The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals

Trump and evangelical "faith leaders" charlatans.

A piece in the New York Times follows on the theme of this morning's post that looks at the toxic influence evangelicals Christians have on the Trump/Pence regime and the danger that the evangelical driven embrace of ignorance and science denial poses to the larger public. In addition to pandering to his Christofascist base through statements and policies, Trump has filled many high level positions with individuals who are utterly unfit simply because they embrace the evangelicals anti-knowledge, anti-government agenda.  This unqualified appointments range from the current head of the Department of Health and human Services, to the Secretary of Education, to Housing and Urban Development. Add to this cuts in funding to agencies that evangelicals view as hostile to the Bronze Age belief system and it adds up to a disaster as we now see unfolding in the form of America's lack of preparedness to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.

At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States. Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans. And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a “Cult of the Green Dragon,” cast environmentalism as an alternative — and false — theology.

This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.

Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as “pansies” and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church “when the rapture is taking place.” In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”

Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base. In his daily briefings from the White House, Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures.

Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course, and not every churchgoer in these uncertain times is showing up for services out of disregard for the scientific evidence. . . . . But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of “packed churches all over our country.”

Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good. . . . Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned. Fealty to the cause is everything; fidelity to the facts means nothing. Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.

In an interview on March 13 on “Fox & Friends,” Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, called the response to Coronavirus “hype” and “overreacting.” “You know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next, ah, their next attempt to get Trump,” he said.

When Rev. Spell in Louisiana defied an order from Gov. John Bel Edwards and hosted in-person services for over 1,000 congregants, he asserted the ban was “politically motivated.” Figures like the anti-L.G.B.T. activist Steve Hotze added to the chorus, denouncing the concern as — you guessed it — “fake news.”

One of the first casualties of fact-free hyper-partisanship is competence in government. The incompetence of the Trump administration in grappling with this crisis is by now well known, at least among those who receive actual news. . . . Less well known is the contribution of the Christian nationalist movement in ensuring that our government is in the hands of people who appear to be incapable of running it well.

Consider the case of Alex Azar, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has had a prominent role in mismanaging the crisis. It seems likely at this point that Mr. Azar’s signature achievement will have been to rebrand his department as the “Department of Life.” Or maybe he will be remembered for establishing a division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, designed to permit health care providers to deny legal and often medically indicated health care services to certain patients as a matter of religious conscience.

Mr. Azar, a “cabinet sponsor” of Capitol Ministries, the Bible study group attended by multiple members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet, brought with him to Health and Human Services an immovable conviction in the righteousness of the pharmaceutical industry (presumably formed during his five-year stint as an executive and lobbyist in the business), a willingness to speak in the most servile way about “the courage” and “openness to change” of Mr. Trump, and a commitment to anti-abortion politics, abstinence education and other causes of the religious right. What he did not bring, evidently, was any notable ability to manage a pandemic.

It is fair to point out that the failings of the Trump administration in the current pandemic are at least as attributable to its economic ideology as they are to its religious inclinations. When the so-called private sector is supposed to have the answer to every problem, it’s hard to deal effectively with the very public problem of a pandemic and its economic consequences. But if you examine the political roots of the life-threatening belief in the privatization of everything, you’ll see that Christian nationalism played a major role in creating and promoting the economic foundations of America’s incompetent response to the pandemic.

For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have lined up with the anti-government, anti-tax agenda not just as a matter of politics but also as a matter of theology. Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, one of the Christian right’s major activist groups, has gone so far as to cast food stamps and other forms of government assistance for essential services as contrary to the “biblical model.”

When a strong centralized response is needed from the federal government, it doesn’t help to have an administration that has never believed in a federal government serving the public good. Ordinarily, the consequences of this kind of behavior don’t show up for some time. In the case of a pandemic, the consequences are too obvious to ignore.

 Evangelicals pose a clear and present danger not only to constitutional government, but also to the health and safety of the majority of Americans.  Their influence needs to be defeated and they need to be cast out into the political wilderness.

A Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded by Trump/Pence

The Trump/Pence regime reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic has been all over the board, ranging from some level of glee that China's economy was being hit hard by the virus, to claiming it was a hoax, to claiming that it had been "controlled" and, of course, claiming there was no way to know of the consequences of such an outbreak.  The last claim is utterly untrue because (i) the Obama administration had warned of the danger of a pandemic and (ii) the Trump/Pence regime ran its own "war game" of sorts just last year using a pandemic eerily similar to that striking the nation.  The exercise showed serious deficiencies in America's preparedness and the resulting report was marked "do not distribute" and little was done to address the severe weaknesses laid out in the report.  All of this is important and cannot be allowed to swept under the rug or lied about by the Trump/Pence regime which needs to be held accountable.  A long article in the New York Times looks at what was known and what was not done. Indeed, Trump's 2021 budget proposes huge cuts to the funding for the Center for Disease Control. Would that protecting the health and safety of Americans had received even a fraction of that Trump has directed to building his ridiculous border wall.  Here are article highlights:

The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.

That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.

The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country.

In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.

What the scenario makes clear, however, is that his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory.

Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”

The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.

The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive branch or from Congress, leaving the nation with funding shortfalls, equipment shortages and disorganization within and among various branches and levels of government.

The October 2019 report in particular documents that officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and even at the White House’s National Security Council, were aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.

“Nobody ever thought of numbers like this,’’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, at a news conference. In fact, they had.

Christopher Kirchhoff, a national security aide who moved from the Pentagon to the White House to deal with the Ebola crisis, was given the job of putting together a “lessons learned” report, with input from across the government.

The weaknesses Mr. Kirchhoff identified were early warning signals of what has unfolded in the past three months.

What is striking in reading Mr. Kirchhoff’s account today, however, is how few of the major faults he found in the American response resulted in action — even though the report was filled with department-by-department recommendations.

But one big change did come out of the study: The creation of a dedicated office at the National Security Council to coordinate responses and raise the alarm early.

After Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Monaco arranged an extensive exercise for high-level incoming officials — including Rex W. Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state; John F. Kelly, designated to become homeland security secretary; and Rick Perry, who would become energy secretary — gaming out the response to a deadly flu outbreak. . . . . But by the time the current crisis hit, almost all of the leaders at the table — Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Perry among them — had been fired or moved on.

[I]n testimony to Congress last week, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested that ending the stand-alone directorate was ill-advised. “It would be nice if the office was still there,” he said.

On Feb. 10, nearly three weeks after the first coronavirus case was diagnosed in the United States, Mr. Trump submitted a 2021 budget proposal that called for a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the C.D.C., or about 9 percent, although there was a modest increase for the division that combats global pandemics.

The exercise from last year then went on to predict how the situation on the ground in the United States would worsen as the weeks passed. . . . . But the problems were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded.

Congress was briefed in December on some of these findings, including the inability to quickly replenish certain medical supplies, given that much of the product comes from overseas.

These concerns turned more urgent at a hearing last Thursday on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers peppered officials with the Department of Health and Human Services with questions that sounded almost as if they had read the script from the fictional exercise, reflecting the shortage of respirators and protective gear.

 Although not mentioned in the article, another problem is that so many of Trump's appointees are not competent to run their agencies and were appointed because they adhered to Trump's ideology.  Appointments based on actual knowledge, skills and expertise might have made a difference.  It is imperative that Trump and Pence be held accountable for their failings.

New Kavanaugh Revelations: Why the Supreme Court is Broken

Two corrupt sexual predators.

Over the weekend, new revelations about past sexual improprieties by Bret Kavanaugh were reported by the New York Times.  Just as disturbingly, the coverage also indicated that the FBI seemingly deliberately failed to follow up on credible sources that would have corroborated allegations against Kavanaugh. One can well imagine where that directive came from.  The overall picture is one of utter corruption on the part of Senate Republicans who sought to ram Kavanaugh's nomination through no matter what.  The second conclusion is that a sitting justice of the Supreme Court is unfit to hold that position.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the corrupt Republican agenda - Senator Susan Collins seeming was a willing part of it - and the institutional damage being done to the Court and to constitutional government.  Here are column excerpts:

We focus, rightly, on the damage President Trump is doing to our institutions. But the wreckage goes beyond Trump and involves the other two branches of government as well. The right wing’s determination to control the Supreme Court is undermining its legitimacy as well as confidence in the U.S. Senate’s approach to confirming nominees.

