No excuses

Charlie Pierce:

Over the weekend, I watched the PBS documentary on Freedom Summer, the effort 50 years ago to register African Americans to vote in the state of Mississippi, the effort that cost so many people so dearly, especially the families of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, who were beaten and shot to death, and buried in a dam, because the state of Mississippi had local police forces shot through with the Ku Klux Klan. Now, five decades later, with a Republican House far gone into nihilistic vandalism, and with the Senate hanging in the balance, and a Supreme Court one septuagenarian’s heartbeat away from a return to the golden days of the last Gilded Age, and a Democratic president in the White House on whom those responsible for the previous three phenomena have painted a bullseye, we keep hearing about how hard it is going to be for the Democratic party to turn out its voters this fall to take advantage of the opportunities for which Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner gave their lives, and did so in my lifetime, not in a distant antebellum episode in some backwater.

So there really isn’t any excuse any more.

Quite simply, if the Republican party gains control of the United States Senate, and if it maintains that majority in 2016, neither Barack Obama, nor Hillary Clinton, if she were to succeed him in office, will be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice. It will not happen. There will be nobody whose views and judicial philosophy will be satisfactory to the majority Republicans unless whoever the president is happens to nominate Antonin (Short Time) Scalia’s left nut. Yesterday, the bare 5-4 majority of Federalist Society Papists demonstrated that it is heedless of concern for women’s health, and poised to eliminate the ability of public employees — and, later, any employees — from organizing themselves.

(For an interesting historical view, I can highly recommend the redoubtable Thers at Whiskey Fire, who draws on his academic experience to explain how, in regard to human sexuality, the United States Of America is turning into the Irish Free State, circa 1935.)

So there really isn’t any excuse any more.

And it’s not like the raw material isn’t there. In a number of states in which the Democratic candidate was thought to be in desperate trouble, those candidates remain stubbornly—and narrowly—ahead. In the newly insane state of North Carolina, Kay Hagan has opened a little daylight over Thom Tillis. It should be significant that Hagan and Tillis are on opposite sides of the Hobby Lobby ruling. In Arkansas, Tea Party heartthrob Tom Cotton is giving a master class in how a promising candidate can fail to launch, and Mark Pryor has been the beneficiary. (Hint: the farmers you represent will not be pleased if you vote against a farm bill, even if it’s because freedom.) Mary Landrieu is still Mary Landrieu, but she’s still in a virtual tie.  Reproductive rights—as defined yesterday by Samuel Alito—could be enough to save Mark Udall in Colorado, who is running a bit ahead of onetime Personhood champion Cory Gardner.  (Gardner already has tried to walk that back, stepping on another rake as he did so.) And, in Michigan, Terri Lynn Land put out a commercial in which she ridiculed the idea of a “war on women.” She’s now running behind Democratic candidate Gary Peters among the women of Michigan.

So there really isn’t any excuse any more.

H/t Thomas Soldan Attorney at Law.