Month: September 2020

Country-bluegrass singer and songwriter Tyler Childers brings a country boy’s perspective to the social and political matters that, well, neighbors from Lawrence County, Kentucky do not come by naturally. The county is tucked up against the West Virginia border and is 99% white.

But as a musician Childers has traveled a bit. In “Long Violent History,” he asks people from places like his rural county to look beyond “tall tales and hearsay and absolute lies” and consider the experience of people unlike them. People like the late fellow Kentuckian Breonna Taylor.

In a video explanation of what inspired the song, Childers asks white fans to do a little self-examination on race and to walk a few steps in the shoes of black neighbors, even if they have never had any:

What if we were to constantly open up our daily paper and see a headline like “East Kentucky man shot seven times on fishing trip“? And read on to find the man was shot while fishing with his son by a game warden who saw him rummaging through his tackle box for his license and thought he was reaching for a knife?

What if we read a story that began, North Carolina man rushing home from work to take his elderly mother to the ER runs a stop sign and is pulled over and beaten by police when they see a gun rack in the truck?

Or a headline like “Ashland Community and Technical College nursing student shot in her sleep“?

How would we react to that? What form of upheaval would that create?

Childers asks rural, white listeners to consider what they might do faced with that treatment:

I mean to say, if we were met with this type of daily attack on our people we would take action in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia. And if we wouldn’t stand for it, why would we expect another group of Americans to stand for it? Why would we stand silent while it happened, or worse, get in the way of it being rectified?

Perhaps we could find more productive ways to preserve our heritage, he suggests, than “lazily defending a flag with history steeped in racism and treason.” Maybe take up hewing logs or canning food, tanning hides or quilting.

Let’s hope the video gets the play and consideration it deserves.

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The estimable Heather Cox Richardson posted to Facebook last might a thumbnail history of how we and the U.S. Supreme Court got here beginning with the aftermath of World War II. A sort of “Previously, on ‘D.C. Law'”:

September 20, 2020 (Sunday)

The big story today is big indeed: how and when the seat on the Supreme Court, now open because of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, will be filled. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced within an hour of the announcement of Ginsburg’s passing that he would move to replace her immediately. Trump says he will announce his pick for the seat as early as Tuesday.

Democrats are crying foul. Their immediate complaint is that after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016, McConnell refused even to meet with President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, on the grounds that it was inappropriate to confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year. He insisted voters should get to decide on who got to nominate the new justice. This “rule” was invented for the moment: in our history, at least 14 Supreme Court justices have been nominated and confirmed during an election year. (Three more were nominated in December, after an election.)

There is a longer history behind this fight that explains just why it is so heated… and what is at stake.

World War Two forced an American reckoning with our long history of racism and sexism. Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, all gender identities, and all levels of wealth had helped to defeat fascism and save democracy, and they demanded a voice in the postwar government. Recognizing both the justice of such claims and the fact that communist leaders used America’s discriminatory laws to insist that democracy was a sham, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower set out to make equal justice under law a reality.

Over the course of his eight years in office, from 1953-1961, Eisenhower appointed five justices to the Supreme Court, beginning with Chief Justice Earl Warren, the former Republican Governor of California, in October 1953. In 1954, the Warren Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision, requiring the desegregation of public schools. The decision was unanimous.

From then until Warren retired in 1969, the “Warren Court” worked to change the legal structures of the nation to promote equality. It required state voting districts to be roughly equal in population, so that, for example, Nevada could no longer have one district of 568 people and another of 127,000. It required law enforcement officers to read suspects their rights. It banned laws criminalizing interracial marriage. It ended laws against contraceptives.

Warren resigned during President Richard Nixon’s term, and Nixon chose Chief Justice Warren Burger to replace him. Burger was less interested than Warren in using the Supreme Court to redefine equal rights in the nation; nonetheless, he presided over the court when it handed down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision striking down restrictive state abortion laws. The case was decided by a vote of 7-2, and the majority opinion was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, a Republican nominated, like Burger, by Richard Nixon. All the justices were men.

Americans opposed to the Supreme Court’s expansion of rights complained bitterly that the court was engaging in what came to be called “judicial activism,” changing the country by decree rather than letting voters decide how their communities would treat the people who lived in them. Rather than simply interpreting existing laws, they said, the Supreme Court was itself creating law.

Those two decades of more-perfect-unioning ended Jim Crow, expanded rights to Blacks and women, and gave the vote to 18-year-olds. But that just set some people’s teeth on edge, no matter how much closer to walking the country’s talk they brought us. A backlash was building.

“Judicial activism” became a rallying cry and Movement Conservatism was born. “Letting voters decide how their communities would treat the people who lived in them” had given the South a hundred years of Jim Crow and redlining and institutional racism elsewhere. For many white people, that arrangement worked just fine. Movement conservatives opposed to so-called judicial activism set out to do a little of their own by arranging for who got to issue the decrees.

