Tag: Politics

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“A court that will do what it is told”

Five years ago, I wrote this post about my thoughts on reforming the Supreme Court. My thoughts were intended as an “intro” to the topic, and I got some interesting commentary response. I have been thinking about the topic again, because the Court is an even bigger problem now, to the point that addressing its problems is rapidly becoming essential, once–and if–saner voices take elective power in Washington. I present below the text of that original post of mine, a lot of which I still think might be a good way of approaching things; lifetime tenure needs to go away, but so does the “accidental” nature of which President gets to make a lot of appointments to the Court and which one does not. I also gave a lot of thought to the shenanigans of one Senator Mitch McConnell, who used the power of the Senate to simply deny a Democratic President a Supreme Court appointment. My attempt to address this got some interesting pushback, and I’m open to suggestion, but I still believe that fundamentally the Senate cannot be allowed to do nothing when an active Supreme Court nomination lies before it. Maybe in addition to requiring a vote, and forbidding the Senate to adjourn while a nomination lies before it, we also change the voting procedure so the vote is not one to confirm, but to deny, with a 3/5 majority required to decline a nomination. Also, re-reading my post, I see that I wrote against expanding the Court. I have changed my mind, and frankly, expanding it to 21 would be OK with me.

Before delving into my own thoughts, though, here’s a video on the topic of our corrupt Supreme Court by the always-brilliant Jamelle Bouie. It’s always worth remembering that our government was structured such that each branch’s power would be checked and balanced by the other two, and that the current state of affairs–in which Congress, run by Republicans, has completed abdicated its responsibility to check or balance anything–is a voluntary one, and also a political one. Nothing in the US Constitution establishes the Supreme Court as a de facto royal body that governs by decree, and in fact, there is a great deal of power that the Congress holds over the Court.

Here is my original post from five years ago:

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: how I would fix the Supreme Court. Obviously, I’m not an expert and am quite possibly wrong in many ways, but you have to start SOMEWHERE, right? Here’s my proposed Amendment which would fix the Court, with interspersed commentary.

WHEREAS it is sufficiently clear in 2021 that the current structure of the United States Supreme Court has proven too easily forced by concerted effort by various factions to extended periods of ideological extremity, I propose the following alterations in how the Court is structured.

While I’m sure American conservatives are all kinds of gleeful that they have finally, after years of focus and hard work, managed to create a Court majority that will favor their ideological goals for quite possibly decades to come, I hope most Americans will agree that this is not a desirable state of affairs.

 

1. The Supreme Court shall consist of 9 seats, with each Seat being held by one Justice.

Why 9? Why not engage in the current liberal wishlist of bumping it up to 13, thus allowing President Biden to name four liberals and immediately grab the balance of the Court back? Well, as much as I’d be on board with that concept in my angrier moments, I’m trying for a more nuanced approach right here. Currently the number of Justices is set by Congress, and there’s no reason to believe that even if the Democrats in Congress pulled this off right now that a future President Hawley (God help us all) and a Republican Congress to come wouldn’t just do the same thing right back, and somehow find a weaselly way to make it worse. Remember, they were quite content to engage in reverse Court-packing by holding the number of Justices at 8 until they could control the nominee. I’d hardwire the 9 into the Constitution at this point. Also, there’s math involved. And why am I referring to nine seats, instead of nine Justices? Read on! We’re getting to the meat of it now:

 

2. One Seat on the Supreme Court shall be vacated on July 5 of each year numbered Oddly, to be filled by an individual named by the sitting President of the United States, with the nominated Justice taking the vacant Seat upon confirmation by a simple Majority vote in the United States Senate.

3. The Senate shall bring any nomination of a Supreme Court Justice to its Floor for a full Confirmation vote within TWO WEEKS of the President’s official Nomination of said Justice, regardless of whether the Senate has concluded its Business in the course of Advising and Consenting. In the event that the Senate fails to confirm a nominated Justice or Judge on three consecutive Votes, the President shall name an APPOINTED JUSTICE to serve on that Seat until either the swearing-in of the Next Senate or the beginning of that Seat’s next term, whichever comes first. No Nominee for the Court, having been rejected by full vote of the Senate, shall be eligible for Renomination before the beginning of a new Senate. 

4. Upon confirmation and installation, a Justice shall hold their Seat for a single term of EIGHTEEN years, at the conclusion of which their Seat shall become again vacant and the sitting President shall name their Successor.

OK. Let’s unpack. What am I getting at here?

First: No more lifetime tenure to the Court for judges. That shit is OVER. No more nominating young judges who will then sit for thirty or forty years or longer. Yes, I’m quite annoyed at the fact that I may well need to adjust my diet to include large amounts of broccoli at this point if I have any hope of seeing a liberal court in my lifetime. Moreover, I don’t think a President, any President, should be able to extend their legacy so far into the future, either through chicanery or by accident of timing or some combination thereof.

It is utterly absurd to me that our 45th President, in his one disastrous term, was able to name three Supreme Court Justice while Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama combined for four in their twenty combined years in office. That 45’s nominations came respectively via Mitch McConnell’s gaming of the rules, Anthony Kennedy’s oddly convenient decision to step down, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing (which gave McConnell a chance to demonstrate just how low his actual commitment was to his previous deeply held principle of not voting on Judicial nominees in election years) isn’t relevant, but we should make sure that this kind of gamesmanship is much harder to pull off, moving forward.

However, while I do favor eliminating lifetime tenure, I do think it’s important to remove the Court as much as we can from the normal cycles of political life in Washington. So I have Justices serving eighteen years: a good long term that gives them political independence that lasts well beyond the reahc of a single Presidential term. As of this writing, eighteen years has spanned four Presidents, two from each party.

