Wash and Dry

Amy, Amy, Amy:  If you aren’t concerned about Judge Amy making it to the Supreme Court you should be.  She spent much of the second day of her question and answer hearing trying to convince the gullible that she has no pre-formed opinions on anything and that despite her background and history of attacking things like reproductive rights and Obamacare she’d be the fairest justice of them all.  But, and it’s a big but, if she’s so fair and overturning Roe v Wade and dismantling Obamacare aren’t part of her mission, why did all the Republican Senators, most notably chairman Lindsey Graham go out of their way yesterday to assure all of us that there is no way she would ever do any of those things (wink, wink)?  Reliably awful Lindsey began by getting the not so good Judge Amy to walk through an explanation of severability, that’s the legal doctrine that states that if some of the terms of a contested statue are held to be illegal or otherwise unenforceable, the remainder should still apply. In a nutshell, the argument is that since the California v Texas case that will be argued in front of SCOTUS on November 10 is about Obamacare’s individual mandate, the whole of Obamacare isn’t really in jeopardy.  While that’s a possible outcome, keep in mind that despite the severability doctrine the lower court has already ruled that the whole of Obamacare should be trashed, that Trump’s Justice Department joined the case to fight for Obamacare’s total and complete demise and despite the Republican tap dance, they’ve spent the better part of the past decade trying to rid us of Obamacare without coming up with a replacement that covers anything least of all pre-existing conditions. Of course, it’s not just Obamacare that’s in jeopardy, while Judge Amy did manage to say that she believes that Brown v Board of Education, the landmark ruling that said that separate is not equal, was well decided and a done deal, she refused to say that about Roe v Wade and wouldn’t even agree that Griswold v Connecticut, the landmark decision that said it was okay for married couples to use contraceptives and that read into the Constitution the right to privacy, a right that originalists like Judge Amy and her mentor Justice Antonin Scalia don’t see because it wasn’t explicitly stated by those Revolutionary era scribes, the same guys who thought that slaves were only 3/5ths of a person and didn’t grant women the right to vote.  The failure to endorse Griswold is particularly notable because Roe v Wade stands upon Griswold’s shoulders.  (note to all, please excuse my oversimplification, as you can tell I am not a lawyer, I just play one for this blog).  Moving on, when asked by Senator Cory Booker if it’s wrong to separate children from their parents, Judge Amy, who we are supposed to believe is the mother of the decade, responded “That’s a matter of hot political debate that I can’t express a view or be drawn into as a judge.” When asked by Senator Amy Klobuchar “if absentee ballots, better known as mail-in ballots, are an essential way to vote for millions of people right now in the middle of the current pandemic,” Judge Amy responded “That's a matter of policy on which I can't express a view.”  Klobuchar also pointed out that if, or sadly when, she is confirmed, SCOTUS would have three justices who worked on behalf of the Republican Party on the infamous Bush v. Gore case that resulted in George W Bush winning in 2000, the other two being Chief Justice Roberts and Justice  Kavanaugh, Judge Amy refused to acknowledge that as anything more than a lovely coincidence. That “coincidence” goes a long way towards explaining why Trump keeps saying he needs her on the court in time to hear the challenges he expects to file if (when?) he loses the election. And then there’s climate science,  Judge Amy who may not have gotten much past Intelligent Design, refused to acknowledge it as a thing because it’s outside of her field of expertise and maybe too because of the Koch Brothers and their ilk who’ve funded her rise.  Likewise, she wasn’t all sure about voting discrimination, and didn’t seem at all put back about that one voting box sitting all by itself in huge Harris County, Texas.  And she wouldn’t even tell Senator Diane Feinstein that Medicare was constitutional though she did discuss her laundry practices in response to a question from the charmer from Louisiana Senator Kennedy. The bottom line is that Judge Amy is likely to be Justice Amy very soon and we should all be very worried because even if the Democrats take over the Senate, win the presidency and keep the House, she together with the rest of the conservatives on the Court will be there to rule against a lot of the “liberal” legislation they plan to pass.

Conspiracy Politics:  On the same day that Attorney General Barr skulked away from his investigation into all that illegal unmasking that wasn’t illegal and just a week or so after he quietly told Republican members of Congress and Trump that the much teased Durham report into Russia investigation improprieties will not be released before the election, the NY Post ran a front page “expose” about some likely doctored if not outright invented email from Hunter Biden to his father, candidate Joe, related to a meeting that Hunter allegedly tried to set up between the then VP and a questionable Ukrainian. The source of this newly discovered email for a meeting that never happened was an abandoned laptop found at a computer shop in Delaware and of course Rudy Giuliani was involved in getting the information to the attention of the NY Post.  Twitter and Facebook blocked the sharing of the article, an indication that both social media companies viewed it as false information intended to sway an election, that of course caused a lot of people on the Republican side to attack CEOs Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.  Enough said.  As to Barr, who may or may not be in a basement somewhere in a COVID quarantine, he appears to be on thin ice with Trump right now which could explain why he has his Justice Department attorneys, the guys paid with our tax dollars, suing Melania’s former friend/event planner Stephanie Winston Wolkoff for all those things she revealed about Melania, like FLOTUS’s  f-ck Christmas statement and her who cares about migrant kids anyway thing.

Trump Front:  Trump was off to Iowa yesterday, one of those states he won by a mile in 2016 but where he is currently in a statistical tie.  He held another super spreader rally, bragged about his recovery, mentioned that his son Barron’s quick, asymptomatic recovery from COVID, something we learned about yesterday for the first time, was proof that kids getting COVID was nothing to worry about and then did a brief advertisement for Eli Lily’s monoclonal antibody drug, one that is similar to the Regeneron one that he received.  Worth noting, Eli Lily paused the study of their monoclonal treatment yesterday morning over safety concerns, well at least concerns to them, Trump, who is all in on herd immunity, doesn’t seem at all bothered.  As to that herd immunity push, in a Monday phone call, White House officials cited something called the Great Barrington Declaration, which argues that the government should push for herd immunity.  That declaration has a number of impressive signatories including: Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas.  Again, enough said.  Keep wearing your mask and washing your hands.  We get to herd immunity with a vaccine, not by running amok at bars and parties. One more thing, remember back when the Mueller investigation was ongoing, there were reports of a subpoena going out to a mystery foreign entity.  Yesterday, CNN reported that entity was an Egyptian bank and that the subpoena was part of an effort to identify the real source of the $10 million that Trump “self-funded” towards the end of his 2016 campaign. The issue was never resolved but Egypt was excluded from the list of foreign countries included in the Muslim ban.  Another coincidence?