ACB-- Another Terrible Idea Of Trump's And His Circle

 

I dissent by Nancy Ohanian

Dan Balz wrote scorching column for the Washington Post yesterday even before Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett, Facing possible defeat, Trump threatens the integrity of the election. "Each week has brough evidence," he began, "of the damage [The Donald] has done during his nearly four years in office. According to his own words, he is not finished. This past week brought a renewed warning of a harm he could yet inflict on the integrity of elections. [Donald] did more than simply refuse to pledge that he would facilitate a peaceful transfer of power if he loses to former vice president Joe Biden, though that in itself was a step no previous president has taken. In doing so, he escalated his ongoing attack on mail-in ballots, seeding the ground to contest the election as rigged or fraudulent if he is not the winner and to propel the country into chaos."

Balz speculated that all this carp from The Donald may "merely reflected the mind-set of a president who knows he is running behind in his bid for a second term, one more rhetorical flailing to somehow throw the opposition off balance and to distract from the real reasons for Biden’s lead in the polls. But this close to the election, anything Trump does to question the validity of the count should be regarded as serious and treated as such. Republicans who normally stand by idle when the president says or does something outrageous pushed back against his words-- though, notably, nearly all were careful neither to rebuke nor condemn the president personally. They simply pointed to a long history of peaceful transfers from one presidency to the next and stood up for the Constitution, which is the minimum expected of elected officials who have sworn an oath to defend that document."

As you know, almost all of these Republicans-- who were fanatics that "the voters must weigh in" when Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court-- almost a year before before the election-- are now saying that Donald's nominee must get a vote. Democrats see it differently. Reaction against his nomination yesterday was swift and overwhelming. Mondaire Jones is Blue America's candidate of the week and a court expert, so I was talking with him about about the nomination. His take, like many progressives, is that Barrett "thinks the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. She thinks abortion is 'always immoral.' She is hostile to LGBTQ+ civil rights, & would vote to undo marriage equality. Her nomination would be a direct attack on millions of Americans. We won't stand for it. A generation ago, the GOP replaced Thurgood Marshall, the founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, with someone who has cast decisive votes to undermine racial justice. Now they want to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with someone who promises to undo her legacy of reproductive justice. Not on our watch." Jones will try to find support among his new colleagues to expand the Supreme Court by 4 members next year. [You can contribute to his campaign here.]

Current members were concerned about the same things Jones is concerned about. Pramila Jayapal, right after the announcement:

Any individual nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court must believe in equal justice under law and opportunity for all. That means being fully committed to protecting civil rights and voting rights, women’s rights and workers’ rights, reproductive rights and disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights and Indigenous rights. It also means standing on the side of people over profits and communities over corporations when it comes to health care, protections for those with pre-existing conditions, immigration, the environment, consumer protections, ending gun violence and getting money out of politics.

Not only does Amy Coney Barrett fail to meet that standard, but she has spent years consistently and dangerously arguing against it from the federal bench. It is no wonder that conservative, right-wing groups had her on their recommendation list as they continue their coordinated attacks on health care, abortion rights, voting rights and the right of workers to organize. I strongly oppose this lifetime appointment to the highest court in our land, and I urge President Trump to withdraw his nomination as quickly as he made it.

With less than 40 days until the election, and as voters across America are already casting their ballots, we need to let their voices be heard. They know that everything is on the line. We must allow them to choose the next president and then allow that president to choose the next nominee for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. This is the same standard that Republicans implemented at the end of President Obama’s term when Merrick Garland was nominated with more than seven months remaining before the election. This is how we must proceed with the future of the court, this country and our democracy hanging in the balance.

AOC weighed in quickly as well: "If confirmed before the election, Barrett will have the opportunity to cast the deciding vote to strike down the ACA on November 10th when the Court hears California v. Texas. Millions of Americans would be thrown off their health insurance in the middle of the pandemic, and health insurers could refuse to cover individuals who have or have had COVID-19... And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Barrett holds radical positions when it comes to the right to choose. She is on record saying that abortion is 'always immoral.' On the 7th Circuit, she has repeatedly handed down decisions that would have limited abortion. With her on the Court, the conservative goal of repealing Roe v. Wade is within reach."

Bernie urged his supporters across the country to tell their senators "to do everything possible to slow down the nomination process... He called her nomination "a disaster for our country and our movement. If confirmed, she poses a threat to health care, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, voting rights, workers' rights, environmental protections, and so much more. Now Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are going to try to rush through Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings and have the Senate vote on her nomination before the end of this year." He continued:

It is not a radical idea to suggest that the winner of this year's presidential election should be the one to select Justice Ginsburg's replacement. In fact, that is what the clear majority of the American people want.

But now that Trump has announced his nominee, Mitch McConnell is planning to rush a vote during this election year-- a complete contradiction from his position just a few years ago.

