Month: October 2020

Because their Dear Leader says they don’t need to:

As President Donald Trump received treatment for the coronavirus at Walter Reed Medical Center last week, he and his aides worked on the stagecraft for his big return home. It needed to be showy and it would require television networks to have their cameras pointed at the White House during the beginning of their primetime shows.

Disembarking from Marine One, Trump walked across the lawn, climbed two flights of stairs to the balcony of the residence, looked directly at the cameras and removed his mask. It was as overly dramatic as it was medically dangerous. For the White House the goal was simple: Put Trump on national television to underscore that the president, despite being infected with a deadly virus, was strong enough not to wear a mask. For scientists, doctors, and even those who work on the president’s response to the pandemic, it was a calamity.

Trump’s infection with COVID had presented an opportunity for him to personally change his behavior and, with it, encourage his followers to do the same. That he didn’t was viewed as the final nail in the coffin for attempts to convince skeptical Americans that masks were invaluable in stopping the deadly disease’s spread.

“That’s when I realized that the time to convince Americans to take all these health precautions seriously in order to prevent the spread was totally over,” said one senior health official who works with the White House’s coronavirus task force.

Since the early days of COVID, the Trump administration has not only resisted mask-wearing but actively portrayed it as a form of partisan virtue signaling. To keep your face uncovered, the thinking went, was to show support for the president, a value of personal liberty, and adefiance against public health professionals who publicly speak out against the president’s response to the virus.

The logic has alarmed scientists. Multiple officials working on the federal government’s coronavirus response said that at the start of the pandemic they pushed for the administration to embrace public health messaging that underscored the importance of wearing a mask, washing hands and maintaining social distancing. Task force officials appeared in public hearings telling lawmakers and the American people that embracing these measures would prevent community spread.

But the White House moved in another direction. It pressured its health agencies to switch its messaging to focus almost entirely on reopening the country no matter the cost, officials said. Two senior health officials told The Daily Beast that they were pressured to step back from reinforcing the effectiveness of masks and social distancing—guidelines that Trump and his confidants viewed as potential obstacles to states reopening schools, bars, and restaurants. And as The New York Times reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was stopped by the White House from mandating masks on public transportation. [Can you believe it???]

The mask skepticism from the White House was so evident that officials inside the West Wing began to stop personally wearing masks for fear of retribution.

“If you stepped into a meeting with the president and you wore a mask when he and the rest of the room were not, you would very likely hear about it from the president himself,” said a Trump administration official who has been in the room in such cases. “It was well-known [in the building] that if you wanted to be taken seriously by the president, you should take his lead on the masks thing… and not be the guy wearing a mask in a gathering with him, as if to say you’re sticking it to [Trump].”

Now, officials say that months of the president mocking mask-wearers and refusing to wear a mask in public has not only instilled a false sense of security in some Americans but facilitated the spread of the virus. Officials say they’ve reached the point of no return—that the time for getting the message out that masks, in particular, are necessary—has passed. And that, they said, points to a dangerous new reality: that the virus could continue to spread throughout the country, killing more people, throughout the next year.

“At least, through the next year,” one senior health official said. “What happens when you can’t convince people to help not only save themselves but save other people by simply wearing a mask?”

In a recent interview Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told attendees at a recent American University event that as many as 400,000 people in the U.S. could die from COVID-19 if “we don’t do what we need to in the fall.” “Maybe 50 percent of you hate me because you think I’m trying to destroy the country, but listen to me for six weeks or so, and do what I say, and you’ll see the numbers go down,” Fauci said.

Just how directly responsible Trump is for discouraging mask-wearing is the topic of continuous debate. The White House insists that the president is not anti-mask, per se, but merely opposed to the use of masks as a cudgel to shame and score political points against him and Republicans. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, last week, said its use was a “personal choice.” Shortly thereafter, she tested positive for the virus.

In response to inquiries about this article, White House spokesperson Judd Deere reiterated an earlier statement that “Trump always put the well-being of the American people first,” including with his China travel ban, and criticized what he described as a double standard with “large gatherings of so-called ‘peace protesters.’”

White House officials also pointed The Daily Beast to President Trump’s past statements on mask-wearing, including: “I think people should wear a mask if they can, if they feel they, they should. But I don’t think it should be a mandatory policy.”