When President Ronald Reagan took office, he attacked the idea of “activist judges” and promised to roll back the process of “legislating from the bench.” In his eight years, he packed the courts with judges who believed in “a strict interpretation of the Constitution” and “family values” and said they would not make law but simply follow it. Reagan appointed more judges than any other president in history: three Supreme Court associate justices and one chief justice, as well as 368 district and appeals court judges. Older members of the Justice Department who believed that the enforcement of the law should not be politicized were outraged when Reagan appointees at the Justice Department quizzed candidates for judgeships about their views on abortion and affirmative action. Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese said that the idea was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”

George H. W. Bush followed Reagan, and his first nominee for the Supreme Court, David Souter, was confirmed easily, by a vote of 90-9. But his next nominee, for the seat of the legendary Thurgood Marshall, was a harder sell.

Clarence Thomas fit the Republican bill by believing in a strict interpretation of the Constitution. But he was rated poorly by the American Bar Association and had criticized affirmative action, making people leery of his support for the civil rights legislation Marshall had championed. Most damaging, though, was that an FBI interview with Anita Hill, a lawyer whom Thomas had supervised at the Department of Education, leaked to the press. In the private interview, Hill said that Thomas had sexually harassed her. The Senate called her to testify (but did not call the other women who had similar stories). One of the first in-depth public discussions of sexual harassment, Hill’s calm testimony revealed what sexual advances, often accepted by men, looked like to professional women. For his part, Thomas called it “a circus… a national disgrace… a high-tech lynching.”

The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52 to 48 in October 1991.

In the context of national anger over the hearing and the outcome, then-Senator Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on June 25, 1992, suggested that, if a Supreme Court vacancy were to occur, the Senate should wait until after the upcoming election to fill it.

“Politics has played far too large a role in the Reagan-Bush nominations to date,” he noted. “Should a justice resign this summer and the president move to name a successor, actions that will occur just days before the Democratic Presidential Convention and weeks before the Republican Convention meets, a process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all. Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself.”

This is the “Biden Rule” that McConnell cited as the reason he would not hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s appointment. There was no vacancy, no nominee, and no vote on any rule, not least because Biden didn’t call for one. He wanted to protect the Supreme Court from being further politicized.

So what is really going on? Republicans recognize that their program is increasingly unpopular, and the only way they can protect it is by packing the courts. By holding the seat open in 2016, McConnell could motivate Republican voters to show up for Trump even if they weren’t thrilled with his candidacy.

It worked. McConnell had held not just the Supreme Court seat open but other appointments as well, meaning that Trump has nominated, and under McConnell the Senate has confirmed, a raft of new federal judges. “You know what Mitch’s biggest thing is in the whole world? His judges,” Trump told journalist Bob Woodward. Faced with a choice between getting 10 ambassadors or a single judge, “he will absolutely ask me, ‘Please, let’s get the judge approved instead of 10 ambassadors.’ ” Trump has already appointed two right-wing Supreme Court justices and now, apparently, plans to nominate a third.

The 2016 McConnell rule that the Senate should not confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year should now stop the Senate from confirming a replacement for Justice Ginsburg, but McConnell now says his rule only holds when the Senate and the president are from different parties. All but two of the many Republicans senators who insisted in 2016 that the Senate absolutely should not confirm a nominee in an election year have suddenly changed their minds and say they will proceed with Trump’s nomination.

This abrupt about-face reveals a naked power grab to cement minority rule.

Both of the last two Republican presidents—Bush and Trump– have lost the popular vote, and yet each nominated two Supreme Court justices, who have been confirmed by the votes of senators who represent a minority of the American people. The confirmation of a fifth justice in this way will create a solid majority on the court, which can then unwind the legal framework that a majority of Americans still supports.

It’s not just the issue of abortion, for all that that’s what gets most press. On the agenda just a week after the election, for example, is the Affordable Care Act.

And here we are.

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I am planning for the worst and hoping for the best in this election. Everything is so surreal these days that I just assume anything can happen and just keep my head down.

Still, it’s no more realistic to assume a bad outcome than to assume a good one in this environment and this piece by Harry Enten offers a possible upbeat scenario for the election:

Poll of the week: A new ABC News/Washington Post poll from Minnesota finds Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with a 57% to 41% lead over President Donald Trump among likely voters.

Two other Minnesota polls released over the last few weeks by CBS News/YouGov and New York Times/Siena College have Biden up by nine points.

What’s the point: The Trump campaign has made a significant investment into turning Minnesota red, after Trump lost it by 1.5 points in 2016. The polling shows his efforts are not working. They are part of a larger sign suggesting that Trump still has a ways to go to win not just in Minnesota but over the electoral map at-large. If his campaign was truly competitive at this point, he’d likely be closer in Minnesota. One day Trump may get there, and he definitely has a shot of winning with still over a month to go in the campaign.Yet, it should also be pointed out that despite folks like me usually focusing on how Trump can close the gap with Biden and put new states into play, there’s another side to this equation.

There is also the distinct possibility that Biden blows Trump out. It’s something I’ve noted before, and the Washington Post’s David Byler pointed out a few weeks ago.If you were to look at the polling right now, there’s a pretty clear picture. Biden has leads of somewhere between five and eight points in a number of states Trump won four years ago: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Those plus the states Hillary Clinton won get Biden to about 290 electoral votes.

