A desperate Trump and Republican National Party, (RNP), who are staring down the barrel of an electoral blowout, have made it quite clear that they have abandoned the principles that formed the basis of America’s constitutional democracy and opted for Machiavellian and Nietzsche power theories of politics - might is right. Added to his unprecedented behavior Trump is making it quite clear, with no evidence, that the election is going to be “rigged” because of the large amount of coronavirus postal balloting expected. The POTUS has gone as far as to say that the "fraudulent" voting is the reason why there was an urgency to appoint another like minded Supreme Court Justice before even the body of the revered Justice Ginsburg had reached the morgue. He is straight out arguing that nine judges should be there to sanctify his actions to back up his rigged election mantra, an election which he rightly assesses he is going to lose. Most dramatically with this pending appointment, the Affordable Health Care Act, where oral arguments are to be heard after the election, is now in greater jeopardy. His Justice Department under Barr want it declared unconstitutional.
For a liberal democracy to mean anything there has to be a rule of law and accountability. Both sides have to act in terms of convention and precedent and most important be credible. In America the Constitution was so designed that compromise and trust were essential. Those aspirations are a joke in this current toxic environment. In fact The Republican party are behaving as if they will cease to be competitive ever again if they don’t retain power one way or another.
TRUMP, THE GOP AND THEIR FUTURE
The latest desperate Trump move, in the wake of Justice Bader Ginsburg’s death, is to further populate the Supreme Court with ideologues representing an ever increasing minority of Americans. It appears that there is no sense of decency or democracy left in the Republican Senators as they publicly break promises to the electorate. In 2016 they literally defied convention by refusing to even give an Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, ten months before an election, a hearing let alone a vote. Now less than seven weeks before the electorate are going to the polls they are rushing through a Trump nominee.
The RNP has watched their numbers dwindle over the past thirty years and have remained competitive by gerrymandering and voter suppression. In seven of the last Presidential elections, their candidates garnered fewer voters than the Democrat nominee whether they won or lost. Although the Republicans have a small Senate majority because of the imbalance caused by rural states they represent fifteen million fewer voters than their opposition. The House differential is even greater.
The Republicans have had two directions to go - ensure minority rule one way or another or seek to become more inclusive. Led by Trump and McConnell. they have chosen the former with a vengeance. By flouting convention they are determined to turn the third co equal branch, the Judiciary, into a rubber stamp in enshrining their minority and reversing the progress of the aspirational Declaration of Independence that , “All men are created equal….”. Trump specifically reiterated that he wanted a new Judge appointed before the election in the event of there being electoral challenges as he believed there would be because of a flood of postal fraud.
TRUMP’S REPUBLICAN PARTY SUPPORT HIS AUTHORITARIAN MINORITY RULE
Trump has made it quite clear that America would be better off with him as a dictator with no term limits and has harkened back to the old Confederacy days. Assisted by Barr, his head of the department of Justice, he has made a mockery of the rule of law. Barr’s behavior is as delusional as Trump’s comparing a public health measure of social distancing and quarantining to slavery. Trump has destroyed and smeared America’s revered institutions; denied accountability laughing off the Legislative Branch again and again. Finally he made it quite clear that the principle criterion by which he will nominate Federal Judges is whether or not they agree with his ideology. In the latter endeavor he has been aided and abetted by Mitch McConnell who has all but ignored the work of the Senate in prioritizing the appointment of Judges.
The GOP legislators stood by as Trump opted for retaining power with the support of a minority of Americans. He has ripped every principle that the Republicans stood for, trashed its heroes and belittled America’s revered institutions. They looked the other way as the Presidency became part of Trump Inc.They neglected their constitutional duty to impeach him for the most egregious abuse of power when he attempted to extort a favor from a foreign country in order to serve his own personal political purposes. Now he and McConnell are forcing them to publicly go back on their words that it was “wrong” to nominate a Supreme Court Judge in a Presidential election year. McConnell’s words are being flung back it him by Biden “The people elect the President and the President appoints the Judges”.
