Tuesday, October 27, 2020
New Hampshire Union Leader Endorses First Democrat in Over 100 Years
Up and down the ticket we are faced with choices in political ideologies, personalities, backgrounds and governing styles.
Some choices are easy. We can wholeheartedly recommend Chris Sununu be elected to another term as governor. He has proven himself a capable leader when faced with an extreme and occasionally hostile legislature. During the COVID-19 crisis, he has deftly handled a situation that left many leaders flustered and swinging from one extreme reaction to the next.
In the race that has dominated political discourse for the past four years the choice is murkier. There is no love lost between this newspaper and President Donald J. Trump.
We were hopeful with Trump’s win that he might change, that the weight and responsibility of the Oval Office might mold a more respectful and presidential man. We have watched with the rest of the world as the mantle of the presidency has done very little to change Trump while the country and world have changed significantly.
President Trump is not always 100 percent wrong, but he is 100 percent wrong for America. Trump has many admirable accomplishments from his first term in office. We can find much common ground with Trump supporters, including judicial appointments, tax policy, support for gun rights, even inroads to Middle East peace.
Since Trump took over, the national debt has exploded by more than 7 TRILLION dollars. While the last several trillion was in response to the COVID-19 economic crisis, at least the first three trillion was on the books well before the pandemic, while Trump was presiding over “...the best economy we’ve ever had in the history of our country.” (Trump’s words.)
The layman would expect that the best economy in history would be a time to get the fiscal house in order, pay down debt and prepare for a rainy day (or perhaps a worldwide pandemic). The real tragedy of this scenario is that the runaway spending under the Trump administration has flashed dollar signs in the eyes of Capitol Hill Democrats. Trillions in unchecked spending has them clamoring to birth the social programs of their dreams.
Federal spending is on an unsustainable path. The fact that it has continued under an allegedly conservative president is unbelievable.
Mr. Trump rightly points out that the COVID-19 crisis isn’t his fault, but a true leader must own any situation that happens on their watch. We may be turning a corner with this virus, but the corner we turned is down a dark alley of record infections and deaths. . . . . when pushed on basic topics he doesn’t want to discuss, he very quickly feigns ignorance.
Donald Trump did not create the social-media-driven political landscape we now live in, but he has weaponized it. . . . . . America faces many challenges and needs a president to build this country up. This appears to be outside of Mr. Trump’s skill set.
Building this country up sits squarely within the skill set of Joseph Biden. We have found Mr. Biden to be a caring, compassionate and professional public servant. He has repeatedly expressed his desire to be a president for all of America, and we take him at his word. Joe Biden may not be the president we want, but in 2020 he is the president we desperately need. He will be a president to bring people together and right the ship of state.
Despite our endorsement of his candidacy, we expect to spend a significant portion of the next four years disagreeing with the Biden administration on our editorial pages.
Biden was among the most moderate in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary field, proposing some of the lowest new spending among that increasingly left-leaning group. We are hopeful that this is a sign of the thoughtful and pragmatic public servant President Joe Biden will be. Sadly, President Trump has proven himself to be the antithesis of thoughtful and pragmatic; he has failed to earn a second term.
Our endorsement for President of these United States goes to Joe Biden.
Monday, October 26, 2020
Can Chief Justice John Roberts Save His Court
Monday’s Senate confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, preceded by a pell-mell scramble to seat her before next week’s election and scheduled to be followed by an unseemly campaign-style celebration at the White House, shreds whatever remained of the high court’s integrity and independence.
Whether the court regains its independence or cements itself as a third partisan branch of government is now largely up to Chief Justice John Roberts. If he does not act, and fast, to mitigate the court’s politicization, Democrats will be fully justified in expanding the court’s membership to restore balance — and indeed will face a public outcry if they don’t. The Barrett spectacle could not have been uglier. It began with a superspreader event at the White House after which a dozen people, including President Trump, contracted covid-19. Trump insisted on naming a replacement even before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in her grave, and he belittled the late justice’s granddaughter for conveying the women’s rights icon’s dying wish that Trump not replace her.
