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      Conservatives' assault on the supreme court is a judicial tragedy in the making | Shira A Scheindlin

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      On Saturday, Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to become an associate justice of the supreme court, to fill the seat vacated by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In one stroke he violated long-held precedents regarding filling supreme court vacancies, undermined the confidence of the American people in the legitimacy of the court, and ensured that the court will turn back decades of progress in civil rights.This nomination is unprecedented. No justice has been confirmed to a seat on the court during an election year when a vacancy occurred after June. Yet when a vacancy occurred in February 2016 – an election year – the Republican majority in the Senate refused to even consider Barack Obama’s March nomination of Merrick Garland. In fact, when Antonin Scalia died, Obama waited a month to make a nomination out of respect for the mourning process. This time, Trump announced within a day of Ginsburg’s death that he would fill the seat immediately and then made his nomination just a week later.In a naked acknowledgment of his true motivation, Trump recently said that the country needs a ninth justice because the pending election could well end up before the court and a 4-4 court would be a bad thing. Yet, in 2016, the Republicans were content with a 4-4 court with an election around the corner. Indeed, Republicans threatened that if Hillary Clinton won the election, no new justice would be confirmed, leaving the court with only eight justices throughout her term.This election is already in progress with thousands (and soon millions) of Americans voting during what will inevitably be a highly contentious confirmation process. This process will inevitably affect the election and thereby politicize the supreme court as never before. The political branches of our government – the executive and legislative branches – are elected by voters; the court, on the other hand, is supposed to be non-partisan. While appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress, the justices are not beholden to any political party but rather to the rule of law.This is no longer the case. Public confidence and public perception that the courts are non-partisan has eroded. The Republican boycott of Garland, together with Trump’s unprecedented nomination of Barrett and her likely confirmation, will seal the Republican theft of two supreme court seats, at least in the eyes of more than half the electorate, and will ensure conservative control of the court for decades to come.If Barrett’s record is any indication, the court will soon turn its back on its most treasured precedents and turn America into a more regressive country. Before joining the bench just three years ago, she served as a law clerk to Scalia, whose judicial philosophy she has fully embraced. She has also been a longtime member of the rightwing Federalist Society.Public confidence and public perception that the courts are non-partisan has erodedHer short judicial record, together with her scholarly writings, reveal that she is a rock-solid conservative jurist. Like Scalia, she defines herself as an originalist and textualist, which means that the constitution must be viewed as of the time it was written. From that perspective, there is nothing in the constitution that would explicitly support abortion rights, gay marriage, mandatory school desegregation, or the right to suppress evidence that is illegally seized. By contrast, in one of her most famous opinions, United States v Virginia (1996), Ginsburg wrote that “a prime part of the history of our constitution … is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded.”In a 2013 article, Barrett repeatedly expressed the view that the supreme court had created, through judicial fiat, a framework of abortion on demand that ignited a national controversy. In an opinion she joined with another judge, she expressed doubt that a law preventing parents from terminating a pregnancy because they did not want a child of a particular sex or one with a disability could be unconstitutional. These writings surely indicate that Barrett will do whatever she can to limit or eliminate abortion rights.Barrett has also expressed dissatisfaction with the Affordable Care Act and support for a broad interpretation of the second amendment. She has written that Chief Justice John Roberts “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning”. She also quoted Scalia, when he wrote that “the statute known as Obamacare should be renamed ‘Scotuscare’” in “honor of the court’s willingness to ‘rewrite’ the statute in order to keep it afloat”. There is little doubt that Barrett would be inclined to find the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional and thereby deprive millions of Americans of affordable healthcare coverage. Similarly, she wrote a dissenting opinion questioning the constitutionality of a statute that prohibited ex-felons from purchasing guns. Thus, she has demonstrated her fealty to the NRA position that the more guns the better – inevitably leading to more Americans dying from gun violence.When addressing the legal doctrine known as stare decisis, meaning respect for precedent, Barrett wrote that she “tend[ed] to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the constitution rather than a precedent she thinks is clearly in conflict with it”. In other words, she would overturn landmark decisions such as Brown v Board of Education or Roe v Wade if those decisions did not reflect her best understanding of the constitution.Stunningly, in an interview in 2016, when asked whether Congress should confirm Obama’s nominee during an election year, Barrett responded that confirmation should wait until after the election because an immediate replacement would “dramatically flip the balance of power”. Given that answer, she should decline the nomination, as her confirmation would even more dramatically flip the balance of the court, entrenching a 6-3 conservative majority.Confirming this nominee before the outcome of the national elections – which will determine both the identity of the next president and the composition of a new Senate – is unprecedented, inexcusable and a threat to many rights that the majority of Americans have embraced. This is a tragedy about to happen. More

