GeorgiaDon

If you meant AG Barr, I agree with you. Indeed, I think this whole scheme to challenge the actual vote, get it thrown out, and substitute a vote by state legislatures is a big Barr shit pie. It's right up his alley in terms of constitutional law and wanting to turn the clock back 200-300 years. On the other hand, Trump has never read the constitution (or anything else that isn't directly about himself) and he would have no idea that such a thing is even possible.

I predict that, if (sorry, I meant when) Trump loses, he will issue a pardon for Ivanka and all his spawn, protecting them from Federal prosecution for tax and all other crimes. He will, of course, claim it is only necessary because the evil Democrats are driven by hate to persecute him and his family. He will also pardon himself, which will open up yet another constitutional can of worms. He will be confidant that his Supreme Court picks will return the favor and cover for him, because for him the whole world is transactional and "they owe him big time". Hopefully he will be in for a big surprise, but we will see.

True in theory. Less so in practice. McConnell is too busy pushing through judges to be bothered with legislation. Plus the "base" ensures that it is political suicide for republican legislators to cooperate with democrats on anything. But yes, even Dred Scott was reversed. Only took a civil war and two constitutional amendments.

The gist of it goes like this: 1. In the last several elections, it has become common for democratic candidates to gain votes as absentee/mail-in ballots are counted, which often is up to a few days after election day. Generally this does not change the outcome, but in some recent elections the republican candidate is ahead (by a bit) on election day, but this changed as absentee ballots are counted. The situation is likely to be more extreme this election as (1) most democratic voters (60% by one recent poll) plan to vote by mail due to the pandemic. That means more ballots to count, which will delay the final tally. On the other hand most republicans plan to vote in person (only 28% mail-in by the same poll), so republican candidates are likely to be leading on Nov 3. 2. The Trump campaign (assisted by Barr) has been trying to discredit mail-in voting. The idea is both to get as many ballots disqualified due to trivial errors such as not having a second "privacy envelope", on the theory that this will disqualify more democrats than republican voters. However the basic idea is to create confusion and then use that confusion to try to get all mail-in ballots thrown out. 3. Also they plan to go to court to get counting stopped on Nov. 3. Even if you filled in your ballot correctly and mailed it in lots of time, it will be disqualified if it is not opened and counted on Nov 3. This is very likely to affect lots of votes because of the increased volume of mail-in ballots, the lack of resources to hire enough people to count them all quickly, and in some states there are laws to prevent mail-in ballots to be counted before Nov. 3. Even if they are received weeks before Nov 3 they will just sit unopened. 4. If all of the above does not produce a vote for Trump, they will go to court to argue the votes are so "tainted" they cannot be trusted, so they should all be thrown out (in-person and mail-in) and state legislatures should choose electors for the electoral college. Since slightly more states have republican legislatures, this should ensure a Trump victory. 5. There are a few states with republican controlled legislatures but democratic governors. In such a case the legislature can choose a set of electors, but so can the governor. However no state can send two sets of electors. In the event of a dispute, who gets to choose what set of electors to count? Why, the president of the Senate, who happens to be Mike Pence. Any guesses which set of electors is counted? The article goes on to discuss even more scenarios, all terrifying for the future of our country and all quite probable with this president. Things like using protests to send in troops in democratic-leaning cities to close the streets so voters can't get to the polls. Or worse things like inviting "citizen militias" to police polling stations and keep out "suspicious looking troublemakers". And on and on. I had planned on voting by mail, but now I am thinking about voting in person, but early to avoid some of the crowded lines.

True, but an appeals court judge is different from a supreme court justice. Bad decisions from the court of appeals can be reversed by the SC (supreme court, that is, not speaker's corner). There is no place to go after the SC to reverse a decision, so they have to get it correct.

By the time he was being considered for the Supreme Court his positions had hardened a lot. Although he objected to the hyperbolic language of Kennedy's speech, Kennedy's comments were based on a fair reading of Bork's then-recent writings. Here is another perspective on Bork: "In terms of the First Amendment, Bork argued in favor of a narrow reading of free expression that would extend protection only to pure political speech for individuals. Because he did not think the same protection extended to nonpolitical speech, he was more willing to accept censorship of what he considered to be pornography in television, film, and music. In his best-selling Slouching towards Gomorrah (1996), Bork indicted modern liberalism, arguing that the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism led to a dangerous social and moral decline in the United States." (source) If you read Slouching towards Gomorrah you will find that he was (by 1996) fully in favor of using censorship to enforce a very puritanical version of society.

