Welcome to another week of The Runback. Have you been enjoying The Duckpin? Do you have comments or suggestions? Do you want to write for us? Let me know at theduckpin@gmail.com. And please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Thanks in advance.
Episode #3 is Here
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News and Politics
Betting on Flexibility: This is how gambling policy is supposed to work.
Off-Session Bill Hearings Violate Legislative Rules: You can’t really do what the Democrats want to do the way they want to do it.
A Second Chance To Get It Right: The Wicomico County Council had a second chance to name Carl Anderton to lead the County, but…..
The Abdication of Responsibility: …..instead the Wicomico County Council Decides Doing Its Job is Not All That Important.
Shameless Plug
The Monday Thought
You can like or not like the laste Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsbierg or her politics, but you must acknowledge she was an accomplished and important jurist.
The being said, let’s take a look at the reaction of me and scores of others as it relates to her passing’s impact on the 2020 Presidential Election.
Everything is scrambled because an election that was already on the precipice of being the worst we’ve experienced in a long time now takes on the added specter of a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
The Republicans, of course, are screwing this up to a point. As you recall four years ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to give an up-or-down vote on the confirmation of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after he was appointed by then-President Barack Obama. McConnell and Senate Republicans believed that the most responsible course of action would be to allowthe winner of the Presidential election to fill the vacancy. Now, McConnell is saying that he plans to move to a swift confirmation vote for whomever President Donald Trump names to the seat.
The Democrats, of course, are screwing this up to a point. As you recall four years ago, Senate Democrats and the entire Democratic Party demanded an up-or-down vote vote on the confirmation of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after he was appointed by then-President Barack Obama. Now, Senate democrats are saying that they believ that the most responsible course of action would be to allow the winner of the Presidential election to fill the vacancy.
All this does it highlight the hypocrisy and the absurdity of both parties when it comes to national and congressional politics. Both parties are awful when it comes to things like this, this being determining their position on the norms of the Senate and the norms of filling court vacancies depending on whether or not it benefits them or not. The national parties are why politics have been the dumpster fire they are.
I said back in 2016 that McConnell should allow an up-or-down vote. I say know that McConnell should allow an up-or-down vote. It’s not like this level of consistency is all that hard to achieve.
McConnell, incidentally, is trying to have his cake and eat it too. Because he knows that he can hold the vote and the nominee likely won’t be seated. At least four Republicans have already indicated that they will not vote to support a nominee. That helps a Republican like Susan Collins, in a tough re-election in Maine. It also gives Republican Senators and the President a campaign issue to work with in the last few weeks of the campaign. McConnell knows this. Because he’s Mitch McConnell.
The left of course, is having a total meltdown and is threatening violence, revolution, and radically reforming our country if the President, mostly because the left these days mainly consists of coddled children who have never been told no in their life and have never take a civics class.
This is pretty much the nightmare scenario as it relates to electoral politics, the type of Black Swan event that upends years worth of campaigning and electoral calculus. Some, like David French, think the upcoming fight over the seat could be another step in the ripping apart of our country:
On Friday afternoon Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class. We knew a polarized and divided nation was about to endure yet another sharp escalation in the culture war, and this escalation could well lead to a cascading series of events that could strain the constitutional and cultural fabric of this nation.
I don’t share French’s pessimism that the country could rip apart, a least not yet.
What I do believe, however, is that this shows that we have let the Supreme Court drive the ship of state far too much. The Court for years has acted more like a superlegislature calling balls and strikes on political point instead of being the court of last resort to settle constitutional and legal issues. The Republicans inability to repeal Obamacare, for instance, and try to fight the battle through the courts is just one of those issues. Same with Republican insistence that the fight against abortion should be done through the courts instead of by attempting to amend the Constitution. Same with Democrats trying to curtail gun ownership through legal challenges to gun laws and through spurious attempts to bankrupt gun manufacturers.
None of this is a role for the courts. It’s the role for Congress. That’s problematic considering the legislative branch has pretty much abdicated much of its responsibility for lawmaking and legislating to the Courts and to the Executive Branch, becoming more of a talking head society than a pair of legislative bodies. Congress could deal with some of this stuff, but it’s become a flock of political hacks instead of an august body of serious men and women who want to take the country’s business seriously.
The Supreme Court has too much influence over our lives. So does the federal government, for that matter. But Congress has allowed its influence over these things to be pissed away for no good reason. And that’s why which you see ostensibly grown and mature people have a nervous breakdown over the death of a judge.
This is the worst case event electorally and it was entirely and throughouly avoidable had members of Congress done their job and have the voters demanded that their member of Congress do their job. Here we are instead, 44 days before the bitterest election in modern times and the stakes have been raised tenfold.