orders made remote work a reality for a much wider swath of the population. Estimates vary, but this summer, more than half of the North American workforce worked predominantly from home, according to a survey across industries by IDC. After the pandemic, the firm expects working from home to be double its pre-pandemic rates. The numbers may be higher when you look at those who might work from home some of the time in a hybrid work model, which is expected to dominate office work going forward.
11) Pets win
Humans’ new work-from-home situation was good news for pets. Not only did being home mean more time for walks, it also meant many people who didn’t previously have time for pets suddenly were flocking to shelters to find a quarantine companion. In 2020, shelter animal adoption rates — the share of dogs and cats adopted relative to those turned in to the shelter — were consistently higher than in 2019, according to data from nonprofit Shelter Animals Count. The adoption rate reached 95 percent in March. The number of animals adopted actually declined, but fewer were taken to shelters in the first place.
“We’ve seen an incredibly compassionate response from people willing to open their homes to foster and adopt vulnerable shelter animals during this period of uncertainty,” ASPCA president and CEO Matt Bershadker told Recode. “This unprecedented response from communities across the country to support their local shelters reflects widespread appreciation of the invaluable role pets play in our lives.”
12) People became more self-sufficient
Early in the pandemic, Americans had to contend with the twin forces of boredom and scarcity. We were isolated at home and we didn’t have the same access to commerce that we usually did, so we turned to Google to entertain ourselves and make what we couldn’t buy. The top trending searches on Google for “how to make” this year paint a pretty accurate vignette of what life was like for many Americans during the pandemic. We were making elaborate and trendy foods, trying to figure out the best background for video calls, and learning how to make masks that were newly mandatory and in short supply. One fun trend not included here was the top trending beauty search — how to cut hair at home — which led to lots of, um, stylish coronacuts.
13) Big Tech got even bigger, even as the rest of the economy flailed
A long-awaited report from House Democrats released in October found that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook all engaged in anti-competitive behavior. The report was just the beginning of upcoming antitrust regulatory proceedings against Big Tech companies, and soon thereafter, the government filed a lawsuit against Google and then Facebook. Still, the prospect of further regulating or breaking up Big Tech has done little to blunt their economic prospects.
While many industries were devastated by the fallout from the coronavirus, the biggest tech companies raked in enormous profits, and their stock prices hit record highs. As of early December, Amazon’s and Apple’s stocks were up nearly 70 percent since the beginning of the year, while Google’s and Facebook’s stocks were up more than 30 percent — much higher than the S&P 500 index, which is made up of the 500 biggest US companies and only went up around 13 percent.
14) It was a very good year for Amazon
Amazon has had an especially good year as online shopping became a safer retail option and, in some cases, the only one available. In the third quarter, Amazon raked in a record $6.3 billion in profit, three times what it made just a year before.
15) E-commerce became commerce
Amazon, of course, is the poster child for e-commerce, which it leads by a wide margin in the US. Census Bureau sales data illustrates how the already fast-growing e-commerce segment saw giant gains, increasing nearly 40 percent in Q3 compared to a year earlier. Online shopping made up 14 percent of all retail sales in the US last quarter as in-store retail flagged. As governments across the country shut down or restrict nonessential retail for a second time this winter, these trends could be exacerbated.
16) Amazon is still terrifying the competition (and everyone else)
Other companies are taking note of these e-commerce trends and how they benefit Amazon. Again this year, a growing number of public companies — 227 so far — have mentioned Amazon in the “risk factors” section of their annual 10-K financial filings, where companies state the most significant risks to their business, according to information from the financial data platform Sentieo.
17) We all streamed together
Spending more time at home during the pandemic meant streaming a lot more video. At one point, Netflix downgraded its streaming quality in Europe so it didn’t break the internet. Time spent watching Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube grew tremendously during the early part of the pandemic, according to data from the research firm MoffettNathanson, as movie theaters closed and streaming platforms became the only places to watch movies — some of which skipped theaters entirely.
18) The coronavirus economy’s winners and losers
The pandemic’s effect on the economy varied by industry. Airlines, unsurprisingly, did poorly as consumers followed stay-at-home orders and didn’t travel. On the other hand, the air freight and logistics industry, which includes package delivery, saw its stock rise 51 percent this year. Software companies like Zoom also performed well, as Americans increasingly relied on software to do just about everything. The stock performance for select industries through early December illustrates that while the stock market has largely recovered its losses from the pandemic, that recovery is uneven.