Next: Well, since we already know the Mitch McConnells of the world will simply change rules any which way they need to in order to make sure that Republicans are the ones controlling the judiciary (and not just the Supreme Court–look at the ways they changed rules for Federal judicial appointments constantly starting in 1995 and then with each subsequent time they either had the Senate, the Presidency, or both), I suppose we need to hard-wire into the Constitution that the Senate will vote on Supreme Court nominees. As a writer whose work involves occasional villains, I have to admit that McConnell’s simple tactic of just not voting at all on Merrick Garland was some Class-A villainy in its ruthless cunning. So, that shot having been fired once, I’d like to take that one permanently out of circulation.

But! Here’s the thing: since 1981–the last forty years–only 22 of those years, barely more than half the time, has seen a President and the Majority of the United States Senate serving from the same party at the same time. It’s easy to see a Republican Senate saying to a Democratic President: “OK, we’re required to give your nominee an up or down vote, so we’re just gonna keep voting your nominees down and run out the clock that way.”

Well…no dice there, either. Three times in a row and the President gets to fill the seat on the Court temporarily, until either the Seat’s term ends (i.e., the 18 years ends) or a Congressional election happens and a new Senate is seated. Then the whole thing starts up again, and the President can nominate the person he or she chose in the first place. Also, note the required time frame: just two weeks, and the Senate is required to vote. If they can’t figure out if they’re on board with a Justice or not within two weeks, they shouldn’t be in that job, and obviously the possibility of any filibustering has to be neutered right in the Constitution. (But ixnay on the President just nominating the same person three times and then seating that person anyway. We still need to take the Senate’s “advise and consent” thing a little seriously.)

Oh, and I said up above that there’s math involved in picking nine judges? Well, assuming an 18-year-term, if you have more than nine judges, then eventually you get to a situation where multiple seats are opening up in odd years. This system guarantees that every President will make some mark on the Supreme Court, as every President will name at least two Justices. But I don’t want a President naming as many as eight. Of course, you could get around this by extending the term of a Justice’s service to twice the number of years as there are sitting Justices, but then terms start getting uncomfortably long again.

All right. We’ve got our Justices serving one eighteen year term on the Supreme Court. Also note that they’re ineligible to hold any other judicial position in the country after they leave! I’m not sure if that would be a big deal or not, but you wouldn’t get to have a Republican President give us a bitter pill like Brett Kavanaugh and then, if his term happens to end during another Republican presidency, just get re-nominated for another 18 years. Also, the eighteen-year-term refers to the seat on the Court, not the specific Justice holding it. In this respect it would be like the Presidency: the term is four years, but if the sitting President dies and the Vice President becomes President, they don’t get four new years: the Presidential term ends at noon on January 20 every four years, no matter what. Likewise, if a Justice dies fifteen years in, obviously you need a replacement–but you do not get to reset the clock with someone to your ideological liking. No getting around it: eighteen years. That’s it. So we would have this provision:

 

5. In the event that a Seat on the Supreme Court becomes vacant sooner than the conclusion of its Eighteen Year Term, the sitting President shall name a Justice to that seat, also pending Senate majority confirmation, to serve only the remaining time in that Seat’s term, at the end of which that Justice shall leave the Court.

Now, we well know that for all the “the Courts are apolitical!” talk we hear a lot, the fact is that the Courts and people on them are as much a part of the political life in this country as anyone else. But to help foster as much political independence as we possibly can, I’d add this:

 

6. No person, having held any portion of a Seat on the United States Supreme Court, shall be eligible for any Senate-confirmable position upon leaving said Seat, or for any Judicial position in the United States; also, no member of that Justice’s family shall be eligible for any Senate-confirmable position for a period beginning with their assumption of that Seat until five years after their departure from it.

In short, no “Hey Judge, I’ll make your kid or your wife Ambassador to the Bahamas”, and no “Hey Judge, if you’re looking to retire early, I might need a new Ambassador to Sweden”. Also, once you leave the Supreme Court, that’s it for your legal career. And really, there’s nowhere else to go after that but write your books and be on a corporate board or two, right? No, I’m not worried about what our Justices will do in their now-much-longer retirements. They’ll make out just fine, I suspect.

Of course, if you’re going to limit the terms, then you have to schedule the terms as well. If we just wait for the existing judges to die or retire and then start the eighteen year thing, then you’d have nominations clustering at eighteen year intervals from whenever those passings happen. So, one seat will open on the Supreme Court every two years, during the odd-numbered years to minimize the degree to which federal-level elections play a role in the politics.

 

7. The transition to this prescription for Supreme Court tenure shall begin on July 5 of the first odd-numbered year following Ratification of this Amendment, with pre-existing terms ending in reverse order of service on the Court.

You have to make your transition some way, right? For my purposes, if I could wave my magic wand and instantly ratify this amendment, then Clarence Thomas would get the boot on July 5, 2023.

As noted above, I’m sure I’ve missed something, and I’m sure there are ways this system would work badly, but…we’ve got to start somewhere, right? And while I yield to no one in my anger at the way Republicans have been gaming our democracy against us (and are still doing so, to what I expect may be our eternal regret, and sooner than we think), I do not want to just shift the gaming-of-the-system to the Democrats just because I’m currently on their side. If there’s one thing the post-2016 era has shown me, it’s that our Constitutional systems are nowhere near as robust as they need to be to withstand the threats confronting them now.

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“Divisive”

President Barack Obama runs down the East Colonnade with family dog, Bo, on the dog’s initial visit to the White House, March 15, 2009. Bo came back to live at the White House in April.
(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
(image via)

This photo is one of my favorites from Barack Obama’s time in the White House. It was taken less than two months into his administration. I love Presidential photography and always have; glimpses into the inner life and the humanity of the people who hold the office of President and those who serve the President are always welcome. I find now, though, a certain tragic note as well in photos like this, and not just of Obama but of Presidents Biden and Bush and Clinton and Bush the Elder and even Reagan, Carter, Ford, and hell, even Nixon, who as weird and skeevy as he was at least looked like a human being sometimes. The guy liked to bowl, at least. The current guy? There’s not a human moment to be found in the man. His White House is bereft of art and music and humanity. He has no dog, no cat, no pet goldfish. Looking for humanity in President DJT is an exercise in futility. It’s one of the things about him that I find the most baffling, in terms of who he is and how he has been so thoroughly embraced by millions of Americans he wouldn’t dream of embracing in return.