If you add on the other states where Biden has at least a nominal edge in the averages (Florida and North Carolina), Biden is above 330 electoral votes.

That’s not quite at blowout levels, but look at the polling in places like Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas. We’re not really talking about those places right now, even though one or both campaigns have fairly major advertising investments planned down the stretch in all four.The polling there has been fairly limited, but it’s been pretty consistent. Biden is quite competitive.

If you were to do an aggregation of the polls that are available in those states, Biden’s down maybe a point or two at most. In other words, Biden’s much closer to leading in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas than Trump is in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, let alone Minnesota.

Indeed, it’s quite possible he’s actually up in either Georgia, Iowa, Ohio or Texas, and we just don’t know it because there isn’t enough fresh data. For example, Clinton only lost in Georgia by five points in 2016, and Biden’s doing about five points better in the national polls than she did in the final vote. It would make sense, therefore, that Biden’s quite close to Trump there at this point.

Wins in any of those states by Biden could push his Electoral College tally up to about 340 electoral votes or higher, depending on which states Biden wins. Victories in all four would push him well over 400 electoral votes.

Models such as those produced by FiveThirtyEight show just how possible it is for Biden to blow Trump out of the water. The model actually anticipates a better chance of Trump closing his deficit than Biden expanding it.

Even so, Biden has a better chance (about 45%) of winning 340 electoral votes than Trump has of winning the election (about 25%). Biden’s chance of taking 400 electoral votes is pretty much the same of Trump winning.

Of course, the ramifications of a Biden blowout versus a small Biden win aren’t anywhere close to being the same as a small Biden win versus a small Trump win. It’s easy to understand why the focus of a potential error is on Trump benefiting from it.

In 2012, however, we saw the leading candidate (Barack Obama) win pretty much all of the close states.In fact, there’s no reason to think that any polling error at the end of the campaign won’t benefit the candidate who is already ahead.

That’s happened plenty of times. Whether it be Obama in 2012 or most infamously Ronald Reagan in 1980. The thing to keep in mind is that it is possible one candidate runs the board because polling errors are correlated across states. That’s exactly what happened in 2016, when Trump won most of the close states.

This year we just don’t know how it’s going to play out. Just keep in mind that the potential change in this race could go to Biden’s benefit as well as Trump’s.

I would be a fool to count on anything. But I will suggest that a blowout election would be the best of all possible worlds, not just because it would be a decisive win that would make Trump’s cheating much more difficult or that it would probably have coattails that would give the Democrats the Senate. Neither is it only because it would send the world a strong message that this rich, military, behemoth of a country is capable of righting its ship.

It’s because if we ever want to get the conservative opposition party to sign on once again to democratic norms and purge itself of the lunacy it’s been embracing for the past 30 years, they need to be in the wilderness, thoroughly marginalized and rejected by the people.

That doesn’t mean they would change right away. It’s takes a while to get toxins out of the political bloodstream. But unless they go through that process we will be in deep trouble with these corrupt, neo-fascist, conspiracy theorists running one of the two political parties.

A blowout isn’t necessary. A win is necessary. But it would a very good thing if the American people would stand up and repudiate what this Republican Party has become in no uncertain terms. I have no idea if it will happen but it’s good to know that the polls are showing it’s at least theoretically possible.

Trump is an idiot, we know that. If he wants to get some anti-abortion moderates who find his grotesque personality and odious immigration policies too much to take to come out and vote for him anyway, you’d think he’d be smart enough to know that holding the vote on a new Supreme Court Justice until after the election could be a motivator for them. (Sure, some will be smart enough to know that win or lose, McConnell can leverage the power to get it done either way, but some won’t understand that.) Foolishly he’s insulting Senators left and right and pushing for a vote before the election, which means anyone who wants a conservative Justice but doesn’t like Trump could see their Justice seated and vote against Trump too. Win-win for those people.

I have no idea what’s going to happen with any of that. A lot depends on what McConnell really wants — which, in my view, is to maintain power. He has already solidified a conservative majority on the Supreme Court by stealing the Scalia seat so the Ginsburg seat is just frosting on the cake. I expect he would prefer to hold the vote after the election to allow his endangered Senators to do what they need to do to keep their seats. But if Trump loses and McConnell loses his majority, he cannot be sure that he’ll be able to keep his Senators together to do it in the lame duck. (They probably will do it anyway because they’re corrupt cowards who have lost all capacity for decent democratic governance. But you never know.)

And again, stealing the Scalia seat from Obama solidified a 5-4 majority. I don’t think they absolutely need this seat to overturn Roe. I fully expect that the conservative Catholic Roberts will be happy to vote with the right wingers when the right case comes before them.

Anyway:

With a 53-seat majority and the vice presidency, Republicans can’t afford more than three defections if Trump’s nominee comes to a vote on the senate floor, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has committed to making happen.

But that majority includes many vulnerable senators up for reelection this year, and while some – like Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) – have committed to supporting a nominee, others, like Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) have not yet commented.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), by many measures the most moderate Republican in the chamber, said she has “no objection” to the senate considering a Trump nominee but that they should not vote prior to election day and that the next president should fill the seat.