Communities across America have leaned into that messaging. In Borough Park, one of Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish communities, protests have erupted in the streets over the New York mask guidance and the governor’s press conferences underscoring the increasing case counts in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. Protesters waved Trump flags and held signs that read “We will not comply.”

When asked about whether there was any empirical evidence that Trump’s messaging was linked to COVID-19 spread, some health officials pointed to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In that report, the agency found that “perceived low severity of disease outcome; perceived responsibility to others; peer pressure; and exposure to misinformation, conflicting messages, or opposing views regarding masks were identified as drivers of behaviors that might influence risk for COVID-19 exposure among young adults” in Winnebago County, Wisconsin.

Top health officials working on the coronavirus task force have, in recent weeks, begun to speak out more forcefully about the need to take the virus’ spread more seriously. Fauci, in particular, has appeared on numerous television shows, podcasts, and spoken to dozens of reporters, underscoring the consequences of the country reopening before flattening the curve.

“At the holidays, we had Fourth of July, Memorial Day, people felt pent-up, they went to the bars, they got infected, maybe they didn’t really get much symptoms. But then they went back into the community and transmitted it to vulnerable people,” Fauci told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. “That’s the reason why we saw the sharp increase in cases and hospitalizations, and deaths.”

[…]

“The president is not humbled by this,” said one of the knowledgeable sources. “It did not sound, based on my conversation with him, that he is going to give the media an ‘I told you so!’ moment this time.”

If evidence was needed that Trump’s own diagnosis would not demonstrably change the way he and his team approached mask-wearing, it came this past week. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., attended an indoor rally Thursday where most of the people in the crowd were not wearing masks, while Pence also attended a rally in Nevada on Thursday and did not wear a mask, though the event was held outdoors.

And then there was Trump, who few expect to do anything differently than he had before he came down with COVID, in what Fauci described as a superspreader event at the White House.

“People don’t want to see the leader of the free world hiding behind a mask; it just sends the wrong message,” said Barry Bennett, a GOP operative and lobbyist who served as a senior Trump adviser during the 2016 campaign. “There are large portions of this country where there were no [COVID-19] hospitalizations this week, there were no deaths this week. It’s not a monolithic experience.”

Asked if Trump himself should start wearing a mask publicly or more regularly, Bennett replied, “He had it, so he’s immune now, so he doesn’t need a mask, right?”

By the way:

Arizona—which at one point was one of the states hit hardest by COVID-19— saw a 75 percent decrease in new cases of the virus following local face mask mandates, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Before the mandate and after a stay-at-home order was lifted, the daily average number of new cases had jumped by 151 percent, overwhelming the state’s health care system. When Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey enforced a mask mandate, new cases sharply decreased. Former Maricopa County health director Dr. Bob England said that the order should have come earlier in order to slow the outbreak from happening in the first place

Trump is holding another super-spreader rally in Florida today.

Very few masks, no distancing — here's an image from Sanford, Florida, where Trump is holding a rally later tonight pic.twitter.com/HilF87ceet

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 12, 2020

And this is how his henchmen are behaving:

My God https://t.co/wpj2adpkZI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 12, 2020

It’s the blithe dismissiveness that they’ve been doing from the beginning. Remember Cornyn jokingly posing with a Corona early in the pandemic because, lol, no reason to freak out? https://t.co/23gIY6Pe3v

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 12, 2020

That’s an evergreen quote in the Trump era, of course. But it’s particularly apt for this Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Any person with integrity would refuse to allow their confirmation to be rammed through under these circumstances. Coney Barrett does not have integrity. Obviously.

Booker: "Nothing about this is normal. It is not normal that Senate Republicans are rushing through a confirmation hearing, violating their own statements & betraying the trust of the people & their colleagues & failing to take even the most basic safety protections." pic.twitter.com/Sm5XbcYqj9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 12, 2020

We know that Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society is behind this of course. Guess what else they are behind? Slate’s Rick Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick have this:

According to new reporting from the Guardian and OpenSecrets, Leo, Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network, and their dark-money backers are promoting the Orwellian-named “Honest Elections Project” to pressure elections administrators to limit access to the ballot and to undermine trust in elections. The messaging echoes Trump’s baseless claims that various states’ efforts to let people vote by mail are fraudulent—and turns these lies into policy. “The project announced it was spending $250,000 in advertisements in April, warning against voting by mail and accusing Democrats of cheating,” the Guardian explained. “It facilitated letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida, and Michigan, using misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threatening legal action. Calling voter suppression a ‘myth,’ it has also been extremely active in the courts, filing briefs in favor of voting restrictions in Nevada, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, among other places, at times represented by lawyers from the same firm that represents Trump.

