Tag: Alito

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The Coming Republican Disaster

No one should say, when it happens, that nobody thought it would.  Everybody thought it would, just as they thought, eight years ago, that a vulgar, loud-mouthed, pathological liar like Trump could never be elected.   But don’t be fooled by a misfire on only one part of the equation.  Yes, Trump got elected,  once, and then again, for a second term, by a population that seemed oblivious to the real forces that shape and distort our economic and social lives.

This is a segment of the population that believes in barstool wisdom: some loudmouth sitting next to you at a bar and mouthing off about how high his taxes are, how crime is getting out of control, how America has outsourced all of the best jobs, how preposterous it is for people to choose their gender, could be the next cabinet secretary in a Trump administration.

When you hear interviews with the MAGA crowd, the first thing that is evident is that they have no idea what economic health or the cause of inflation is.  They believe that crime is on the increase when it objectively is not.  They have no idea that 75% of the manufacturing jobs that were lost over the last 20 years were lost to automation, not out-sourcing. They zero in on inflation and magically believe that Joe Biden’s policies caused it, even though it happened in every developed country.  They hated the constrictions imposed on them by the Covid epidemic but nobody had a magical formula for preventing its spread, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, while allowing everyone to conduct business as usual.  Nobody was going to be happy with any solution– and they weren’t.  They blamed Biden for the deplorable mess at the exit from Afghanistan, but only the generals who believed the U.S. should stay there for at least another 20 years had any alternative.  Diatribes about the messy exist almost never acknowledge the fact that the U.S. and it’s allies were losing, badly, by that time, and that the whole project was a colossal failure, and that it was the Republican Party that got America into that mess in the first place.  The honest Republican knows in his heart that it was their party’s great fortune that a plan devised by Trump had to be executed under a Democratic Administration.  Trump, who was just as determined to leave, would have fared no better.

Lost in all the flotsam around the Biden Administration, is the fact that he pulled off a singularly remarkable achievement: he kept the economy chugging along while reducing inflation.  Most economists will tell you that reducing inflation will causes joblessness to rise significantly.  Biden’s infrastructure investment and other policies prevented that.  That is a signal accomplishment for which Biden gets no credit.

I doubt that anyone would have fared better than Harris had Biden had the sense to not run for re-election.  It will be to his everlasting discredit that he allowed his ego to blind him to his own frailties, but had someone been nominated earlier, and contested the primaries, would it have made a difference?  A large portion of the voting public were ornery, dissatisfied with their lives, and infatuated with simplistic solutions.  Trump would make prices go down, houses go up, and people who don’t like me go away.  Trump will bring peace to Gaza and the Ukraine.  Trump will teach China a lesson.

And so we arrive at the Trump Administration.  I think it is natural for most informed observes to instinctively believe, on some level, that he can’t be serious.  He’s not going to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, deport 15 million illegal immigrants, or invade Greenland.  He can’t let China bully Taiwan.  He can’t really end Obamacare.  He certainly won’t balance the budget.

He can’t be serious, because what he says he is going to do is stupid.

What will probably happen?

Either he will go ahead and impose the tariffs or he will grant so many exceptions that some people will realize– as if they didn’t already know– that he is a liar, like every other politician.  If he imposes the tariffs, he will re-ignite inflation, and that will be embarrassing, but he can try to blame it on some kind of hidden Biden policies that he couldn’t vanquish overnight.  But it will raise suspicions.  But then, other nations will retaliate with tariffs on U. S. exports, causing jobs to be lost and corporations to lose money.

He can try to round up millions of illegal immigrants, but that will require something that looks like concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands of state employees, guards, administration, lawyers.  It will be very costly, and it will have a large impact on some industries that depend on immigrants, like construction, meat packing, and agriculture.  Again, there will be a significant inflationary impact.

He will try to extend his tax cuts, due to expire next year, and add a few more.  This will lead to an interesting battle with the hard core tea-party Republicans who sincerely want to balance the budget.  Dream on.  In the meantime, Speaker Johnson will have a monumental challenge to get any budgetary measures passed given that he has a razor-thin majority and lots of members of his own party who won’t hesitate to sabotage their own agenda.  To keep the tax cuts, Trump badly needs an extension– or suspension– of the debt ceiling.  The Tea Party Republicans will probably try to hold the process hostage to their own radical agenda– massive cuts to the budget.  That should be fun.