Senate Republicans rammed through Barrett eight days before an election Trump seems likely to lose, and even though Trump has made clear he’s counting on the Supreme Court to overturn the result. They did this in an extraordinary public display of hypocrisy, four years after refusing to seat an Obama nominee to the high court because, they said then, that doing so more than eight months before an election was too soon. And they did this after abolishing the minority’s right to filibuster.
Barrett, in her confirmation hearing, made a mockery of the supposed “originalism” and “textualism” she professes to practice. She conspicuously refused to say whether a president could unilaterally postpone an election and whether voter intimidation is illegal — matters unarguable under the clear words of the Constitution and statutes.
[F]ew even pretended they were engaged in some historic or noble tradition. The debate sounded more like a medical conference as Democrats warned about the many conditions that might not be covered if Barrett strikes down the Affordable Care Act after it comes before the court in two weeks.
If the chief justice wishes to restore dignity to the Roberts Court, it’s clear enough what needs to be done:
He can lean heavily on Barrett to recuse herself from any case arising from the presidential election next week.
He can use his influence to make sure the court upholds the Affordable Care Act after it hears arguments next month — not a legalistic punt on technical matters of “severability” but a ruling that puts an end to the constant assaults on Obamacare.
He can persuade his conservative colleagues to join him in upholding the rights of LGBTQ Americans as established in the 2015 Obergefell case, by rejecting a challenge to it by Catholic Social Services that will be argued the morning after the election next week.
He can forge a majority to reject Trump’s latest tired attempt to use the Supreme Court to further delay handing over his financial records to New York prosecutors.
And he and his colleagues can agree to hear one of the many challenges to Roe v. Wade now making their way through lower courts — and vote to uphold Roe for now. That would be the surest sign that the Roberts Court is not going to turn (immediately at least) into the reactionary caricature that most expect.
If Roberts and his conservative allies on the court don’t do at least some of this in the next few months, they can count on being joined next year by a whole batch of new colleagues.
White House Signals Defeat in Pandemic
With the election a little over a week away, the new White House outbreak spotlighted the administration’s failure to contain the pandemic as hospitalizations surge across much of the United States and daily new cases hit all-time highs.
The outbreak around Pence, who chairs the White House’s coronavirus task force, undermines the argument Trump has been making to voters that the country is “rounding the turn,” as the president put it at a rally Sunday in New Hampshire.
Further complicating Trump’s campaign-trail pitch was an extraordinary admission Sunday from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that the administration had effectively given up on trying to slow the virus’s spread.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who regularly wears a mask on the campaign trail and strictly adheres to social distancing guidelines, sought to capitalize on the remark.
“This wasn’t a slip by Meadows; it was a candid acknowledgment of what
PresidentTrump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away,” Biden said in a statement. “It hasn’t, and it won’t.”Some in the vice president’s office suggested that White House doctors should release a statement saying that Short was positive and that Pence was still okay to travel. But that idea was scuttled by Meadows and others, officials said.
Officials said the new list of those infected includes the vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short; his top outside political adviser, Marty Obst; his personal aide Zach Bauer, known as a “body man,” who accompanies him throughout his day; and two other staff members.
Some White House aides said they did not want attention on the outbreak because it would highlight the pandemic in the final week of the campaign and raise questions about the administration’s handling of it.
The vice president continued Sunday with his heavy travel schedule, flying to North Carolina for an evening rally in Kinston. He told aides that he was determined to keep up his appearances through the week despite his potential exposure, irrespective of guidelines, officials said. Some aides said they would have preferred tele-rallies because if the vice president is infected while on the road in the final days of the campaign, it is likely to become a major news story for several days.
On Monday, Pence is expected to visit the Capitol to preside over the Senate vote to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) decried Pence’s plans to continue with his scheduled events. “God help us,” Schumer said in a speech Sunday on the Senate floor.
he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people stay home for 14 days following possible exposure and to socially distance at all times. The CDC allows an exemption for “critical infrastructure workers” who are not experiencing symptoms so long as they socially distance and cover their faces at all times.
