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      in US Politics

      'They won't be able to do anything about this': McConnell revels in Barrett supreme court vote

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      “By tomorrow night,” Mitch McConnell told Senate Republicans on Sunday, after they voted to limit debate and advance the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, “we’ll have a new member of the United States supreme court.
      “A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election,” the majority leader said on the Senate floor. “They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”
      The Republican was alluding to the possibility, largely backed by polling data, that Democrats will take back the White House and the Senate on 3 November.
      Sunday’s vote moved the Senate closer to a final vote on Donald Trump’s third supreme court nominee, a little more than a week before the election. The confirmation vote is expected on Monday evening.
      Two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, opposed limiting debate. But Murkowski said on Saturday she intends to vote to confirm.
      “I have no doubt about her capability to do the job and to do it well,” she said.
      No nominee has ever been confirmed this close to an election. More than 58 million ballots have already been cast.
      Democrats boycotted the committee vote on Thursday that advanced the nomination. Ahead of Monday night’s vote, they expressed concerns about the risks of contracting Covid-19, after several Republican staffers and members of Vice-President Mike Pence’s team tested positive. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer urged Democrats not to congregate in the chamber and to cast their votes “quickly and from a safe distance”.
      McConnell twice declined to answer questions about whether Pence would come to the chamber to preside on Monday. At a rally in Florida on Saturday, however, Pence said: “I wouldn’t miss that vote for the world.”
      Schumer said Pence “reportedly intends to come”, and blasted him for being willing to put “the health of everyone who works in this building at risk”.
      “It sets a terrible, terrible example to the American people,” the New York Democrat said. “The Republican party is willing to ignore the pandemic to rush this supreme court nomination forward.”
      Brian Schatz, a senator for Hawaii, told a reporter: “It is clear to me that their closing message is that they’re going to personally deliver Covid to as many people as possible.”
      Republicans did not appear concerned.
      “We’ve done a very good job within the Senate to follow the guidelines as best we can and I think the vice-president will do the same,” said Mike Rounds of South Dakota, adding that Pence was “very responsible”.
      On Sunday the White House said Pence did not have to follow federal guidelines and quarantine for 14 days because he was an essential worker. Pence continued campaigning.
      With Barrett, the supreme court will have a 6-3 conservative majority that could last for years. In the short term, Barrett could weigh in on cases involving the election. Trump has said he believes the court will decide the election and has made clear he wants Barrett on the bench for any such cases.
      Barrett is also likely to participate in oral arguments on 10 November, in which Trump and fellow Republicans are asking the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, the health law known as Obamacare, in the middle of a pandemic which has infected 8.5m and killed 224,000.
      A favourite of Christian conservatives, Barrett frustrated judiciary committee Democrats this month by sidestepping questions on abortion, presidential powers, climate change, voting rights, Obamacare and other issues. She has criticized rulings upholding Obamacare but said during her confirmation she has no agenda to invalidate the measure.
      Democrats were incensed that Republicans moved forward with Barrett’s confirmation so near an election, after refusing in 2016 to act on a nomination by Barack Obama, because it was an election year. Republicans are hoping Barrett’s confirmation can give a boost to Trump and senators seeking re-election.
      Democrats are considering structural reform to the Senate and the court, should they win back control. Republicans claim such reforms, including expansion of the court, would be dangerous.
      Barrett, 48, has been a federal appeals court judge since 2017 . Before that she was a legal scholar at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Trump touted her nomination at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Sunday.
      “We’re giving you a great new supreme court justice,” he said. More

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      in Elections

      'Sue if you must': Lincoln Project rejects threat over Kushner and Ivanka billboards