While Collins did not rule out supporting a nominee if one came to a vote, Trump nonetheless called her out at a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, taunting that when Supreme Court seats have opened up in past election years, “nobody said ‘oh let’s not fill the seat’… but we have some senators… I won’t say it Susan. I won’t say it Susan.”

Trump also hit out at Murkowski – who has not commented since Ginsburg’s death but said the afternoon before that she would not vote for a replacement ahead of inauguration day; Trump tweeted, “No Thanks!” in response to the Alaska Chamber of Commerce announcing a town hall with her.

Trump may have already burned his bridges with Murkowski. After she said in June she was “struggling” with the question of whether to vote for Trump in November, Trump vowed to campaign against her. “Few people know where they’ll be in two years from now, but I do, in the Great State of Alaska (which I love) campaigning against Senator Lisa Murkowski,” Trump tweeted. “Get any candidate ready, good or bad, I don’t care, I’m endorsing. If you have a pulse, I’m with you!”

Trump inanely believes that he’s extremely talented and accomplished because he can sign the piece of paper to appoint Justices who are handpicked by GOP legal operatives. Apparently, he doesn’t know that any Republican president who can hold a pen could do the same.

But you’d think he would be smart enough to see that he might be able to gain a few voters by pretending that they need to vote for him in order to get the seat. I don’t think he is. And if he’s counting on Mitch looking out for he should think again. Mitch cares about Mitch and Mitch can read polls.

Here’s the first poll about the Supreme Court seat:

The national opinion poll, conducted Sept. 19-20 after Ginsburg’s death was announced, suggests that many Americans object to President Donald Trump’s plan, backed by many Senate Republicans, to push through another lifetime appointee and cement a 6-3 conservative majority on the court.

The poll found that 62% of American adults agreed the vacancy should be filled by the winner of the Nov. 3 matchup between Trump and Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden, while 23% disagreed and the rest said they were not sure.

Eight out of 10 Democrats – and five in 10 Republicans – agreed that the appointment should wait until after the election.

I’m going to guess that 99% of the Republicans who believe it should wait until after the election will also say that Trump and McConnell should ram through the appointment in the lame duck if Trump loses. They have been trained to embrace hypocrisy.

Still, it’s interesting and perhaps may guide McConnell’s decision. One step at a time.

New polling:

After a month of political conventions, fresh controversies, more protests and additional deaths from the coronavirus, the 2020 presidential race remains where’s it’s been for months — with Joe Biden leading President Trump nationally by nearly double digits, and with a majority of voters opposing the president.

Those are the results of a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which finds Biden ahead by 8 points among registered voters, 51 percent to 43 percent, with more than 50 percent of voters disapproving of Trump’s job performance and with Trump holding the advantage on the economy and Biden holding the edge on the coronavirus.

What’s more, the poll shows that close to 90 percent of voters have firmly made up their minds, and that seven-in-10 believe the upcoming debates aren’t that important in deciding their vote.

I still find it hard to believe that after everything Trump still has his base firmly behind him. It’s absolutely true that he could shoot someone on on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes. He’s responsible for the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and he hasn’t lost a single supporter. His hold on these people is just supernatural.

Howie Klein sent this out to all Bue America donors today. Since people are donating this weekend in massive numbers to Democratic candidates, I thought some of you might be interested in this little campaign as well:

Blue America’s IE Committee has begun purchasing ads for our candidates. The first batch went up as a YouTube pre-roll for Kara Eastman (NE-02), Liam O’Mara (CA-42), Mike Siegel (TX-10) and Julie Oliver (TX-25).

There’s another one, still in production, going up for Adam Christensen (FL-03) this week. I want to talk about the Julie Oliver ad because Google removed it and told us it violates their “shocking content” policy.

They didn’t tell us which part of the ad violates the policy. Here’s the policy:

Shocking content
The following is not allow

• Promotions containing violent language, gruesome or disgusting imagery, or graphic images or accounts of physical trauma

Examples (non-exhaustive): Crime scene or accident photos, execution videos

• Promotions containing gratuitous portrayals of bodily fluids or waste
• Blood, guts, gore, sexual fluids, human or animal waste
• Promotions containing obscene or profane language
• Swear or curse words, slurs relating to race or sexuality, variations and misspellings of profane language

If the official name of your product, website, or app includes profane language, request a review and provide details of the name.

• Promotions that are likely to shock or scare

Examples (non-exhaustive): Promotions that suggest you may be in danger, be infected with a disease, or be the victim of a conspiracy

We appealed and we lucked-out. The Google employee who got the appeal is not a right-wing freak like the one who disapproved the ad (after, we assume, getting complaints from Republicans in the district.) So the ad was up again. In the interim we made another version where we took out slides we thought might offend someone enough to claim they violated the policies. And sure enough, on Saturday, they disapproved the ad again!

Please take a look at it and tell us what you think is “shocking content.” The ads only run in the candidates’ respective districts. But you can see them all on the Blue America YouTube channel.

The music for the Julie Oliver ad, “Cussin’ Trump,” was created by two-time Grammy Award winner Gary Nicholson, who re-purposed his song “You Can’t Listen When You’re Talkin'” and gave it to us (gratis) to use to help our candidates.

