America may be broken beyond repair
In an ad
released last year, Blake Masters, a leading candidate in Arizona’s Republican
Senate primary, cradles a semiautomatic weapon. “This is a shortbarreled
rifle,” he said, ominous music playing in the background. “It wasn’t designed
for hunting. This is designed to kill people.”
For Masters, this isn’t an argument against
allowing such guns to proliferate. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment of why access
to these weapons is, for the right, a matter of existential importance. “The
Second Amendment is not about duck hunting,” said Masters. “It’s about
protecting your family and your country. What’s the first thing the Taliban did
when Joe Biden handed them Afghanistan? They took away people’s guns.”
Guns, in
this worldview, are a guarantor against government overreach. And government
overreach includes attempts to regulate guns. These days, it’s barely
remarkable when Republicans issue what sound like threats against those who’d
dare curtail their private arsenals.
“I have news
for the embarrassment that claims to be our president — try to take our guns
and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,”
Randy Fine, a state representative in Florida, tweeted [recently].
It will be
impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national
level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in
reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has
done little to alter this dynamic. Republicans have no intention of letting
Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks, and as
long as the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to amend
the filibuster, Republicans retain a veto over national policy.
Victims of our increasingly frequent mass
shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats
refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it. Fine’s words echoed Donald
Trump’s during the 2016 election, when he said that “Second Amendment people”
might be able to stop a President Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court
justices. What was once a barely concealed insinuation of violence has morphed,
especially since Jan. 6, into an even more forthright menace.
As
ProPublica has reported, dozens of members of the Oath Keepers militia were
arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol, but that hasn’t stopped
the organization from “evolving into a force within the Republican Party.” In
Shasta County, a conservative part of rural Northern California, a militia-aligned
faction has secured a majority on the board of supervisors, in what members of
the movement see as a blueprint that can be deployed nationally.
Throughout the country, reported The New York
Times, “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the
use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him” — meaning
Trump — “from power.” Expecting those same Republicans to collaborate with
Democrats on public safety is madness.
The
horrifying irony, the hideous ratchet, is that the more America is besieged by
senseless violence, the more the paramilitary wing of the American right is
strengthened. Gun sales tend to rise after mass shootings. Republicans
responded to the massacre in Uvalde by doubling down on calls to arm teachers
and “harden” schools. An article in The Federalist argued that parents must
home-school so that kids can learn “in a controlled environment where guns can
be safely carried for self-defense or locked away when not in use.” It’s a
vision of a society — if you can call it that — where every family is a
fortress.
Guns are now the leading cause of death for
American children. Many conservatives consider this a price worth paying for
their version of freedom. Our institutions give these conservatives
disproportionate power whether or not they win elections. The filibuster
renders the Senate largely impotent.
Trump, a
president who lost the popular vote, was able to appoint Supreme Court justices
who are poised to help overturn a New York state law restricting the carrying
of concealed weapons. It’s increasingly hard to see a path to small-d
democratic reform. And so among liberals, there’s an overwhelming feeling of
despair. Even as people learn the names of all those murdered children, the most
common sentiment is not “never again,” but a bitter acknowledgment that nothing
is going to change.
America is
too sick, too broken. It is perhaps beyond repair. Two years ago, David French,
an anti-Trump conservative, published a book, “Divided We Fall,” warning of the
possible crackup of the United States. It included two chapters imagining
scenarios for how the dissolution of the country might happen. One involved a
mass shooting at a school in California, to which the state’s people reacted
“with white-hot rage.” French envisioned furious state politicians defying the
Second Amendment, leading to a nullification crisis and blue-state secession.
He meant it as a cautionary tale, but rereading the chapter after Uvalde, it
feels less bleak than our reality. In French’s scenario, atrocity has the
effect of energizing people rather than immobilizing them. They are determined
to fight, not resigned to defeat. They have audacity and hope.
The real
nightmare is not that the repetition of nihilist terrorism brings American
politics to an inflection point, but that it doesn’t. The nightmare is that we
simply stumble on, helpless as things keep getting worse.