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      The Lincoln Project “will not be intimidated by empty bluster”, a lawyer for the group wrote late on Saturday, in response to a threat from an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner over two billboards put up in Times Square.“Sue if you must,” Matthew Sanderson said.The New York City billboards show the president’s daughter and her husband, both senior White House advisers, displaying apparent indifference to public suffering under Covid-19.Kushner is shown next to the quote “[New Yorkers] are going to suffer and that’s their problem”, above a line of body bags. Trump is shown gesturing, with a smile, to statistics for how many New Yorkers and Americans as a whole have died.According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 8.5m coronavirus cases have been recorded across the US and more than 224,000 have died. Case numbers are at record daily levels and one study has predicted 500,000 deaths by February. New York was hit hard at the pandemic’s outset.The Lincoln Project is a group of former Republican consultants who have made it their mission to attack Donald Trump and support Joe Biden.On Friday, Marc Kasowitz, an attorney who has represented the president against allegations of fraud and sexual assault, wrote to the Lincoln Project, demanding the “false, malicious and defamatory” ads be removed, or “we will sue you for what will doubtless be enormous compensatory and punitive damages”.The Lincoln Project responded that they would not remove the billboards, citing first amendment rights of free speech and the “reckless mismanagement of Covid-19” by the Trump White House.In a legal response on Saturday night, attorney Matthew Sanderson told Kasowitz: “Please peddle your scare tactics elsewhere. The Lincoln Project will not be intimidated by such empty bluster … your clients are no longer Upper East Side socialites, able to sue at the slightest offense to their personal sensitivities.”Due to a “gross act of nepotism”, Sanderson wrote, citing supreme court precedent and “substantial constitutional protections for those who speak out”, Trump and Kushner have become public officials whom Americans “have the right to discuss and criticise freely”.Kasowitz claimed Kushner “never said” the words attributed to him on the billboards, and Trump “never made the gesture” she is shown to make.Vanity Fair reported the Kushner quote, from a meeting in March, in which Kushner criticised New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Trump tweeted the pose used by the Lincoln Project in July, controversially promoting Goya foods.The “bruised self-image” of the president’s daughter, Sanderson wrote, “does not change the fact that this billboard accurately depicts her support of a federal response that has utterly failed to prevent an unmitigated tragedy for the United States”.“May I suggest,” he added, “that if Mr Kushner and Ms Trump are genuinely concerned about salvaging their reputations, they would do well to stop suppressing truthful criticism and instead turn their attention to the Covid-19 crisis that is still unfolding under their inept watch.“These billboards are not causing [their] standing with the public to plummet. Their incompetence is.”A footnote to Sanderson’s letter cited “one of the seminal libel-proof plaintiff cases”, that of a well-known mobster whose reputation was “so tarnished … he could claim no damages for defamation”.“Mr Kushner and Ms Trump’s claims will fare no better than Boobie Cerasini’s given their tarnished reputations on Covid-19,” it said.Sanderson also said “this isn’t over” and added: “Sue if you must.”As University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the Guardian on Saturday, that seems unlikely.Donald Trump “has honed litigation abuse, as a business person and president, to an art form,” Tobias said. But “if they did sue, the litigation might take years to resolve, be expensive and lead to embarrassing revelations … suits like this by people who have thrust themselves into the public eye are notoriously difficult to win.“In short, this appears to be the usual Trump family bluster.” More

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      in US Politics

      'Deep down, he's a terrified little boy': Bob Woodward, John Bolton and others on Trump

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      Bob Woodward: ‘I can’t think of a time I’ve felt more anxiety about the presidency’Bob Woodward is associate editor of the Washington Post and the author of 20 books on American politics. In 50 years as a journalist he has covered nine presidents. His reporting on the Watergate break-in and cover-up with his colleague Carl Bernstein helped bring down Richard Nixon and won the Post a Pulitzer prize. His latest book about Donald Trump, Rage, is based on 10 hours of interviews, spread over 19 taped phone calls, often initiated by the president himself, in which Trump proved “only too willing to blow the whistle on himself”, as the Observer’s review noted.There is an atmosphere in Washington of high anxiety. Trump is melting down, to put it charitably. His campaign has been about lashing out, about wanting his former political opponents – President Obama and Joe Biden, who’s now running against him, of course – to be indicted then charged. Then there was his announcement that he is not necessarily going to accept the electoral result against him. The idea that the president would put in doubt the basic process of democracy and voting is not only unacceptable, it is a nightmare. More

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      in US Politics

      '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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      in US Politics

