We begin today’s roundup with analysis of the GOP’s confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. First up, The New York Times:
Senate Republicans, who represent a minority of the American people, are straining the legitimacy of the court by installing a deeply conservative jurist, Amy Coney Barrett, to a lifetime seat just days before an election that polls suggest could deal their party a major defeat. [...]
Along with hundreds of new lower-court judges installed in vacancies that Republicans refused to fill when Barack Obama was president, these three Supreme Court choices were part of the project to turn the courts from a counter-majoritarian shield that protects the rights of minorities to an anti-democratic sword to wield against popular progressive legislation like the Affordable Care Act.
The process also smacked of unseemly hypocrisy. Republicans raced to install Judge Barrett barely one week before a national election, in defiance of a principle they loudly insisted upon four years ago.
Mondaire Jones at The Nation writes about what’s at stake for voting rights:
The passage of the Voting Rights Act was a hard-won victory decades in the making. Blood was shed. But in the end, my grandparents and millions of others secured their right to vote, and within a decade, elected Black candidates to public office at a rate not seen since the dawn of Reconstruction.
Nearly 60 years later, Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation threatens to return Black people to an era that our grandparents had reduced to memory. Jim Crow will be reborn, unraveling democracy as we know it. This is not hyperbole. Barrett’s record as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit makes this clear. In one decision, she supported “virtue-based restrictions” on voting. In her view, voting is not a fundamental right guaranteed to every citizen of this country; it is a privilege that states can revoke when they see fit. This harkens back to the “morals” tests Southern states once deployed to disenfranchise Black voters.
More from Dana Milbank at The Washington Post, who argues the pressure is now on Chief Justice John Roberts:
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. [...]
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.
But Seung Min Kim argues that the ball is also in the Democrats’ court, with the ability to now play by the GOP’s power rules should they retake the Senate:
the pipeline of conservative judges and the fast-track procedures Republicans have used to confirm them give a potential President Joe Biden and a Democratic-led Senate a rough playbook to try to install their own stream of liberal nominees. [...]
A Biden White House and a Democratic-controlled Senate could certainly take advantage of the floor changes by being able to confirm Supreme Court picks with a simple majority and process district court nominees more quickly on the floor, should they prioritize the judiciary. [...]
“No,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), when asked whether Democrats should offer deference to Republican home-state senators if they do not sign off on circuit court nominees from a Biden administration. “The rules have changed. Do I look stupid to you?”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), another Judiciary Committee member, also stressed that he believes Democrats “ought to play complete hardball” on judges.
Meanwhile, on the pandemic, Paul Krugman analyzes the White House’s white flag of surrender:
This is, after all, Donald Trump. Also, we’ve seen this combination of denial, declared helplessness and conspiracy theorizing before: Trump and company are following the same strategy on Covid-19 that the right has long followed on climate change. [...]
Was there ever a chance that Trump would take the pandemic seriously? Probably not. After all, he has always been a die-hard, conspiracy-theorizing denier of climate change, and his coronavirus response has come straight out of the climate-denier playbook.
In any case, we can predict with high accuracy what he will do if the polls are wrong, and he wins a second term. He will do nothing at all to fight the pandemic; he will, however, try to suppress the truth about what’s happening. And many, many more Americans will die.
The Washington Post explains how a responsible administration could handle the pandemic:
At least 225,000 Americans have died, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Although optimism about an effective vaccine or therapy is warranted, no one can be sure when either will be ready. Until then, virus hot spots need a rapid response, including temporary shutdowns where necessary to slow transmission. A nationwide mask mandate would help immensely. Shortages in personal protective equipment must be alleviated. Once the raging community spread is reduced, a massive drive to test, trace and isolate the sick could begin to keep infections at a low level. All of this will require leadership — which is another way of saying it will require a different president.
Speaking of responsible administrations, former President Barack Obama previews a portion of his book at The New Yorker. It’s a must read:
I’d seen him in March, when he’d made a surprise appearance at a White House conference we held to get the ball rolling on universal-health-care legislation. Teddy’s walk was unsteady that day; his suit draped loosely on him after all the weight he’d lost, and despite his cheerful demeanor his pinched, cloudy eyes showed the strain it took just to hold himself upright. And yet he’d insisted on coming anyway, because thirty-five years earlier the cause of getting everyone decent, affordable health care had become personal for him. His son Teddy, Jr., had been diagnosed with a bone cancer that led to a leg amputation at the age of twelve. While at the hospital, Teddy had come to know other parents whose children were just as ill but who had no idea how they’d pay the mounting medical bills. Then and there, he had vowed to do something to change that.