19) Greenhouse gas emissions went down unintentionally
Despite America’s best attempts to the contrary, US greenhouse gas emissions went down drastically this year, to their lowest level since the 1980s, according to data from BloombergNEF. The 9 percent drop was the biggest on record. The Trump administration has been disastrous for the environment, pulling the US out of the Paris accord, an agreement meant to stem the threats of climate change, and reversing more than 100 environmental rules. But the pandemic was stronger. Emissions from transportation dropped the most, due to Americans being stuck at home. BloombergNEF expects emissions to climb again next year.
20) Hurricane and fire seasons set records
Global warming is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive. In 2020, there were also more of them. 2020’s hurricane season now holds the notorious record for most named storms, with 30 of them, including 13 hurricanes and 17 tropical storms. Twelve made landfall in the US. The previous record had been 28 named storms in 2005. Meanwhile, fires devastated the West Coast. The August Complex Fire became the largest in California history, burning more than a million acres this summer.
Oh, and if 2020 wasn’t wild enough: Aliens reportedly exist and the government knows about it. The former head of space security at Israel’s Defense Ministry wrote in his new book that a “galactic federation” has been hanging out with astronauts in an underground base on Mars. Perhaps most surprisingly, Trump has not tweeted about this.


vox--2020-12-15--Mark Zuckerberg gave $75 million to a San Francisco hospital. The city has condemned him anyway.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ’ s adopted hometown of San Francisco on Tuesday formally condemned the naming of a major hospital after him and his wife , the latest flashpoint in the debate over the proper role for billionaire philanthropy .
The city ’ s board of supervisors approved the condemnation , a move that reflects the new , increasingly controversial politics of both the tech industry and of its founders .
Activists on both the left and the right have grown sharply critical of big tech companies like Facebook .
And simultaneously , there is a building backlash movement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The 10-1 vote is a manifestation of each of those crosscurrents , which both run particularly strong in liberal San Francisco .
The measure has no legal force and is merely symbolic .
Five years ago , Zuckerberg and his wife , Priscilla Chan , gave $ 75 million to San Francisco General Hospital , the city ’ s sole public hospital , where Chan was a pediatrician at the time .
As part of the donation , the hospital was formally renamed the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Zuckerberg has emerged as a political piñata as Facebook grew in size and has been dogged by cascading scandals .
And Zuckerberg ’ s troubles in his corporate life have increasingly boomeranged onto his charitable gifts , most notably at his and his wife ’ s eponymous philanthropy , the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative .
And so after years of fits and starts , a group of hospital nurses , anti-Facebook activists , and progressive lawmakers on San Francisco ’ s board of supervisors began to mobilize this summer to push back against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than moving to officially rename it — which contractually could require returning the $ 75 million gift — the group decided to push for a middle ground : to condemn the name while leaving it in place .
The final vote on Tuesday followed an earlier vote this month by the Committee on Government Audit and Oversight , a panel on San Francisco ’ s board of supervisors .
That ’ s when the measure was debated more fully .
“ San Francisco ’ s only public hospital should not bear the name @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health in our country and around the world — and yet it does , ” said Gordon Mar , the lead sponsor of the measure .
“ These are policy choices , and they have a body count.
” “ We ’ re of course thankful for the gift and we ’ re thankful for any gift to our most important institutions during this time , ” said Matt Haney , another supervisor backing it .
“ But that doesn ’ t mean that we should for forever essentially have given away advertising @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” That session quickly became a pop-off session on the Facebook founder , with activists pillorying him for any corporate transgressions and downplaying the significance of his gift , which was the largest single private gift to a public hospital ever .
The comments became quite caustic — for instance , one San Franciscan called him a “ rich , amoral egotist who runs an extraction corporation.
” Meanwhile , charity leaders voiced concern over the precedent that the resolution could set .
Defenders of high-dollar philanthropy often argue that regardless of any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ donation offers the giver , their money also does real good for the disadvantaged .
And the hospital agreed in 2015 when it accepted the $ 75 million that it would keep the Zuckerberg name for at least 50 years .