I hear this Robert Bork thing all the time, and I just do not get it. Bork was an awful candidate. You would not recognize Bork's America. Besides his ideas that the presidency should have absolute power and not answer to Congress about anything (as Barr believes today), he saw the primary role of the government as maintaining social order and suppressing dissent. He strongly favored government censorship of movies, music, books and magazines, etc. He taught that the 14th amendment was intended to apply only to freed slaves, and opposed application of the equal protection clause to anyone else (such as women). He opposed all of the civil rights decisions of the Warren court. There is a reason why the Senate is supposed to advise the President and then vote to approve (or not) the nominee. If the only role of the Senate is to rubber stamp the appointment, why bother holding hearings?

Regret what? When McConnell was the Senate minority leader, he used the filibuster to block every one of Obama's nominees to court positions. With no nominees going through, the courts started to have real problems keeping up with their dockets because of too few judges. Reid eliminated the filibuster for lower level judges but kept it for supreme court appointments. What alternative did he have? Not fill one empty judge seat as long as Obama was in office? Later when McConnell became majority leader he blocked every Obama nominee, which is why there were so many empty judgeships for Trump to fill. brenthutch calls it "realpolitik", and so it is. Win at all costs, even if you destroy the Senate in the process, poison the well so collaboration to solve problems becomes impossible, and force American citizens to wait years longer than they should have for their day in court. At one time people could call the Senate "the world's greatest deliberative body" without throwing up in their mouth. No longer.

I agree. This is why I think it is time to think about some new amendments to the constitution, to clarify some existing amendments and to define some rights and to make it clear that the government has the authority to act in certain domains. For example, I think it would be hard to directly state a right to abortion but it should be possible to come up with language to enshrine the right to privacy and so prevent the government from taking away your ability to make your own decisions about medical procedures. Similarly an amendment could solidify the government's ability to take actions to protect the environment we all depend on and limit the ability of entities to pollute. Yes I know it is hard to get amendments passed. However if they are not limited by time limit clauses, and they are actually a good idea, they will pass eventually when enough people in enough states demand that they pass. The ERA would be law now if it didn't have a strict time limit for passage. Also, I think every bill should have at the beginning a clear statement of the writer's view of the constitutional justification for the bill. It would help if bills were clearly written so lawyers couldn't tie them up in court for years or decades arguing about the meaning of a word or phrase.

A snap election is infinitely more tolerable than the protracted American process. Electioneering starts almost the instant the last election is over. Legislators have at best one session to get anything done before they are 100% on fundraising and campaigning. Also if a government is doing an absolutely shit job (like the current US administration) and if they happen to be a minority government there is always a chance of a vote of non-confidence to force another roll of the dice. The biggest Canadian ethics scandals, such as Trudeau's connection with the WE charity contract, would scarcely make the news on a slow day here, given our constant fire hose barrage of corruption from the White House. Don

While that is true, it oversimplifies the issue, at least until people like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton get appointed to the court. It is inevitable that presidents will nominate people whose vision of the constitution and the law are similar to their own. And, there is diversity in how people understand the constitution. Originalists and textualists read the constitution as if nothing has changed about society in hundreds of years. Unfortunately many of the amendments in the Bill of Rights are not as specific as one might wish. For example, the 10th amendment says: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." What is "excessive", and what is "cruel and unusual"? These are not defined, so justices have to debate meanings and split hairs. A conservative judge might look to the 18th century and decide that burning at the stake is not cruel, by the standards of that century. I recall that Bork was especially dismissive of the 12th amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Since this amendment does not name specific powers, his attitude (I believe) was that such powers do not exist. Roe v Wade is based on the idea that people have the right privacy, in other words a right to make decisions about their own bodies and their own life, and not have those decisions imposed by government. If someone does not believe that such a right exists, because it is not explicitly stated as one of the powers reserved to the people, then the government is free to impose it's own view of what is best on you. Bork would have been a disaster in many ways, not just because of his views on women's autonomy. For example, he believed that the first amendment guarantee of "free speech" applied only to political speech, and it was the duty of the government to control all other forms of communication (especially "smut", as he saw it) to promote social order. A judge like Bork need not simply parrot Republican policies to arrive at positions attractive to extreme conservatives. The good side of this (to a limited extent) is that one might manage some victories in court by finding a way to package your argument in textualist terms, instead of relying on what is "obviously the most desirable outcome". Gorsuch was persuaded to support LGBTQ employment rights (and by implication some other rights) thanks to a convincing argument about the meaning of the word "sex". If he made rulings along strict Republican party lines that would not have happened. The take-home lesson for Democrats these days is, I think, that they have to craft and pass well-written laws, and perhaps to pursue some constitutional amendments, to get their agenda made fire-proof. (Of course that means they need to overcome gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc and get themselves elected). Laws that are based too much on regulatory interpretation and rule-making are subject to regulatory re-interpretation, leading (for example) to the gutting of many environmental protection laws. Rights that are based on legal rulings, even Supreme Court rulings, can be reversed overnight. If those rights are enshrined in a constitutional amendment they are much more difficult to sweep away.

