In Sunday School, we heard from Ken Starr and Laurence Tribe, two constitutional law experts, on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to fill RBG's seat on the Supreme Court. While Starr thought going ahead with the nomination was fine, Tribe disagreed.
Tribe went first and said the nomination should have waited until we had the results of the election, and that "we've never, never jumped the gun this quickly" and that people are already voting. And he compared that to the 400 days with an open seat after the nomination of Merrick Garland.
The idea that we need to rush ahead with a lifetime appointment, that as Judge Barrett herself would readily acknowledge will make a huge difference in the tilt of the court on health care, on women's reproductive rights, on voting rights, the idea that we can't wait a few days is ludicrous. There's no reason for it.
And, although he said he thinks quite well of Amy Coney Barrett, "the issue is not the nominee, it's the nomination." The Rs aren't willing to wait, Tribe said, because "they really are nervous about what the American people believe the Constitution means and what they believe should be represented on the Supreme Court."
On Monday, My Sweet Baboo and I took one of our epic fall foliage tours - an 11-hour trip that did more for our mental health than anything else I can think of - so I didn't give you an Extra Credit post. On Tuesday though, it was a two-fer.
First up, a post from January on Making Political Debates Better - something that we clearly need. The post recapped some of my thoughts, and added those of Greta Van Susteren, who shares my opinion that we do this really badly. And that was before Tuesday night's cage fight. Among my ideas?
I would much rather hear real discussion on key topics, with 30 minutes or more set aside to have a real debate about the issues that matter. The candidates can be made aware of the topics in advance, but obviously not the questions, so everyone can be prepared for a robust discussion. That's right, a discussion - not an argument or dissection of resumes.And here's a bit of what Van Susteren's thinking.
Presidential debates are supposed to provide voters with a better understanding of a candidate’s views and how he or she would likely govern. Of course, if you think the job of the president is to make short, snappy decisions without consulting others and without examining all the pros and cons, then the existing debate format probably suits you. If, on the other hand, you think the job of the president is problem-solving, then the debate ought to be exactly that — a problem-solving test.
... If we don’t want the Oval Office to operate like Twitter, why do we test our candidates as if it does?
More people need to listen to Greta and me...
And, I offered some specific pre-debate thoughts in this post, including
The larger questions?
- Is anyone watching to learn, or just to have fun?
- Will either candidate even answer a question, much less answer it fully and factually?
- Will anyone actually talk about policy, or will it be just a bunch of malarkey?
- Will any votes change as a result of the debate?
- Will the debates encourage people to vote, or have them running screaming into the woods and far, far away from their polling places or mail-in ballots?
- Does anyone think there's really any value in having these darn things, anyway?
I saw a tweet last night suggesting that Latinos watching the debate on Telemundo thought that Trump won the debate. And that got me wondering what it must have been like being the translators and closed-captioners for the #CacophonyinCleveland - I picture it looking something like this: fkjg;h$(*Y lkjaoia4[ #$(*&#P$( )$5385-#$$^%(^(@*#pao48yp983y4t -- and I hope I've not offended anyone with that effort. For all I know, I've typed a top secret Qanon password or something, and my fervent hope is that's not the case.
Thursday's review of emails from politicians did give us a clear winner for Email of the Week, which sometimes doesn't happen. There was a lot of fundraising stuff, given the end-of-quarter deadline on the 3oth, but one email stood out: one from Tom Steyer, the billionaire turned climate activist. You can read the email in the post, but in a nutshell,
For not asking me for money, for asking me to volunteer (even though I'm not a young person, which is the demographic NextGen America speaks to), for not taking his eyes off the prize - beating Donald Trump - and for staying true to his passion, dealing with climate change, Steyer earns the coveted Email of the Week.
On Friday, I was looking for an old post on something - what I was looking for escapes me now, which often happens - but what I found was a year-old Poll Watch post on the leading candidates in the Dem primary, and the president. The post gave us the Not-so-good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Take a look.
The other takeaway from this question? Approval of his policies is underwater by 10 points (54% don't approve, 44% do). And, this will pain Trump I'm sure, but his predecessors - Obama (64%), Bush II (57%), Clinton (55%) Bush I (78%), and Reagan (66%) were all better liked than he is. Data on Abraham Lincoln is not immediately available.
That, and the fact that all of them - the Dems and Trump - were under water on the positive to negative question. Which led me to offer this:
There's a lot the Dems can learn from this survey, I think, in terms of the depth of support, the lack of recognition for even the front-runners, and on why voters vote. The last thing the Dems want to do is choose a candidate who is 'less dislikeable' than Trump.
Yep. The last thing they wanted to do...
Also on Friday, another two-fer from last week, we had our TGIF feature, which included a confession that, in private conversations, I behaved like the president when talking about the president and his positive COVID diagnosis.
I don't wish him any harm, really - I want him out of office, that's a well-known fact - but I shouldn't be laughing at the karma or the fact that he brought this on himself by not doing the right thing, and about Melania having to quarantine with him, and other thoughts that, quite frankly, are representative of how HE treats people than the way that I like to treat people. And I shared those thoughts with two of my most irreverent friends who, if they ever publish our text messages, will make true our surmisal that we're going to end up in hell.
In thinking about the many and varied conspiracy theories surrounding this whole adventure happening at this particular time, I had to ask these questions:
And how horrible is it, that the president and his entire administration have lied to us so many times that those thoughts, or other similar ones, can actually be entertained by reasonable people? How much trust have people lost in the president, the presidency, the White House? And will we ever get that trust back again?
That we have to ask those questions is much worse than me laughing at a meme of Melania holding a shovel and... Anyway.
And finally, yesterday while meandering through posts, about the coronavirus pandemic, I stumbled on a Sidebar from back in March, where Donny Jr. had been complaining about people politicizing the virus, and where Mike Pence was asked to give a specific example of that. He pointed to a NY Times article, which I dissected to see what the heck he was talking about.
So, what did the piece, with the headline "Let's Call it Trumpvirus," say? Let's take a look at what columnist Gail Collins, former editor of the Times' Op-Ed page, wrote.
On appointing Mike Pence to be head of the coronavirus task force:
So, our Coronavirus Czar is going to be … Mike Pence. Feeling more secure? “I know full well the importance of presidential leadership,” the vice president said as soon as he was introduced in his new role. Totally qualified. First criterion for every job in this administration is capacity for praising the gloriousness of our commander in chief...
In contrast, here's what the president had to say about appointing a similarly unqualified person to lead a pandemic effort.
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