Of course, the photo is also sad because of the components in the photo, only one–President Obama himself–still exists. Bo the dog passed away several years ago, and President DJT had the East Colonnade demolished last week in favor of building his colossally stupid ball room.

I’ve had President Obama on my mind of late, for various reasons…and not just because I find myself wistfully looking back on a President who wasn’t, well, garbage in every way. I’m thinking about him because of a talking point that I see over and over again from right-wingers.

I rarely try to plumb the depth of right-wing logic anymore, because generally the right (at least in the US, I’m not sure about elsewhere) increasingly bases its ideas on pure, unadulterated fantasy coupled with constructs of logic that are about as sound as the present-day hull of the RMS Titanic. But one talking point that I have heard a lot in recent years that actually does pose an interesting look into just how the American right views the world is their idea that the most divisive political figure in recent American history is not Donald Trump, or Mitch McConnell, or Steve Bannon, or Stephen Miller, or JD Vance. No, for them the most divisive political figure in recent American history (or in all of American history, depending on who is spouting the talking point) is former President Barack Obama.

When I’ve encountered this notion, I’ve pretty much laughed it off because it just doesn’t make any sense…but I keep hearing it and I keep hearing it, to the point that I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I had to figure out just how on Earth President Obama is supposed to have been a deeply divisive person, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got it.

Maybe this is the most obvious thing ever, but…the man is Black.

Yes, I know. But why would he be divisive just by being Black?

This is where the white “entitlement” comes into play. Because Barack Obama didn’t just be president while being Black. He also talked about his Blackness. He talked about race. Did he talk about those things a lot? Probably not. Did he talk about those things enough? In my opinion, definitely not. But for many Americans, and almost all of them on the right, his error was in ever talking about his Blackness in particular and about race in general at all.

Barack Obama was elected President for many reasons: his predecessor had made a thorough mess of everything; he was an energetic new voice who spoke with eloquent relish about rising to the challenges facing the country; and yes, he is Black. For many Americans, if not most Americans, the prospect of President Barack Obama was an opportunity to embrace a future that was unthinkable just years before, certainly within my lifetime. The problem is that for a great many Americans, and quite possibly a majority of white Americans, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States wasn’t just about making a big step in our nation’s long struggle with race. No, for many–and certainly for everyone on the right, even if they never once considered voting for him–the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency was about ending our nation’s long struggle with race.

With Obama’s election, race was over. It was done. We had finally defeated racism, for all time. How could a racist country elect a Black man to its highest office? Obviously it couldn’t…which means, ergo, that America was no longer racist. All such talk was now off the table permanently. “See, Black people? We did it! We let one of you be President! Now it’s all done and none of you can complain anymore!”

That is absolutely the logic that the American right took when Obama was elected…and so, when it turned out that no, we were not done with our racial struggle, not by a long shot, not by any damn sight, that meant that it was all Obama’s fault. He was supposed to get into office and declare racism over, but he didn’t. Racial things still happened, and worst of all, Barack Obama talked about it. He brought it up.

And that is where the division, the divisiveness, comes in. Because by electing Barack Obama, White America finally gave itself permission to not think about race anymore. The slate was clean, atonement was achieved, and all wrongs had been addressed. And now this uppity Black President thinks that he gets to talk about race more? He thinks he gets to keep–gasp!–playing the Race Card?

(That’s what “playing the Race Card” means. You realize this, right? You know that when a white person complains about a Black person “playing the Race Card”, the white person is actually saying, “That Black person mentioned race in a way that I do not personally approve of.”)

Ultimately, Barack Obama is seen as “divisive” because white people don’t want to have to think about race anymore, and he made them think about it. White people don’t want to talk about race anymore, and he made them talk about it. White people want Black people to just calm down and be quiet about all that unpleasantness, see. Race is over, see. Why do you gotta keep bringing it up?

Why can’t you people just stay in your lane? Why can’t you people just stay where you belong?

They think Barack Obama is divisive because he didn’t quiet down and he dared set the direction of the national conversation. Which is what Presidents of the United States are supposed to do, isn’t it…unless. Unless they’re Black. In that case, a President is supposed to prioritize the comfort of white people. He was divisive because he didn’t maintain the national conversation in a way that they preferred.

As for me…well, I wonder if President Obama wasn’t divisive enough. I, for one, am deeply tired of all of the factors holding America back, and one of those is very much the “comfort of white people”. Maybe it’s time for more discomfort. Maybe. Just maybe.

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The answer is “No.”

And the question is, Will you be watching the debate?

Even if this was any kind of “normal” election year, I wouldn’t watch debates, because I decided years ago–2000, in fact–that political debates are a complete and utter waste of time, and that if you as a citizen really need the theatrical experience of a debate to decide who gets your vote, then you are a bad citizen because you clearly have not done one ounce of work to figure out (a) what you believe the direction of the country should be, (b) what kind of government we should have, and therefore (c) which candidate(s) are obviously best suited to providing the results you have determined you want by processing items (a) and (b) above. I literally cannot fathom the idea of sitting down to watch a debate because you are genuinely undecided, and that’s in a normal year.

This year, if you’re undecided, I’d almost honestly rather you didn’t vote at all.

Since I reject debates as a tool for deciding between candidates, that reduces them to basically little more interest than a sporting event, and there are plenty of those around. Thus, no, I will not be watching any debates. At all. I don’t need to listen to two hours of 45 spouting complete and utter nonsense to figure this out.

