With the torrent of awful rulings from a corrupt Supreme Court over the last few days, I struggled to put all my thoughts into something cogent before the day ended.
"The Guardian", 6/30, Joel Warner: "The King of Dark $$ Effectively controls the US Sup Ct now." Owned and operated by plutocrats, soldiered by Evangelicals, serving the insatiable drive for control & power of a minority, vastly white male. That is US today and for coming generations unless we find some way to stop the coup very soon. It is not in slow motion; it is fast or, perhaps, over. MOORE served their purposes, also. 1 purpose was to remind everyone that fed cts, esp. S Ct, can pull another Bush v Gore. Many still do not know that the Sup Ct was n-o-t legally required to hear that case. It CHOSE to.
I have been reading and enjoying Hopium Chronicles as a nonsubscriber for a while now. I just now subscribed, principally for the purpose of being able to comment on this isuue. In addition to your publication, I also subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, James Fallows, among others.
I agree the recent rulings by SCOTUS are a travesty, a disaster. But please, for God's sake, please stop referring to SCOTUS as the "corrupt Supreme Court". With that overly broad brush you are (perhaps unintentionally) tarring three fine justices (Sotomayor, Kagan, and Brown Jackson) who will forever be considered part of the Roberts Court. Do you read what you write before you send it? To me you sound like the mirror image of some Fox twerp. Stop the over-the-top ad hominem! Thank you.
Good people can be part of a institution that has in fact become corrupted. He didn't say anything about the individual justices....he said the corrupt "Supreme Court", which by nearly any objective measure has been corrupted by a lack of any enforceable ethics code, no agreed upon protocols for mandating recusal from a case, and the unintended consequences of a vague constitutional article outlining how justices are installed, but with nothing concretely written to prevent the gamesmanship employed by Mitch McConnell that stole an appointment from Barack Obama, and then violated his own predicate for doing so in order to squeeze a third one in for Donald Trump at the buzzer. Yes, I'm sorry you take it personally on our three great Justices' behalf, but the Supreme Court IS corrupt, and it isn't their fault, nor do they have the power to repair it on their own.
Will have respectfully disagree with you Robert, but also feel like this is distracting us from what happened this week and I urge everyone to move on and keep the focus on them and not me or us. This isn't about me - it's about they are doing to the country and quibbles about language or framing is a collective waste of our time.
A corrupted court, yes, sans doubt! But it doesn’t confer it’s bought-and-paid for status to Jackson, Sotomayor or Kagan by dint of them serving concurrently with Barrett, Gorsuch, Alito, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Thomas!
Thank you Simon. Bothering to respond while still being thoughtful and bringing forward resonant, if gently used, words is helpful after a very sad and sordid week of American history.
That a small group of individuals, the majority of whom have led a life of extreme privilege and who have never endured the indignity of poverty or the pain of racism can justify attempts at remedying these blights through education is beyond me. White nationalism is backward and dangerous. We are facing enormous challenges and the more voices we hear from the better. There is a seduction in that privileged bubble but it is, in the end, an empty shell.
You are so right, and Biden has announced he will try to push through student loan forgiveness again. One way to ensure increasing equality is to reduce the cost to students of higher education. Considering the size of endowments at schools like UNC (51 BILLION raised last year) it’s time they separated out academic and athletic missions. Don’t get me started. The Supremes threw slop on the 4th of July, but we are going to win, and honor humanity instead of oppressing it.