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      in US Politics

      CDC director takes aim at Trump's Covid adviser: 'Everything he says is false'

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      The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was overheard on a phone conversation aboard a commercial flight saying a lead member of Donald Trump’s coronavirus taskforce has been spreading misinformation about the pandemic.Robert Redfield was overheard by an employee of NBC News on a flight from Atlanta to Washington. According to NBC, Redfield criticized Scott Atlas, a radiologist and Fox News talking head added to the taskforce last month.“Everything he says is false,” Redfield said about Atlas, NBC reported. Redfield later confirmed he had been talking about Atlas.Confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in the United States have passed 200,000 and the number of cases has passed 7m.Atlas, who has no background in infectious diseases but who appears to have the best current access to Trump of any medical adviser, has been frequently criticized by the scientific and medical communities for offering what public health professionals say is bad advice about coronavirus.On Monday afternoon, the top US public health expert and infectious diseases lead on the taskforce, Anthony Fauci, chimed in to tell CNN he was concerned that Atlas was at times providing misleading or incorrect information on the pandemic to Trump.“Well, yeah, I’m concerned that sometimes things are said that are really taken either out of context or are actually incorrect,” Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said when asked in an interview if he was worried Atlas was sharing misleading information.Atlas has misleadingly called into question the efficacy of masks and social distancing, has echoed Trump’s call for reopening schools, and perhaps most controversially has supported the purposeful contraction of the virus by young people to create so-called “herd immunity”.Public health experts warn that the viability of a “herd immunity” against coronavirus without a vaccine is unknown, given uncertainty about levels and duration of immunity in individual cases. They also say that achieving “herd immunity” would involve millions of infections and unknown thousands of cases of serious illness and death.Atlas is a former Stanford medicine professor and a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University.His controversial statements drew an open letter from 78 former colleagues at Stanford medical school, who warned that his advice was dangerous.“Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science, and, by doing so, undermine public-health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy,” the letter said.Asked to respond to Redfield’s comments, Atlas told NBC News: “Everything I have said is directly from the data and the science.”In the judgment of Redfield and other specialists, that is not true. The CDC said NBC News heard only “one side” of Redfield’s conversation, but did not dispute the report.“NBC News is reporting one side of a private phone conversation … overheard on a plane from Atlanta Hartsfield airport,” the CDC said. “Dr Redfield was having a private discussion regarding a number of points he has made publicly about Covid-19.”On Monday afternoon, Atlas had spoken alongside the president at a coronavirus progress briefing, while his better-known White House taskforce public health expert colleagues, Fauci and Deborah Birx, were nowhere to be seen.Atlas insisted the country has a handle on the virus even though the US death toll surpassed 200,000 last week, and public health experts have admitted the pandemic is still out of control.But Redfield, who was also absent from the Monday White House briefing, had said “we’re nowhere near the end” of the pandemic, NBC reported.Cases are currently rising in 21 states and Vice-President Mike Pence, at the Monday briefing in the Rose Garden, said: “The American people should anticipate that cases will rise in the days ahead.”CNN later tweeted that when asked in an interview on Monday if the taskforce was working together or against each other, in light of the controversy over Atlas, Fauci responded: “Most are working together. I think you know who the outlier is,” in an assumed nod to Atlas.Meanwhile, Trump called the briefing to talk about a rollout of millions of rapid, easily administered Covid-19 tests, which he had already announced in August. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump again claims US 'rounding the corner' on Covid as Pence warns of cases rising – live

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      Vice-president says numbers will climb in coming days
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      Brad Parscale, former Trump campaign manager, hospitalised after self-harm threats

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      Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale has been hospitalised after he threatened to harm himself, according to Florida police and campaign officials.Police were called to the home in Desota Drive in the Seven Isles community of Fort Lauderdale late on Sunday afternoon. The home is owned by Bradley and Candice Parscale.“When officers arrived on scene, they made contact with the reportee (wife of armed subject) who advised her husband was armed, had access to multiple firearms inside the residence and was threatening to harm himself,” Fort Lauderdale police said in a statement.“Officers determined the only occupant inside the home was the adult male. Officers made contact with the male, developed a rapport, and safely negotiated for him to exit the home.”Police identified the man as Parscale. He did not threaten police and accompanied officers willingly under Florida’s Baker Act, which gives police the power to detain a person who poses a potential threat to themselves or others for 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation.On Monday afternoon, police body-cam footage was released of Parscale being dramatically taken down and handcuffed by police.Parscale was taken to Broward Health medical center.The number and nature of the firearms in the Parscale home was not known.Fort Lauderdale’s mayor, Dean Trantalis, said he had been informed there was a Swat team standoff at Parscale’s home.“It was indicated to me that he had weapons,” Trantalis told the Sun-Sentinel.“I’m glad he didn’t do any harm to himself or others. I commend our Swat team for being able to negotiate a peaceful ending to this.”Parscale was removed as Trump’s campaign manager in July after a much-hyped campaign rally in Tulsa attracted an embarrassingly sparse crowd.He was replaced by the then deputy campaign manager, Bill Stepien, but has stayed on as a senior adviser to the campaign. On his Twitter account Parscale describes himself as “senior adviser, digital and data” for Donald Trump.The Trump campaign communications director, Tim Murtaugh, issued a statement late on Sunday offering support to Parscale.“Brad Parscale is a member of our family and we all love him. We are ready to support him and his family in any way possible.”A police report on Monday noted that officers were called by a woman reporting that Parscale had been heard “ranting and raving about something” before a gunshot was fired.Candice Parscale told police that she ran from the house because she was alarmed by her husband’s behavior, local TV station WPLG reported.According to the report, Parscale began to barricade himself inside the home, hanging up on callers, the police report said, adding that he later spoke to police negotiators.“I initiated a double leg take down,” wrote Sgt Matthew Moceri, a responding officer, noting that the 6ft 8in Parscale towered over him and would not get on the ground.When officers initially arrived, Candice Parscale said the couple had argued and Brad pulled out a handgun and loaded it.She said he had post-traumatic stress disorder and had recently become violent, showing police bruises on her arms from an argument two days prior. Police photographed the injuries, they said, and the Miami Herald reported.In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255, or you can text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counsellor. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. More

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      in World Politics

      The Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

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      Reporting on a defamation trial brought against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Business Insider notes a rare but significant crack in the facade of contemporary media that could, if we were to pay attention, help to deconstruct the reigning hyperreality that has in recent decades overwhelmed public discourse in the US.

      To maintain its control not just of our lives but of our perception of the environment and culture in which we live, the political class as a whole, in connivance with the media, has created the illusion that when people speak in public — and especially on TV or radio — they are essentially engaged in delivering their sincere opinion and sharing their understanding of the world. They may be mistaken or even wrong about what they claim, but the public has been taught to give any articulate American credit for standing up for what they believe.

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      We have been told that this respect for public personalities’ freedom of expression serves a democratic purpose. It allows for productive debate to develop, as different interpretations vie and eventually converge to establish a truth that legitimately supports variable faces and facets. Though they generally try to avoid it, when Americans happen to hear the opinion or the analysis of a person they don’t agree with, they may simply oppose that point of view rather than listen to it, but they also tend to feel sorry for that person’s inability to construe reality correctly.

      In other words, the default position concerning freedom of speech has traditionally maintained that a person’s discourse may be wrong, biased or misinformed, but only in exceptional cases should the sincerity of the speaker be called into question. For this very reason, US President Donald Trump’s supporters may think that many of the things he says could be erroneous, but they assume that their hero is at least being sincere. They even consider that when his ravings contradict the science or reasoning of other informed voices, his insistence is proof of his sincerity. They admire him for it.

