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      'Power grab': how Republican hardball gave us Amy Coney Barrett

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      The almost certain confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court on Monday represents a “power grab” by Republicans facing possible wipeout at the ballot box, activists and analysts say.
      Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee shrugged off a Democratic boycott on Thursday to advance Barrett’s nomination to the full Senate, which will vote little more than a week before the presidential election. If confirmed, Barrett could be sworn in as a justice almost immediately.
      To critics, the rushed process represents one of the most naked power plays yet by a party which, confronting dismal opinion polls, is weaponizing unelected judges to compensate for setbacks in elections. Even as they contemplate the loss of political power, Republicans are poised to cement judicial power for generations.
      “This is like the last gasp by the Republican party to try to lock in their minority rule,” said Christopher Kang, co-founder and chief counsel of the progressive group Demand Justice. “They’re potentially just days away from not only losing the White House but also the Senate, maybe even resoundingly, and so they’re trying to do everything they can to consolidate on the supreme court a Trump supermajority for decades to come.”
      Under Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Republicans have built a reputation for ruthless bare knuckle tactics Democrats struggle to combat. They blocked swaths of Barack Obama’s legislative agenda and in 2016 refused to grant a hearing to his supreme court nominee Merrick Garland, arguing that it was an election year so the voters should decide.
      In 2018, when the conservative nominee Brett Kavanaugh faced credible allegations of sexual assault, Republicans ignored fierce protests and rammed his appointment through. And when liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last month, Donald Trump moved like lightning to replace her with Barrett, 48, a lifetime appointment who would tilt America’s highest court to a 6-3 conservative majority.
      It was another example of Republican hardball – audacious, shameless and devastatingly effective.
      Comedian Bill Maher told viewers of his HBO show: “If you haven’t gotten it yet, this kind of completely bald-faced premeditated hypocrisy should make it clear. There’s no catching them in an inconsistency. They don’t care because it’s all and only about power. The only rule Republicans play by is: the people who win make the rules. Power talks, losers walk.”
      Democrats cried foul, pointing out that the Senate has never confirmed a supreme court nominee so close to a presidential election. They were whistling in the wind. During committee hearings Barrett swerved most of their questions, refusing to commit herself on abortion, the transfer or power or the climate crisis.
      Kang said: “The process was so rushed and she was far more evasive and refused to answer more questions than any other nominee. That was a little bit jarring, if not surprising, but it shows how little respect Republicans have not only for the Senate but the supreme court itself. The Republican party is very blatantly just treating the supreme court as another political branch of government.”
      Demand Justice has called for Democrats to fight back by expanding the court, noting that its size has been changed seven times before. Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has said he will appoint a bipartisan commission to examine such proposals.
      Kang predicted: “Republicans’ attempt to assert their raw political partisan power grab to get a sixth seat on the court, when they already have five, could end up backfiring spectacularly on them and they could be on the losing side of a 7-6 supreme court before they know it.”
      All 12 Republicans on the judiciary committee voted in favour of Barrett. Ted Cruz of Texas hailed perhaps the “single most important accomplishment” of Trump’s presidency. Democrats displayed posters at their desks, of Americans who benefited from Obama’s Affordable Care Act which they warn Barrett could help strike down.
      Democrats have also warned that if Trump follows through on his threat to dispute the outcome of the 3 November election, it might go before Barrett and other members of the supreme court for a final ruling, just like the 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore.

      Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, described Barrett’s probable confirmation as a “‘power grab’ in every relevant sense of the term, especially in light of President Trump’s open concession that he appointed judge Coney Barrett in part to ensure her ability to vote in his favour should his re-election as president end up turning on a case the supreme court would need to resolve in order to give him an electoral college victory in the face of a national popular defeat.”
      Trump has appointed more than 200 federal judges, likely to be his most lasting legacy whether he serves one term or two. Critics suggest the courts represent the last bulwark of Republican minority rule and the Barrett episode is starkly indicative of a party that has lost its ideological and ethical moorings and now treats power as an end in itself.
      Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said Republicans have betrayed their claims to be the party of fiscal responsibility, pro-life principles, small government and congressional oversight.
      “When a party diverges from itself on so many issues so many times,” he said, “it tells you they don’t actually have any moral convictions or principles that guide them. Only the pursuit of power.” More

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      Trump assaulted American democracy – here's how Democrats can save it | Robert Reich