This topic, above all others, is why I'm a Democrat. I'm a student of history (the ugly history and the pleasant history), so I'm well aware of the disgraceful past of the Dem party.....that we were the fuel behind slave states, secessionists, the KKK.....it's so despicable that my stomach churns just thinking about it. And YET.....in my lifetime, and really even my parents' lifetimes (Baby Boomers born in 1947), it is ONLY the Democratic Party that has been on a slow path of redemption, improvement, modernization, and virtuous evolution. And we have the scars to show for it politically.....because of the incredible work done from visionary activists like MLK, Malcom X, John Lewis, and many others less well known, applying pressure for decades on both parties, there was a clear choice to be made.....Harry Truman started the ball rolling with the integration of the military....Eisenhower tried to maintain the Republicans' claim to Lincoln's legacy with the beginning of integrating schools....but it was the DEMOCRATIC PARTY that took the difficult path in the 60s and used their political capital to make serious structural changes. The laws weren't perfect and need reform to this day....but we TRIED. And the Republicans took that moment to lean into a majority white America feeling anxious about change and fed them cynical bullshit with their "southern strategy" and the "silent majority"......feeding and rewarding racism and winning 5 out of 6 Presidential Elections, 2 with 49 state drubbings, and two others in landslides that would be historically embarrassing for us on their own had it not been for the two 49 staters.......we managed to eke out a 2 point victory a year and a half after the sitting Republican President resigned from office in disgrace because he was such a criminal that his own party was going to help remove him from office via impeachment.
It's that history that made me a Democrat.....I knew society would eventually catch up, and that the sacrifices to their brand and frankly their souls would not age well......and here we are. My party isn't perfect, but on the central question that faces America in this new age of profound diversity, interconnectivity, and interdependence.....are the opportunities and endless bounty of the American experiment for EVERYONE, or not?.....the Democratic Party is the ONLY serious political institution who has tried to grow with the times and answer that question with a resounding YES.
We'll never be perfect.....but I'm proud to be part of a party that TRIES to be an advocate for every American, because despite the million specific policy disagreements we will always continue to have, philosophically, there's really nothing else that matters.
I don't participate here as much as I want / wish to. But even just keeping abreast of your conversations, Simon, keeps me focused on long game. Long game. Long game. Long game. There are more of us than there are of them. And we are on the wide of the good of humanity, of acceptance and appreciation and respect and connection. We seem to be learning how to organize a bit, finally. Good. More. Long game. Could you maybe do a convo with Ben Wikler at some point (if you haven't already)? He seems to me to be the embodiment of long game in Wisconsin. I've learned a lot from following him.
Thank you Susan Troy, Simon and others for being practical about our current political climate. It is what it is--nasty, depraved & malevolent thanks to a republican party filled with what Liz Cheney recently said, “We’re electing idiots...” Specifically, they are republican idiots. They have no shame or capacity to feel embarrassed by what they do and that’s precisely what the GOP wants... those shameless idiots to lie endlessly, make accusations with no supporting evidence & impune the character of good people who are trying to do the right thing while at the same time they celebrate the corruption of the Supreme Court.
It’s no way to run a country that has a history of supporting a certain moral ideal of equal opportunity. America has never been perfect and we’ve had our share of evil people throughout history, but so far, they haven’t prevailed for very long in the bigger scheme of things.
This degradation of our democracy isn’t going to last forever. The pendulum will swing the other way when enough Americans have had it. In the meantime we keep democracy alive by pushing back on the depravity, pointing out their perversion of language
and vocally condemning the naked corruption of our
I am with you on most of this, love FDR and the four freedoms, but you kind of lost me with the inclusion of the WTO and the prosecution of the Cold War. That is Reaganism. It is time to put away the Thomas Friedman books, it isn't the 1990s anymore.
I empathize with the struggle. The two days give new meaning to "speechless." One issue I wonder if anyone has data on is who takes student loans and who has difficulty repaying them. I'm seeing a lot of talk from the right about how the student loan decision is a victory against elites, especially "coastal elites" (Marsha Blackburn). I don't think its people who go to Harvard and Yale are the ones who have trouble paying their loans back. More likely, it's people who were duped into attempting degrees from substandard schools or expensive trade schools. But before I start saying that, I'd like to check the data. Has anyone done this?
Love, love, love this from FDR (Heather Cox Richardson has called it out as well, so you are in very good company)...it's a potent reminder that we've long, far too long, ceded the ground on freedom to an anti-democratic party who finds it antithetical to their patriarchal world view.
The article pretty much sums up their value system and brings logic to all their cra-cra (it also highlights a missed Dem messaging opportunity in 2016):
Your essay is what will happen , Simon, 🌿💯
Rough going. Thank you, Simon.
Spot on, Simon!
The “Thomas Court” is now the latest threat to equality and democracy since Dred Scott and Plessey!
