Tag Archives: 2020 Election

The Ginsburg Vacancy and the Future of the Supreme Court

By tmess2 | Published September 22, 2020

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg occurs when our country was already at a crossroad.  By historical accident, there has been a “Republican” majority on the court since 1972.    For the past thirty years, there has been a movement among conservative interest groups and supportive lawyers to rewrite the Constitution to undermine the protection given to constitutional rights during the Warren Court and to undermine the legal consensus that arose from the New Deal era.

The Constitution says very little about the structure of the judiciary.  It says that there will be a  Supreme Court with some cases on which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction.  For the most part, however, the Constitution left it to Congress to fill in the details.  And, while the justices are appointed by the President with the “advice and consent” of the Senate, the Constitution is silent on the details of the confirmation process.

The latter issue is currently front and center.  When there was a vacancy in February 2016, Moscow Mitch cited a non-existent Biden rule as barring any confirmation hearing in a presidential election year.  This year, Moscow Mitch has put forth a modified version of the rule holding that confirmation hearings are only barred if the Senate is controlled by the opposing party.  Of course, that is not a principled rule.  It is a rule about power.  Namely, that the Senate majority gets to do what it wants regardless of what is in the best interest of the American people. Continue Reading...

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Early Post-Mortem

By tmess2 | Published November 20, 2016

This election is a bitter pill to swallow because everybody got it wrong.  Apparently even the internal polls of the RNC in the last week of the campaign showed Secretary Clinton ahead.  At the end of the day, President-elect Trump managed to avoid shooting himself in the foot just long enough during the last two weeks for Republicans who were telling pollsters that they were voting for Governor Johnson or were undecided to hold their noses and come back home.  Certainly, the polls with two weeks to go encouraged the Clinton campaign to dream about states that they could go into and help Democrats in down ballot races.  The perception that Clinton would win in some ways gave permission for Republicans to hold their noses and vote for Trump to keep the margin down and for Democrats to cast protest votes for third party candidates.

It’s also a bitter pill because the race got very personal.  Since the election, I have gotten e-mails from local activists about the issues that the party needs to address.  On most of the issues, there was a plan on that issue from the Clinton campaign.  The issues, however, never got aired as the campaign focused on the flaws of the two candidates.    I don’t think that the choice of the Democratic candidate mattered on this aspect of the campaign.  In the primary, Trump also ran a very personality based campaign, slandering his opponents and coming up with labels to characterize the rest of the Republican candidates.   Certain issues that were mentioned in the DNC WikiLeaks memos were not good issues for a Democratic primary but would have proven useful tools for the Trump campaign in the general election.  Trump was such a big personality and so uniquely “not ready” to be President, it is hard to see how any Democratic campaign could have avoided the temptation to focus on Trump’s flaws and gotten the media to focus on the issues rather than the personalities.

Given the closeness of this election what needs to change between now and 2020. Continue Reading...

Posted in Delegates, Democratic Party, Elections, Electoral College | Also tagged , 1 Comment