You may recall that in 2016 Mitch McConnell refused to have the Senate vote on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Scalia. McConnell's view at that time was that the nomination should be the job of the next president.

Here is what McConnell told Fox News in 2016:

"The Senate has a role to play here. The president nominates, we decide to confirm. We think the important principle in the middle of this presidential year is that the American people need to weigh in and decide who's going to make this decision."

And it's not just Mitch McConnell-- many other Republican senators are on the record saying the same thing.

Well, today I say to my colleagues in the Senate: We must let the next president name Justice Ginsburg's replacement. Respect the will of the American people and delay Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Barbara Lee (D-CA) noted that "Senate Republicans have no shame in pushing a right-wing judge just weeks before the election despite the fact that a majority of Americans believe Mitch McConnell should wait to replace the judge until after the election. This lifetime appointment will reshape the court to a 6-3 conservative majority and have far-reaching impacts on our nation for generations to come. Amy Coney Barrett has a record of being hostile to reproductive rights, immigrants’ rights, gun control policies, and the Affordable Care Act. With the Supreme Court scheduled to hear a case on the Affordable Care Act coming up a week after the election, the stakes have never been higher. Right now our fundamental rights are on the line, and we need to do everything we can to honor Justice Ginsburg’s last wish and prevent Mitch McConnell from stealing this seat."

Back to Balz's pre-announcement column. He wrote that Señor Trumpanzee's "Republican allies in Congress... are they the people whose views he cares about most. Instead, his attempt to discredit mail-in ballots as a way to challenge a possible Biden victory is aimed at rallying his own army of supporters, prepping them to respond, if necessary, with protests or perhaps worse if he challenges vote tabulations-- and therefore the results-- in the days after the election. If any people believed that the president was just letting off steam when he declined to pledge a peaceful transfer of power, they can look to something White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said after FBI Director Christopher A. Wray had testified before a Senate committee that he knows of no evidence of 'any kind of national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.' Wray’s comments were the latest in a string of statements from all kinds of election and security experts debunking Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots being rife with fraud. Meadows, however, chose to challenge the FBI director during an interview Friday on CBS’s This Morning. 'With all due respect to Director Wray,' he said, 'he has a hard time finding emails in his own FBI, let alone figuring out whether there’s any kind of voter fraud.' That was not a chief of staff trying to retract a president’s words or clean up after a mistake. What he said in attacking Wray was meant to reinforce the message the president continues to deliver."

Attorney General William P. Barr has added his voice to the campaign against mail-in ballots, saying they mean an end to the sanctity of the secret ballot-- and ignoring the steps states take to protect the secrecy of votes cast that way. This past week, Barr told the president about discarded mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, which the president claimed was evidence of fraud.

Voting-law experts have sharply criticized a Justice Department investigation into the matter.

People do want to know who wins the presidency as soon as possible, and generally that’s been on the night of the election or by early next day. But that was in years when nearly everyone voted in person on Election Day. In recent years, more Americans have chosen to vote ahead of the election at designated early-voting sites.

This year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans are reluctant to vote in person, whether on the day of the election or during specified early-voting windows. They prefer to mark their ballots without having to be in places with other people. As a result, there has been a surge in requests for mail-in ballots. Trump appears to fear that the more people who vote, and the easier it is for people who fear the virus to do so safely, the less chance he has to win the election.

The processing of those mail-in ballots will take longer than ballots cast on Election Day. Some states require that mail-in ballots arrive by Election Day, others that they simply be postmarked by Election Day. Ballots may legally arrive for days after Election Day, and processing and counting can and will be slow in some places, as the primary elections showed. There will also be challenges to some of these ballots, and some will be discarded because they were filled out improperly.

No matter the exact system, the processing and counting of these ballots is more laborious and therefore slower. California is a case in point, a state where the counting can go on for days and possibly weeks. In 2016, Hillary Clinton saw her vote totals rise steadily after the week of the election, eventually amassing a popular vote margin of nearly 5 million votes in the state. In 2018, California Democrats captured House seats with the votes that were tabulated days after the election, including two in which Republicans were leading the day after the election.

The scenario that could play out on the night of the election is simple. In the hours after the polls close, Trump could appear to be winning in some of the states that will decide the election, even though tens upon tens of thousands of ballots will not have been counted.

At that point, as he did with a tweet during the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Arizona, Trump could attempt to call a rhetorical halt and claim that whatever happens next is a sign of fraud or evidence of a rigged count. The tabulating will continue, but how will his loyalists react if he cries foul?

To suggest this is all just mischief-making by the president is to understate the potential maliciousness of what he is attempting to do. He seeks to disqualify voting in states where all voters are being sent mail-in ballots, which he claimed, without evidence, in a recent tweet means they are open to “ELECTION INTERFERENCE by foreign countries” that will lead to “massive chaos and confusion.”