When Google pulled it down there were already 2,182 impressions and almost a quarter of them– 517 people– had watched at least 30 seconds. Blue America is charged $36.01 for that many views, a good deal. As of Saturday afternoon, over 4,000 people had watched at least 30 seconds of each of the other ads.

Right now 4,155 people have watched the Mike Siegel ad, 4,944 have watched the Liam O’Mara ad, 4,458 have watched the Kara Eastman ad. And we’re determined to get the Julie Oliver ad back up– as well as the Adam Christensen ad when it’s finished. That’s a lot of viewers and we’re happy about the campaign, other than the arbitrary interference by Google. So far we’ve spent $436.17 on O’Mara, $437.08 on Eastman and $432.40 on Siegel. Amazing how close it is.

In any case, we fund these ad campaigns with the money contributors give to Blue America. We usually only ask for contributions for our I.E. (Independent Expenditure) Committee once a year. That’s today.

You can contribute by clicking here .You can also send a check to “Blue America PAC, I.E. at PO Box 27201, Los Angeles, CA 90027.”

I always feel a little embarrassed asking for contributions that don’t go directly to our candidates, mostly because I believe the candidates know how to spend contribution money better than we or anyone else

But Blue America is an all volunteer organization and over 95% of the contributions that come in are given to the candidates. We have some fun with the IEs– billboards, TV and radio ads, newspaper ads and these Google ads. And we’re always open to suggestions for how work more effectively and which candidates to concentrate on.

The contributions we get today will go to keep these ads running and to make ads for more candidates.

I suspect that neoconservative hack Danielle Pletka represents a certain strain of Never Trumper who see Trump failing to win re-election and are positioning themselves to get back in the fold of the GOP. Pletka wrote an op-ed saying that while she truly loathes Donald Trump she may reluctantly have to vote for him because “the left” is worse. It’s a logical career move and I’d expect more like her to follow. (And it’s one she telegraphed with an earlier op-ed in which she called herself “#NeverTrump and #NeverHillary.)

The best interviewer in the media today, Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, had a little chat with her this week. She’s still picking herself up off the floor.

An excerpt:

You write, “Are there problems on the right—horrible nasties on a par with the violent protesters who have lately inflicted untold damage on many U.S. cities, businesses and lives? You bet. These execrable gun-toting racists have received too much tacit encouragement from Trump.” Would you say it’s tacit? Isn’t it more direct than tacit?

I have to think about my answer. I think Donald Trump has played an opposite and equal role in encouraging bad people in the destruction that we’ve seen this year.

I’m asking because he talked about liberating Michigan. And then what he said about Kyle Rittenhouse.

Well, again, Donald Trump’s reaction, for example, in the wake of Charlottesville was abhorrent. I find an unwillingness on the part of many to condemn the destruction that takes place. The shootings, the violence, the threatening that’s been taking place—I find that also extraordinarily troubling. Now, is it incumbent upon the President to behave better? Damn, yes. That is why, for the last three and a half years, I’ve done very little but condemn Donald Trump on these matters. I try to be fair in calling balls and strikes, as I tried to be fair with Obama. I’m a conservative, so my view of what a ball and a strike is is different from yours. Nonetheless, those things are abhorrent. The problem that I see and the problem that brought me to write this is that there is an almost equal and opposite reaction on the other side.

You follow up that last quote by writing, “But they do not represent the mainstream of the Republican Party or guide the choices of the vast mass of Republican members of Congress.” Can you explain this a little bit more? I was slightly confused, because Trump is actually the President. And so it feels like maybe that does represent the mainstream of the Party, since he is the nominee and extremely popular and the most powerful and important Republican.

It’s a reasonable question that you ask. And all I can tell you is that when I look at the United States Senate, when I look at the United States House, when I look at the people I know who are Republican—and I’ve been a conservative and I’ve been in Washington for many decades now—that does not represent who they are. Are there people who find that every utterance, no matter how abhorrent I may think it is, is golden to their ears? You bet. There are people within the Republican Party who believe that.

So you’re saying that, when you meet members of Congress or senators, they are as disgusted as you are by the things Trump says, and you see them as distinct from him?

I think that they do not share his vision. And I don’t think that they share his attitudes on these things. Have all Republicans been as courageous as they should have been in standing up and saying that? No, absolutely not. Nonetheless, when I talk about it, I say that I don’t believe that he represents the mainstream of the Party.

I guess one counter to that would be to say that how they act in public or what they refuse to condemn publicly would be more important than what they might say to you or other people in Washington.

I think that’s a perfectly legitimate point of view. And one of the things I’ve tried to say to people who disagree is that disagreeing is totally fine. Seeing this differently is O.K. And I more than welcome that. What I don’t welcome is having my motives questioned. What I don’t welcome is being called a racist. What I don’t welcome is people who want to excommunicate me from society because of what I think.

Who called you a racist?

I have not shared my many joy-filled messages with you, nor what I have heard from people in debates that I’ve engaged in, in Washington, over the last couple of years. It’s not my job to give publicity to people who should have been brought up better by their mothers.

When they call you a racist, is that about Trump? Is that about you working for Jesse Helms? What’s the source of that?