If she had resigned in Obama's second term Trump would have had 2 appointments to fill as soon as he took office. Do you really think the Republicans would have approved any Obama nominee, especially in the last 2 years of his term? They sat on dozens of vacant judge positions for years, and backlogged cases for years, so that Trump would be able to stack the judicial system. Trump's appointees will disproportionally influence the courts for.another 40+ years.

7-8 years ago she was at the height of her ability to do the job. Why should someone who is one of the sharpest minds in the law quit when they still have years in them? Some people don't especially relish sitting in a bingo parlor wasting time until the grim reaper comes for them. I have read that she planned to retire when there was a woman in the oval office, which she (and most people) thought would be 2017. I've also read that McConnell and others have been pressuring Thomas to retire for the same reason, and he has (so far) refused for the same reason: he loves the job and thinks no-one else would be better. Probably the best idea I've seen is to limit terms to 20 years, and stagger them so each president automatically gets 2 positions per term to fill. That way it won't be possible to stack the court so ideologies get locked in for generations and become totally disconnected from American society.

Who is this "she" of which you speak? You are also hopelessly screwed up on the history of this mess. Harry Reid changed the threshold for approving appeals court judges from 60 to 51 after the Republicans instituted a policy of blocking every single nominee put forward by Obama. Supreme Court appointments remained at 60 though. Then McConnell refused to allow a vote, or even a meeting with Garland. He then changed the threshold to 51 for Gorsuch as there was no way Democrats would vote for him considering how his seat was stolen. All of this cluster fuck flows from Mitch McConnell and his contempt for democracy and his willingness to destroy any possibility of representative democracy in the USA. Personally I wish I believed in Hell as I wish he would take his place there, along side Newt Gingerich.

Because there is no difference between 9 months and 1 1/2 months before the election, in your mind? Innumeracy does seem to be a general property of Trump and his minions.

If you can start doing the physiotherapy exercises before the surgery and get the muscles in good shape, it can cut down on the recovery time quite a bit.

I think the issue is more that several states (Texas for one) allow anyone 65 or older to vote by mail; i.e. they can submit an absentee ballot without actually being out of state. This means that older demographic, which leans Republican by some margin, can already vote by mail. By forcing everyone else to actually go to the polls in a pandemic, they hope lots of people won't take the risk. Democrats are stronger in the younger age groups so this tactic gives Republicans an advantage. If they can also do things like reduce polling stations so you have to stand in line for hours, that will tilt the field even more towards older voters who can mail in their ballots. Don

