We all know about the built-in advantages Republicans will enjoy in next year’s midterms. It’s nearly always the case that the party not in the White House cleans up in the midterms. And thanks to Manchin and Sinema we’re not going to get election reform, so congressional GOP candidates can rely on gerrymandering and voter suppression to ensure victory. Those factors will be really hard to overcome. Is there any way Democrats can hang on to the Senate and House?

In the Senate, Republicans will be defending 20 seats and Democrats 14. Five of those Republican seats are “open”; the Republicans holding those seats now are not running again. As of now, all of the Democratic incumbents are running again. So there is opportunity there. Current forecasts give Democrats some hope of hanging on. But the House is expected to flip. It may not, of course, but the odds that it won’t are considerably long. The advantage of Republican gerrymandering is just too strong.

It’s also the case that, however, we’re heading into unknown territory here. And that’s because the Republican Party is so tied to Trump. Barring some unforeseen disaster in the Biden Administration, I have a hard time imagining that the educated urbanites and suburbanites who voted for Democrats in 2018 and 2020 will find a bunch of Trumpy, hard-right Republican candidates all that palatable. And that might help Democrats keep the Senate.

As for the House, Kevin McCarthy seems determined to make the Republican House races as Trumpy as possible. McCarthy has met with Trump several times to discuss the midterms for the House. Seriously. Greg Sargent wrote last week that McCarthy is trying to portray the Trump administration as a lost golden age, and if only Democrats hadn’t taken over, everything would be great again now. The story is that Trump left Biden a country in great shape, and Biden has already screwed it all up. Sargent:

But telling the GOP base an absurd, lurid, emotionally charged fiction is central to GOP midterm hopes: The Trump era represented an idyllic age that has been torn asunder from Republican voters, who in their fury, deprivation and victimization should storm out in 2022 to avenge it all.

The success of this strategy will depend a lot on what happens between now and November 2022. Certainly the American voting public has a long history of gullibility regarding politicians selling snake oil. But sometimes they do recognize the snake oil for what it is, if the sales pitch isn’t matching their personal experience. (Example: Remember George Bush’s campaign to privatize Social Security?)

Right now, economic forecasts for the U.S. economy — the ones not generated by right-wing think tanks or Fox Business News, anyway — are really, really good. The IMF is projecting that the U.S. economy will grow by 7 percent in 2021. Especially if the infrastructure bills pass this year, 2022 ought to be a good year for most Americans, and a better year for working class Americans than they’ve had in a long time. And by then the supply and staffing issues driving shortages and price hikes will have worked out. And in that case, the story that Biden screwed up the great economy Trump built may be hard to sell outside the Trump Cult.

It’s also the case that people outside the Trump Cult were not happy with the January 6 insurrection. There’s a member’s-only analysis at Talking Points Memo that I recommend, if you’re a member. In summary, Republican House candidates will depend on staying in Trump’s good graces to get past the primaries. This makes the House select committee to investigate the insurrection a real hot potato for McCarthy.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced this week that the Jan. 6 select committee would hold its first hearing on July 27, kicking off its review of the insurrection with “firsthand” testimony from Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police officers. That means McCarthy has a pseudo deadline for appointing members to the committee (which Pelosi can veto), but he hasn’t made any movement on that front and has not even confirmed that he will pick people to begin with (Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) is the only Republican Pelosi’s appointed to the committee.)

McCarthy could appoint GOP members who will be vocal in their defense of Trump, or who will also take the work seriously to appease those suburban Republican voters disenchanted with the former president and/or disturbed by the insurrection. It’s a tough needle to thread leading up to the midterms — which is why Republicans were against the commission in the first place; they were worried about the negative impact a review of a Trumpian coup might have on midterm messaging.

It’s expected that McCarthy will be advised by Trump on whom to choose. But the January 6 investigations, plus Trump’s ongoing legal jeopardies, could have a big impact on the political landscape in the next few months.