When asked Sunday about Pence’s decision to continue campaigning in person despite the fresh outbreak among his team, Harris told reporters: “He should be following the guidelines. We’re doing it. I think we have modeled the right and good behavior, and they should take our lead.”
The latest outbreak underscored the absence of some basic health safety protocols at the White House and at Trump and Pence’s campaign events, where the two and their aides routinely flout CDC recommendations and state or local health guidelines. They do not wear masks with any regularity, nor do they practice social distancing. Aboard Air Force Two, where Pence and his team have spent considerable time in recent weeks jetting among campaign stops, officials often do not wear masks.
Meadows tried to keep details about the infections within Pence’s orbit under wraps and opposed the vice president’s office releasing such information, according to two officials. It was not until Saturday evening that Short and Obst’s infections were first reported by the media.
New coronavirus cases in the United States reached an all-time high on Friday and hospitalizations have soared, surpassing the mark set during the summer as cases spiked across the Sun Belt in particular.
Campaigning over the weekend, Trump tried to present an alternate reality. At a rally Sunday in Londonderry, N.H., Trump said the pandemic would soon end thanks to a potential vaccine, which he said was “going to be delivered fast.”
Trump also had hoped to divert attention from the pandemic in his final stretch of campaigning, though the new outbreak at the White House could upend that strategy.
At a rally Saturday in North Carolina — where scores of maskless attendees stood shoulder to shoulder — Trump played down the dangers of the virus and predicted that the news media would stop covering the pandemic after Election Day.
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Amy Coney Barrett Is the Least Experienced Supreme Court Nominee in 30 Years
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett took some heat from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) during her confirmation hearing last week, when he pressed her on her failure to turn over additional relevant documents to the committee, including an anti-abortion newspaper ad she’d signed in 2006. Barrett responded that she had submitted 30 years’ worth of material to the committee, and that she had simply missed the 15-year-old ad. “I produced 1,800 pages of material,” she insisted, implying that this submission was voluminous.
In the world of Supreme Court nominees, however, 1,800 pages of documents barely registers as a footnote. Chief Justice John Roberts rustled up 75,000 pages of records for his 2005 confirmation hearing—just from his time serving in Republican administrations. The Senate reviewed about 170,000 pages of records before confirming Justice Elena Kagan and 180,000 for Justice Neil Gorsuch. No one even comes close to the document dump from Justice Brett Kavanaugh
[T]he relative paucity of Barrett’s is an indication of just how circumscribed her legal experience has been compared with virtually all of her predecessors—and even one nominee who was ultimately denied the position. The permanent record of the 48-year-old former Notre Dame law school professor is in direct proportion with her resume, which is strikingly thin for someone nominated to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court. By almost any objective measure, Barrett is the most inexperienced person nominated to the Supreme Court since 1991, when President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, then just 43, to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall.
Barrett’s limited CV did have an upside: It’s one reason that Republicans have been able to rush her confirmation hearings and vote on her nomination, which the Judiciary Committee did Thursday without a single Democrat in the room. (The full Senate will vote on it Monday.) There’s simply not that much in her record to review.
But Barrett’s insular professional history raises some pertinent questions about her nomination that go beyond how she might rule on hot-button social issues: How did a professor from a second-tier law school with such a shallow reservoir of experience manage to leapfrog to the top of the list of potential Republican Supreme Court nominees? And why were Republicans, who have spent decades obstructing legislation that would help women advance in the workplace, so eager to promote this particular under-credentialed, female candidate?
Barrett has spent virtually all of her professional life in academia. Until President Trump nominated her to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, she had never been a judge, never worked in the government as a prosecutor, defense lawyer, solicitor general, or attorney general, or served as counsel to any legislative body—the usual professional channels that Supreme Court nominees tend to hail from. A graduate of Notre Dame law school, Barrett has almost no experience practicing law whatsoever—a hole in her resume so glaring that during her 7th Circuit confirmation hearing in 2017, Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were dismayed that she couldn’t recall more than three cases she’d worked on during her brief two years in private practice. Nominees are asked to provide details on 10.