Whitehouse told us, in an email, that “while Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court deliver decisions greenlighting GOP voter suppression, Leo and his network mobilize to tip elections by making it harder for people to vote. We’ve seen this mischief in the records of judges Leo and his dark money groups have packed onto the federal bench; now he’s mounting a direct dark-money assault on the American voter.”

It almost goes without saying at this juncture, but we will say it again: The idea that voter fraud in the United States is widespread has been debunked many times. There’s so little evidence to support the claims that the true aim of such chatter must be to use lies to make it harder for people likely to vote for Democrats to register and vote. The reality is that some Republicans have turned to suppressing the vote—by voter roll purges, voter disenfranchisement, voter intimidation, and the closing of polling places—when they fear they cannot win an election fairly. It is also not in dispute that vote by mail is not rife with fraud, that many states already allow for no-excuse vote by mail, and that attempts to stop the franchise by discouraging mail-in voting are simply the newest flavor of vote suppression for the pandemic era. That’s why the president is dementedly tweeting about it, even as he is being debunked in real time. And that’s why Leonard Leo and his confederates are directing untraceable dark money away from the judge-picking business and into the apparently booming vote-suppression business.

Of course they are doing this. The dynamic duo of McConnell and the orange clown who will sign anything they tell him to sign has been hugely successful to their project. They would love to have four more years to send the country back to some pre-civil war era of white, male supremacy and unfettered capitalism. And they could do it. In fact, they may already have if the Democrats don’t summon the will and the grit to rebalance our courts and return the nation to a democratic republic in which the people choose their leaders.

I wonder why?

This is what happens…

From Amy Walter of the Cook Politial Report:

Long before COVID-19 or the economic collapse that followed in its wake, President Trump gambled his re-election prospects on the assumption that his base would be enough to ensure his re-election. Since the first days of his presidency, Trump rewarded those who already liked or voted for him and ignored — or just outright alienated — everyone else.

And this past week, with polls showing him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by double-digits and with only three weeks left until Election Day, Trump is once again spending all of his time in his comfort zone; calling into friendly cable TV and talk radio hosts.

To be successful, this ‘thread the needle’ re-election strategy required four main elements: 

1. A united, enthusiastic and engaged GOP base
2. A deeply flawed opponent 
3. Decent support among independent voters (Even as Trump ran up the score among his base in 2016, he also carried independent voters by 2-points.)
4. Third-party candidates siphoning off enough votes to allow Trump to win key states with a plurality as he did in 2016

Oh, and of course, it would also help to have a good economy, and not have a majority of Americans think that you have mismanaged a major health crisis. 

Right now, only #1 is there for him. Even that rock-solid support from his base is looking shaky in the wake of his disastrous debate performance and COVID diagnosis. 

Here’s where he is on the other three key elements:

2) Joe Biden has never been popular, but he’s also never been as unpopular as Hillary Clinton. 

For example, the early October NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds Biden’s favorable ratings at 43 percent — not all that much better than Hillary Clinton’s 39 percent at this point in 2016. But, when you look at their unfavorable ratings, Biden’s are 10 points lower than Clinton’s (41 percent to 51 percent). As important, the intensity of dislike for Biden (28 percent strongly disapprove) is also, well, not as intense as it was for Clinton, who, at this point in 2016, was deeply unfavorable to 40 percent of voters. 

3) Trump is trailing Biden among independents in the most recent national polling by Fox News, CNN and Pew by 14 to 18 points. 

Polling done this week in key swing states by Siena/New York Times finds Trump trailing independent voters by 11 points in Pennsylvania and 25-points in Arizona. Even if you turn out your base at high levels, you can’t win an election if you lose independents by double digits. 

4) At this point in the 2016 election, 14 percent of registered voters in a Pew poll said they planned to vote for a third-party candidate.

 In the end, the non-Clinton/Trump vote was six percent. The most recent Pew poll (Sept. 30-Oct. 5) finds just five percent of voters choosing a third-party candidate. As such, we should expect that third-party candidates will comprise a much smaller percentage of the electorate this year — probably around 3 percent.  The lower the third party vote, the harder it will be to carry a state with less than 50 percent. In 2016, Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Florida with less than 49 percent of the vote. 