For the GOP, nothing will be allowed to derail its effort to create a generation-long conservative majority on the court. And that helps to explain why Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh was railroaded through his confirmation hearings last year after what amounted to a pretend inquiry into the various charges against him.

The costs of this approach were underscored this weekend by a New York Times report that offers new corroboration for charges by Deborah Ramirez that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her when both were undergraduates at Yale. In denying the charge, Kavanaugh told the Senate that had it been true, the incident would have been “the talk of the campus.” Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly — drawing on their new book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation” — write tellingly: “Our reporting suggests that it was.”

More than that, they report on an entirely separate incident involving Kavanaugh that Max Stier, a classmate of Ramirez’s, brought to the attention of the Senate and the FBI at the time of the hearings. It involved, they write, “a different drunken dorm party” where, according to the allegation, Kavanaugh had a different inappropriate encounter with a female student. Stier is president of the thoroughly bipartisan and widely respected Partnership for Public Service. From my experience, he is the last person who would want to get into the middle of an ideological fight — unless his conscience required him to.

Ramirez’s legal team gave the FBI a list of “at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence” of her story. The bureau, the authors report, “interviewed none of them.” Nor did the FBI look into Stier’s account.

Now let’s take a step back: If Senate Republicans had declared Kavanaugh’s behavior as a high school and college student off-limits, they would have risked a firestorm, but at least they would have been honest about what they were up to.

However, they could not take this route once they agreed to hear psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford’s four hours of testimony about her charge that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the early 1980s when both were in high school. Ford’s testimony was so credible — Republican after Republican praised her — that the GOP was forced to agree to a brief FBI investigation.

But it was such a sharply constrained investigation that neither Kavanaugh nor Ford was questioned, and the other allegations against Kavanaugh were ignored. “The process was a sham,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a member of the Judiciary Committee who is seeking her party’s presidential nomination, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” She was not being hyperbolic. In the wake of the new revelations, three other Democratic contenders quickly called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment.

This leaves it to journalists to keep exploring questions the Senate refused to settle. And it leaves the court and the country in a terrible place.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had already signaled that court packing took priority over due process . . . . The administration seems eager to flaunt the right’s new judicial power. . . . And the administration is developing the habit of skipping the normal appeals process to advance cases to a Supreme Court it has shaped to its liking. This drew a sharp rebuke from Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent last week when the court overturned a lower court’s national injunction against the administration’s asylum policy. She said colleagues’ “precipitous” ruling “sidesteps the ordinary judicial process to allow the Government to implement a rule that bypassed the ordinary rulemaking ­process.”

It was Kavanaugh who said in his opening statement to the Judiciary Committee at his 2018 hearing: “The Supreme Court must never, never be viewed as a partisan institution.” But it’s impossible not to view the court in exactly that way, thanks to a GOP determined to control it by any means at its disposal. It’s why questions — about Kavanaugh and the court itself — will continue to haunt us.

Amy Coney Barrett: A Frightening Possible SCOTUS Nominee

Barrett belongs to a right wing group that believes wives should be subservient to their husbands.

Throughout his term on the U.S. Supreme Court the late Antonin Scalia routinely allowed his right wing Catholicism to influence his opinions on the Court, utterly ignoring the warnings of Thomas Jefferson who condemned rulers and judges who imposed their beliefs on all.  Jefferson called such actions "sinful and tyrannical."  Meanwhile, even as he imposed his own beliefs, Scalia pretended to be an "originalist" who sought to channel the intent of the Founding Fathers.  Now, as a column in the  New York Times notes, Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, may be contemplating nominating an individual who would be Scalia on steroids when it comes to believing her extreme right Catholic beliefs should be binding on all Americans. Equally disturbing is her lack of top credentials and very limited time on the bench - of any court.  Here are column excerpts:

There’s little that President Trump loves more than cementing his supporters’ adoration of him while making his foes squirm. Nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court would do both. She’s not just a staunch conservative over whom Republicans and Democrats would wage a familiar fight. She’s the prompt for an all-out culture war. 

She was one of four finalists interviewed by Trump on Monday, when CBS News, without specifying its source or sources, identified her as one of two leading contenders. The other was Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Many conservatives are lobbying ardently on her behalf. . . . Barrett, you see, talks readily and proudly about her Catholicism, making no bones about its presence at the center of her life. She and her husband have seven children, two of whom are adopted. She belongs to a mostly Catholic group, People of Praise, whose members make an especially intense commitment to their faith.

And Republicans . . . They’re setting her up to be a Christian martyr, minus the grisly end, and daring Democrats to take the bait.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake sagely sized up the appeal of this dynamic to Trump, writing that it’s “exactly the kind of battle he generally relishes: One that invites his opponents to overreach.” My Times colleague Ross Douthat tweeted that if Trump wants to “trigger the libs,” he’ll nominate Barrett. Douthat further predicted that her nomination “might bring on the culture-war apocalypse.”

In terms of experience, she’d be an atypical nominee. She’d be the only justice on the Supreme Court without the imprimatur of the Ivy League, and there’s little whiff of the coastal elites about her. She did her undergraduate work at Rhodes College in Tennessee and then attended law school at Notre Dame, where she subsequently taught for more than a decade, up until her appointment to the circuit court last year. While she clerked long ago for Justice Antonin Scalia, her own time on the bench is limited to her eight months on that court.

And her Senate confirmation hearings after her nomination for the circuit court made her a hero to conservatives, especially religious ones. They took issue in particular with questions that Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, asked Barrett about whether she could properly separate her fidelity to Catholic tenets from her duty to interpret the law for all Americans.

Barrett should be measured by the legal perspectives that she has articulated in public remarks and scholarly journals. Those have persuaded her backers that she can be depended on to sweep aside Roe v. Wade and to toe the conservative line on other issues. Democrats should be equally convinced, and should confront her, fiercely, on those grounds.

A piece in the Times last year looked at the bizarre quasi-Catholic that Barrett belongs to.  Suffice it to say, it about as far as one can get from mainstream as possible:

Some of the group’s practices would surprise many faithful Catholics. Members of the group swear a lifelong oath of loyalty, called a covenant, to one another, and are assigned and are accountable to a personal adviser, called a “head” for men and a “handmaid” for women. The group teaches that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family.

Current and former members say that the heads and handmaids give direction on important decisions, including whom to date or marry, where to live, whether to take a job or buy a home, and how to raise children.

Legal scholars said that such loyalty oaths could raise legitimate questions about a judicial nominee’s independence and impartiality. The scholars said in interviews that while there certainly was no religious test for office, it would have been relevant for the senators to examine what it means for a judicial nominee to make an oath to a group that could wield significant authority over its members’ lives. 

The group believes in prophecy, speaking in tongues and divine healings, staples of Pentecostal churches that some Catholics have also adopted in a movement called charismatic renewal. . . . about 90 percent of its members are Catholic.

To fulfill the group’s communitarian vision, unmarried members are sometimes placed to live in homes with married couples and their children, and members often look to buy or rent homes near other members.

There are some indications that both Ms. Barrett and the People of Praise may have tried to obscure Ms. Barrett’s membership in the group.

Every nominee for the federal bench is required to fill out a detailed questionnaire for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ms. Barrett did not list any religious affiliations on her questionnaire, though many nominees have in the past.

Sadly, Republicans rubber stamped Barrett's nomination to the 7th Circuit. If she is elevated to the Supreme Court, expect rulings that uphold a Christian version of Sharia law in America.  She is very frightening. 

An Open Letter to Justice Anthony Kennedy

If one looks at Donald Trump's picks for cabinet positions, most have been frightening and have involved ideologues and those not competent for their positions.  A number of his would be judicial appointments have been labeled "unfit" by the American Bar Associations.  Thus, nothing is more frightening than the prospects of Donald Trump nominating a second justice to the United States Supreme Court should Justice Anthony Kennedy retire as some rumors have suggested might occur.  This would be a tragedy for the rule of law and would literally threaten the rights of minorities of all stripes and invite an impermissible intertwining of right wing Christian hate and bigotry into the nation's laws.  An open letter by the Editorial Board of the New York Times pleads with Kennedy to remain in his post through next January to save the country and the court.   I hope Kennedy listens to this plea.  Here are  highlights of that letter:

Dear Justice Kennedy,

As you have no doubt heard, rumors of your impending retirement are, for the second year in a row, echoing around Washington and across America. While you and your colleagues on the Supreme Court were listening to the final oral arguments of the term in recent days, those rumors were only growing more insistent.