      From climate to China, how Joe Biden is plotting America’s restoration

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      By any measure, Joe Biden is old in the ways of the world. As Barack Obama’s vice-president, he met all the big international actors. As chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, he helped direct US foreign policy.
      After four years of Donald Trump’s manic leadership, the Democrat offers a steady, dependable hand on the tiller. Biden’s grand aim: a glorious American restoration, at home and abroad.
      But his long experience cuts both ways. For many on the left, Biden’s conventional global outlook represents not so much a new dawn as a return to the Washington establishment-led policies of the pre-Trump era.
      Those hoping for radical action on pressing issues such as the climate crisis, global inequality, or confronting authoritarian “strongman” leaders could be disappointed.
      If he wins, Biden’s supporters say, America will be back in charge at the global helm. Normal service will resume. Biden’s critics say he is but a pale shadow of his old boss – a cautious, centrist politician like Obama but lacking the latter’s vision.
      In either case, who Biden selects to be his secretary of state, national security adviser and defence secretary could be crucial.
      Pressure from Democratic party progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pushed Biden leftwards during the campaign.
      The twin health and economic crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic also shifted his thinking. He now talks about “reimagining” America’s relationship with the world.
      Whether his views have really changed remains to be seen. And for all his foreign policy expertise, it’s clear Biden’s primary focus, if elected, will be domestic.
      Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine earlier this year, he set out a “foreign policy for the middle class” whose top priority was “enabling Americans to succeed in the global economy”.
      Strengthening the US at home was a prerequisite for restoring global leadership, he said. His priorities were plain.
      The idea that America must and should lead internationally, and that Trump “abdicated” that duty, is nevertheless hard-wired into Biden, a child of the cold war.
      This assumption of supremacy is challenged nowadays by those who believe post-1989 and post-9/11 US leadership, and particularly its armed interventions abroad, have served neither the US nor the world. They point to Iraq – a war Biden supported. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden gains as suburban women and elderly voters look to dump Trump

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      Joe Biden’s hopes of reaching the White House could rest on two crucial demographic groups that appear to be deserting Donald Trump: elderly people and suburban women.
      They would join a broad coalition that includes strong support among African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, the LGBTQ community and young people. With the gender gap potentially bigger than ever, the president appears more reliant than ever on white men.
      Little more than a week before election day, Biden enjoys a double-digit lead in almost every national poll and is ahead in the crucial battleground states. More than 52 million people have already voted, according to the US Elections Project.
      In the past four presidential elections, Republicans have led among the elderly by around 10 points. But about four in five Americans killed by the coronavirus were older than 65 and a majority of Americans say Trump has mishandled the pandemic.
      The president trails among elderly voters by more than 20 points, according to recent CNN and Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls. This swing could prove critical in states such as Arizona and Florida, which have a high number of retirees.
      “In terms of voting blocs, there are two that are absolutely dooming Donald Trump,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.
      “He won the senior vote by seven points in 2016; that was very important in Florida and a few other states. He’s now losing that bloc and the polls differ about how much, but the fact that he no longer has an advantage among seniors is really crippling for him.
      “And then he has so alienated suburban women that it’s put a whole number of states in play, including states you wouldn’t expect, like Georgia. This kind of macho presidency has gotten the ringing rejection by women, particularly educated women who are so tired of the 1950s.”
      The suburban revolt against Trump’s bigotry, hardline agenda and chaotic leadership was manifest in the 2018 midterm elections when Democrats gained 41 seats in the House of Representatives, the biggest such shift since the post-Watergate 1974 elections, and won the popular vote by 8.6%.
      Trump’s campaign to win back this constituency, variously known as “soccer moms”, “security moms” and “hockey moms”, has been anything but subtle. He has tried to tap racist fears of suburbs overrun by crime, violence and low-income housing. In one tweet, he promised to protect “the Suburban Housewives of America”. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he pleaded: “Suburban women, will you please like me? Remember? Hey, please, I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”

      Polls suggest the plea is falling on deaf ears. Biden leads by 23 points among suburban women in swing states, according to the New York Times and Siena College, and by 19 points among suburban women overall, according to Pew Research. Pew also found that Hispanic women prefer Biden by 44 points and Black women go for the Democrat by a staggering 85 points.
      Andrea Moore, 45, a stay-at-home mom in suburban Wayne county, Michigan, voted for Trump in 2016 because she was tired of career politicians.
      “He was an unknown quantity, but now we know,” she told the Associated Press, explaining that she will not vote for the president again because of “a million little things” including his divisiveness, fearmongering and failed Covid-19 response.
      The trends were underlined this week by a national survey of 2,538 Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that showed Trump haemorrhaging support among the elderly and suburban women as well as another, less expected group: white Catholics.
      Only 38% of people aged 65 or older approve of Trump’s handling of the pandemic while 61% say they disapprove, the PRRI found. Among white college-educated women, seven in 10 disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, seven in 10 disapprove of his response to racial justice protests and a similar share believe he has encouraged white supremacists.
      There are also signs of erosion among religious conservatives, a bulwark of Trump’s base. PRRI found that while three in four (76%) white evangelical Protestants still approve of the job Trump is doing, only 52% of white mainline Protestants and 49% of white Catholics agree. Biden would be only the second Catholic president.
      Robert P Jones, chief executive and founder of PRRI, said: “White Catholics are a group that particularly in those swing rust belt states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio – are really on the president’s must-win list. They’re also important in a place like Arizona. They are as big or bigger than white evangelicals in those states, so in terms of religious groups they are quite an important constituency.
      “White Catholics in 2016 were basically evenly divided between Trump and Hillary Clinton at this stage in the race. We have them at 54% Biden, 41% Trump, so that’s a sea change. This group is going to play an outsized role in Trump’s path to the electoral college and he’s not doing well with them at all.”
      Clinton was beaten in the electoral college after suffering heavy losses among non-college-educated white voters – a majority of the population in battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – and failing to turn out African Americans at levels Barack Obama achieved. Current polling suggests Biden will do better on both accounts. More