But by the time Trump picked him [Kavanaugh] to replace Kennedy, he had spent 12 years on the appellate court and written hundreds of opinions. Trump’s other appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, had been an appellate court judge for 11 years before Trump nominated him to fill the seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Sonia Sotomayor had been an assistant district attorney in New York City, a solo practitioner, and later a corporate litigator and law firm partner. She had been a federal judge, first at the trial court level, and then on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, for 17 years before Obama tapped her for the Supreme Court.
As for Kagan’s 15 years in academia, she wasn’t just any law professor, teaching three classes a year as Barrett did during her 15 years as a full-time law professor. In 2003, Kagan became the first female dean of Harvard Law School, where she had also studied. At the nation’s largest and most prestigious law school, Kagan oversaw a $400 million capital campaign, an operating budget of $180 million, and 500 employees.
Even Harriet Miers had a more substantial legal background than Barrett. Miers was the last woman a Republican president tried (though failed) to put on the high court. . . . Miers had once been a Democrat and conservatives attacked her credentials, suggesting that while she’d litigated and argued a host of cases in federal and state courts, they weren’t the right kind of cases. (Flash forward to Barrett, who has never litigated anything in federal court.)
Barrett is not the only conservative woman with a shallow CV to benefit from an assist from the Federalist Society. Sarah Pitlyk, a former Kavanaugh clerk who had previously worked at an anti-abortion legal nonprofit, is now a Trump-appointed judge on the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. A unanimous committee of the ABA rated her unqualified for the seat, in part because of “a very substantial gap” in her resume.
Historically, Maxwell says, the conservative movement has made an exception for women like Barrett as long as they are furthering its anti-feminist agenda. She compares her to another Catholic superwoman of the religious right, the late Phyllis Schlafly, mother of six, who worked full time to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment as part of her lifelong campaign to keep mothers out of the workplace.
“She’s clearly very intelligent,” Maxwell says of Barrett, but her nomination is reminiscent of the time when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was trying to find a woman to put on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket and emerged with Sarah Palin.
Barrett also checks another important box for the religious right: Men who would like to see the Supreme Court overturn the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade have long hoped to have a woman cast the deciding vote. “It washes away the stench of it being sexist if it’s coming from a woman,” Maxwell says. Having not just a woman but one with seven children poised to overturn Roe explains conservatives’ outsize enthusiasm for a nominee whose professional record falls short when compared with most Supreme Court justices. “That is really part of the symbolic strategy,” Maxwell says. “I can still have it all, adopt the babies, have all of the children, cherish life, and still have all the success that every woman wants.”
The GOP’s Demographic Doom
The coming generational backlash against Donald Trump may represent only the first tremor in a much larger earthquake threatening the GOP through the 2020s.
Trump is eroding the Republican Party’s position with younger voters at precisely the same time as the massively diverse Millennials and Generation Z are poised to become the largest voting bloc in the electorate, as new research released this week shows.
That prospect presents both a near- and long-term danger for the GOP. The immediate problem is that polls nationally and in key swing states show Joe Biden positioned to significantly expand on Hillary Clinton’s margin among younger voters, even as many more of them are signaling they intend to vote than did in 2016.
“There’s a consistent picture coming together that says we’re going to have the highest youth turnout since 2008, and maybe since 1992,” Ben Wessel, the executive director of NextGen America, a group working to mobilize younger voters for Democrats, told me. “And they are rebuking Trump and the Republicans in a way we haven’t seen since the 2008 presidential” race.
If anything, the longer-term trends may be more ominous. The electorate is beginning its most profound generational transition since the early 1980s, when Baby Boomers became the largest voting bloc, dislodging the Greatest Generation of Americans, who came of age during the Depression and World War II.
In 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Gen Z (which comprise young adults born in 1981 or later) will equal Baby Boomers and prior generations (older adults born in 1964 or earlier) as a share of all Americans eligible to vote, according to a new study from the nonpartisan States of Change project. Because older voters typically turn out at higher rates than younger ones, the study forecasts that those earlier generations will still cast more ballots next month, by a margin of 43 percent to 32 percent. But in 2024, the two younger generations are expected to equal the older ones as a share of actual voters on Election Day. And by 2028, Millennials and Gen Z will dwarf the older generations as a share of both eligible and actual voters.