      In contrast, Trump’s enemies want us to believe he is unique and the opposite of the truthtellers on their side. But Trump is far from alone. He just pushes the trend of exaggerating the truth and developing unfounded arguments further than his opponents or even his friends. And because he shakes off all challenges, his fans see him as that much more authentic and sincere than everyone else.

      And so the hyperreal system maintains itself without the need of resorting to objective reality. That may explain why the ruling of the judge in favor of Carlson seems to jar with the rules of the hyperreal game. A former Playboy model accused Carlson of defamation. Here is how Business Insider framed the case: “A federal judge on Wednesday [September 23] dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously.” In the judge’s words, “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Reasonable viewer:

      An imaginary human being considered to be capable of critical thinking when sitting in front of an American news broadcast on television, contradicting all empirical evidence that shows no such person has ever existed

      Contextual Note

      The idea of a “reasonable viewer” is similar to the equally nonexistent “homo economicus,” a concept dear to economists who want the public to believe that markets represent the ultimate expression of human rationality. They imagine a world in which all people do nothing other than pursue their enlightened and informed self-interest.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The judge in the Carlson case is one of those rare Americans who understand that all the news — and Fox News par excellence — is entertainment. But what he fails to acknowledge is that broadcast “news” has become a consciously tendentious form of entertainment that privileges emotion over reason and has an insidious impact on people’s civic behavior. 

      Whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, no complex story exists that cannot be reduced to the kind of binary conflict its viewers expect to hear about and resonate to. That means nothing could be more unreasonable than to believe there is such a thing as a “reasonable viewer,” especially one who refuses to take Carlson “seriously.”

      In other words, the judge is right to highlight the fundamental triviality — or, worse, the hyperreal character of most TV news and Carlson in particular — but wrong to think it appeals to “reasonable” viewers or that reasonable viewers, if they exist at all, are even aware of it.

      Historical Note

      Throughout the history of the US in the 20th century, media fluctuated between a sense of vocation in reporting fundamentally factual stories and one of serving the needs of propaganda either of the government or of political parties. There has long been a distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, though throughout the 20th century, the distinction applied more to the editorial pages in which columnists had the liberty to express their particular bias than to reporting of the news itself.

      Quentin Fottrell, in an article for Market Watch published in 2019, described the process by which, in his words, “U.S. news has shifted to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion.” He sums up the findings of a study by the Rand Corporation in these terms: “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.”

      Significantly, the Rand study found that the very language used in reporting had evolved: “Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning.” This points to the core issue in the shift that has taken place. Over the past 20 years, “broadcast news became more focused on-air personalities and talking heads debating the news.” This indicates a deliberate intention of news media to appeal to emotion rather than reason, even to the exclusion of any form of critical thinking.

      Fottrell notes the significance of the year 2000, a moment at which “ratings of all three major cable networks in the U.S. began to increase dramatically.” When the focus turns to ratings — the unique key to corporate income — the traditional vocation of informing the public takes a back seat. He quotes a patent attorney who studied media bias and found that the “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases.”

      The “worst instincts” are also known as the lowest common denominator. According to the logic of monopoly that guides all big corporations in the US, the standard strategy for a news outlet is to identify a broad target audience and then seek to develop a message that stretches from the high-profile minority who have an economic or professional interest in the political agenda to the dimmest and least discerning of a consumer public who are moved by “fear and tribalism.”

      It’s a winning formula because the elite segment of the target audience, a tiny minority of interested parties who are capable of understanding the issues and the stakes, willingly participate in the dumbing down of the news with the goal of using emotion to attract the least discerning to the causes they identify with and profit from economically and politically. 

      Just as the average Fox News viewer has no objective interest in Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or his permanent campaign to gut health care but will be easily incited to see the president as the champion of their lifestyle, the average MSNBC viewer will endorse the Wall Street bias of establishment Democrats always intent on eschewing serious reforms, citing the fact that they are too expensive. They do so only because MSNBC has excited their emotions against the arch-villain Trump.