How can we put this the right way? Please don’t go.

Sitting between the four liberal justices and the four conservatives, you are the most powerful member of the most powerful court in the country, as you have been for at least a decade. Your vote, more than that of any other justice, has delivered landmark legal victories for Americans of all political stripes, from gays and lesbians seeking equal rights to African-American college students seeking a better education to deep-pocketed corporations seeking to spend more money influencing politics.

You have sent mixed signals about your intentions, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans in Congress from referring to your departure as a done deal.

[T]his moment is about so much more than partisan jockeying. We can’t know what is in your heart, Your Honor, but we do know what your departure right now would mean for the court, and for the nation. It would not be good. [H]ere are two ways to think about this decision: The safeguarding of your legacy, and the safeguarding of the Supreme Court itself.

Start with the legacy. Across your 30 years on the court, your most important opinions — and there are many — have altered not just the lives of millions of Americans but the course of the nation’s history. A sampling: Protecting reproductive rights, and saving Roe v. Wade from being essentially overturned, in 1992. Recognizing the equality and dignity of gays and lesbians multiple times since 1996 and, in 2015, granting same-sex couples the constitutional right to marry.  . . . You’ve also recognized the continuing travesty of the nation’s broken criminal justice system, voting to strike down excessive sentences for juveniles and the intellectually disabled and forcing states to shrink their overcrowded prisons.

Your record is more conservative than liberal, but there’s no question that you are less of an ideologue than anyone President Trump would pick. How do we know? Look at his first nominee, Justice Gorsuch. Perhaps you were comforted by this choice — a well-qualified judge who clerked for you, and who would have been on any Republican’s short list. But Justice Gorsuch has already made it clear that while he’s a fan of individual liberty, at least in some cases, he is unlikely to go to great pains to protect your most cherished values — equality and human dignity.

Justice Gorsuch replaced Antonin Scalia, a move that didn’t disrupt the balance of the court. Replacing you with a hard-line conservative, in contrast, would have enormous consequences for the nation’s laws and Constitution for decades to come. Just ask Sandra Day O’Connor, your onetime fellow swing justice who left the court in 2006 and now watches helplessly as her replacement, the arch-conservative Samuel Alito Jr., votes to tear down her legacy.

[D]id you spend a lifetime honoring and upholding the Constitution and the values of civility and decency in American public life only to have your replacement chosen by Donald Trump?

Do you want to give your seat to a president whose campaign and administration are under criminal investigation, whose closest aides have been indicted or have pleaded guilty to federal crimes?

There is also the institutional legitimacy of and public respect for the nation’s highest court, which we know you cherish even beyond your own legacy. Right now that legitimacy is eroding. The audacious decision by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to hold a court seat hostage and use it as an electoral tool “places the court in a position of real institutional peril, . . . . You know as well as anyone that the Supreme Court’s authority depends on public confidence. When that fails, the consequences can be dire.

This is where you come in, Justice Kennedy. You’re a conservative from a time when conservatism was a more or less coherent political philosophy, not a tribal identity. You’re a believer in free markets and individual liberty, and also in human rights and equal justice. A defender of the rule of law, of civility and decorum — those time-honored values now desecrated daily by the current inhabitant of the Oval Office.

The American people are desperate for someone who is not polarizing, and your continued service would be an encouraging sign to them that the court can still operate outside politics. It could also be a model for future justices, though we’re not holding our breath. If you leave, the dam breaks. We realize this isn’t an entirely fair request. Every 81-year-old, especially those who have devoted their lives to the service of their country, should have the freedom to retire without worrying that the nation’s future may hang in the balance. But this is the world we live in. By stealing the seat [of Merrick Garland] for short-term political advantage, Mr. McConnell has inflicted institutional damage from which the court, and the Senate, may never fully recover. This is your court, Justice Kennedy. It is facing an institutional crisis, and it needs you.