The constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery

I had a performance warmup to get to yesterday afternoon and 20 minutes before heading out the electricity cut out. I called the electric company to register the outage. If those couple sentences look a bit familiar it’s because I wrote something similar merely 9 days ago. Yes, the power was cut 20 minutes before leaving home, as the last time. And, like before, the weather was windy and the whole neighborhood was dark. However, this time the electric company did not offer an estimated time. So I left for my gig, wondering how widespread the outage was. The traffic lights at the major intersection a mile from my house were working, so I was pretty sure the evening performance would not be canceled due to no power. My performance group met, warmed up, and gave a pretty good concert. This is our third of the season with one more to go. Back home yesterday evening, the electricity was still out. I pulled out the candles and lit them. I read by candlelight for a while. I called the electric company – still no estimate of when the power might be back on. The house was at 62F when I went to bed, and quite dark when I blew out the candles. This morning the inside temperature was 55F. I called the electric company – still no estimate. I sat in my car and listened to a news report – my electric company said 70K customers lost power, much better than the 700K that lost power after a big storm back in August. I ate an electric free breakfast and went off to church. After the service I talked to the pastor for a while and mentioned the lack of power. I decided to check on the house before going to a restaurant for lunch. I got to the front door and heard music. That’s a good sign. If the sound system is playing when the electricity shuts off there is no way to turn it off and it will resume when power is restored. I checked clocks and computed when the power came back on and how long it had been out – 19 hours. Then I had lunch at home. This is the third substantial outage in four months. On Saturday I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data based on Friday. Last week’s big peak in new cases per day has indeed been revised, from 11,189 down to 9103. This is 10% above the peaks in April and November a year ago, rather than the 32% above I reported the week before. The peak for this last week is 8291, still quite high. The Thanksgiving day low of 1837 I reported the week before has also been revised to 2179. Deaths per day for the week of November 28 now shows several days of more than 100 deaths, with a peak of 114 in one day. I get my Michigan COVID data from here. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that the Health Department in Laclede County, Missouri is stopping all COVID related work – case investigations, contact tracing, quarantine orders, mask recommendations, and such. They, and other counties in the state, are doing it because of threats of legal action by Attorney General Eric Schmitt. He has also requested parents to report their children’s schools if they do anything to protect students from the virus. Thankfully, some school districts and counties are refusing. Even so, Sumner wrote:

Eric Schmitt is running for the Senate. Killing Missourians is his platform.

Charles Jay of the Kos Community Contributor’s Team discussed abortion. He started with a quote by the Center for American Progress:

Simply put there are two key ways to reduce abortion—by making it less necessary or by making it less available. In our view, only the former approach is humane, effective and just.

The Guttmacher Institute said a big reason women choose abortion is they can’t afford the child. So a way to making an abortion less necessary is to support the mother. And the Build Back Better bill intends to do that through child care support, universal pre-K, child tax credits, paid leave, affordable housing, and better health care. This means Democrats should be exposing the Republican hypocrisy – their demand that women carry the child to birth, yet refuse to support her before and after the baby is born. When the Texas legislature designed their abortion ban they set it up so there is nobody to sue to overturn it. The state isn’t enforcing it, individual citizens are. Joan McCarter of Kos reported the law went before the Supreme Court in what I think is a case on how to proceed. The Court said state judges and the attorney general can’t be sued, leaving whatever group does discipline over medical licensees. I don’t understand it either. The important point is the case can proceed. And in the meantime abortions are still banned. As before Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a strong dissent. It seems the conservatives on the Court are buying into the idea that it is possible to design a law that evades judicial review. And, if true, that invites other states to design laws that the Supremes cannot review and overturn. Which means the end of federal protection of rights. McCarter also reported Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the progressives, is frightened by the possibility of an out-of-control judiciary. He wrote a paper published on the Court website saying the Texas law and this decision threatens the supremacy of federal law.

If the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.

Though Roberts doesn’t go so far McCarter reported that what Roberts did write feeds into what others are saying about the need for court expansion. Without expansion Roberts is “in danger of being remembered as the chief justice who oversaw the dismantling of our democracy.” Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Barton Gellman of The Atlantic:

Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed that one big reason why Biden’s approval is low is because his approval by Democrats has dropped by 13 points. At the start of Biden’s campaign he sounded like he was clear about what sort of threat the nasty guy posed to the country. But now he doesn’t seem to understand the seriousness of the threat. Yeah, the infrastructure bill is great. So is the Build Back Better bill (though it hasn’t passed the Senate yet).