      It isn’t as if reasonable viewers didn’t exist. The news networks have banished them to pursue their interests on the internet or simply replaced anything that resembles reason by pure emotion.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'

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      Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign has been accused of actively seeking to deter 3.5 million black Americans in battleground states from voting by deliberately targeting them with negative Hillary Clinton ads on Facebook.The secret effort concentrated on 16 swing states, several narrowly won by Trump after the black Democrat vote collapsed.The claims have come from an investigation by Channel 4 News, which was leaked a copy of a vast election database it says was used by the Trump campaign in 2016.Comprising the records of 198 million Americans, and containing details about their domestic and economic status acquired from market research firms, the investigation claimed voters were segmented into eight categories.One was marked “deterrence”. Those placed in the special category – voters thought likely to vote for Clinton or not at all – were disproportionately black.According to the investigation, the Trump campaign’s goal was to dissuade them from backing the Democrat entirely by targeting them with “dark adverts” on their Facebook feeds, which heavily attacked Clinton and, in some cases, argued she lacked sympathy with African Americans.The effort is said to have been devised in part by Cambridge Analytica, the notorious election consultant that ceased trading last year following revelations that it used dirty tricks to help win elections around the world and had gained unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles.In Michigan, a state that Trump won by 10,000 votes, 15% of voters are black. But they represented 33% of the special deterrence category in the secret database, meaning black voters were apparently disproportionately targeted by anti-Clinton ads.In Wisconsin, where the Republicans won by 30,000, 5.4% of voters are black, but 17% of the deterrence group. According the Channel 4, that amounted to more than a third of black voters in the state overall, all placed in the group to be sent anti-Clinton material on their Facebook feeds.Attacks ads that were used by Trump’s digital campaign included one known as the “super-predator” commercial, featuring a video clip of controversial remarks made by Clinton in 1996, which the Republicans claimed referred to African Americans.Arguing that it was necessary “to have an organised effort against gangs”, and their members Clinton said: “They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators – no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”The Democrat apologised for using those words shortly after being confronted by Black Lives Matter activists about them in February 2016, but the language was picked up by Trump during the campaign and heavily recycled online.Another attack ad reportedly came from a political action committee also run by Cambridge Analytica. It features a young black woman who appears to be a Clinton supporter abandoning her script to say: “I just don’t believe what I’m saying.”When reminded that she is an actor, she replies that she is “not that good” of an actorJamal Watkins, the vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said it was shocking and troubling that there was a covert attempt to suppress the black vote in 2016.“So, we use data – similar to voter file data – but it’s to motivate, persuade and encourage folks to participate. We don’t use the data to say who can we deter and keep at home. That just seems, fundamentally, it’s a shift from the notion of democracy,” Watkins told Channel 4.It is estimated that 2 million black voters across the US who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 did not turn out for Hillary Clinton. In Wisconsin, Trump’s vote matched Mitt Romney’s in 2012, but Clinton lost because her vote collapsed. The Democrat polled 230,000 votes fewer than Obama.Key to the Trump victory was putting off black voters in cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In one city ward, where 80% of its 1,440 voters were black, almost half or 44% of the ward was marked as for deterrence, a total of 636 people, 90% of whom were black.Many other factors accounted for Clinton’s defeat, including legislation that was accused of suppressing the black vote.Again, in Wisconsin, the Republican-run state has introduced measures requiring citizens to produce valid voter identification, which it was argued disproportionately affected poor and black voters.The Trump campaign spent $44m (£34m) on Facebook advertising and generated 6m adverts overall. But the passage of time has meant that only a handful of the attack ads used by the Trump campaign have been recorded, and Facebook will not say how many or which ads were used at the time.The company said that “since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook – what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn’t happen today”. It added that it now has “rules prohibiting voter suppression” and was “running the largest voter information campaign in American history”.The Trump campaign, the Republican national committee and the White House all declined to comment.A senior official in the the Trump campaign has previously denied any targeted campaigns against individual groups. More

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      How Catholics Can Tilt the US Election

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      Few Americans these days are likely to recognize the name Thomas Nast. Yet in the Civil War era, Nast was arguably the most famous cartoonist in the United States, responsible for creating and popularizing iconic images, such as “jolly St. Nick” (aka Santa Claus), Uncle Sam and the donkey and the elephant — symbols of the Democrats and Republicans ever since. Nast’s fame was reflected in the Overseas Press Club of America’s decision, in 1978, to name their annual award for best cartoons on international affairs after him.