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      Barring a miracle, Amy Coney Barrett will be confirmed on Monday as the ninth justice on the US supreme court.
      This is a travesty of democracy.
      The vote on Barrett’s confirmation will occur just eight days before election day. By contrast, the Senate didn’t even hold a hearing on Merrick Garland, who Barack Obama nominated almost a year before the end of his term. Majority leader Mitch McConnell argued at the time that any vote should wait “until we have a new president”.
      Barrett was nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots, and who was impeached by the House of Representatives. When Barrett joins the court, five of the nine justices will have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote.
      The Republican senators who will vote for her represent 15 million fewer Americans than their Democratic colleagues.
      Once on the high court, Barrett will join five other reactionaries who together will be able to declare laws unconstitutional, for perhaps a generation.
      Barrett’s confirmation is the culmination of years in which a shrinking and increasingly conservative, rural and white segment of the US population has been imposing its will on the rest of America. They’ve been bankrolled by big business, seeking lower taxes and fewer regulations.
      In the event Joe Biden becomes president on 20 January and both houses of Congress come under control of the Democrats, they can reverse this trend. It may be the last chance – both for the Democrats and, more importantly, for American democracy.
      How?
      For starters, increase the size of the supreme court. The constitution says nothing about the number of justices. The court changed size seven times in its first 80 years, from as few as five justices under John Adams to 10 under Abraham Lincoln.
      Biden says if elected he’ll create a bipartisan commission to study a possible court overhaul “because it’s getting out of whack”. That’s fine, but he’ll need to move quickly. The window of opportunity could close by the 2022 midterm elections.
      Second, abolish the Senate filibuster. Under current rules, 60 votes are needed to enact legislation. This means that if Democrats win a bare majority there, Republicans could block any new legislation Biden hopes to pass.
      The filibuster could be ended with a rule change requiring 51 votes. There is growing support among Democrats for doing this if they gain that many seats. During the campaign, Biden acknowledged that the filibuster has become a negative force in government.
      The filibuster is not in the constitution either.
      The most ambitious structural reform would be to rebalance the Senate itself. For decades, rural states have been emptying as the US population has shifted to vast megalopolises. The result is a growing disparity in representation, especially of nonwhite voters.
      For example, both California, with a population of 40 million, and Wyoming, whose population is 579,000, get two senators. If population trends continue, by 2040 some 40% of Americans will live in just five states, and half of America will be represented by 18 Senators, the other half by 82.
      This distortion also skews the electoral college, because each state’s number of electors equals its total of senators and representatives. Hence, the recent presidents who have lost the popular vote.
      This growing imbalance can be remedied by creating more states representing a larger majority of Americans. At the least, statehood should be granted to Washington DC. And given that one out of eight Americans now lives in California – whose economy, if it were a separate country, would be the ninth-largest in the world – why not split it into a North and South California?
      The constitution is also silent on the number of states.
      Those who recoil from structural reforms such as the three I’ve outlined warn that Republicans will retaliate when they return to power. That’s rubbish. Republicans have already altered the ground rules. In 2016, they failed to win a majority of votes cast for the House, Senate or the presidency, yet secured control of all three.
      Barrett’s ascent is the latest illustration of how grotesque the power imbalance has become, and how it continues to entrench itself ever more deeply. If not reversed soon, it will be impossible to remedy.
      What’s at stake is not partisan politics. It is representative government. If Democrats get the opportunity, they must redress this growing imbalance – for the sake of democracy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US More

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      Women march against Trump and Republicans in major US cities

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      Thousands of mostly young women in masks rallied on Saturday in Washington DC and other US cities, exhorting voters to oppose Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in the 3 November elections. The latest in a series of rallies that began with a massive women’s march the day after Trump’s January 2017 inauguration was playing out during the coronavirus pandemic. Demonstrators were asked to wear face coverings and practice social distancing. Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, opened the Washington event by asking people to keep their distance from one another, saying the only superspreader event would be the recent one at the White House. She talked about the power of women to end Trump’s presidency. “His presidency began with women marching and now it’s going to end with woman voting. Period,” she said. More

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      Senators stir ghosts of Scalia and Ginsburg for Amy Coney Barrett hearing