Here is an interesting opinion piece in Scientific American. The author has been an ER and critical care physician for 7 years, and is also a professor in the Harvard medical school. He noticed that, despite the CDC's reports of annual flu deaths being between 25,000 and 60,000+, he could recall only one patient death due to the flu. He contacted a number of colleagues who also work in emergency medicine, and uniformly they recalled none or very few patients who died of the flu. This contrasts with CDC reports of deaths from car accidents or gunshot injuries or opioid overdoses, which the CDC reports in the same ballpark as the flu, ~30-40,000 deaths/year. All the ER doctors see patients die of these causes all the time. Something seems "off" about the flu numbers. In actuality, the CDC flu numbers are a statistical estimate with many assumptions about the numbers of people who die without being tested, and limitations in data reporting as the flu is not a reportable disease, except for pediatric cases. The number of cases in which a patient has a positive diagnostic test (which is the standard the CDC applies to COVID-19 deaths) varied over the last 7 flu seasons from ~3,500 to ~15,000. He compared the number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the 2nd week of April to the number confirmed flu deaths in each of the last 7 flu seasons. By that measure, COVID-19 is between 9.5 and 44 fold more deadly than the flu. Arguments that COVID-19 is just like the flu based on CDC number are highly misleading, because they involve comparing test-confirmed COVID-19 deaths (a large underestimate, because of very limited access to testing) to an inflated statistical estimate of flu deaths. In fact, the fine print on the CDC website indicates that the flu numbers assume that a very large fraction of pneumonia deaths are due to the flu, despite that fact that several different diseases can result in pneumonia. Why would the CDC inflate flu deaths? One suggestion is that higher numbers are more effective at encouraging people to get the flu vaccine, which unquestionably reduce the impact of the flu. From a public health perspective this is a good thing. And, of course, the statistical model may not be far off. Certainly many or most flu deaths are not diagnosed by lab tests, so the "real" number cannot be known, only estimated. However the same is true of COVID-19. Especially earlier in the pandemic, until quite recently, access to tests were so limited that most hospital patients were not tested, especially if they died before being tested, and many thousands of people who died at home or in nursing homes were never tested. At the end of the day, comparing lab-confirmed COVID-19 deaths to the high end of a statistical estimate of possible flu deaths is a highly misleading and ultimately deadly basis for decisions about risk from COVID-19, including when to abandon social distancing guidelines. Don

I think that is also true, but they are not mutually exclusive propositions. The Republican Party is very adept at getting people to pay to support positions that are ultimately not in their own best interest, by re-labeling those positions as "freedom" or opposing positions as "socialism/communism". It's amazing to me that people are (as just one example, many others could be given) willing to accept filthy air and water (as per airdvr's anti-EPA comment earlier) rather than be subjugated to the so-called "nanny state". As if any one individual, no matter how determined they may be to "take care of themselves", can ensure themselves of a healthy environment if it is the financial interests of industry and other players to dump their waste into the air/water/ground. Don Drag files here to attach, or choose files...

I suspect that, behind the facade of "caring" for the "pre-born", the real reason for Republican devotion to the "pro-life" mantra is a desire to use pregnancy as a means to exert control over women who dare to challenge their perception of the "right" (as in "correct") way to live. Don

Apparently the Red Cross will soon be providing an antibody test, so people who can provide convalescent plasma can be identified. Once that is up and running you will be able to get an antibody test by donating blood or plasma. Don

Excellent news. Don

The estimated death rate of ~ 2% is certainly an overestimate, as it only counts deaths among people who were sick enough to seek medical help and tested positive for COVID-19. Certainly many infected people are asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms. On the other hand, it seems such people may still be infectious. There is no practical way to detect and quarantine such asymptomatic people, so they slip though any effort at isolating the virus. Already we are seeing a few cases in the US of diagnosed patients who have no travel history or history of contact with known patients. The possibility of becoming infected by handling products shipped from China has been discounted, so those new cases must have been exposed in some way to an asymptomatic carrier. There is no way to prevent the virus from coming to the US, though it might be possible to slow things down a bit. The precautions Bill mentions are very reasonable. Unfortunately the US health care system is not well prepared for this situation in some ways. We are told to see a doctor and stay home from work if we get sick. The US has a much larger proportion of the population that is uninsured, and who work at jobs without paid sick leave. Missing work can have serious financial implications, ranging from big medical bills and lost pay to losing your job. Often people in this situation do go to work until they get so sick they can't. Also they will send their kids (who have been exposed to whatever illness is involved) to day care, opening another avenue to spread the virus. If we had universal health care and universal paid sick leave the situation could be much better. Don

The story seems outrageous, but then again Fox has been known to slant their coverage more than a little. No doubt there was more to the story than what Fox chose to tell. Anyway, if this case makes it OK to solicit murder, then surely the non-prosecution of Trump even after he bragged on camera about assaulting women makes that behavior legal for everybody? Don

It is consistent with the new Republican Party platform though. That platform being, Trump is King, and whatever is in Trump's personal interest is by definition in the national interest. On the other hand, any criticism of Trump, or any disagreement with his brain-dead policies, is by definition unpatriotic and even treasonous. I recall the days when the Republican party at least pretended to have principles and policies. That party is dead if not buried. Now it is a personality cult. I'm quite certain that Trump could walk into Congress, shoot Schiff and Pelosi in the head in front of all the members of the House and Senate, and not one Republican would speak a word of criticism. Don