 

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The Odd Pathology of the Politician’s Mind

Here’s something that I’ve been thinking about all day. It’s a video of Senator Ted Cruz cheerfully walking up the aisle at Yankee Stadium, as Yankee fans make their opinions of him loudly known, right to his face.

There’s a LOT of very salty language here, so be careful…but what gets me here is Cruz’s demeanor here. He looks like he’s having the time of his life and that he’s surrounded by loved ones and supporters who can’t get enough of him or his presence…and nobody, not one single solitary soul, is the least bit happy to see him. At all.

I get that politicians have to cultivate a thick skin and all, and that this sort of thing is probably par for the course sometimes. But there’s just something about Cruz here that…how can I put this…it’s like he has a mental ability to simply remove it from his perception. He’s acting as if he genuinely doesn’t even notice this reaction. It’s not the mean enjoyment of it that wafts from Mitch McConnell’s body like a putrid death-stench; Cruz doesn’t strike me as enjoying being this hated. He strikes me as being completely unaware of it.

I guess this isn’t terribly surprising, given his history of sycophantic groveling and his cheerfulness as he spouts complete and utter nonsense that is so redolent of bullshit it often stuns other people in their tracks as they try to parse together enough of his absurdities to amount to something easily refuted. But this just really puts it front and center. He’s looking around, grinning and waving when the only people around are the ones shouting obscenities at him; he looks like he’s trying to shake hands with nobody who is offering their hand in return.

Someday, when the historians chronicle this period we’re being dragged through like prisoners in a chain gang, there will be entire chapters dedicated to attempting an explanation of Ted Cruz. If I were writing such a history, the entire chapter would simply be this:

CHAPTER 22: SENATOR TED CRUZ

That was some weird shit and there is no explanation for any of it.

Moving on….

 

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What a, very strange, piece of writing

Setting aside all the various issues with its interpretation–and honestly, I’ve pretty much conclusively come to the conclusion that it should simply be repealed entirely–I realized anew that other day just how weird the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is. It’s just a strange piece of writing, even for its time.

I came to this when I read news of an unfortunate encounter with a police officer that took place in Rochester. (I know, a bad police story, big shocker there.) Summing it up: a cop parked his cop car in a space outside a hospital’s Emergency entrance that is marked for ambulances and EMT vehicles only, because…it doesn’t matter. I’ve long observed that cops take it as a given that they get to park wherever the hell they want, for any reason. But now an ambulance comes in with a patient, and in parking, bumps the cop’s car. This pisses off the cop, who can’t think the actual thing he should have thought: “Yikes, I shouldn’t be parked here, my bad.” No, the cop jumped out and started being all “KNEEL BEFORE COP!!!” while the EMT was all “I really gotta get this person into the hospital for treatment.” And since the EMT did not KNEEL BEFORE COP!!!, the cop put the EMT in cuffs. (The cop is now on desk duty. Personally, I think he should be on laundry duty, but that’s just me.)

As I have always noticed how cops tend to view themselves as somehow above the laws they’re supposedly enforcing, I looked up the Second Amendment and recast it as follows:

“A cowed populace, being necessary to the security of a police State, the right of the constabulary to do whatever it wishes, shall not be infringed.”

I wanted to make sure I got the wording exactly the way I wanted it, complete with the Amendment’s phrasing and punctuation. And that’s when I realized, typing it out, how strange a piece of actual writing the Second Amendment is. I mean, look at it:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

There is, quite famously, no helpful text to explain just how the first clause relates to the second, which has naturally caused all manner of unfortunate shenanigans in American history. And what is with all those commas? There are three commas in this single sentence, separating this thing into four distinct language clauses. Just on its own, the Second Amendment is a linguistic calamity. I can’t believe anyone at the Convention didn’t look at this thing and say, “Guys, this makes no sense as written and we need to clarify it.” That was a room full of good writers (as well as drunkards and nitwits), and yet, this terribly-written Amendment was allowed to stand. Why? Well, maybe they thought the meaning they intended was so clear and unlikely to change that it would never be an issue. Or maybe they figured, given the general ambivalence to the Constitution at the time, that it would be fixed on revision anyway. Or maybe…well, who cares. Fact is, we’re saddled with it. As is. Which is itself absurd, but hey, 21st Century America is, if nothing else, a great national monument to absurdity.

I also glanced at the other Amendments surrounding the Second. Were they all this badly written? Why…no! Here’s the First:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That’s pretty damned clear. The commas are used logically, and the clauses clearly relate as part of the same sentence. Odd capitalization abounds, but that was just a Thing back then. (I assume there was some Rule by which those writing chose which words to Capitalize.) But the First reads very clearly: Congress is forbidden to do this.

The other Amendments are all pretty specific in the way they limit government, except for the Ninth and Tenth, which are clearly intended to forestall arguments down the road of the “Well, the Constitution doesn’t specifically SAY you can’t do this, so you CAN!” or vice-versa. (Pssst, Messrs Jefferson et al: It didn’t work.) So then I look back at the Second, aghast anew at is appalling lack of specificity, its foggy language, and its unique phrasing (nowhere else is the construct “shall not be infringed” used).

Bad writing has consequences, folks. Especially when a big part of your country’s population has decided to treat a certain piece of bad writing as if it was handed down by God on a third tablet.

(For an amusing bit of Constitutional comedy, here is John Mulaney in one of his SNL monologues. The relevant bit is at the 3:52 mark:

I love the line, “They knew how to make a pen, they were just being jerks.”)

 

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Tab Closing Day

Time to close out some tabs I’ve had open for a while:

::  The Future Republicans Want

A look at the unbelievably fascist document that is the official platform of the Texas Republican Party:

The fundamentalist religious fervor perhaps extends most strongly to gay rights and others of alternative sexual lifestyles. The platform directly declares that “Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice” and that “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity.” §§ 143–144 (p. 21). The Republican platform seeks to ban gay marriage.

