So, Amy Coney Barret has been confirmed to the Supreme Court. We knew this would happen, since the idea of the Democrats fighting the right is ludicrous.
There is now a 6-3 moderate conservative majority on the Court, and a 5-4 reactionary majority on the Court.
I do not expect Roe vs. Wade to survive, and I do expect the Court to be used to change laws in an attempt to give Republicans a permanent advantage, to enshrine further rights for the rich, and so on. One can expect civil liberties to be further gutted.
Citizen’s United was the red line “this is now an oligarchy” moment. This is the “rights? You have no rights” moment.
This is what the US conservative movement has been working towards for over 50 years. They have relentlessly had their eye on the prize. The court cases will now go forward, and precedents will fall like dominoes: do not be deceived, they have prepared for this moment and will use it.
If the election is close, the Court will also be used, as in 2000, to award the Presidency to the Republicans. Those who squeal about a possible coup forget that the US already had one in 2000, and that one mattered more: it set the precedent for many things, including that Democrats would just roll over.
Trump’s allies have spent the past year purging the civil service. They haven’t gotten very far, but if they have another four years, they will. By the time a Trump second term is done, the Republicans will have a permanent advantage. (Obama, when he took power, did not replace most of the Republican operatives that Bush had put in place.)
If Biden wins, on the other hand, unless he and the Senate attack the base of Republican power, he will only be an interregnum. If he rules as Obama term three, then all that happens is that the next Republican President is a more disciplined version of Trump. Back in February of 2010, I noted that Obama’s handling of the economy, his choice for plutocracy meant that the next Republican President would be a right wing populist. While one can argue Trump isn’t, and be right, it is what he ran as. A Biden plutocratic administration will ensure the same thing.
What is important about all this is not what happens, but as I noted in a recent interview, what you, the reader, will do. If Biden is elected, does that change what you do? If Trump is elected does that change what you do? If your answer is no to both, then the election doesn’t really matter, it’s weather.
If, on the other hand, you are looking at what amounts to political and economic climate change and you are making plans to avoid the bad things and take advantage of what you can, then you are preparing for the future.
There’s an old saying: “the race is not always to the swift, nor the fight to the strong, but that’s how you bet.”
It may be that America will turn around from its path of plutocracy, and, in fact, the next 10 to 12 years will determine if it does. But you are betting a great deal for yourself and your family if you do not plan and draw red lines: at what point will you leave, if you can? At what point will you start preparing, however you can, to live in a plutocratic theocratic America, knowing it may not happen but that the cost of not preparing is higher than the cost of preparations?
Everyone has to draw a line. You fight to save the ship from going down, but know when the emphasis of the fight turns from saving everyone, to saving those few you can.
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So, Covid-19 has led to over 180K deaths so far. The economy is trash, something like a third of renters can’t make their rent, unemployment levels are at Great Depression levels, and so on.
The two most important consequences of this decision derive from the fact that Biden is old and almost certainly senile.
Biden was one of the key architects of the bankrupty bill, which made it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans.