One Week or an Eternity

The Supremes:  At the end of the day only one Republican, Senator Susan Collins, crossed over to vote against Amy Coney Barret’s confirmation so Judge Amy is now Justice Amy Coney Barrett.  Last night during another celebration at COVID House she was sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas of the infamous coke can.  Judge Amy tried to reassure skeptics that she’ll be fair minded by saying that “A judge declares independence not only from Congress and the president, but also from the private beliefs that might otherwise move her,” but she said that with a heavily spray tanned Trump lurking over her shoulder.  That’s the same Trump who as recently as last week reminded us that he’s looking forward to her voting to overturn the entirety of the Affordable Care Act and who previously told us that he would only appoint justices who’d vote against Roe v Wade, and she apparently had no qualms about participating in what was clearly a campaign event for her favorite candidate, so count me among those who find her claim that she’ll leave her private beliefs at the door hard to believe.  During the Amy garden party, whoever controls the House Judiciary GOP Twitter account snidely tweeted “Amy Coney Barrett confirmed. Happy Birthday @HillaryClinton.” Is it any wonder that so many Democrats are calling for changes to the process for seating SCOTUS justices? To that end Joe Biden repeated that if he wins next week or whenever the election is decided, he plans to set up a bipartisan court commission, giving its members 180 days to come up with a solution to the mess that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has gifted the nation.  As to elections, yesterday SCOTUS issued another voter squelching decision, declining by a 5 – 3 vote to lift a lower court ruling preventing swing state Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots that arrive up to six days after Election Day, an accommodation that was supposed to undo the damage caused by Postmaster General DeJoy’s war on timely mail delivery during the pandemic. Chief Justice John Roberts, who recently sided with the Court liberals to let a similar Pennsylvania provision stand justified his move to the dark side by saying that "This case involves federal intrusions on state lawmaking processes,” while the Pennsylvania case was about “the authority of state courts to apply their own constitutions" but he probably meant that with Amy about to join the court, he sees the writing on the wall and would rather be the head of a majority conservative contingent than join with those loser libs. As to the conservatives, Justices Brett Kavanaugh who worked on the infamous Bush v Gore case back in the day, went even further.  “Beer” Brett justified the Wisconsin decision by saying “If the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing due to late arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode.” If that sounds familiar and scary as sh-t it should, it’s what Trump’s been saying for months in his tirades against mail-in voting.   

Human Resources:  Late last week, while few were watching, King wannabee Trump signed an executive order removing job protections for long term civil servants.  The order gives Trump the power to purge thousands of federal workers in order to replace them with “politically appointed hacks who would spend the next four years doing Trump’s bidding” something that could also impede a Biden administration for months even if Trump loses, at a time when it will need to act fast on things like the virus and reassembling health care protections.  That order was so disturbing to life-long Republican Ronald Sanders, a Trump appointee to the Federal Salary Council, that he resigned on Sunday saying that it “is nothing more than a smoke screen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise” Trump “or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process.”  By the way, it’s likely that virus guru Fauci now falls into the category of professionals that Trump could axe going forward.  Jared Kushner, the guy skewered in that prominent bill board over Times Square, doesn’t have to worry about Trump firing him because nepotism is so on brand in Trump world.  That said, Trump might want to hide him away for a few days. Yesterday the tone deaf Jared, who was born rich and who benefited from his father greasing his path into Harvard by throwing a million or more at the tony ivy’s admission office told Trump’s Fox & Friends echo chamber that “One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that” Trump’s “policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about but he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.” In other words, Jared’s all in on the racist stereotype that Black people don’t succeed because they aren’t trying hard enough. He then went on to say that a lot of “those” people protesting the George Floyd killing were more concerned with “virtue signaling” than in coming up with “solutions” and by solutions, he likely means joining the Trump “LAW & ORDER” train. 

Politics Unusual:  As the daily count of new coronavirus positives skyrockets, hospitals fill up and ICU beds run short Trump continues to hold super spreader rallies in swing locales. In addition to saying that the raging virus has turned a corner to oblivion and calling for a laundry list of Democrats to be locked up, he’s now saying that NJ Senator Cory Booker, the former Mayor of Newark who he keeps threatening (or promising?) will invade white suburbs, never lived in Newark and for good measure he’s also threatening to punish Tom Wolf, the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, for “shutting down” his state and not being more cooperative about hosting  super spreader rallies.   Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are off to Georgia and Texas, two states that look temptingly up for grabs though given their history of successfully suppressing minority votes probably aren’t, yet.  That said, Beto O’Rourke has been working hard to expand the Texas voter base and Stacey Abrams has been doing a similarly remarkable job in Georgia so with the possibility of winning some key down ballot races as well as a total of three Senate seats teetering on the edge, two in Georgia, one in Texas, those visits could pay off even if they don’t mean electoral college votes this go round.

 The polls are the polls. Keep breathing.