And that’s just one example of the awfulness therein.

::  The Message of the Republican Party: Don’t Tread On Me, I Tread On You.

The press does not want to have a direct conversation with you about what’s really at the heart of Republican messaging. As a former Republican who now consistently votes for the Democratic Party in US elections, I will. When I came to realize what the true message of the Republican Party was, I was out, and have been voting Democratic ever since.

Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:

  1. They can tell people what to do.
  2. You cannot tell them what to do.

This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (we will discuss this later in the piece), but this is the basic formula.

::  Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked.

::  Bill Altreuter, a Buffalo trial lawyer, on the Supreme Court:

I don’t see the path out. Even if we were able to pack the Courts with jurists who believe in now outdated concepts like stare decisis all that would mean would be that we would be acknowledging that the Supreme Court is an unelected super-legislature. It actually always has been, but before this there were recognized limits on how far the Court could go. That’s gone now.

Increasingly we’re in a place where the only way to really fix things is to blow it all up and start over with an all-new Constitution, and when you consider how the one we have was a messy document full of compromises and good-enough’s that none of the rich white men who wrote it even liked very much, well, what are our chances of getting it right?

::  Roger’s thoughts on Independence Day are not much rosier than my own.

::  ‘An old strain of English magic had returned’: stars on why they fell in love with Kate Bush

This has been an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold the last month or so: a song by 80s singer Kate Bush featured prominently in an episode of the new season of Stranger Things, which has in turn led to an enormous resurgence of interest in Bush herself. The Internet and social media have exploded with discussions of Bush and her songs. I am always happy to see older cultural material get another crack at the limelight; we are too focused on the new-and-shiny as a culture, and it depresses me that lots of good things disappear if they don’t have their Big Moment quickly enough when they’re new.

In my particular case this is helpful because somehow I managed to completely miss Kate Bush in the 80s. I have no memory of her music at all, none whatsoever. I don’t know how this came to happen, but I have a few suspicions, and it had to do with (a) the music I was consuming in 1985 or so, and (b) how I was consuming it. I liked rock and pop a great deal back then! I spent too many hours in front of MTV, and I owned a lot of rock and pop records. But even so, most of my music listening around that point focused strongly on classical, and that didn’t let up until…well, it hasn’t, actually, though I’ve added other genres along the way.

My consumption of rock and pop had nothing at all to do with the usual way of hearing such music, the radio; in the Southern Tier there wasn’t all that much radio at all other than what was powerful enough to reach that far from Buffalo, and when we were driving around, my father asserted the “Driver chooses the music!” rule, which meant country music a lot of the time. So as far as pop and rock went, if I didn’t hear them on MTV, I didn’t hear them at all. I don’t know if Kate Bush made music videos, but I don’t recall seeing them much, if she did.

And that just means I have something new to explore!

::  Meet Jillian Hanesworth, Buffalo’s new–and first ever–poet laureate!

::  And finally, fireworks…in space!!!

Not fireworks, actually:

Since July 4th is a time when many enjoy fireworks, here is this image of a supernova that looks a lot like a fireworks explosion. Explosions of actual stars are a focus for scientists who hope to better understand their births, lives, and deaths and how they interact with their surroundings. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2015, astronomers have studied one particular explosion that may provide clues to the dynamics of other, much larger stellar eruptions. This is an image of GK Persei, an object that became a sensation in the astronomical world in 1901 when it suddenly appeared as one of the brightest stars in the sky for a few days.

Amazing!

 

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Then: Hoovervilles! Now: Shapirovilles!

So, a couple weeks back, a video made the rounds of social media that was billed as “A progressive DESTROYS Ben Shapiro!!!!” Now, this is an obnoxious tendency in our click-bait era, when any time a person on one side challenges someone on the other in “debate”, it’s described as “Joe ABSOLUTELY DEMOLISHES Donald!” or the like. It’s pretty tiresome, because every time I watch one of these, it’s never really one person UTTERLY CRUSHING the other. It might be a slight upper-hand, but that’s about it. And this video was a case in point.

The video wasn’t worthless, though, because while it didn’t show Shapiro getting reduced to a pile of sniveling tears, it did put Shapiro’s debate “style” on display. (If you’re not familiar with Ben Shapiro, you are really lucky and really not missing much. He’s one of the current darlings of America’s right-wing, and he’s as nauseating now as he was when he was a 15-year-old kid writing pro-Iraq war columns back in the early 2000s.) A guy stepped up to the q-and-a mike at one of Ben Shapiro’s events and challenged him on the topic of “wokeism” (which is in itself a deeply tiring and dull obsession of America’s right wing, but I digress). When the guy started talking, the audience went “Oooooooh!”, thus demonstrating part one of Shapiro’s strategy: Always have a friendly audience.

The next thing Shapiro did was to let the guy talk just long enough that he’d be able to say that “I let you speak”, and then he began talking over the guy, basically taking over. Shapiro then went into his personal definition of “wokeism”, which is a definition that is just full of nonsensical characterizations, but when the guy at the mike tried pushing back, guess what: Ben starts with the “I let you speak, now it’s my turn” stuff, and he spouted some more nonsense, very quickly. That’s the second of Shapiro’s debate tricks: speak quickly and sound authoritative. The strategy is to get so much BS into the air that it’s difficult for the other interlocutor to figure out where to start.

And when the interlocutor does start, Ben turned to his final trick: he had the friendly folks running his event cut off the guy’s mike.

People like Ben Shapiro are why I think “debate” is a giant waste of time. The ability to debate has little to do with being correct, or analyzing issues, or providing genuine factual context. It’s about speaking quickly and maintaining composure while speaking quickly. The person who controls the conversation is the one who “wins” the debate (and frankly, the idea that a debate should be “winnable” in the sense that a football game is “winnable” is utter nonsense), not the one with the better ideas or the more correct interpretation of the facts. This is why I never watch debates of any kind, not even the final Presidential debates.