Lindsey Graham stated the following when almost a year from the 2016 Presidential contest in order to justify this decision, “If there is a Republican President in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of his first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, “Let’s let the next president whoever it might be, make the nomination”. He reassured further that he could “be called on that’.To hammer home his point he stated that at the time he would be head of the Senate Judiciary Committee and as such could decide whether even to go forward with the Presidential request”. His rationalization for his volte face is, too banal to repeat.
Trump, Graham, who is in a surprising life or death struggle for his Senate seat, and McConnell rationalize that this skulduggery will help Trump and the Republicans electorally, but more on that later.
WHERE TRUMP AND HIS GOP ARE NOW AND WHY ANYTHING GOES
With six weeks to go and the tightening in the Presidential race just not happening Biden is between seven and nine points nationally among likely voters. In the three key States that Trump won by seventy thousand votes in total, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, he is consistently behind between five and eight percentage points. In Florida which he also won by a few percentage points he is behind by a similar amount. To add insult to injury Michael Bloomberg has thrown a hundred million dollars into the Florida race.
They are two other metrics that the forecasters believe are extremely valid predictors of victory - a candidate frequently hitting fifty percent in polling, which Biden does and Trump never comes near. The other parameter that the famed Cook Report focus on is the gap between the approval rating and the disapproval rating, especially in an incumbent President. Trump’s positives are at most forty three percent with a disapproval rating of above fifty percent. Biden’s approval rating is higher than Trump’s and negatives far lower. The two incumbents in the past fifty years, Carter and George HW Bush, both of whom who lost, had similar numbers to Trump. Trump won the Presidency with forty - six percent of the vote. The Green Party, who are not on the 2020 ballot to any significant extent, getting between four and five percent. The Democrats are the favorites to win back the Senate and if Biden trounces the POTUS they can add two or three more Senators in Red States such as Georgia and even South Carolina.
For practical purposes Trump’s base has hung tight and that is his ceiling. He shows no signs of regaining the white women suburban voters, youth, seniors and independents that he has lost. In fact he has made no attempt. He has upped the ante on his divisive rhetoric as if just obtaining his ceiling at forty - three percent is enough. The response of those who believe he walks on water is - well Hillary was up in the polls so Trump will pull a rabbit out of the hat again. He won’t as Jay H. Ell will show and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and his response to that tragedy will add to his woes.
WHY NO REPEAT OF HILLARY
In 2016 Trump was running as a populist against the elitist establishment which Sanders had painted Hillary as a prime example of. Trump just followed on with a vengeance. “Crooked” Hillary was never up in the National or swing state polls by as much as Biden is. She never ever reached fifty percent approval. Hillary had matching disapproval rates to then TV Reality Star. The smear campaign that Biden is an elitist Marxist isn’t sticking and in fact Trump is the one from Park Avenue New York and Biden is from Scranton.
Unbelievably Biden has collected far more money than Trump who has to cut back on advertising. In 2016 he had a massive war cheat.
Trump has not only not delivered on his promises. He has proven to be an incompetent narcissistic liar who is escaping the law by the skin of his teeth. He now is a known quantity and although his name wasn’t on the ballot in 2018 he campaigned like crazy telling the world that the election was about him and the voters mustn’t let him down.
On top of it all there have been three major crises in the interim, racial injustice, the pandemic and economic austerity. In both the former his approval rating is around thirty percent. It is only in the latter which is currently not a priority is he ahead of Biden by a few points. What is about to become Biden’s central issue in the campaign, Health Care Trump is far behind and Biden is about to link that to his rush to get another Judge on the Supreme Court. Trump is litigating to dump Obamacare with nothing to replace it with. Oral arguments are scheduled to be held on November 10, seven days after the election.
WHO IS GINSBERG?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has literally single handedly, over a half century, pioneered gender equality - first as a litigator then as a Jurist. She is an unlikely icon believing that progress is incremental and until very recently this soft spoken five footer shunned the public arena. Her battle against prejudice begun even at Harvard Law School where she was one of nine women in a class of five hundred men. She subsequently transferred to Columbia where she came top in the class. Unable, as a woman, to obtain employment in a legal firm she subsequently formed the Women’s Rights Project. She chose her cases strategically even arguing for the rights of men who were discriminated against by Social Security as caregivers. Crucially she successfully litigated that women were entitled to “Equal Protection Under the Law” as outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment. As a corollary to that she gained the rights of women to receive the same benefits and subsidies in the workplace as men as they had previously been denied not being considered the household providers.