Another wild card is covid recovery. Things could get better, or they could get worse. If they get worse, will voters in general blame Joe Biden? Or will they blame the red state deadheads who refused to get vaccinated?

Do you ever have a feeling that civilization is hanging by a thread? For example, we’ve got deadly weather patterns around the world screaming “climate change.” Recent heat destroyed millions of ocean creatures, and somehow this didn’t make headlines.

Here in the U.S. it’s unlikely voting rights bills will pass. Yesterday the brave Texas Democrats in Exile met with Joe Manchin to impress on him the critical need for voting protections. Today, Manchin is spitting in their faces by traveling to Texas for a fundraiser hosted by GOP donors. As much as some people in media continue to hold out the hope that Manchin (and Sinema) will budge on the filibuster, we know that Manchin is under orders from his billionaire donors (capital management, equity firms, hedge funds) to leave the filibuster alone.

Meanwhile, the Dealth Cult Republicans continue to stampede the faithful over the coronavirus cliff. Tennessee joined in the great red state race to the bottom by ending programs that encouraged and provided vaccines — all vaccines — to adolescents. Republicans in Congress hope to enable the spread of the Delta variant nationwide by banning “tyrranical” federal mask mandates on interstate transportation.

Is there anything to be hopeful about? At the moment, the reconciliation infrastructure bill looks good. There’s a $3.5 trillion infrastructure plan in Congress that has broad support in the party. From what I can see the progressives will support it, and so far the blue dogs haven’t said they’d oppose it. And Paul Krugman is happy.

The way it was: Some years ago I attended a meeting in which President Barack Obama asked a group of economists for unconventional policy ideas. I distinctly remember him saying: “Don’t tell me that I should spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure. I know that, but I can’t do it.”

The way it is: Top Democrats have agreed on a proposal to spend $3.5 trillion on public investment of various kinds, to be passed via reconciliation on top of a $600 billion bipartisan plan for physical infrastructure spending.

Give a lot of the credit to Bernie Sanders, who was proposing much more spending but compromised “down” to $3.5 trillion. This is how negotiating works, people.

It’s too soon to say the reconciliation bill is a sure thing, but at the moment it’s about the only good news we’ve got.

Yeah, this is grand.

Missouri is the most concerning state in the country as the Delta variant of the coronavirus continues to spread, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said Thursday.

“When I look at the map, Missouri actually jumps out as the place that I’m most worried about because there’s a lot of cases now happening very rapidly,” Dr. Francis Collins told McClatchy’s bureau in the District of Columbia.

Next month I’m planning to fly to NYC to see my grandbabies, and now I’m afraid they’re going to quarantine the bleeping state. See also a segment from last night’s Maddow.

The news stories keep talking about Springfield, but that’s because the cases are being taken to hospitals in Springfield. Springfield is smack in between two tourist destination areas, the Lake of the Ozarks to the north and Branson to the south. These are both popular vacation spots for people in Missouri and nearby states Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

In May 2020, Lake of the Ozarks made international news because of a packed pool party. I complained about the place last September because of a massive multi-state motorcycle rally. If any businesses in either place closed for the pandemic it was only briefly. I believe both tourist areas were open last summer and have remained open since. Branson was advertising its Christmas entertainment last December, so I know it was open all winter. LotO and Branson are perfect for infecting lots of people and spreading it around the multi-state area.

If there are any saving graces operating here is that the weather has been conducive to outdoor activity. So far this summer hasn’t been quite as britally hot as summer usually is in these parts.

But the attention is on Springfield. The delta variant is ravaging this Missouri city. Many residents are still wary of vaccines. One sad young woman who survived covid is certain she gave it to her mother, who died. Yes, she’s very sad. People still aren’t getting vaccinated. They still think vaccines are a liberal plot, and the young folks believe they are immune.

I wrote awhile back about Kevin Strickland, a Black man wrongly convicted of murder 40 years ago who remains in prison in Missouri because the governor won’t act and the local prosecutors, who acknowledge that Strickland was wrongly convicted, have no legal means to release him. In Missouri they can’t just go to a court and ask a judge to void the conviction.