The proper way to engage Ben Shapiro, if engage him one must, is shown in the following video. Apparently this guy managed to so get under Shapiro’s skin with this that Shapiro blocked him on social media:

(This is actually an excerpt from a longer video.)

Video like this, where you can isolate each bullshit bullet point that comes from Shapiro’s mouth and bask in the scent of its idiocy, is the best way to deal with him and his comrades-in-arms. (I was going to say “ilk”, but wow, do I hate the word “ilk”. It sounds like an incomplete word, like someone choked out a syllable and someone else decided, “OK, that’s the word, I guess.”) His intellectual nonsense is so much more obvious when he’s not able to surround it by a lot of other rapid-fire nonsense.

This specific brand of Shapiro dopeyness came to mind earlier today when I saw this on Twitter:

In honor of Ben “Don’t you think they’d have already sold their houses and moved?” Shapiro, I propose that since we’re going to see much, much, much more of these “houses crumble into the sea” videos in the years to come, we should dub such locales where this happens as Shapirovilles. Not unlike the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.

Shapirovilles: where the real estate trends favor mer-people!

 

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A Proposed AMENDMENT, addressing certain ISSUES pertaining to the SUPREME COURT of these UNITED STATES.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: how I would fix the Supreme Court. Obviously, I’m not an expert and am quite possibly wrong in many ways, but you have to start SOMEWHERE, right? Here’s my proposed Amendment which would fix the Court, with interspersed commentary.

This is long, so it’s after the fold.

 

WHEREAS it is sufficiently clear in 2021 that the current structure of the United States Supreme Court has proven too easily forced by concerted effort by various factions to extended periods of ideological extremity, I propose the following alterations in how the Court is structured.

While I’m sure American conservatives are all kinds of gleeful that they have finally, after years of focus and hard work, managed to create a Court majority that will favor their ideological goals for quite possibly decades to come, I hope most Americans will agree that this is not a desirable state of affairs.

1. The Supreme Court shall consist of 9 seats, with each Seat being held by one Justice.

Why 9? Why not engage in the current liberal wishlist of bumping it up to 13, thus allowing President Biden to name four liberals and immediately grab the balance of the Court back? Well, as much as I’d be on board with that concept in my angrier moments, I’m trying for a more nuanced approach right here. Currently the number of Justices is set by Congress, and there’s no reason to believe that even if the Democrats in Congress pulled this off right now that a future President Hawley (God help us all) and a Republican Congress to come wouldn’t just do the same thing right back, and somehow find a weaselly way to make it worse. Remember, they were quite content to engage in reverse Court-packing by holding the number of Justices at 8 until they could control the nominee. I’d hardwire the 9 into the Constitution at this point. Also, there’s math involved. And why am I referring to nine seats, instead of nine Justices? Read on! We’re getting to the meat of it now:

2. One Seat on the Supreme Court shall be vacated on July 5 of each year numbered Oddly, to be filled by an individual named by the sitting President of the United States, with the nominated Justice taking the vacant Seat upon confirmation by a simple Majority vote in the United States Senate.

3. The Senate shall bring any nomination of a Supreme Court Justice to its Floor for a full Confirmation vote within TWO WEEKS of the President’s official Nomination of said Justice, regardless of whether the Senate has concluded its Business in the course of Advising and Consenting. In the event that the Senate fails to confirm a nominated Justice or Judge on three consecutive Votes, the President shall name an APPOINTED JUSTICE to serve on that Seat until either the swearing-in of the Next Senate or the beginning of that Seat’s next term, whichever comes first. No Nominee for the Court, having been rejected by full vote of the Senate, shall be eligible for Renomination before the beginning of a new Senate. 

4. Upon confirmation and installation, a Justice shall hold their Seat for a single term of EIGHTEEN years, at the conclusion of which their Seat shall become again vacant and the sitting President shall name their Successor.

OK. Let’s unpack. What am I getting at here?

First: No more lifetime tenure to the Court for judges. That shit is OVER. No more nominating young judges who will then sit for thirty or forty years or longer. Yes, I’m quite annoyed at the fact that I may well need to adjust my diet to include large amounts of broccoli at this point if I have any hope of seeing a liberal court in my lifetime. Moreover, I don’t think a President, any President, should be able to extend their legacy so far into the future, either through chicanery or by accident of timing or some combination thereof.

It is utterly absurd to me that our 45th President, in his one disastrous term, was able to name three Supreme Court Justice while Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama combined for four in their twenty combined years in office. That 45’s nominations came respectively via Mitch McConnell’s gaming of the rules, Anthony Kennedy’s oddly convenient decision to step down, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing (which gave McConnell a chance to demonstrate just how low his actual commitment was to his previous deeply held principle of not voting on Judicial nominees in election years) isn’t relevant, but we should make sure that this kind of gamesmanship is much harder to pull off, moving forward.

However, while I do favor eliminating lifetime tenure, I do think it’s important to remove the Court as much as we can from the normal cycles of political life in Washington. So I have Justices serving eighteen years: a good long term that gives them political independence that lasts well beyond the reahc of a single Presidential term. As of this writing, eighteen years has spanned four Presidents, two from each party.

Next: Well, since we already know the Mitch McConnells of the world will simply change rules any which way they need to in order to make sure that Republicans are the ones controlling the judiciary (and not just the Supreme Court–look at the ways they changed rules for Federal judicial appointments constantly starting in 1995 and then with each subsequent time they either had the Senate, the Presidency, or both), I suppose we need to hard-wire into the Constitution that the Senate will vote on Supreme Court nominees. As a writer whose work involves occasional villains, I have to admit that McConnell’s simple tactic of just not voting at all on Merrick Garland was some Class-A villainy in its ruthless cunning. So, that shot having been fired once, I’d like to take that one permanently out of circulation.