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      in US Politics

      Kleptopia review: power, theft and Trump as leader in Putin’s own image

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      In a year dominated by a US presidential election between a kleptocrat and a democrat, a book about world-class thieves laundering trillions ought be the perfect bedtime reading for anyone curious about the unprecedented amounts of money that have been looted and hidden over the last 20 years.Tom Burgis, a reporter for the Financial Times, is certainly an impressive investigator. He works hard to explain how myriad financial institutions, from the Bank of New York to Merrill Lynch and HSBC, have tried to deceive regulators and wash the ill-gotten gains of countless dictators.The oligarchs of Putin’s Russia are big players in these pages. So are Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, British bankers turned regulators, a trio of Central Asian billionaires, and no fewer than 30 other major characters, all listed at the beginning.This results in so many competing storylines that it becomes almost impossible to keep track. We bounce back and forth, from the Russian and Italian gangsters of Brooklyn to the oil fields of the former Soviet Union, from the platinum mines of Zimbabwe to the copper and cobalt of the Congo.Burgis draws useful parallels between Putin’s kleptocracy and Hitler’s GermanyThere are long sections about the wholesale theft of natural resources in post-Soviet Russia and the birth of the oligarchs, all of whom were forced to become Putin’s partners – or face imprisonment or death. For example, the purchase of a three-quarter stake in Yukos, for $350m, made Mikhail Khodorkovsky the richest man in Russia. Five years later, the vast oil company with 100,000 employees was worth $12bn. Khodorkovsky was arrested, jailed and eventually sent into exile.Burgis draws useful parallels between Putin’s kleptocracy and Hitler’s Germany, each home to both a “normative state” that generally respects its own laws and a “prerogative state” that violates most of them.According to the German-Jewish lawyer who was the author of the theory in the 1930s, “Nazi Germany was not a straightforward totalitarian system. It retained some vestiges of the rule of law, chiefly in matters of business, so that the capitalist economy had the basic rules it needed to keep going. But the prerogative state – Hitler’s political machinery – enjoyed … ‘jurisdiction over jurisdiction.”Trump helped to construct a new ‘global alliance of kleptocrats’. Their whole goal is the privatization of powerPutin has used his jurisdiction over everything to vanquish almost all of his enemies. And since Donald Trump has been collaborating with Russians in one way or another for almost 40 years, our kleptocrat-in-chief does finally make an appearance in Kleptopia, on page 250. After we’ve read a lot about Felix Sater, a second-generation Russian mobster connected to several schemes including the Trump Soho in lower Manhattan, Trump is identified as the “crucial ingredient” in Sater’s “magic potion for transforming dirty money”.Once the ratings of The Apprentice had washed away the public memory of multiple bankruptcies and “reinvented” his name as “a success”, Trump’s role in real estate deals became simply to “rent out his name”.“The projects could go bust,” Burgis writes, and “they usually did – but that wasn’t a problem.” The money had completed “its metamorphoses from plunder to clean capital”.Then there was the notorious sale of Trump’s Palm Beach mansion, to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95m, more than twice what Trump paid a few years before. According to Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, Trump thought the real buyer was Putin – a story which hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it should.With his election as president, as Burgis puts it, Trump helped to construct a new “global alliance of kleptocrats”. Their whole goal is the privatization of power, and they control “the three great poles” – the US, China and Russia.In our new world of alternate facts, corruption is “no longer a sign of a failing state, but of a state succeeding in its new purpose”. The new kleptocrats have subverted their nations’ institutions, “to seize for themselves that which rightfully belonged to the commonwealth”.This is a ghastly and very important story. But the secret to great storytelling is knowing what to leave out. If Burgis had found a more focused way to tell this one, he would have written a much more powerful book. More

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      in US Politics

      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