No, it’s about the fact that I will not sign on wholesale to the notions that are being propagated.

You write, “With Donald Trump, I know what I am getting. He wears his sins on the outside. For good and ill, he runs his administration. I worry more about his incompetence and vacillation than I do about any dictatorial tendencies.” And then you contrast that with Biden, who you feel perhaps is not going to run his Administration. In terms of competence or stability, are you saying that Trump offers something that Biden does not?

So, that’s a little bit of an invidious contrast, isn’t it? I think that the problem that I perceive is that Biden is no longer really a steady hand. Now, is Donald Trump a steady hand? Well, let’s put it this way: what you see is what you get.

He tweets too much.

He’s dreadful. I mean, I don’t accept the notion that some of my very dear friends suggest, that “you just have to put him on mute.” No, there’s a package there, sorry. And I don’t know anybody who doesn’t wish he would stop, but, that being said, you do really have a window into who he is, how he thinks, and how he runs things. This is not only an unbelievably transparent Administration in its way—this is an Administration that has been constrained by how many investigations, how many court cases?

Did you say transparent?

I said it has been transparent in the sense that it has been constrained by how many court cases, how many investigations. Has there been a moment that Congress has not demanded documentation, called hearings, pulled people up, tried to extort, sometimes with great difficulty, from the Administration—

These things happen, and then there will be whistle-blower complaints, and then we find out about them that way. I’m not sure if that’s exactly transparency.

No, I think you’re probably right calling me out on that. That’s not a great word. And not only that but I agree with you that, were it up to Trump, these whistle-blowing incidents, these disclosures, would not have happened.

What he’s done to government, what we’ve seen go on in the intelligence agencies, what we’ve seen go on at the C.D.C., what we’ve seen go on up and down every government agency, regardless of what your politics are, seems like a much graver threat to our institutions than Joe Biden. Is your feeling that Trump has not done that as badly as I’m saying he has or that Biden would be worse?

I think that what many people fail to understand is that the kind of predations that Trump has engaged in toward government agencies didn’t begin with Donald Trump. Do you remember the I.R.S. investigating conservative organizations?

I think that the story is a little bit more complicated than that.

I think all of these stories are a little more complicated than that. But, when you come from the left, you tend to want to believe one side over the other. All I can tell you is that, for those organizations that felt victimized by that, there was a government agency that was acting out its President’s particular politics. [In 2017, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General issued a report finding that the I.R.S. had unfairly flagged applications for tax-exempt status from conservative and progressive groups.]

You don’t think it’s reached a new level in this Administration?

I do. I think it has reached a new level, but I also think that there are safeguards against it. And I am more comfortable with those safeguards than I am with the notion of a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic White House. An end to the filibuster and everything that it brings with it.

And what do you think it might bring with it?

I think it might usher in an era of irreversible drift in the direction that I think will be dangerous for the country. Don’t forget, I may not like Donald Trump, and I may not have voted for Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean that I think socialized medicine is a good idea.

Fair enough. But socialized medicine is something that exists in almost every Western democracy.

Again, your bias is showing.

Sorry, I don’t mean to make a pro or con statement about what should happen with health care. I’m saying that some version of socialized medicine exists in most European countries, and I think we would agree that they’re all democracies.

I didn’t suggest that the imposition of socialized medicine was somehow going to end our democracy. I merely said that it was going to usher in things that were irreversible that were not going to be good for our country.

You wrote, “I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses—almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November—would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small ‘d’ democracy.” You then list things Congress would do and include national health care on the list.

Because, again, I think that if you have a unitary executive and legislative branch with absolutely no safeguards other than the courts, that they will usher in—like they did Obamacare, like they did the Iran deal—things that are fundamentally anti-democratic, or at least in anti-democratic spirits, things that will be bad for our country.

I can understand not liking the Iran deal or not liking Obamacare, but I’m confused about how they violate some democratic spirit of the country. Whereas some of the things that we’ve read about with Trump, about Ukraine, or about saying nice things about the people in Charlottesville, violated something we would hope is the spirit of our country.

I’m not a huge fan of what-about-isms, since they’re easy to apply to almost everything. On the other hand, just because I didn’t like the Democrats doing it doesn’t mean I do like Trump doing it. And I don’t like the President of the United States calling up his counterpart in Ukraine and saying, “Hey, buddy, got some dirt on my opponent?” You see one as worse. I see them all as dangerous.

Obamacare and the Iran deal seem to me like fairly predictable policies of a Democratic Administration, just like tax cuts and the health-care plan Bush tried to get through were features of a Republican Administration. What I was wondering is why these things were threats to democracy, rather than just normal Democratic policies you don’t like?

Some of them are normal Democratic policies that I don’t like, that I think are dangerous for our country. And some of them I think are anti-democratic. When I say anti-democratic, I mean small-“d” democracy. I think racial prejudice is despicable. I think racial prejudice against Black people, brown people, and white people is despicable. And I don’t want to see a country in which people are told that they are guilty for being white.

Saying this now about racial issues, how do you feel in hindsight about your work with Senator Helms? [Helms was known for decades of race-baiting campaign tactics and vehement opposition to the civil-rights movement.]