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      Depending on your point of view, the woman seated before the Senate judiciary committee for her first day of questioning was either the female Scalia or the anti-RBG. Or maybe, of course, both.As proceedings commenced in a brightly lit and deeply sanitized hearing room, Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s third nominee to the supreme court, described herself as an originalist in the tradition of her mentor. Like the late Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked, she subscribes to a theory of constitutional interpretation that attempts to understand and apply “meaning that [the constitution] had at the time people ratified it”.That time was the 1780s, when only white and land-owning men could vote. Oddly, Scalia often produced opinions that delighted conservatives. Outside the Capitol on Tuesday, a group of conservative women gathered to sing and pray, hands extended heavenward.Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican committee chair, asked Barrett if it was appropriate to call her the “female Scalia”. She demurred.“If I am confirmed, you would not be getting Justice Scalia,” she said. “You would be getting Justice Barrett.”All of the young conservative women out there, this hearing to me is about a place for youLindsey GrahamThat, of course, is exactly what Democrats fear.In several rounds of questioning, Democratic senators portrayed the would-be justice as a rightwing crusader, chosen to undermine the civil rights legacy of the justice she hopes to replace, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon, a world-famous champion of women.Outside the Capitol on Monday, progressive activists had worn blood-red robes and bonnets, symbols of female oppression taken from The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel.Barrett has roots in a charismatic Catholic group, People of Praise, which has been cited as an inspiration for Atwood. Such citations are wrong, but in the hearing room on Tuesday Democratic senators nonetheless painted a determinedly dystopian picture, of an America ruled by a conservative court.In their telling, millions – constituents with names, faces and gut-wrenching stories the senators took took pains to tell – stand to lose access to life-saving services provided by the Affordable Care Act; poor women who cannot afford to travel for an abortion will be forced to make dangerous choices; same-sex couples may no longer have the right to marry.Barrett declined to answer questions on such issues – and in doing so, perhaps provocatively, cited RBG. A dictum Ginsburg set forth during her 1993 confirmation hearing: “No hints, no forecasts, no previews.”“These are life and death questions for people,” insisted Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the panel. Barrett’s repeated refusal to answer questions on abortion was “distressing” Feinstein said, noting that Ginsburg was far more forthcoming about her views on the issue.“I have no agenda,” Barrett said, not for the first or last time.But Donald Trump does.The president chose Barrett from a list of what he called “pro-life” judges. He has said he hopes, even expects, the court will overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion.The president tweets of what he expects a supreme court nominee to do politically for himDick DurbinThe president has also insisted he needs a ninth justice on the court before the election, in case the result is contested.“Who came up with this notion, this insulting notion, that you might violate your oath?” Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, wondered sarcastically, in response to Republicans’ accusation that his party was impugning Barrett’s judicial independence merely by asking where she stood on key issues.“Where could this idea have come from? Could it have come from the White House? Could it have come from the president’s tweets of what he expects a supreme court nominee to do politically for him? That is where it originated.”Despite it all, the hearing played out with an air of inevitability. Graham was clear. This was “the hearing to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court”, rather than the traditional opportunity to “consider” her nomination. More

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      Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain's spaniel became Trump's poodle

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      Opinion

      US Senate

      Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodle

      Sidney Blumenthal

      On Monday, the senator who praised Hillary and helped get the Steele dossier to the FBI will preside over a hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee to tilt the supreme court right for years to come. His is a quintessential Washington tale More

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      Trump deserves four more years, says ex-counsel who called him 'King Kong'

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      Don McGahn, the former White House counsel credited as an architect of Donald Trump’s makeover of the federal judiciary, has defended Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court, declaring the conservative judge he vetted was “the right person at the right time”.Perhaps more surprisingly, in a rare public appearance on Sunday McGahn also laid out why he believed Trump deserves four more years in power, despite having incurred the wrath of his former boss who blamed him for failing to protect him from the Mueller inquiry, and reportedly having compared an angry Trump to King Kong.“He promised justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia, a great justice,” McGahn told CBS’ Face the Nation. “[Barrett] clerked for Scalia, became a protege of his and I think she’s a fantastic judge. There’s no reason why the Senate shouldn’t confirm her.”McGahn resigned in October 2018, amid the special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian influence on the Trump administration, with which McGahn cooperated extensively as a witness.The Mueller report confirmed that McGahn refused orders from the president to have the special counsel fired.Trump called the allegation “fake news” but tweeted he was “never a big fan” of McGahn. Nonetheless, as White House counsel McGahn masterminded the ascension not only of two supreme court judges, Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, but also hundreds of conservatives to the federal bench.McGahn has never spoken publicly about his links with the special counsel and Trump’s orders to fire Mueller, having resisted a congressional subpoena for months before a federal appeals court ruled he was not compelled to testify.McGahn was however quoted by Michael Schmidt, a Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist, in his recent book Donald Trump v the United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President. Schmidt said McGahn insisted his cooperation with Mueller “damaged the office of the president”, not the president himself.On Sunday, Schmidt tweeted his surprise that a man who secretly insulted a president whom he said uttered “some crazy shit” would now break his silence to express public support.“Despite calling Trump ‘King Kong’ behind [his] back for unnecessary destruction and having to serve as chief witness against him in Mueller investigation, McGahn believes so much in mission of remaking federal judiciary that he says Trump deserves four more years,” Schmidt wrote.McGahn told CBS he thought Trump had earned the right to a second term.“He had the economy going wonderfully [before the coronavirus pandemic hit], he made a number of promises on the campaign trail that he kept,” he said.“One is his judicial selection, which he’s done. He’s set a record number of judges on there, on the circuit courts, and this really matters.” More