If that sounds crazy to you, it sounds crazy to me too. It sounds crazy to a lot of people.

There are two other Black men in prison here whose convictions have been acknowledged to be unjust. Their names are Lamar Johnson and Christopher Dunn. Here is a recent PBS News Hour report on Lamar Johnson. Johnson’s case was investigated by St. Louis circuit attorney Kimberly Gardner . She discovered prosecutorial misconduct up the wazoo. This is from the PBS report:

Gardner’s investigation turned up even more proof of Johnson’s innocence. The prosecution’s eyewitness recanted, admitting he’d only identified Johnson because police told him Johnson was guilty.

And her team found records showing prosecutors paid that witness more than $4,000 for housing and expenses, information that was never disclosed to the defense.

So, you have no evidence that he committed the crime. You have the confession of two other people that they committed the crime and that he did not. You have raised pretty good questions about whether or not the trial was fair. People will ask, then why is he in prison?

And the answer seems to be that Missouri simply never created a process by which wrongly convicted people can be exonerated and released. One must be pardoned by a governor, and Gov. Mike Parson appears not to see why innocent Black men ought to be released from jail. As Parson said of Strickland, he was convicted “by a jury of his peers.” So what if the prosecutors manipulated the photo lineup, bribed another prisoner to snitch, and withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and jury? So what if other people have confessed to the crimes? What if the prosecutors’ entire case has been found to be lies? Parson doesn’t see the problem. 

And it probably doesn’t help Mr. Johnson that the Republicans in Jefferson City hate Kimberly Gardner with a white-hot passion. Among other things, they blame her, and not their stupid NRA-approved gun un-regulations, for rampant gun violence in St. Louis. They also blame her for being a Black woman. She also was instrumental in prying Gov. Eric Greitens out of office, although the Republicans in Jefferson City don’t like Greitens, either, so I don’t know why they care about that.

This March the Missouri Supreme Court denied an appeal from Mr. Johnson, who was convicted of murder in 1995.

The state’s highest court upheld that decision this week on procedural grounds, saying that Gardner lacked the ability under state law to file a motion for a new trial so long after Johnson’s original conviction. All seven of the court’s justices agreed with the conclusion, which did not address any of Johnson’s innocence claims.

There’s a statute of limitations on innocence? It gets dumber. I have learned that according to current Missouri case law, “actual innocence” is not a sufficient reason to release a prisoner found to have been wrongly convicted unless the prisoner is on death row.

I’ll repeat that. “Actual innocence” is not a sufficient reason to release a prisoner found to be innocent unless the prisoner is on death row.

Not being a lawyer I may be misinterpreting things, but here is the relevant case cited in the Post-Dispatch. Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District. IN RE: Rodney L. Lincoln, Petitioner, v. Jay Cassady, Superintendent, Jefferson City Correctional Center, Respondent. WD 79854 Decided: October 11, 2016

In this case, Rodney Lincoln had filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus requesting the vacation of his 1983 convictions of two counts of first-degree assault and of manslaughter. Lincoln spent 36 years in prison. You can read the background of his case here.  By six years or so after his conviction the evidence had fallen apart, but the Midwest Innocence Project kept taking cases to court to get his conviction voided. And in 2016, the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, declared —

Because the Missouri Supreme Court has not recognized a freestanding claim of actual innocence in cases where the death penalty has not been imposed, we are not at liberty to expand Missouri habeas jurisprudence to permit consideration of the claim in this case. Accordingly, Relator’s habeas petition is denied.

So, if you’re not on death row, you can’t get your wrongful conviction overturned? In 2018 Lincoln, who is White, was set free by Gov. Eric Greitens. One wonders if he’d still be in jail if he were Black. But Lincoln received no compensation whatsoever from the state for the 36 years he was kept imprisoned.

This state makes me crazy.