Given that the younger generations align much more closely with Democratic ideological views on almost all policy questions, this shift underscores the stakes in the generational roulette Trump has played by defining the GOP so narrowly around the priorities and preferences of his core groups: older, nonurban, non-college-educated, and evangelical white people. If Democrats can not only express the values of younger Americans, but also advance their material interests, they will have a substantial advantage in building electoral majorities through the decade ahead . . . .
Most of the generational discussion in the 2020 election has focused on Biden’s potential to run better among seniors than any other Democratic presidential nominee since Al Gore in 2000. And that indeed has enormous implications for his ability to claw back votes in Trump states with large older populations, particularly Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
But many analysts believe that the Democratic resurgence among preponderantly white seniors is a temporary phenomenon rooted in voters’ comfort with the 77-year-old Biden and their discontent over Trump’s chaotic handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The shift among younger generations could have a much more enduring impact on the country.
Before Millennials entered the electorate in large numbers in the 2004 election, adults younger than 30 had generally tracked voting preferences of the country overall, without providing any particular advantage to Democrats;
But in the years since, the Democratic advantage among younger adults has swelled. In 2004, John Kerry won 54 percent of them. Barack Obama won 66 percent of them, compared with John McCain’s 32 percent in 2008, before topping Mitt Romney in 2012 by a narrower margin: 60 percent to 37 percent.
In 2016, Trump didn’t improve on Romney’s performance—he won only 36 percent of adults younger than 30—but Clinton substantially retreated from Obama’s.
But despite all that, Democrats are optimistic that Biden can rebuild his vote share with younger adults—at least up to Obama’s 60 percent showing in 2012, and maybe even his towering 66 percent in 2008. Public polls—such as recent Marist Institute, Harvard University Institute of Politics, and Pew Research Center national surveys—generally show Biden at about 60 percent. But Wessel said that, given antipathy toward Trump, the higher number is within Biden’s reach. He notes that two-thirds of younger adults supported Democrats in House races during the 2018 midterms. “We see even people who self-identify as young Republicans disagree with Trump on almost every issue,” Wessel told me.
States of Change anticipates that Millennials will actually plateau at about one-fourth of both eligible and actual voters between now and 2036. The biggest change to the electorate will be the explosive growth of Gen Z, which will increase from a projected 8 percent of actual voters this year to 29 percent in 2036. That year, the two generations combined will comprise a clear 55 percent majority of all voters. As soon as 2028, States of Change expects them to outvote the Boomers and even older generations by a double-digit margin.
Strikingly, this transition will be as powerful in the older, mostly white states of the Rust Belt as it will be in the younger, more diverse, and rapidly growing Sun Belt states. According to the previously unpublished States of Change projections, by 2028, the giant younger generations will comprise at least 40 percent of actual voters not only in Colorado, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, but also in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Ohio, and Iowa.
That’s a worrisome trend for Republicans. In another study by Pew, analysts concluded that “similar to Millennials, Gen Zers are progressive and pro-government, most see the country’s growing racial and ethnic diversity as a good thing, and they’re less likely than older generations to see the United States as superior to other nations.” All of that clangs against the agenda Trump has stamped on the GOP, of open resistance to racial and cultural change.
[T]he generational challenge facing Republicans seems much more acute. The American Values Survey showed that big majorities of adults ages 18 to 49 expressed views antithetical to the dominant GOP positions on racial equity, immigration, economic inequality, abortion, building a border wall, and the value of a society that is both racially and religiously diverse.
In all these ways, Trump’s belligerent politics has created an opportunity for Democrats to cement a lasting generational advantage not seen perhaps since Franklin Roosevelt built his sturdy New Deal coalition during the Depression.
If Democrats win the White House in November and can put Millennials and Gen Z on a better financial trajectory, “they will have an incredible opportunity” to solidify a durable majority electoral coalition, Teixeira said.
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