As a Supreme Court Jurist she continued her scholarly interpretation of the law in favor of equity and as the more liberal judges were replaced one by one became she the main spokesperson for equality. A landmark case with regard to gender equality where she utilized all her skills, she successfully maintained that women were entitled to become recruits in the prestigious Virginia Military Academy. As well as authoring the majority opinion in the latter, she was likewise the main proponent in legislation that mental illness should be covered by the Medical Disabilities Act.
With the passage of time as the court became more and more conservative she became renowned for her carefully reasoned dissents which she hoped might become the basis of law in years to come. Her dissents included several on the topic of the women’s right to choose, as well as an infamous case where it was upheld that a company could withhold contraception from a health care plan. She wrote that it was largely because of the control of their reproduction preferences that women could assume an equal role in the work place. In a much quoted dissent where a five to four decision removed the supervision over states that had been found guilty of voter suppression, she maintained that the court was removing an umbrella in a rainstorm just because no one was wet yet. Her assessment has proved prophetic. One of her dissents resulted in legislation to ensure equal pay for women doing equal work, “The Lilly Leadbeater Fair Pay Act”.
Her gutsy commitment of truth to power resulted in Ginsburg becoming a cult figure with the youth given the moniker of “The Notorious RBG” arising out of the a rapper’s name “The Notorious BIG”. Besides Facebook pages, web sites, a ton of mugs, T shirts and even tatoos she has become a TV and movie celebrity. She was regularly portrayed on Saturday Night Live by Kate McKinnon. A two hour CNN documentary entitled RBG has been run again and again. There are movies where she is alluded to and one “On the Basis of Sex” where her activist role is portrayed.
On the announcement of her death there were outpourings of grief and silent gatherings for nights on end. Flowers and messages adorned courts throughout the country reminiscent of the response to Princess Diane's passing. A record one hundred and sixty one million dollars in small donations flowed into Democratic Party action committees within forty - eight hours of her passing. She will be the first woman ever to lie in state in the Capitol in Washington………
Lest there be any doubt as to the GOP priority when Ginsburg’s passing was announced McConnell dispelled it. One hour after it was broadcast he stated that he was going to replace her as soon as possible. It took Trump one day to share what he really thought. He claimed with his usual authority that it wasn’t Ginsburg who had stated that it was her “fervent wish” that her seat be filled by the next elected president, but either Pelosi, Schumer or “Shifty” Schiff”.
Bizarrely it is her death and the obscenely rapid replacement on the Supreme Court which is the basis for Trump, McConnell and the Republican Party’s belief they are going to revitalize their electoral chances, particularly in the Senate Races. The replacement will be a woman who has expressed reservations of a woman’s right to chose, believes that Obamacare is illegal…..
HOW WILL GINSBURG’S DEATH AND HER RAPID REPLACEMENT HELP THE TRUMP AND GOP CAUSE?
An immediate poll following the former Justice’s death indicated that sixty - three percent stated that her replacement should be made by the new President as opposed to slightly more than twenty percent that didn’t. (That incidentally is similar to the polling around a women’s right to an abortion).
The belief of the Republicans is that all this will consolidate the base especially around the Senate candidates. The base is already consolidated. Will this change the mind of Republican suburban women who switched in 2018 or the Republican youth that abandoned the party? Jay H. Ell doesn’t think so but Trump, McConnell and the RNC are desperate.
When this obscene ghoulish behavior produces nothing they will try something else. Trump cannot afford to lose. The courts have ordered his son to answer questions in the NY State Attorney’s investigation into fraud. The Atlantic has just published an authoritative article claiming that Trump simply won’t leave office, reinforcing his claim that he is not necessarily going to accept the results….
PAUSE FOR THOUGHT
In response to Trump's raves about a coup d' etat Mitch McConnell has reasured America that there will be a smooth transition of power. Why should anyone believe him?
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