Facing possible defeat in November, the president also recently tweeted that this year’s election “may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED” because of mail-in ballots. In another tweet he claimed, “RIGGED ELECTION in waiting.” At a rally in Wisconsin last month, he said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” On Friday night in Virginia, he said, “We’re not going to lose this except if they cheat.”

If Trump loses the election and then moves to discredit the results in the face of no evidence of widespread fraud, the country will be confronted with one more crisis of his presidency-- one that will have been unfolding in plain view.

Donald’s announcement of his Supreme Court nominee drew about 150 guests to the White House and, appropriately enough, according to Washington Post reporter Seung Min Kim "most of [them] declined to wear masks or social distance because of the coronavirus pandemic. Notable in the Rose Garden crowd were former campaign aide Corey Lewandowski, Faith & Freedom Coalition Founder Ralph Reed and Fox News host Laura Ingraham. Folding chairs were set close together for the event. Among the lawmakers in attendance were Republican senators who will be voting on the nominee-- Josh Hawley (MO), Thom Tillis (NC), Deb Fischer (NE), Ben Sasse (NE), Kelly Loeffler (GA), Mike Lee (UT) and Marsha Blackburn (TN)." If you could pick one of them to not die, who would it be?

I caught up with New Jersey congresswoman and progressive icon Bonnie Watson Coleman at church this morning. After the services, she told me that she had two problems with what was happening here, first "The hypocrisy of nominating a replacement of this ilk, or any person to the Supreme Court at this time, and second This particular nominee, Amy Barrett Coney. First, we are at the end of the election season when an important decision about the direction of this country is being considered. Trump has made a mockery of our values, made our citizens less safe and divided this country with his inciting and racist words and deeds. McConnell refused to consider Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court with 400 days left in his administration, yet he promises to force this upon us in less than 40 days left before an election and at a time when some states are already voting. Sheer hypocrisy and evil and it pisses me off. Regarding the second point, this candidate does not deserve to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She represents a direct threat to access to health care, a woman’s autonomy over her body, protection of civil rights, LGTBQ+ rights and voting rights. She’s wrong for the job."

Adam Christensen, the progressive Democrat aiming to replace Ted Yoho in north-central Florida by beating some shady character from Yoho's orbit, noted that "Amy Coney Barrett stands against everything we fight for: Medicare, civil rights, climate legislation, LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights to choose. Mrs. Barrett would be on the bench for decades and would prevent any meaningful change from occurring. If she is nominated before this election we must expand the Supreme Court to allow for fair justices who will stand for the issues that matter to all Americans, not just the few." It'll be great seeing him and Mondaire Jones working on this together.


Nate McMurray is running for Congress in western New York, a rural/suburban district between Buffalo and Rochester that is the reddest district in New York and a district McMurray, running as a progressive with no help-- to put it mildly-- from the DCCC came within a third of a percentage point (1,087 votes) of winning in 2018. Presumably because he did so well, the vile, progressive-hating Blue Dog Cheri Bustos, who heads the DCCC, is again actively sabotaging McMurray's campaign. Meanwhile, the DCCC and it's corporate candidates can take a lesson from McMurray in how to talk with their voters about Trump's Supreme Court power-grab. McMurray to NY-27 voters today:

A mere week after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, the Trump administration speeds forward with its plan to install another extremist ideologue on the Supreme Court by Election Day in November, flouting the Constitution yet again in the process.

All this so the Republican party can cruelly do away with protections for preexisting conditions and go after women's health and protections for minority communities. Over 204,000 Americans are dead, seven million more infected and at risk of long-term effects of COVID-19. Over 40 million Americans are out of work and 12 million lost their health insurance since March. It is unconscionable that President Trump would choose a nominee who will deliver the death blow to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and rip health care away from millions of people during a deadly pandemic.

After Justice Ginsburg’s passing, I said that Trump’s choice for nomination would unravel Justice Ginsburg’s legacy of protecting choice and equality. Sadly, I was correct. And the hyper-political nature of this moment puts on full display his utter contempt for the American judicial system and the confirmation process.

There is no doubt that Trump will, if allowed to stack the highest court in the United States, ask them to overturn the ACA, including its protections for people with pre-existing conditions. If Trump has his way, complications from COVID-19, on top of conditions like cancer, diabetes, and pregnancy, will become pre-existing conditions that allow families to be denied healthcare coverage.

My opponent, who has only known a life of wealth and privilege, including lifelong access to excellent healthcare, has already signaled his support of Trump’s nominee. Chris Jacobs has no idea what it is like to be unemployed or struggling, without health insurance, in a health crisis. I do. The voters do. God help us.