      Yet 40 years later, the Press Club decided to wipe Nast’s name clean of the official title of the award. This came at the heel of the controversy, a few years earlier, provoked by Nast’s nomination for induction into New Jersey’s Hall of Fame. The nomination, his third in four years, once again ended in failure, despite Nast’s merits of having exposed the corruption of New York’s infamous Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, and despite his commitment to the anti-slavery cause and racial equality.

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      Unfortunately, Nast had a serious blind spot: a pronounced hostility to the country’s Catholic, and particularly Irish Catholic immigrant, community. Nast routinely portrayed the Irish as drunkards with ape-like features, bent on creating havoc; one cartoon has an Irishman sitting on a powder keg, a bottle in one hand, a torch in the other. His famous cartoon, “The American River Ganges,” was a perfect expression of the way Protestant Americans viewed the influx of European Catholics. It depicts Catholic bishops as crocodiles crawling onto American shores bent on attacking innocent schoolchildren.

      Blind Spot

      Nast’s kind of bigotry was hardly something new. Anti-Catholic sentiments ran rampant throughout the 19th century, starting with the massive influx of Irish and southern German Catholics in the 1840s and 1850s, regaining steam in the decades of the Civil War, with the emergence of the American Protective Association and a wave of pamphlets peddling anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, most famously the claim that the Catholic Church had been behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

      Catholics were generally regarded with suspicion, if not outright fear, as an alien force sent by the pope to subvert the country’s republican institutions and destroy democracy in the United States. Even those who would concede that these allegations were highly exaggerated maintained that Catholic immigrants were not in a position to act as responsible citizens, lacking the independence of mind indispensable for being a good democrat. They were deemed to be under the influence of the pope and priests, who, in turn, were charged with being fundamentally hostile to American democracy.

      Most of its detractors maintained that the Catholic faith was fundamentally incompatible with the basic values that informed the American republic. Nativist and white supremacist organizations in the 1920s, most notoriously the second Ku Klux Klan, routinely targeted the country’s growing Catholic community.

      It took more than a century for American Catholics to be accepted as fully equal citizens. In 1937, when Gallup first asked the question, no more than 60% of respondents said they would vote for a Catholic presidential candidate. It took until the late 1970s that that number surpassed the 90% mark. As late as 2003, a prominent book on anti-Catholicism referred to it as the “last acceptable prejudice” in the United States. Some 15 years later, a commentary in the Catholic News Agency charged that it was “becoming more and more obvious that the Catholic Church is being targeted as the public enemy of our society.” For the author, a retired bishop from New Jersey whose diocese was marred in sex abuse scandals during his tenure, the main reason for anti-Catholic hostility was the church’s standing firm on “her teaching on contraception, abortion, stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, marriage and divorce.”

      This is one side of the story and certainly an important one that must not be ignored or trivialized. For large parts of American history, Catholics represented a besieged minority, particularly if they happened to be of Irish or Italian descent. At the same time, however, as the size of the Catholic immigrant community grew in size, so did its influence. Many in the first wave of Catholic immigrants settled in large northeastern cities, such as New York and Boston, where they quickly became a major political factor, primarily for the Democratic Party, which built a whole patronage system on the largely Irish Catholic vote. From this perspective, Nast’s crusade against New York City’s Tammany Hall and his anti-Irish cartoons acquire a certain logic.

      It is also a fact that the American Catholic Church actively opposed abolitionism in the United States. And it is also a fact that there was little love lost between the Irish, and later Italian, immigrant communities and the African American minority, with animosities coming from both sides. Catholic immigrants had always voted for the Democratic Party, and the outcome of the Civil War only strengthened the association, as did Lincoln’s Republican Party’s association with the anti-Catholic cause, albeit rather subtle, even if it was well known that in some parts of the country there were strong ties between the Republicans and the American Protective Association.