"The Guardian", 6/30, Joel Warner: "The King of Dark $$ Effectively controls the US Sup Ct now." Owned and operated by plutocrats, soldiered by Evangelicals, serving the insatiable drive for control & power of a minority, vastly white male. That is US today and for coming generations unless we find some way to stop the coup very soon. It is not in slow motion; it is fast or, perhaps, over. MOORE served their purposes, also. 1 purpose was to remind everyone that fed cts, esp. S Ct, can pull another Bush v Gore. Many still do not know that the Sup Ct was n-o-t legally required to hear that case. It CHOSE to.
I have been reading and enjoying Hopium Chronicles as a nonsubscriber for a while now. I just now subscribed, principally for the purpose of being able to comment on this isuue. In addition to your publication, I also subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, James Fallows, among others.
I agree the recent rulings by SCOTUS are a travesty, a disaster. But please, for God's sake, please stop referring to SCOTUS as the "corrupt Supreme Court". With that overly broad brush you are (perhaps unintentionally) tarring three fine justices (Sotomayor, Kagan, and Brown Jackson) who will forever be considered part of the Roberts Court. Do you read what you write before you send it? To me you sound like the mirror image of some Fox twerp. Stop the over-the-top ad hominem! Thank you.
Good people can be part of a institution that has in fact become corrupted. He didn't say anything about the individual justices....he said the corrupt "Supreme Court", which by nearly any objective measure has been corrupted by a lack of any enforceable ethics code, no agreed upon protocols for mandating recusal from a case, and the unintended consequences of a vague constitutional article outlining how justices are installed, but with nothing concretely written to prevent the gamesmanship employed by Mitch McConnell that stole an appointment from Barack Obama, and then violated his own predicate for doing so in order to squeeze a third one in for Donald Trump at the buzzer. Yes, I'm sorry you take it personally on our three great Justices' behalf, but the Supreme Court IS corrupt, and it isn't their fault, nor do they have the power to repair it on their own.
This Court meets every definition of corrupt - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corrupt
Will have respectfully disagree with you Robert, but also feel like this is distracting us from what happened this week and I urge everyone to move on and keep the focus on them and not me or us. This isn't about me - it's about they are doing to the country and quibbles about language or framing is a collective waste of our time.
A corrupted court, yes, sans doubt! But it doesn’t confer it’s bought-and-paid for status to Jackson, Sotomayor or Kagan by dint of them serving concurrently with Barrett, Gorsuch, Alito, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Thomas!
Thank you Simon. Bothering to respond while still being thoughtful and bringing forward resonant, if gently used, words is helpful after a very sad and sordid week of American history.
Be safe this weekend, everyone!
Do you read what you write before you send it?
“To me you sound like the mirror image of some Fox twerp.”
Can we please stop with “the over-the-top ad hominem”?
Thank you. ;)
That a small group of individuals, the majority of whom have led a life of extreme privilege and who have never endured the indignity of poverty or the pain of racism can justify attempts at remedying these blights through education is beyond me. White nationalism is backward and dangerous. We are facing enormous challenges and the more voices we hear from the better. There is a seduction in that privileged bubble but it is, in the end, an empty shell.
Hi Susan -- Well said!
You are so right, and Biden has announced he will try to push through student loan forgiveness again. One way to ensure increasing equality is to reduce the cost to students of higher education. Considering the size of endowments at schools like UNC (51 BILLION raised last year) it’s time they separated out academic and athletic missions. Don’t get me started. The Supremes threw slop on the 4th of July, but we are going to win, and honor humanity instead of oppressing it.