Lamar Johnson

A long, long time ago I decided that the biggest difference between the two major parties was their style of addressing problems. Democrats have long tended to identify a problem and then think up policies to address it. The policies may or may not work. They may fall way short of what’s needed. They may cost a lot of money. But as a rule Democrats will admit to a problem when it arises and think up something to do about it.

Republicans, on the other hand, most of the time refuse to admit there is a problem, especially if it’s one that can’t be solved with tax cuts and privatization. The classic example of this involves health care. By the late 1980s a lot of Democrats were admitting we needed health care reform. Mike Dukakis made health care reform a big part of his presidential campaign in 1988. But the response to this from Republicans was “we have the best health care in the world” and there was absolutely no reason to lift a finger to reform it.

After all these years the Republicans still don’t want to face the realities of the corrupted, tangled mess that is the U.S. overexpensive and inefficient healthcare system, although most will admit that maybe something needs to be done to bring costs down. But all the “reforms” they can think of basically amount to meaningless tweaks. And like Donald Trump’s famous health care plan that is perpetually two weeks’ away from being ready to unveil, Republicans for at least the past decade or so have claimed to have comprehensive plans for health care in the works that never materialize. Or, if they do materialize, they are very, very stupid and don’t survive being exposed to daylight. See, for example, The Conservative Plan: Don’t Get Sick from September 2009.

The exception to the “What problem?” rule happens when a problem, whether real or imaginary, can be politicized to bash Democrats. Thus the Wall Street Journal even today is giving a lot of space to a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

In GOP world, vaccine mandates that don’t exist are a crisis, but not the pandemic itself. But if the pandemic is a problem, then the most important thing is not to slow its spread but to find out who can be blamed for it. There is nothing about the pandemic itself that provides an obvious argument for tax cuts or for privatizing government services, so Republicans on the whole don’t see it as an issue worth addressing.

But since Joe Biden became president and Congress gained a slim Democratic majority, Republicans have put great effort into demonizing everything Democrats are trying to do to save lives. Government overreach! they scream, even as the Delta variant spreads. As I wrote recently, many GOP governors have put more effort into “protecting” their citizens from having to wear masks or get vaccinated than in protectiong their citizens from the bleeping virus. So here is a map showing where covid cases are increasing at the moment:

source: https://covidactnow.org/?s=2025944

If you’re wondering, Vermont has a 66 percent full vaccination rate, and Massachusetts has a 62.5 percent full vaccination rate. If only we could get to that rate everywhere … It’s just over 50 percent in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), but maybe its isolation has protected it. Sounds like a nice place to visit, though.

This week rightie world went ballistic about government overreach! after President Biden said something about people going door to door to encourage vaccination. Here is that remark, in context.

Because here’s the deal: We are continuing to wind down the mass vaccination sites that did so much in the spring to rapidly vaccinate those eager to get their first shot — and their second shot, for that matter, if they needed a second.

Now we need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus.

Look, equity, equality — it remains at the heart of our responsibility of ensuring that communities that are the hardest hit by the virus have the information and the access to get vaccinated.

So, as we shift from these centralized mass — mass vaccination sites, where we were doing thousands of people a day, we’re going to put even more emphasis on getting vaccinated in your community, close to home, conveniently at a location you’re already familiar with.

Right on cue, Marjorie Taylor Greene compared this effort to the Nazis.

“Biden pushing a vaccine that is NOT FDA approved shows covid is a political tool used to control people,” Greene tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations. You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment….”

To Greene, “fascism” is defined as “anything a Democrat does.” See also David Graham, “The Rise of Anti-History,” at The Atlantic.

For Greene and others in the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party, anti-history has become a shibboleth. They drop historical references and facts into political debates, but without regard to context, logic, or proportionality. Their villains include Adolf Hitler, but also Mao Zedong and Joseph McCarthy; the Holocaust was bad, but also, Jewish people control the weather. The pose is more than the simple historical illiteracy that’s endemic among American politicians. In this GOP faction, members are willfully ignorant of history, which they view in purely instrumental terms, as a bludgeon to wield even as they do not bother to understand it.