As important, however, is the fact that those 2016 third- party voters and voters who didn’t vote in 2016, lean heavily to Biden now. According to the most recent Pew survey, Biden leads among 2016 third party voters 49 percent to 26 percent (23 points). Biden leads among those who didn’t vote in 2016, 54 percent to 38 percent. 

In other words, Trump has not converted many of those ‘up for grabs’ voters to his column. That means he is more dependent than ever on pumping up and turning out those who have always been with him. But, there’s no evidence that he has been able to drive up his margins among those who are his biggest supporters. 

This August, I compared Pew polling taken in July with the results of their 2016 validated vote survey (basically, a post-election exit poll that uses official voting records). What I found was that Trump was hitting his 2016 share of the vote among most demographic groups. But, that his 2016 vote seems to be his ceiling. 

The most recent Pew survey finds this same dynamic in place. The good news for Trump, he’s not doing any worse with white, college-educated voters today than he did in 2016 (37 percent now versus 38 percent in 2016). But, he’s also not doing any better among those in his ‘base’ (white voters, white non-college voters, or men). In fact, since July, Trump has seen a deterioration in his support from men (he was down four points from his 2016 showing back in July; by early October, his support among men dropped to 45 percent, a seven-point drop from 2016). 

Meanwhile, Biden has improved on Clinton’s performance with almost every single demographic group — most significantly with men (+8), white non-college (+6), seniors (+5) and independents (+11). 

There are still three long weeks of this campaign to go. Can the race tighten up between now and November 3rd? Absolutely. Could there be a big ‘hidden’ Trump vote — not ‘shy’ Trump supporters but the kinds of pro-Trump voters who pollsters, despite all the changes they made to weighting post-2016, still fail to capture? Perhaps. But, as the New York Times’ Nate Cohen wrote last week, “Joe Biden leads by enough to withstand a repeat of the polling error in 2016.”

Given the kind of year 2020 has been, it’s best to prepare for the unexpected. But, it’s also important not to ignore what’s in front of us today. Trump is a president who is deeply underwater with only a few weeks to go in an election that lacks many of the things – like a deeply unpopular opponent and significant third-party support – that benefitted him back in 2016. 

Neal Katyal posted this virtual TED Talk on persuasion and it’s good. Really good.

Too often, people on the left try to browbeat others into submission with what they are convinced is their superior command of the facts. Then they wonder why it doesn’t work. Katyal relates how he learned something about making a human connection to persuade others in presenting a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

He prepared. He rehearsed before law professors. But his argument seemed to land flat.

Desperate, Katyal spoke with an acting coach who insisted he look him in the eye to deliver it, to focus on his audience and use that human connection to bring his argument to life. Everything changed.

He won, BTW.

Our Netroots family lost such a speaking coach to cancer a couple of years ago. Joel Silberman was a Broadway-trained actor who could be found backstage at many progressive events, stage managing and preparing speakers to tell their stories in way that would make them authentic and “present” to the audience. He was the media trainer for the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He trained Elizabeth Warren.

Joel was a gift and we miss him mightily.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

The great thing about having an online progressive network is not having to remember the history behind every single issue yourself. We can’t all be Marcy Wheeler.

Josh Holland reminds us that this whole modifying the size of Supreme Courts kerfuffle has recent, less-noticed precedent among Republican governors.

Two Republican governors expanded their state Supreme courts in 2016. Nathan Deal’s expansion shifted the balance of power on the GA Supreme Court.

Reporters should ask why it’s a dog-bites-man story for the GOP to do do this stuff but somehow outrageous when it’s the Dems.

— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) October 11, 2020

About Georgia’s Republican court packing in Nov. 2016:

Gov. Nathan Deal continued a transformation of the judiciary on Wednesday by tapping three new Georgia Supreme Court justices and two new judges on Georgia’s Court of Appeals, stocking the court system with young conservatives who are poised to long outlast his tenure in office.

Arizona’s Republican governor beat Deal to it. Doug Ducey added judges in May:

Gov. Doug Ducey signed legislation Wednesday that will let him name two more justices to what has been a five-judge panel.

The governor said having seven justices will put Arizona on par with states that have a similar or smaller population, including Nevada, Colorado, Washington and Wisconsin. He said more justices will lead to more efficiency, and denied he’s “packing” the court.