      Historical Irony

      It is important to keep this in mind in order to appreciate the significance of the role of the Catholic vote for the November election. Gone are the days when Catholics formed a dependable vote bank for the Democratic Party, when the Republicans were seen biased, if not hostile, to the Catholic faith. In 2016, according to Pew Research, 56% of registered Catholics voted for Trump, 44% for Hillary Clinton. Generally, nowadays, about half of registered Catholic voters identify themselves more or less as Republicans; roughly the same share more or less as Democrats. This implies that the Catholic vote is a perfect reflection of the pronounced political polarization and partisanship that has characterized the country as a whole for the past few decades.

      At the same time, Catholics are no longer considered unfit for high political offices, their republican credentials questioned, as was still the case when John F. Kennedy ran for office. To be sure, this has not yet played itself out with respect to the presidency. Joe Biden, if elected, would only be the second Catholic to be elected to the country’s highest political office. It is, however, the case for the other branches of the American political system — the Congress and particularly the Supreme Court. It is perhaps one of the great ironies of American history that today, the majority of the Supreme Court justices who are supposed to interpret and uphold the Constitution of the United States happen to be Catholics — members of a faith that once was considered anathema to everything the country stood for, or at least claimed to stand for.

      With the passing away of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18, the Supreme Court has once again become a focal point of attention. This might appear a bit strange. After all, the Supreme Court is generally seen as “‘the least dangerous branch’ because it can only tell you what the law means.” Its principal task is “to settle conflicting judgments from lower courts, and determine whether laws are in conflict with the Constitution or other federal laws.”

      This, however, is not how America’s Christian fundamentalists see it. For them, the Supreme Court is the one crucial institution that is in a position to reverse what they consider the greatest abomination in American legal history, Roe vs. Wade, the decision that made abortion legal countywide. President Donald Trump’s choice of Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic and mother of seven (two of the children by adoption), to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court is, therefore, of supreme significance. Not only because it would tilt the court decisively to the right, but also because it might help sway the outcome of the November election in Trump’s favor, particularly with respect to the Hispanic Catholic vote.

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      In a recent commentary in The New York Times, Linda Chavez called upon the Democrats not to take the Hispanic vote for granted. In 2016, almost 30% of Hispanics voted for Trump, despite his blatant denigration of migrants from south of the border. There are numerous reasons for the way Hispanics vote the way they do, not least their national origins. And there is the religious factor. As Chavez points out, a growing number of Hispanics identify themselves as Protestants or even evangelicals, and as such are more prone to vote for Trump.

      In addition, there is the question of abortion — an abomination to evangelicals and devout Roman Catholics alike. In a recent poll, more than 50% of Hispanic Catholics thought abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. In fact, Hispanics were the only distinct ethnic group to think so. Among white Catholics, for instance, roughly 40% took the pro-life position. To complicate things even more, a study from 2007 found a marked difference between first and second-generation American Hispanics on the question of abortion. Among the former, almost two-thirds indicated at the time that it should be illegal; among the latter, only a bit more than 40% thought so.

      God’s Tool

      In an earlier article, I have suggested that Trump’s core constituency, evangelicals and devout Catholics, have supported him not because they believe he is a man of God — he quite clearly is the opposite, all his pretending notwithstanding — but because they believe he is “God’s tool.” Ginsburg’s passing away a few weeks before the election, allowing Trump to choose an avowed abortion opponent to fill her seat, cannot but strengthen their belief that the president is on a mission from God. Trump, of course, has far more mundane motives, first and foremost to lock in all the conservative, reactionary and far-right groups in American society that might put him over the edge in crucial states.

      There is a certain irony to the fact that the most widely loathed president, both at home and abroad, in recent American history might be put in a position to impose himself for four more years both on the United States and the world at large with the help of a community that for a long time in the past was one of the most disparaged, if not outright abhorred religious minority in America. One might be tempted to see in this an instance of belated revenge for the treatment received in the past. As the good book states in Romans 12:19, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Poor Thomas Nast must be spinning like a mad top in his grave.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More