Kim Meredith , the head of the hospital ’ s foundation , stressed that the “ heartfelt gift ” from Zuckerberg and Chan had made the city “ a model of care ” during the coronavirus pandemic .
“ This resolution of condemnation on the naming of [ the hospital ] has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chilling effect on past , present , and future gifts to the city , ” she said .
“ We will need philanthropies to continue to tackle the challenges of Covid-19 , health equity , and recovery in future years.
” Meredith added in a later statement that she was “ proud that the hospital now bears their names.
” It is not unusual for an institution to name something after a donor who makes a particularly large gift .
Another San Francisco hospital is named after a different tech billionaire , Salesforce @ @ @ @ @ @ @ signed off on the Zuckerberg naming contract in 2015 .
But for an institution to formally condemn a donor is unusual , if not unprecedented .

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s adopted hometown of San Francisco on Tuesday formally condemned the naming of a major hospital after him and his wife, the latest flashpoint in the debate over the proper role for billionaire philanthropy.
The city’s board of supervisors approved the condemnation, a move that reflects the new, increasingly controversial politics of both the tech industry and of its founders. Activists on both the left and the right have grown sharply critical of big tech companies like Facebook. And simultaneously, there is a building backlash movement to charitable gifts from the mega rich.
The 10-1 vote is a manifestation of each of those crosscurrents, which both run particularly strong in liberal San Francisco. The measure has no legal force and is merely symbolic.
Five years ago, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital, the city’s sole public hospital, where Chan was a pediatrician at the time. As part of the donation, the hospital was formally renamed the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
Since then, Zuckerberg has emerged as a political piñata as Facebook grew in size and has been dogged by cascading scandals. And Zuckerberg’s troubles in his corporate life have increasingly boomeranged onto his charitable gifts, most notably at his and his wife’s eponymous philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
And so after years of fits and starts, a group of hospital nurses, anti-Facebook activists, and progressive lawmakers on San Francisco’s board of supervisors began to mobilize this summer to push back against the hospital’s name. Rather than moving to officially rename it — which contractually could require returning the $75 million gift — the group decided to push for a middle ground: to condemn the name while leaving it in place.
The final vote on Tuesday followed an earlier vote this month by the Committee on Government Audit and Oversight, a panel on San Francisco’s board of supervisors. That’s when the measure was debated more fully.
“San Francisco’s only public hospital should not bear the name of a person responsible for endangering public health in our country and around the world — and yet it does,” said Gordon Mar, the lead sponsor of the measure. “These are policy choices, and they have a body count.”
“We’re of course thankful for the gift and we’re thankful for any gift to our most important institutions during this time,” said Matt Haney, another supervisor backing it. “But that doesn’t mean that we should for forever essentially have given away advertising rights on this most essential public institution.”
That session quickly became a pop-off session on the Facebook founder, with activists pillorying him for any corporate transgressions and downplaying the significance of his gift, which was the largest single private gift to a public hospital ever. The comments became quite caustic — for instance, one San Franciscan called him a “rich, amoral egotist who runs an extraction corporation.”
Meanwhile, charity leaders voiced concern over the precedent that the resolution could set. Defenders of high-dollar philanthropy often argue that regardless of any tax advantages or public-relations boons that the donation offers the giver, their money also does real good for the disadvantaged. And the hospital agreed in 2015 when it accepted the $75 million that it would keep the Zuckerberg name for at least 50 years.
Kim Meredith, the head of the hospital’s foundation, stressed that the “heartfelt gift” from Zuckerberg and Chan had made the city “a model of care” during the coronavirus pandemic.
“This resolution of condemnation on the naming of [the hospital] has the potential of unintended consequences and a chilling effect on past, present, and future gifts to the city,” she said. “We will need philanthropies to continue to tackle the challenges of Covid-19, health equity, and recovery in future years.”
Meredith added in a later statement that she was “proud that the hospital now bears their names.”
It is not unusual for an institution to name something after a donor who makes a particularly large gift. Another San Francisco hospital is named after a different tech billionaire, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. San Francisco officials signed off on the Zuckerberg naming contract in 2015.
But for an institution to formally condemn a donor is unusual, if not unprecedented.