--Michelle
Goldberg, New York Times
Opinions vary on revising the Supreme
Court
The leaked draft Supreme Court opinion
suggesting a conservative majority will strike down Roe v. Wade this summer has
ignited debate over the future of the court. Is reform coming?
Lifetime
appointments have to go
With the Supreme Court poised to
overturn Roe v. Wade, says Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times, it's time
to discuss "how to rein in the court's extreme conservative slant."
There are a few widely discussed ways to address the problem. One that is
starting to catch on is "eliminating the justices' right to lifetime
appointments by imposing a term limit." Former President Donald Trump, by
the "luck of the draw," got to appoint three of the five conservative
justices in the majority that, according to a draft opinion leaked this week,
is going to strike down Roe, which established the constitutional right to
abortion and protected it for nearly 50 years. With lifetime appointments, this
hard-right tilt on the court will last decades, given life expectancies that
are now far beyond what the Founding Fathers could have imagined. Fixed terms
of 18 years, say, would "provide an opening every two years, or two every
presidential term," and make it harder for the right, or the left, to
dominate the bench.
Add more justices to even the bench
The hitch is that it's not clear the
Constitution gives Congress the power to impose Supreme Court term limits, say
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Michael Tabb at FiveThirtyEight. That leaves
Democrats with "one crazy, pull-the-fire-alarm solution: They could add
more justices to the court." The Constitution requires the United States
to have a Supreme Court, but leaves it to Congress to decide how many justices
it will have. It started out with six seats, briefly had 10 under President
Abraham Lincoln. For most of the nation's history, it has had nine. Four
progressive Democrats last year proposed increasing that to 13, but most
Democrats, including President Biden, gave the idea the cold shoulder.
Packing the court is a "terrible
idea," says The Economist. Which is why it's "currently a fringe
position in the Democratic Party." But if the court "swings hard to
the right" and the new 6-3 conservative majority "start tearing up
precedents that have stood for half a century, there will be growing political
pressure to remake the court." The high court could "save itself by
acting with restraint," and "bolster its own legitimacy" by
imposing an ethics code on itself, to disperse whiffs of partisanship like the
"angling" by Justice Clarence Thomas' wife to overturn Trump's 2020
election loss.
The liberal appetite for packing the
Supreme Court is no surprise, says The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Nor
is "the return of fevered threats to break the Senate filibuster" to
give Democrats, with their narrow Senate majority, the power they crave to
remake the court. Watch, next they'll try to Impeach justices. "This fury
is intended to intimidate the justices and, if that doesn't work, use abortion
to change the election subject in November from Democratic policy
failures." The Supreme Court's "best response" is to
"ignore the political fallout and focus on the law." Chief Justice
John Roberts has rightly called for investigating the leak of the draft
opinion. "A statement from all nine Justices deploring the leak would be a
useful defense of the court as an institution, as the liberal Justices know
they may eventually be in the majority."
That's obviously not going to happen
for a long time, says Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. The makeup of
the Electoral College and the Senate, our "primordial gerrymander"
giving Republicans power disproportionate to their numbers, have left the
United States under "minority rule," with an ever more
"right-wing judiciary" making the rules for a 21stcentury world it
just doesn't get. There are no "readily realizable" reforms that can
fix this, but remember: "Even in a democracy as flawed as ours, the
majority, if it turns out in sufficient numbers, can still assert its right to
rule.”
--Harold Maass, The Week
Ten more David Foster Wallace Quotes
1. “The really important kind of freedom
involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able
truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in
myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
2.
“There are no choices without personal freedom. It’s not us who are dead
inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us—these are just the
hazards of being free.
3.
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with
you.”
4.
“Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”
5.
“I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of
having to go back in my head and enjoy them.”
6.
“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
7.
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they
are different from everyone else.”
8.
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when
you realize how seldom they do.”
9.
“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”
10. “The parts of me that used to think I was different or
smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”