No, of course he isn’t.

What the brouhaha over Biden's deferral on "court-packing" really says is this: media have accepted a dualism where Republicans destroy norms and Democrats preserve them. So if Biden challenges a norm, it gets breathless coverage, just as it does when Trump doesn't lie.

— 🕷Dante Atkins🕷 (@DanteAtkins) October 11, 2020

Journalistic malpractice to the max

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) October 12, 2020

So as Josh says, why is it a dog-bites-man story when the GOP does this stuff but a scandal when Democrats do it to undo GOP rigging?

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

About those superior genes:

NEW: “My father has lost a fortune,” Eric Trump tells @jonkarl when pressed on a NYT report that Pres. Trump turned “his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway’s new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign.” https://t.co/3Gyv6yH9hc pic.twitter.com/W6eSSed66U

— ABC News (@ABC) October 11, 2020

All the Trump’s have become even more obnoxious since 2016. Junior has turned into Rush Limbaugh without the charm and good looks. Ivanka is now a shrill, hyper-partisan imitation of Kellyanne Conway. Eric, who was actually always smarter than Don Jr (a dubious distinction) has become an aggressive, motor-mouthed whiner. They weren’t much to begin with. But the unctuous martyrdom makes them even more unbearable than they were before.

All these right wing jurists are not just ideological extremists — they are nasty, cynical power players. Even the lovely Amy. Especially the lovely Amy. This piece by Tom Scocca in Slate reveals all:

As she introduced herself to the nation in the White House Rose Garden, Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s newest Supreme Court nominee, almost sounded respectful. “The flag of the United States,” she said, “is still flying at half-staff in memory of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to mark the end of a great American life.”

Really it was a taunt. Barrett, in a venue deliberately decorated to copy Ginsburg’s own nomination scene, was showing up to snatch Ginsburg’s job before the late justice’s body was even in the ground. “I will be mindful of who came before me,” Barrett said—but not so mindful as to acknowledge, let alone respect, Ginsburg’s direct dying wish that the seat stay vacant until a newly elected president could fill it.

The words fit the deed. When Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, he used his introductory remarks to praise Trump for having put more thought and effort into the selection than any previous president had. It was absurd to claim Trump had done any  such thing; Kavanaugh was merely pledging loyalty, demonstrating that he is a ridiculous liar and a toady. In the same vein, by bringing up Ginsburg, Barrett established who she is: a shameless, cynical careerist who believes nobody can stop her.

[…]

So far, the debate around this nomination has purported to be about people being unkind or unfair to Barrett, with Republicans preemptively denouncing Senate Democrats for their plans to attack her charismatic Catholic religious identity or her traditionalist wife-and-mother persona—and Senate Democrats shying away from attacking her at all, in favor of vague hand-wringing about how Trump and Mitch McConnell are abusing the nomination process.

But what’s wrong with Barrett isn’t that she’s too pious, or that she’s submissive in her personal life. It’s that she’s bent on making herself one of the nine most powerful judges in the country, even if she has to do it in the most graspingly partisan and destructive way possible.

“I never imagined that I would find myself in this position,” she said in the Rose Garden—a lie as brazen, in context, as Kavanaugh’s claim to have been the product of unprecedentedly rigorous presidential vetting. In fact, Trump had long ago hailed her as a Supreme Court justice in waiting, because she’s a dedicated right-wing judicial politician who’s been angling for the job for years. She’s a member of the Federalist Society, loyal to the band of wealthy and publicly anonymous donors who put millions of dollars of ads and campaign donations behind McConnell’s blockade of Merrick Garland.

Their ethics are her ethics. Her own current seat on the federal bench, on the Seventh Circuit, was held open for her by another Senate blockade of an Obama nominee. Her work as a judge, in her brief time doing it, has been cruel and heavily slanted rightward, and she has a prior history of supporting illiberal activist groups and endorsing absolutist positions. To argue about her past holdings or her potential future decisions, though, is to miss the point: She doesn’t care what the public, or the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, think about  her as a judge. She didn’t even bother to complete her disclosure forms. What explains this approach? It’s ‘When you’re a star, they let you do it,’ for seats on the bench.