But! Here’s the thing: since 1981–the last forty years–only 22 of those years, barely more than half the time, has seen a President and the Majority of the United States Senate serving from the same party at the same time. It’s easy to see a Republican Senate saying to a Democratic President: “OK, we’re required to give your nominee an up or down vote, so we’re just gonna keep voting your nominees down and run out the clock that way.”

Well…no dice there, either. Three times in a row and the President gets to fill the seat on the Court temporarily, until either the Seat’s term ends (i.e., the 18 years ends) or a Congressional election happens and a new Senate is seated. Then the whole thing starts up again, and the President can nominate the person he or she chose in the first place. Also, note the required time frame: just two weeks, and the Senate is required to vote. If they can’t figure out if they’re on board with a Justice or not within two weeks, they shouldn’t be in that job, and obviously the possibility of any filibustering has to be neutered right in the Constitution. (But ixnay on the President just nominating the same person three times and then seating that person anyway. We still need to take the Senate’s “advise and consent” thing a little seriously.)

Oh, and I said up above that there’s math involved in picking nine judges? Well, assuming an 18-year-term, if you have more than nine judges, then eventually you get to a situation where multiple seats are opening up in odd years. This system guarantees that every President will make some mark on the Supreme Court, as every President will name at least two Justices. But I don’t want a President naming as many as eight. Of course, you could get around this by extending the term of a Justice’s service to twice the number of years as there are sitting Justices, but then terms start getting uncomfortably long again.

All right. We’ve got our Justices serving one eighteen year term on the Supreme Court. Also note that they’re ineligible to hold any other judicial position in the country after they leave! I’m not sure if that would be a big deal or not, but you wouldn’t get to have a Republican President give us a bitter pill like Brett Kavanaugh and then, if his term happens to end during another Republican presidency, just get re-nominated for another 18 years. Also, the eighteen-year-term refers to the seat on the Court, not the specific Justice holding it. In this respect it would be like the Presidency: the term is four years, but if the sitting President dies and the Vice President becomes President, they don’t get four new years: the Presidential term ends at noon on January 20 every four years, no matter what. Likewise, if a Justice dies fifteen years in, obviously you need a replacement–but you do not get to reset the clock with someone to your ideological liking. No getting around it: eighteen years. That’s it. So we would have this provision:

5. In the event that a Seat on the Supreme Court becomes vacant sooner than the conclusion of its Eighteen Year Term, the sitting President shall name a Justice to that seat, also pending Senate majority confirmation, to serve only the remaining time in that Seat’s term, at the end of which that Justice shall leave the Court.

Now, we well know that for all the “the Courts are apolitical!” talk we hear a lot, the fact is that the Courts and people on them are as much a part of the political life in this country as anyone else. But to help foster as much political independence as we possibly can, I’d add this:

6. No person, having held any portion of a Seat on the United States Supreme Court, shall be eligible for any Senate-confirmable position upon leaving said Seat, or for any Judicial position in the United States; also, no member of that Justice’s family shall be eligible for any Senate-confirmable position for a period beginning with their assumption of that Seat until five years after their departure from it.

In short, no “Hey Judge, I’ll make your kid or your wife Ambassador to the Bahamas”, and no “Hey Judge, if you’re looking to retire early, I might need a new Ambassador to Sweden”. Also, once you leave the Supreme Court, that’s it for your legal career. And really, there’s nowhere else to go after that but write your books and be on a corporate board or two, right? No, I’m not worried about what our Justices will do in their now-much-longer retirements. They’ll make out just fine, I suspect.

Of course, if you’re going to limit the terms, then you have to schedule the terms as well. If we just wait for the existing judges to die or retire and then start the eighteen year thing, then you’d have nominations clustering at eighteen year intervals from whenever those passings happen. So, one seat will open on the Supreme Court every two years, during the odd-numbered years to minimize the degree to which federal-level elections play a role in the politics.

7. The transition to this prescription for Supreme Court tenure shall begin on July 5 of the first odd-numbered year following Ratification of this Amendment, with pre-existing terms ending in reverse order of service on the Court.

You have to make your transition some way, right? For my purposes, if I could wave my magic wand and instantly ratify this amendment, then Clarence Thomas would get the boot on July 5, 2023.

As noted above, I’m sure I’ve missed something, and I’m sure there are ways this system would work badly, but…we’ve got to start somewhere, right? And while I yield to no one in my anger at the way Republicans have been gaming our democracy against us (and are still doing so, to what I expect may be our eternal regret, and sooner than we think), I do not want to just shift the gaming-of-the-system to the Democrats just because I’m currently on their side. If there’s one thing the post-2016 era has shown me, it’s that our Constitutional systems are nowhere near as robust as they need to be to withstand the threats confronting them now.

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Dear 45 (an Open Letter to the President of the United States)

As I write this, you are still President, for another 47 minutes. I guess it’s time to reflect a bit. Here’s part of what I wrote to you four years ago today: 