I did foreign policy for Senator Helms. I worked for the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As far as I was concerned, in my work with him, he never uttered a racist statement, never betrayed a racial bias. To the contrary. And believed more than many of the people I worked with in human freedom, human rights, equality of opportunity. He fought for people who were disadvantaged. So there may have been a Jesse Helms one day who did things that were wrong.

You know things that were wrong. This isn’t a “may.”

But I worked for him on the Middle East and South Asia, and I was very proud of what we accomplished.

You know his record on South Africa, though, correct? [Helms opposed any sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. When Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol in 1994, soon after he was elected South Africa’s first post-apartheid President, Helms turned his back on him.]

I didn’t work on South Africa. I worked on the Middle East and South Asia.

I understand that. But I’m saying you must know about the guy’s career? I mean, the Civil Rights Act, the Martin Luther King holiday, his interactions with Carol Moseley Braun, his ads, his comments about South Africa and African National Congress. This stuff isn’t completely unknown to you.

I’m not quite sure what this has to do with my article.

You said that you were opposed to racism and all its forms. And I was just asking whether you had—

Are you questioning whether I’m opposed to racism and all its forms?

I was questioning whether someone who is opposed to racism in all its forms has any second thoughts about Jesse Helms. Yes, that’s what I was asking.

Interesting question.

O.K., so we’re not going anywhere with that. Do you think that’s an unfair question? You’ve spoken out against Trump’s racism, and you’ve spoken out against racism of all sorts. I thought it was fair to ask about Helms, that’s all.

I think it’s fair to ask me anything you’d like. I’m assuming you think that it’s fair that I won’t answer certain questions, because you seem to want to trap me and discredit my views. So I’m just going to leave this topic alone, if that’s O.K., Isaac.

I think we know what Danielle Pletka really is, don’t we? But then was it ever in doubt? She has appeared with he friend Chuck Todd frequently during the Trump administration and I never saw her as someone who really objected to anything Trump did except tweet mean things about other Republicans.

But you do have to love this insistence that Republicans in Congress are all really honest, straight-laced, mainstream guys and gals who really don’t like Donald Trump. In private. I think Chotiner decimates her arguments there.

As far as jesse Helms is concerned. Sorry, you lie down with racist dogs — and Helms was the worst racist dog left in the US Senate at the time — you have to wear his racist fleas for the rest of your career. She knew what he was. Everyone did. She could have worked for someone else. No excuse.

We know what Danielle Pletka is. There will be a lot of these folks we’ll have to contend with over the next few years if Trump loses. She’s just getting ahead of the curve. Wingnut welfare always rewards early adapters.

Oh:

Microsoft founder Bill Gates told “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace President Trump may have worsened the coronavirus pandemic with his travel bans, in an exclusive interview set to air this weekend.

On Jan. 31, Trump issued a travel ban on China after the coronavirus broke out in Wuhan before issuing others in February and March, banning travel from Europe and other countries with coronavirus outbreaks.

“We created this rush, and we didn’t have the ability to test or quarantine those people,” the billionaire philanthropist said.

“And so that seeded the disease here. You know, the ban probably accelerated that, the way it was executed,” Gates said.

Wallace pressed Gates: “You’re saying that the travel bans made the situation worse, not better?”

Gates explained that “March saw this incredible explosion — the West Coast coming from China and then the East Coast coming out of Europe, and so, even though we’d seen China and we’d seen Europe, that testing capacity and clear message of how to behave wasn’t there.”

The bans made it worse because we didn’t even test people as they were coming in from China and Europe via god knows how many other countries, no quarantine, no contact tracing, no masks, no social distancing, nothing. Of course, it helped spread it. Look at that picture taken right in the middle of the first giant surge.

In other words, even Trump’s one positive talking point is bullshit. Of course it is.

Jeff Sharlet (“The Family“) knows a thing or two about fundamentalism. He posted a long tweet thread on its influence on Donald Trump’s interest in “patriotic education.” Not civics education, mind you. Indoctrination, emphasis on doctrine. Let’s skip through a few:

"Patriotic education" is Stephen Miller's fascism + Mike Pence's fundamentalism. Some years ago, I took a course in "patriotic education" for my book THE FAMILY. I spent a season reading its textbooks & talking to its teachers. Here's what to expect… A thread.

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) September 18, 2020

"Patriotic education" is a fundamentalist concept. Just as fundamentalist religion supposes that divine truths are literal & determined by (white male) authority, so fundamentalist history discards the ongoing work of knowing the past. 6/

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) September 18, 2020

This is why I get irritated with people who think the presidential race is the be-all and end-all of each election. Down-ballot races matter. Way down-ballot races matter:

A popular jr. high "patriotic education" textbook begins: "“Who, knowing the facts of our history, can doubt that the U.S has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity?” Trump, ystrdy: "the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilization." 12/

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) September 18, 2020

Jon McNaughton paints works of conservative fiction depicting Donald Trump in heroic settings and American founders flanked by Jesus. Critics call his work “kitschy, sycophantic, and a parody of itself.” It is black-velvet art without the black velvet. But they reinforce the fundamentalist view of the country’s Christian origins, with a series of “great men” sent by god (Trump included):

During Iraq War, Christian nationalists erected 100s of billboards depicting a U.S. soldier backed by a ghostly Washington. Now it's cops, heroes in nationalist imagination of a new war, backed by angels & patriotic ghosts. 26/

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) September 18, 2020

“Aha! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!” a mud-caked Michael Palin said in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So it is with American Jesus.