But frankly, none of that will matter unless Democrats spend the lion's share of 2022 doing everything in their conceivable power to shore up the nation's electoral system and frame the midterms as a choice between sound Democratic leadership and a party bent on functionally destroying our democracy.

They need to do this to please their own base. Eleveld commented on remarks by Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster:

In Belcher’s view, whether or not Democrats can actually pass a voting rights bill, they have to die trying, and I think he’s right.

And as part of that Democrats must make sure Senators Manchin and Sinema don’t sabotage it. In another pundit roundup, Dworkin quoted Cory Robin of the New York Times:

The real cause of the unease about Mr. Biden lies elsewhere. There is a sense that however large his spending bills may be, they come nowhere near to solving the problems they are meant to address. There is also a sense that however much in control of the federal government progressives may be, the right is still calling the shots. The first point is inarguable, especially when it comes to climate change and inequality. The second point is questionable, but it can find confirmation in everything from a conservative Supreme Court supermajority to the right’s ability to unleash one debilitating culture war after another — and in the growing fear that Republicans will ride back into the halls of power and slam the doors of democracy behind them, maybe forever.

A poll from Generation Lab/Axios asked “College students who would not go out on a date with someone who voted for the opposing presidential candidate.” 71% of Democratic students said they would not date a Republican. 31% of Republican students said they would not date a Democrat. There are other similar questions in the poll. Kos of Kos discussed the results. First, he discussed the conservative reaction:

“Liberals are so intolerant!” they scream, because their plague-spreading, gun-toting, schoolchild-killing, antisemitic, racial- and ethnic-minority-hating, misogynistic, democracy-destroying ideology is totes no big deal. I mean, why shouldn’t I be required, in the name of “tolerance,” to go out with someone who dehumanizes my Latino brothers and sisters, and worships a guy who says they’re all drug dealers, criminals, and rapists? Ladies, so what if that guy is a forced-birther who wants to insert his unwelcome judgment when making decisions between you and your doctor. And really, who cares if they want to take away a gay couple’s right to marry? Intolerance, it seems, is a one-way street! We tolerate their intolerance, or everyone has a sad.

Kos then quoted a tweet by Amanda Marcotte:

Better interpretation of the poll: Democrats are simply more desirable as friends and lovers, which is why both Democrats and Republicans say they want to socialize with and date Democrats.

Quoting a tweet from MerryFoon:

I understand this as a Democratic person who will lose my civil rights (and have already lost some right) when Republicans get their way. So that’s why Dems are dismissing Republicans. Republicans’ lives actually improve when Dems pass laws. Dems lives deteriorate under GOP.

Kos concluded:

The story here is simple: “Young people don’t like assholes.”

That big infrastructure law I mentioned will soon be at the point of actually distributing money. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is the point person in charge of distributing the money. Ian Reifowitz of Kos reported that Buttigieg has explained decisions on how the money is spent are to be based on equity – projects should not be based on racism. There’s even money in the law to reconnect neighborhoods that were damaged by infrastructure projects. One problem – the federal Transportation Department gives money to the states and state legislatures decide on the details of how the money is spent. Yeah, the DOT has some say in how the money is spent. But there are limits. Almost two weeks ago, in my review of the book Black Bottom Saints, I discussed how I-375 in Detroit was constructed to wipe away the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit. That was in the late 1950s. But that was in the past. We don’t do that anymore. Do we? Yeah. We do. One example given by Reifowitz is I-49 in Shreveport, Louisiana. I looked at that one on a map. There is a section that heads north of Shreveport and a section that heads south. In between those segments is the black neighborhood of Allendale. There is a similar situation in Houston with I-45. Sumner also wrote about the way the nasty guy is purging the Republican Party of any who are disloyal to him. And the current definition of “loyal” is actively supporting the Big Lie.

Trump’s winnowing of the GOP is happening at all levels. Governors, senators, and representatives have all found themselves facing primary opponents—or a sudden lack of donors—when they run afoul of Trump. So have members of state legislatures. So have members of state and local election boards. So have candidates right down to the level of local school boards. All of these candidates have one thing in common: “They all support his efforts to overturn Joe Biden's victory.” ... But the stakes are far, far higher than whether Democrats can hold a slim majority in the brutal response that always seems to come with the midterms. Because the purge is about installing nothing but Republicans who will never lose again … no matter what the vote says. From county election boards to state legislatures to the governor’s office, Trump is installing teams who will only send Republican electors to Congress. No counting necessary.

Yes, there are some holdouts. Rep. Peter Meijer of western Michigan, who voted for impeachment, is one. He might not need to be a nasty guy cheerleader. He only need to have “a blind eye here, some radio silence there.”