(It might be best to understand Greene as a kind of walking Rorschach test. What she bleats out of her mouth isn’t important and doesn’t make sense, anyway. But whatever you make of what she says reveals something about you.)

But it gets better. At CPAC (yes, they’re holding CPAC again. I think they’re making it a monthly event) Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) warned his fellow wingnuts that Biden’s door-to-door effort is designed to take away their Bibles. And maybe their guns, too. The la-la is strong with this guy.

If it weren’t for the fact that a big, unvaccinated population increases the likelihood of a new variant developing that can’t be stopped with vaccines, I’d say let ’em be crazy. By this time next year, there will be fewer of them. But people who are not-wingnuts will be endangered, also. Maybe the way to reach the wackjobs is to declare that vaccines are available only to registered Democrats. Then they’ll want them.

See also: Delta variant spills out of an incubator that is also a Midwest tourist hotspot by Josh Wingrove, Bloomberg.

Bodies are still being found in the rubble of the Champlain Towers condominiums. Those who escaped are having a rough time. Many ran out of the towers with nothing but the pajamas they were wearing. They’ve lost their homes and everything in them. Neighbors and charities are stepping up, but the newly homeless are left wondering if they still have to pay off mortgages (surely  not!). They are getting help replacing driver’s licenses and getting their utility bills stopped.

I confess I’d never given much thought to the issue of building upkeep for condominiums. There’s a monthly association fee, and out of that the common areas of the building are maintained, right? The concept of condominiums dates to the 1950s, but they didn’t really take off until the 1980s. I believe most coop apartments in the New York City area are converted apartment buildings, many built before World War II, but most (not all) condos are new construction. And now the first condo buildings are aging. The Champlain Towers complex was built in 1981, for example.

There are still stories coming out about flawed construction and missed warnings, but the most obvious problem was that the building required $15 million in repairs, and the complex’s owner-residents were balking at paying the assessment. Possibly some of them couldn’t afford the assessment. (That was my issue with the coop apartment I owned for a time. In ten years the management-maintenance fees went from $500 a month to over $1,200 a month, on top of a mortgage, which was not what I signed up for.) If the building were owned by a corporation that could draw on bigger resources for repairs, perhaps it still would be standing.

I’m thinking also about Brooklyn, NY. In the year I lived in the temple the Brooklyn skyline was all high-rise apartment buildings under construction, mostly luxury condos. One downtown condo tower is 720 feet tall, which is hard to miss. Another, 680 feet tall, has a swimming pool on the roof. That makes it the highest swimming pool in the western hemisphere. I have no idea what individual units cost, and the websites don’t tell you, but I’m guessing some number in seven figures.

And the issue here is twofold. One, there is a desperate need for decent affordable housing in New York City. I’ve known people in white-collar jobs who live in little rooms with a “kitchen” consisting of a microwave and a coffee pot, because rental of a real apartment would eat most of their paychecks. But the builders want to build luxury places, often for extremely wealthy people who have other homes, because there’s more profit in it. Yay, capitalism. (I have little hope that the new Democratic nominee for mayor is going to do anything about housing. But we’ll see.)

And I have to say that if somebody gave me several million dollars to afford an apartment in one of those buildings, and if they could guarantee that the building will never deteriorate or suffer power failures or the swimming pool on the roof won’t leak and there will be no fires, I’d take it. But reality is that if I’m several stories up and the elevators break down I’d be stuck. And global warming, rising seas, bigger and badder hurricanes, are going to challenge those buildings in the years to come. It wouldn’t surprise me if in 40 years the rich people will have cleared out, and any towers still standing will have been taken over by squatters.

And, of course, affordable housing isn’t just a New York City problem.

And the other problem is whether this condo-coop housing model is really what we need for the long haul. If you live in a city there have to be apartments, although maybe the increase in remote jobs and telecommuting will relieve some of the pressure to pack large numbers of people into urban areas. Whatever the solution, it’s madness to assume the “free market” will provide it. We need government to step in, somehow.

See also Condo Buildings Are at Risk. So Is All Real Estate at The Atlantic.

Update: I just found this. This is from January 2020, pre-covid.

In Manhattan, the homeless shelters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are vacant.

Such is the tale of two cities within America’s largest metro. Even as 80,000 people sleep in New York City’s shelters or on its streets, Manhattan residents have watched skinny condominium skyscrapers rise across the island. These colossal stalagmites initially transformed not only the city’s skyline but also the real-estate market for new homes. From 2011 to 2019, the average price of a newly listed condo in New York soared from $1.15 million to $3.77 million.

But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times.

There is no reason to imagine that’s not true of the new condo towers in Brooklyn, also. Most of them are only a twenty-minute or less subway ride to Wall Street. But most of these luxury condos that are all over the place were built with foreign investors and corporations in mind, not New Yorkers.

From any rational perspective, what New York needs isn’t glistening three-bedroom units, but more simple one- and two-bedroom apartments for New York’s many singles, roommates, and small families. Mayor Bill De Blasio made affordable housing a centerpiece of his administration. But progress here has been stalled by onerous zoning regulations, limited federal subsidies, construction delays, and blocked pro-tenant bills.

The cost of housing has made New York City nearly unlivable for all but the very wealthy and long-time residents who bought their homes years ago or live in rent controlled apartments. The article says that at the time the city was losing 300 residents a day.

At the site of the collapsed Champlain Towers

Call it Covid Karma. Republican governors of several states who have pooh-poohed the pandemic and refused to address it aggressively are now seeing their states turn into vast petri dishes for cultivating the Delta Variant.

GOP governors implored their residents on Sunday to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, as polling shows that vaccine hesitancy has been driven by Republicans and as the virus’s new, more contagious delta variant has caused recent upticks in covid-19 cases in areas with low vaccination rates.

Here is Missouri, the utterly worthless governor Mike Parson has all along refused to issue any sort of mandate to wear masks in public. For a short time last spring there were limits on the number of people who could be inside a business, but that didn’t last long. Througout the pandemic there has been tension between the cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, and the Parson administration over Covid restrictions. Our excessively worthless attorney general Eric Schmitt at one point filed a lawsuit against St. Louis County for its “overreach” on mask mandates and limits on social gatherings, all of which followed CDC guidelines. On June 15 Parson himself signed a law that put limits on the ability of county health agencies to enforce any kind of pandemic restriction unless the governor has declared a state of emergency. He also has banned any publicly funded entity from using vaccine passports or requiring proof of vaccination.

But now I see the state has asked the White House for help with the Delta variant.

The state reached out to the Biden Administration only hours after the White House announced that it was creating “surge response teams” to help states contain outbreaks fueled by the new variant and low inoculation rates.

In the past two weeks, the daily number of reported cases in Missouri has more than doubled, and hospitalizations have increased 20 percent, though the figures remain a fraction of their November peak, according to a New York Times database.

The spike has been especially pronounced in the southwestern part of the state, which is home to tourist destinations like Branson and the Lake of the Ozarks, and where several hospitals recently had to move about a dozen Covid patients to other facilities because of staffing and capacity issues. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates based on genomic testing put the prevalence of Delta cases in the state at nearly 30 percent.

The Branson/Lake of the Ozarks area is some distance from where I’m living. It’s an area set up for tourism because it’s not much good for anything else. It’s some distance from cities and you can’t farm it, but you can book, um, entertainment. It’s like redneck Las Vegas, but with no gambling. And as I wrote last year, Branson closed briefly but, with the governor’s encouragement, reopened in May 2020 and stayed open.

And now it’s a Delta variant hotspot. Big surprise.

At the New York Times, Giovanni Russonello writes that Republican governors all along have been more concerned about “enshrining the right to refuse a vaccine” than in public safety. In some cases, governors have just been plain ridiculous; for example, Gov. DeSantis of Florida won’t let the cruise industry require proof of vaccinations for passengers. The cruise industry, not unreasonably, believes that will make it harder to get passengers back on their boats. Ironically, in carrying out his opposition to government interference in business, DeSantis is interfering in business.

So we’ve got parts of the country — mostly Republican, mostly rural — lagging way behind in vaccination rates, and it’s expected there will be dense outbreaks of the Delta variant in those parts in the weeks and months to come. Thanks, wingnuts. We could be pretty much done with the bleeping pandemic were it not for you.

Chris Hayes blasted the Supreme Court last night for what it has done to voting rights, and I can’t find the video clip. The transcript is a bit long to post, but here it is, and you can start a few paragraphs from the top where it says “HAYES: What problem are they solving for?” Here’s just a bit:

I mean, the Voting Rights Act. It`s what made American democracy as we know it, American democracy, it overcame totalitarian apartheid rule in the south. It`s part of our national civic canon, the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement who fought and died for it.

They are celebrated to this day. They shed their own blood to make America a true democracy for all. People like Lamar Smith who organized black Mississippians devote and then was shot dead by a white man in broad daylight on the courthouse lawn in 1955. And people like Medgar Evers, the NAACP is first field Secretary in Mississippi who was shot and killed, murdered in his own home in 1963. And people like John Lewis who led a group marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, and was brutally beaten with inches of his life by state troopers.

I mean, you can`t be against the Voting Rights Act. What, you`re going to be on the side of the state troopers? You`re going to be on the side of those with dogs and fire hoses? You can`t be against the voting rights act without desecrated the martyrs who fought and died for it and the religion that built up around it unless, unless you`re John Roberts, the conservative on elected Chief Justice Supreme Court. He doesn`t have to have any voters vote for him, right, lifetime appointment.

Selma, 1965

So what’s the difference between Chief Justice Roberts and his crew and the likes of Sheriff Jim Clark? A cloak of respectability, I suppose. A very thin, flimsy cloak.

See The Supreme Court showcased its ‘textualist’ double standard on voting rights by Nicholas Stephanopoulos of Harvard Law School.

Today’s conservative judges pride themselves on being textualists. When interpreting a statute, they always start with the law’s text. Unless the law is ambiguous, they end with the text, too. As Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. put it just last year, the courts’ focus must never waver from what a statute’s “words were understood to mean at the time of enactment.” Any other approach, even one that “sails under a textualist flag,” Alito lectured, is “like a pirate ship” — inappropriate and illegitimate.

So it was a shock to see the Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by none other than Alito, stacking one extra-textual constraint after another onto Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision prohibits any “standard, practice, or procedure” that makes it disproportionately harder for minority citizens to vote. In that situation, voting isn’t “equally open” to citizens of all races, and minority citizens “have less opportunity” to vote.
But Alito, and the five conservative justices who joined his opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, were unwilling to heed this clear textual command. They invented several limits that will make it harder for plaintiffs to win future Section 2 cases — and that appear nowhere in Section 2’s language.

Last October I wrote a post called A Tyranny of the Dead that called originalism or textualism or whatever you want to name it a crock. “The originalists may think they are not making decisions based on their personal values, but of course they do,” I wrote.  “They just lack the self-awareness to recognize their own biases as biases.” But I take that back. They know good and well what they are doing.

Paul Waldman, The Supreme Court’s new ruling confirms it’s the enemy of democracy.

The partisan commitment of this court is so clear that in oral arguments, the lawyer for the Arizona GOP comfortably declared that the party has standing to support the law throwing out ballots cast at the wrong precinct because counting such votes “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.” He knew who he was talking to.

The big picture here is that the court’s conservatives operate according to the “heads we win, tails you lose” approach to voting rights, in which with only the occasional exception, the best predictor of how a voting rights case will turn out is which side the Republican Party is taking.

They are nothing but party hacks. If it’s ever possible that we can get a big enough not-stupid majority in Congress before democracy is completely destroyed, court reform has to be high on the to-do list.

The Federalist Society judges — (clockwise from upper left) Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.