This topic, above all others, is why I'm a Democrat. I'm a student of history (the ugly history and the pleasant history), so I'm well aware of the disgraceful past of the Dem party.....that we were the fuel behind slave states, secessionists, the KKK.....it's so despicable that my stomach churns just thinking about it. And YET.....in my lifetime, and really even my parents' lifetimes (Baby Boomers born in 1947), it is ONLY the Democratic Party that has been on a slow path of redemption, improvement, modernization, and virtuous evolution. And we have the scars to show for it politically.....because of the incredible work done from visionary activists like MLK, Malcom X, John Lewis, and many others less well known, applying pressure for decades on both parties, there was a clear choice to be made.....Harry Truman started the ball rolling with the integration of the military....Eisenhower tried to maintain the Republicans' claim to Lincoln's legacy with the beginning of integrating schools....but it was the DEMOCRATIC PARTY that took the difficult path in the 60s and used their political capital to make serious structural changes. The laws weren't perfect and need reform to this day....but we TRIED. And the Republicans took that moment to lean into a majority white America feeling anxious about change and fed them cynical bullshit with their "southern strategy" and the "silent majority"......feeding and rewarding racism and winning 5 out of 6 Presidential Elections, 2 with 49 state drubbings, and two others in landslides that would be historically embarrassing for us on their own had it not been for the two 49 staters.......we managed to eke out a 2 point victory a year and a half after the sitting Republican President resigned from office in disgrace because he was such a criminal that his own party was going to help remove him from office via impeachment.
It's that history that made me a Democrat.....I knew society would eventually catch up, and that the sacrifices to their brand and frankly their souls would not age well......and here we are. My party isn't perfect, but on the central question that faces America in this new age of profound diversity, interconnectivity, and interdependence.....are the opportunities and endless bounty of the American experiment for EVERYONE, or not?.....the Democratic Party is the ONLY serious political institution who has tried to grow with the times and answer that question with a resounding YES.
We'll never be perfect.....but I'm proud to be part of a party that TRIES to be an advocate for every American, because despite the million specific policy disagreements we will always continue to have, philosophically, there's really nothing else that matters.
Love you brother!
Beautiful!
I don't participate here as much as I want / wish to. But even just keeping abreast of your conversations, Simon, keeps me focused on long game. Long game. Long game. Long game. There are more of us than there are of them. And we are on the wide of the good of humanity, of acceptance and appreciation and respect and connection. We seem to be learning how to organize a bit, finally. Good. More. Long game. Could you maybe do a convo with Ben Wikler at some point (if you haven't already)? He seems to me to be the embodiment of long game in Wisconsin. I've learned a lot from following him.
Thank you Susan Troy, Simon and others for being practical about our current political climate. It is what it is--nasty, depraved & malevolent thanks to a republican party filled with what Liz Cheney recently said, “We’re electing idiots...” Specifically, they are republican idiots. They have no shame or capacity to feel embarrassed by what they do and that’s precisely what the GOP wants... those shameless idiots to lie endlessly, make accusations with no supporting evidence & impune the character of good people who are trying to do the right thing while at the same time they celebrate the corruption of the Supreme Court.
It’s no way to run a country that has a history of supporting a certain moral ideal of equal opportunity. America has never been perfect and we’ve had our share of evil people throughout history, but so far, they haven’t prevailed for very long in the bigger scheme of things.
This degradation of our democracy isn’t going to last forever. The pendulum will swing the other way when enough Americans have had it. In the meantime we keep democracy alive by pushing back on the depravity, pointing out their perversion of language
and vocally condemning the naked corruption of our
Supreme Court.
I am with you on most of this, love FDR and the four freedoms, but you kind of lost me with the inclusion of the WTO and the prosecution of the Cold War. That is Reaganism. It is time to put away the Thomas Friedman books, it isn't the 1990s anymore.
I empathize with the struggle. The two days give new meaning to "speechless." One issue I wonder if anyone has data on is who takes student loans and who has difficulty repaying them. I'm seeing a lot of talk from the right about how the student loan decision is a victory against elites, especially "coastal elites" (Marsha Blackburn). I don't think its people who go to Harvard and Yale are the ones who have trouble paying their loans back. More likely, it's people who were duped into attempting degrees from substandard schools or expensive trade schools. But before I start saying that, I'd like to check the data. Has anyone done this?
Love, love, love this from FDR (Heather Cox Richardson has called it out as well, so you are in very good company)...it's a potent reminder that we've long, far too long, ceded the ground on freedom to an anti-democratic party who finds it antithetical to their patriarchal world view.
The article pretty much sums up their value system and brings logic to all their cra-cra (it also highlights a missed Dem messaging opportunity in 2016):
https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2017/jul/20/the-power-of-framing-its-not-what-you-say-its-how-you-say-it
🙏