I do not support you, and I do not expect good things from you. I do not expect good policy choices, nor do I expect good outcomes. My expectations for you are astoundingly, confounding low, because that’s where you put them. You did it by appealing, day in and day out, to the very worst instincts in the American psyche, right from your campaign’s opening address when you warned us all about the steady stream and rapists and murderers surging into our country from across the Rio Grande.
You did it by lying day in and day out, so much that reporters had trouble figuring out how to report that you were lying. You lied so much that you were eventually lying about having lied in the first place. You ran the most dishonest presidential campaign I have ever seen, and yet somehow you managed to reap the benefit of an opponent whom most people seem to think is also a huge liar, even though she isn’t.
You did it by cheering on the expulsion of people from your events of people who don’t like you or who say things about you that you don’t like.
You did it by several years ago making your first big claim to political fame by pursuing the stupid fiction that Barack Obama was not a natural-born American citizen.
You did it by showing on FOX News repeatedly to scoff at the very idea of global warming and climate change.
You did it with idiotic policy proposals like building a wall between the United States and Mexico, and then compounding this stupidity with the idea that Mexico will somehow be forced to pay for it.
You did it by filling your administration with people who are clearly on the take, people who are clearly going to make out like bandits, people who are obviously going to set to the tasks of destroying the missions of the agencies they are heading, and people who are simply downright ignorant (an Energy Secretary who didn’t know what the department even does, or a HUD secretary who believes that the Egyptian pyramids are grain silos).
You lowered my expectations by attacking people left and right on Twitter, by egging on your bizarrely rabid followers, by threatening your opponent with investigations and prosecutions, and by scoffing at one’s obligations as a citizen by saying “It makes you smart” that you managed to avoid paying income taxes at one point.
There is literally nothing you have said or done over the last eighteen months that gives me the smallest reason to think that you might be a good President. You have shown no curiosity about issues or insight into them. You have shown zero respect for the work of the job or the norms that surround it. You have demonstrated no foreign policy acumen aside from chest-thumping and Russo-philia. I can think of no issue that stands to improve for your having addressed it, and I can think of no aspect of American life that will be better for your having been President.
And the thing is? You’re going to fail. No matter what. You’re going to be able to do a lot of damage, and you’ll ruin a lot of lives. Hell, if you and your cohorts in Congress repeal the ACA without a “replacement” (and let’s be honest, none of you has the slightest idea what kind of “replacement” you’ll offer), you might just kill people. But it won’t matter. Not in the long-run, it won’t. You’re not going to reignite American manufacturing so that towns once more have big factories employing ten thousand people. You’re not going to be able to push all of the queer people back into their respective closets. You’re not going to make the young people like you.
Ultimately, though, I don’t even think you care that much, and that may bother me most of all. You seem to expect the Presidency to be this easy thing that you can almost do on a part-time basis, and that your business experience is one hundred percent applicable to the challenges you will confront as President. As to the latter, your business experience isn’t the unbroken run of amazing success stories that you often say it is, and that experience is not always applicable. What might be OK in a board room is not OK in a cabinet meeting.
In short, I expect your Presidency to be a time of awful policy making combined with amazing levels of corruption. The last administration that paired deep disengagement in policy and facts with willingness to profit from events did not result in good results. Your judicial appointees will be terrible people, and our Congress will rubber-stamp your stuff and you’ll rubber-stamp their stuff. The idea of national government in the hands of you, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell fills me with many emotions, none of them happy and most of them angry.

Not only was none of this wrong, you somehow managed to be even worse than I expected. I expected George W. Bush levels of incompetence, disengagement, and bad policy, but not only did you manage to crank up the settings on all of those, you added to the mix a casual type of cruelty that wasn’t terribly surprising, but it was still unnerving. You seemed to take actual delight in the sufferings of the American people whom you were elected (if only by the deeply bizarre set-up we Americans have where someone with fewer votes can still be elected) to lead and serve.

I never had any expectation of you growing in office, but damned if you didn’t seem to shrink to the occasion, each and every time. I knew that your general approach to policy would be terrible, and my only real hope was that things would somehow manage to not get super bad in America by the time we got our chance to vote you out.

Of course, this hope was in itself dangerous, since Americans don’t tend to take a very long view of policy, which made it a very real risk that we’d hit 2020 with things just king of bubbling along, like they were for the first three years of your term, and Americans would look at the state of affairs and say, “Meh, he’s doing OK, I guess.” The inertia of history takes a long time to shift, and it often takes bad governance years to manifest in terrible results that hurt millions. Likewise, it takes good governance years to repair terrible results, which is where America often gets into trouble: we get frustrated when the Democratic Presidents we elect to get America out of the ditch that Republican Presidents like you steered it into don’t quite get the job done in 18 months, and then we fill Congress with Republicans who have zero investment in doing anything other than keeping us in the ditch.

But here we are: you put the country in a calamitous position, by pursuing things that were unimportant and ignoring things that were. You ignored the warnings about likely pandemics, and then when one actually arrived, you dithered and you dallied and you ignored experts who were telling you what you didn’t want to hear and you installed charlatans who told you what you did, and now here we are, four hundred thousand deaths and counting later, and we’re a country that can’t get on the same page about something so simple as wearing masks to protect each other.

No, you didn’t create the climate in America, but you took advantage of it and you poured gas on its embers and fanned the flames at every opportunity you had. You used the power of your office in the most brazenly and transparently transactional way probably in history, and what of that? You’re still heading off to face all manner of legal troubles, and the idea of anyone giving you giant sums of money to build some tall building someplace is laughable. (Maybe Boise will try; you could end up with Trump Tower Boise being the tallest building there, but then, in Boise, twenty floors will get it done.) You gave your ear to the Stephen Millers, Steve Bannons, Seb Gorkas, and Michael Caputos of the world. I expected your administration to be a Rogue’s Gallery of the worst people in America, and you certainly met that expectation, head-on.

Meanwhile, our country’s economic inequality continues to grow, student loans continue to break the backs of millions, our infrastructure (which of all things I expected you to do something about, even if it was a half-assed grifting something) is still crumbling and well behind the rest of the world, and we have lost another four years that we didn’t have to fight climate change. I am not exaggerating when I say that there is no aspect of American life that is better for your having touched it. Yours is a perverse kind of mirror universe Midas touch, in which everything with which you come in contact is either terrible to begin with or becomes terrible because you touched it.

Well, while there is still the enormous problem that many millions of Americans still support you, and that a significant portion of those do so on the basis of irrational nonsense conspiracy crap that wouldn’t even make an interesting X-Files episode, I can still take comfort in the fact that of the many problems America is facing today and in days to come, one of them has been definitively addressed.

You, Mr. Trump, are no longer America’s problem. May the wind be forever in your face, and may the road crumble before you with each step you take.

Sincerely,

–An American citizen who has no more time or inclination to think about you at all.

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