Such terms come straight outta R.J. Rushdoony. Christian nationalist apologists, "responsible" conservatives, insist Rushdoony was fringe. & yet he was in many ways father of 2 major ideas: Christian homeschooling, & "providential history"–aka modern "patriotic education." 28/

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) September 18, 2020

There is more. We are beset by a flood of future-anxious white people intent on repurposing education to secure their places atop a multicultural country they insist is not.

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Retrospectives on the life of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg are everywhere this morning. As are previews of how Democrats might fight confirmation of another Donald Trump-Federalist Society justice before the next inauguration. Those stories have for now pushed the death count from COVID-19 below the fold if not entirely off the front page.

Ginsburg’s death and the fate of the Supreme Court under Trump are distractions from the still-raging pandemic, though hardly a welcome one.

Meanwhile, early voting has begun in several states. North Carolina voters have returned more than 100,000 absentee ballots since they went into the mail on Sept. 4. In Virginia, Trump supporters intent on voting on Election Day as instructed by Dear Leader are arriving at early voting places to show the flag for their candidate. Literally. And perhaps to intimidate non-Trumpers.

A vigil for Ginsburg held here Saturday drew over 200 people on the first, brisk evening of the fall. Masked, socially distanced, of course. It was the first time I had been around a crowd since late February. But one wonders about the 200,000-plus private remembrances for COVID-19 victims in the U.S. alone. Because there will be more.

Even many of the recovered are merely “recovered.” They are the forgotten COVID-“long haulers,” explain staffers at The Week:

It’s a persistent and wide-ranging set of symptoms that follow a coronavirus infection. Nearly 100 kinds of lingering symptoms and physical damage have been catalogued, including scarred lungs, chronic heart damage, severe headaches, kidney failure, bulging veins, hand tremors, debilitating fatigue, fever, nausea, stomach problems, hair loss, sensitivity to light and sound, blurry vision, loss of taste and smell, short-term memory loss, and a brain fog so dense it can be difficult to write even a simple email. New York City resident Deborah Copaken, 54, was diagnosed with COVID-19 in March and still suffers from shortness of breath and the repeated and sudden onset of a rapid heartbeat so severe that she must lie down in order to avoid passing out. “A few weeks ago,” she said, “I stood up to make a smoothie and my heart rate zoomed from lying-in-a-hammock to booming-bass-drum.” David Putrino, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital who has treated many long-haulers, says his patients struggle with a bewildering array of maladies. “It’s like every day, you reach your hand into a bucket of symptoms, throw some on the table, and say, ‘This is you for today.'”

These are not elderly patients. They are mostly female and average 44 years-old. Isabela Pauer of Cleveland, 22, worked out four to five times a week before taking ill. She developed COVID symptoms in Barcelona six months ago and today labors to brush her teeth. “My whole body feels, like, very weighted down,” she said. Studies in Italy, Germany and Great Britain find such lingering effects persist in patients weeks or months after onset of the disease: fatigue, shortness of breath, heart abnormalities, mental fogginess. Figures suggest there could be millions of long-haulers.

Many COVID long-haulers complain that they were denied tests early on in the pandemic because of shortages in diagnostic swabs and restrictions placed on who was eligible for scarce tests. Boston resident Lauren Nichols, 32, got sick in March but was denied a test by her doctor, who said at her age she was in no danger. She finally tested positive, and has suffered a debilitating array of symptoms consistent with those experienced by other long-haulers, including nausea, brain fog, insomnia, and shortness of breath. Complicating matters, said neuroscientist David Putrino, two-thirds of the 1,400 patients he studied did not test positive for COVID antibodies. Some, like Nichols, tested negative for antibodies even after testing positive for the virus itself. That can make it difficult for the afflicted to prove they have COVID and get paid time off from work or qualify for disability benefits. “Just because you’re negative for antibodies,” Putrino said, “doesn’t mean you didn’t have COVID-19.”

Indeed, we knew three people in our county of 260,000 sick in March with classic COVID-19 symptoms at a time there were only 40 official cases. (Today there are 2,871 cases and 81 deaths.) Like Nichols, they did not qualify for testing. Their cases were never counted. Nationally and worldwide, who knows how many victims went uncounted.

What happens with Ginsburg’s replacement on the Supreme Court is important. But perhaps more important is replacing the acting president who has mismanaged this pandemic from the start. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands more Americans will die or suffer long-term health effects because this country elected a president with no government experience, no competence, no focus, no ability to learn the job, and no care for anyone but himself.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is Trump’s polar opposite. Yes, the fate of our nation may be at stake in this election. But so are the fates of countless of our neighbors. Their lives will be cut short or permanently damaged if this country does not come to its senses and elect a president committed to stopping the spread of this illness with science and sound leadership, not empty bluster, denial, and quack remedies.

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