“We don’t take them by their word alone but by their actions,” President Biden said on Tuesday. “Them” being the Taliban. Democrats expecting to be taken at their word instead of their actions, take heed.
Words won’t cut it any more than Susan Collins’s “concern” or the Roberts Supreme Court’s “serious questions” about the constitutionality of the Texas law that effectively bans abortion and shows other Republican-controlled states how it’s done.
Dahlia Lithwick is done with words:
To President Joe Biden, and the Democrats who are madly tweeting that they are fighting to defend abortion rights in Texas, one does want to know what that looks like, beyond tweeting that you are fighting to defend abortion rights in Texas. What exactly is the plan here? The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States is not about to reinstate the rule of law in Texas.
So, now what? I and others want to know what to do about a court that has “become terrifyingly adept” at “judging between the raindrops” and outside of public view via the shadow docket.
Lithwick recommends (in a dispatch written before the court’s opinion filed last night):
[T]he only things to do now are work to protect the vote and fix the courts—the boring tedious work that also happens outside the spotlight and beneath the fold. If the systemic machinery of justice isn’t immediately repaired, what happens in the shadows is going to keep catching us off guard, late at night, while we struggle to decide if Roe was overruled this week, or nullified, or merely paused for a few million people. Until the courts do their work in the open, according to the agreed-upon rules of the road, this slow erosion of the rule of law is always going to occur between the raindrops, and we’re going to feel surprised and powerless every single time.
Much of the work of politics is boring and tedious and outside the spotlight. Activists who prefer noisy protests in the streets have trouble seeing that Democrats “doing something” is not always noisy and public. Backchannel work often is more effective than showing out. Because you don’t see it does not mean something is not happening. And yet….
The problem now is that angry, noisy, and red-faced gets headlines above the fold where influencers see and feel it. Public pressure works. Especially in an era in which Republicans work feverishly in public to neuter election results and to threaten violence if they don’t get their way. Ask school board members worn down by shouts and threats if public pressure works.
But like the Civil Rights movement of over a half-century ago, how and where to apply public pressure matters. Voting rights activists had a disciplined strategy that depended on their opponents getting loud enough and angry enough in public to awaken the American conscience in revulsion. To date, Americans in what’s left of the mainstream are merely fed up. And whether the left has the stomach to renew its 1960s defense of democracy (or to invent a modern version) remains an open question.
Fed up won’t be enough to defeat what has become a creeping fifth column.