Some liberal legal scholars have gone out of their way to give testimonials about Barrett’s temperament and decency. She is surely kind to her colleagues, but all they’re describing is a networking strategy. Everyone who maneuvers themself into position for a judicial nomination is nice to the other people who populate or operate the pipeline. Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an op-ed praising Kavanaugh when he was up for the court; Kavanaugh gave Chua’s daughter a Supreme Court clerkship in return. Barrett’s endorsers are telling the public nothing more than that they personally want to have a Supreme Court justice on their side. Whose side she’ll take in actual court business is irrelevant to them.

[…]

Since the Rose Garden speech, Barrett’s pursuit of the seat clarified her character. Her announcement festivities—a crowded series of indoor-outdoor events, full of maskless VIPs schmoozing the maskless nominee and her maskless family, in defiance of basic public-health protocols and municipal limits on gatherings—turned out to be a COVID superspreader event, sickening Trump himself and infecting a broad swath of the administration and multiple senators. Instead of slowing down and trying to take stock of the disaster, or even fully tracing the outbreak and notifying the people who may be in danger, the Republican Party is stampeding on with her confirmation process: abandoning any effort to pass COVID relief legislation, convening yet more meetings with potentially infectious people in them, refusing to even test all the senators so that they won’t have to be quarantined.

And Barrett is encouraging this. The coverage of her campaign for the position projects an odd passivity onto her, as if she’s simply been caught up in events controlled by others. But the truth is that she’s actively lobbying for the job, calling senators to help push the process along, even as the virus runs loose through official Washington. She reportedly already had the virus during the summer, so the odds are it’s not going to harm her personally.

Some people, if they discovered themselves at the center of an orgy of illness and destruction, staged for their own aggrandizement—and to boost the reelection bid of a bigot and multiply accused rapist—might have second thoughts about what they were doing. Barrett could stop  the circus if she wanted. She is only 48 years old. If she has to wait for another chance—even until the winner of the 2024 election is sworn in—she’ll be 52. That’s still younger than Kavanaugh, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, or Samuel Alito were when they were nominated, to just look at the current justices.

Why would she need to wait even that long, though? Surely if the American public wants Donald Trump making Supreme Court picks and Mitch McConnell’s Senate majority confirming them, the voters will reelect them a month from now, and Barrett’s seat would be assured, with no need for frantic plague-dodging. She could even take the time to complete her paperwork and go through more than pro forma vetting and hearings, for courtesy’s sake.

But Barrett knows perfectly well that the public is against Trump and McConnell, and against her, too. She is determined to win this victory right now, while she still can, for herself and her agenda. The will of the public doesn’t enter into it, any more than morality does. Barrett is an educated person. She graduated at the top of her law school class. She certainly can count past four. She knows Antonin Scalia, the justice she clerked for, died in February of 2016, and that Ginsburg died in September of 2020—four years and seven months apart—and that Trump is claiming the right to fill both vacancies.

What sort of prospective Supreme Court justice believes a president should get five years’ worth of court picks in a four-year term? The same kind who puts herself forward for an impossibly rushed confirmation process, and who declines to say if she’ll recuse herself from cases that might decide the reelection of the president who is taking such extraordinary measures to give her the job. Like McConnell and Trump, her vision of the law is based on nothing more than what she can get away with; the Constitution is a set of rules to be gamed for personal advantage, not a framework for popular legitimacy or justice. The entire presidency of Donald Trump has been building toward this moment, and Amy Coney Barrett is the woman he was waiting for.

And people are saying the Democrats shouldn’t expand the court because it will hurt the legitimacy of the institution. Sorry — that ship sailed with Mitch McConnell’s devious manipulation of the nomination process. This court is going to be completely out of touch with the country. It must be rebalanced.

And people wonder why they’re talking about the 25th Amendment:

In several phone calls last weekend from the presidential suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump shared an idea he was considering: When he left the hospital, he wanted to appear frail at first when people saw him, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. But underneath his button-down dress shirt, he would wear a Superman T-shirt, which he would reveal as a symbol of strength when he ripped open the top layer. He ultimately did not go ahead with the stunt.

Too bad.

He’s a lunatic who’s believing his own hype. This stuff is all over the internet:

That last is a real billboard someone put up in Times Square.

Yep:.

The crowd to hear Mike Pence at The Villages in Florida. Few masks, little distancing. Oh, by the way, The Villages is a retirement community. pic.twitter.com/LISRWuLg1S

— Christian Christensen (@ChrChristensen) October 10, 2020