Trump has nominated a bunch of clowns for the top cabinet posts in his administration.  Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., are almost literally, yes, clowns.  You can be assured that most of government is actually carried out by deferential functionaries below the level of cabinet secretary, but these three, and the others, have big egos and extraordinary confidence in their own genius and may try to push through things that any sensible person would hesitate to push through.  Will Kennedy try to stop vaccine mandates, or undermine them?  Will he take on the processed food industry?  Will Hegseth stay sober on the job?  Will Gabbard try to restore Assad to power in Syria?

And will Trump cut off aide to Ukraine?  Ukraine does receive a lot of aide from other nations, including Germany, France, and Britain, but if it collapses, will the American public be as eager to wash their hands of it as Trump is?  And what if Putin, seeing the opportunity, starts to mass troops at the border of Moldova or Georgia?

Americans– aside from some Republican true believers– don’t care much about the deficit.  It will balloon under Trump because he will cut taxes even more than he did in his first term but won’t dare touch Social Security or Medicare, the two largest (by far) spending items in the budget.  But Republican strategy– the core of their very being as a political party– is to complain bitterly about the deficit only when they are not in office.

The last balanced budget in the U.S. was the last year of the Clinton Administration.

In Republican Fantasy, after a few months or a year of Trump, inflation will be down to below 2%, housing starts will rise, house prices will drop, mortgage rates will drop, Hamas will turn over the remaining hostages, Ukraine will surrender the seized territories to the Russians, NATO countries will increase their spending on defense, and thousands of factories will open to begin manufacturing televisions, washers, and driers in America.  With high-paying union jobs.  Wait– Trump is not going to be good for unions.

The sales of electric cars will decline while America will amazingly find even more oil to burn.  Don’t forget: crime will go down.

And if it happens, it will be due to the miraculous intervention of Donald Trump, or God, or both.  And if none of it happens, it will still be Joe Biden’s fault, whose administration policies were so bad that even Trump cannot undo them during his time of administration even though he told you that he could.

What he won’t be able to blame on Biden are the numerous scandals and blow-ups that seem likely to pervade this Administration.  Trump’s people are unusually shameless about wanting to get very rich while having a rather cavalier attitude towards ethics and propriety.  Trump’s family and cohorts are already lining up “investments” and real estate deals with the oil-producing Arab states.  In Trump’s view, MAGA people don’t mind. That’s why they elected him.  But there is a tiny smidgeon of shame left in the Republican Party and Trump is a lame-duck: he cannot run again.

I repeat: he is a lame-duck, who cannot run for president again.  If it is to the material advantage of one of his “friends” to turn on him, he will.  If it is to the political advantage of a Congressman or Senator to diverge from the Trump agenda, he or she will.

One last depressing probability: Supreme Court Justice Alito retires and, without McConnell to influence him, Trump gets to replace him with, I don’t know,  Donald Jr.  The most moronic president in recent history will have appointed four justices to the highest court in the land.

 

 

 

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The Implications

Today it was revealed that the Supreme Court is likely to rule to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Everyone is hopefully clear on the fact that overturning “Roe vs Wade” does not make abortion illegal.  It throws the problem back to the states which now may either ban it, partially ban it, or allow it, depending on the whims of state legislators.

States will now be allowed to compel women to carry a pregnancy to full term whether they wish to or not, even in the case of incest or rape.

If this indeed is going to be the ruling (which will be handed down in June), there are some enormous implications.  Off hand, I can think of these:

  • The Democratic base will be energized going into the fall congressional elections.  This is Mitch McConnell’s nightmare.  Mid-term elections generally favor the opposition party at least partly because the government doesn’t have a burning issue to run against– it is the government many people like to vote against no matter what stripe.  But overturning Roe vs Wade may light a fire under the Democrats.
  • The issue should play well for the Democrats.  About 60-65% of Americans support the general right to abortion, though they also think limits should apply.  Democrats can cite the government telling women what they may or may not do with their bodies.  Republican state governments are going to “compel” women to carry pregnancies to term which can be spun as intrusive or egregious or over-reach or patriarchal.  Republicans cannot really run on “life begins at conception”– at least, I’ll believe it when I see it.
  • Further to that — evangelical Christians will not be satisfied with overturning Roe vs. Wade.  They want the Supreme Court to go further and ban all abortions.  Life, to them, begins at conception.  They may begin to demand that their Republican trolls reflect that in their legislation, which may be a bridge too far for independents and moderate Republican women.
  • Why stop at Roe vs Wade?  There are host of privacy rights implied in the principle that the Constitution does not protect them.  Strip searches?  Infrared scans of homes?  Drones?  Cell phone messages?  Library records?  Who says we (the FBI, Homeland Security) can’t look?   Who says those records are private (unless the police have a warrant)?
  • So when really does life begin?  If state governments begin debating this issue, and pass legislation, and this legislation is appealed to the Supreme Court, we will have an even bigger can of worms.
  • State Senate races in close states could swing.  Susan Collins is safe for now– she has five years left in her term.  Lisa Murkowski– lucky for her– voted against Kavanaugh, so she is probably safe.  But many other Republicans running in purple states will have to answer the question of who they would confirm to Supreme Court given that they might make another really stupid decision.  (Is “stupid” a blunt instrument?  I mean, Alito and Thomas are obviously not fools, but I stand by my conclusion of the fundamental soundness of their reasoning behind their votes on Roe vs Wade.  In the totality of their disregard for history, culture, justice, and just plain common sense: stupid.  Just plain stupid.  It can stand with the Dred Scott decision– that negroes are not “persons”.)

As you would think is obvious, the ruling is at odds with conservative ideals about government being restrained from intruding into areas of personal freedom.  The government should not be able to require you to wear a mask  around vulnerable people even if you could be infected with Covid 19, but it should be allowed to compel you to carry a pregnancy to full term.

 

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The Psychopathic Justice

The New York Times Article

In his dissent in Mr. Florence’s case, Judge Louis H. Pollak, a former dean of Yale Law School, was also skeptical of the majority’s theory. “One might doubt,” he wrote, “that individuals would deliberately commit minor offenses such as civil contempt — the offense for which Florence was arrested — and then secrete contraband on their persons, all in the hope that they will, at some future moment, be arrested and taken to jail to make their illicit deliveries.”

The older I get and the more I see of cases like that of Mr. Florence the more I believe that the difference between criminality and civility in our society depends upon who was first to pull out the gun.

Mr. Florence got a ticket once. In 2003 he committed a traffic offense. He paid his fine. He obtained a letter from the court certifying that he had paid his fine– God knows why he even thought for a second he would ever need it. Just because he was black? Because he was a financial adviser to a car dealership and made a decent wage? Because he drove a BMW?  [You know, I suspect that a certain segment of the population has already sighed a little sigh of condescension: well– he’s black and driving a BMW…..]

Then, in 2005, Mr. Florence was pulled over. His wife was driving and his four-year-old son was in the back. The cop called up the record of the offense and arrested Mr. Florence on the spot. Mr. Florence showed him the document from the court showing that he had paid the fine for the offense. The cop– representing you and me and all other white taxpayers, and Clarence Thomas, one must suppose, because he sure as hell didn’t seem to represent any coloured taxpayers– arrested him anyways. He was held for eight days.

You don’t believe that? I don’t either. Here’s a direct quote from the NY Times article:

Mr. Florence was nonetheless held for eight days in two counties on a charge of civil contempt before matters were sorted out.

Say what you want about the NY Times, they almost always have the facts right, so I believe it.

But here is the issue germane now– maybe– to the Supreme Court: he was ordered to strip, bend over, and separate his cheeks while a group of manly police officers looked on.

Mr. Florence is asking the court to rule that such intrusive, humiliating actions are not justified by the law. The prosecutors argue that such procedures are justified by the enormous risk of people driving around with drugs or weapons stuffed into their anuses on the off chance that a police officer might stop them, call up a paid traffic ticket on their computers, and prove incapable of decoding the information correctly and decide this person was a threat to society and needed to be locked up in the same jail cell as a rich convict who had secretly arranged the entire thing from his prison cell and doesn’t care where the contraband has been.

The black man on the Supreme Court will relish ruling against him, but what about the seven sane members (Scalia, in my view, is nearly a psychopath) who might consider Judge Pollak’s perspective above.

What kind of person believes the police should have the right to pick up a man — seemingly at random– and strip search him and hold him for eight days… for a traffic offense (if one were to assume, crazily, for a moment, that Mr. Florence was even guilty of not paying the fine)?

Yes, the Supreme Court said, “that’s all right, that’s all right, that’s all right with me…”

[Update 2022-04-30]

And of course it was a 5-4 decision.  But don’t worry– Amy Coney Barrett has assured us that the Court is not political and of course the 5 who voted in favor of this outlandish travesty were not Republican Appointees (oh yes they were).