In 1820 the Missouri Compromise was enacted by the US Congress as an effort to preserve the balance of political power between slaveholder and free states. Missouri was admitted as a slave state; Maine was admitted as a free state. Perhaps more significantly, slavery was also prohibited in the former Louisiana territory north of latitude 36° 30’, which was part of the boundary between Missouri and Arkansas.
“The Republican Party is an authoritarian outlier,” wrote Vox’s Zach Beauchamp in September 2020. Beauchamp was writing in the context of the rush to confirm Federalist Society darling Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice following the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite several Republicans having refused to consider a nominee to the court “in an election year” during the Obama administration. Citing experts on comparative politics including Harvard’s Steven Zilitsky, who with Daniel Ziblatt authored New York Times bestselling How Democracies Die, Beauchamp writes that the GOP should no longer be considered in the same category with traditional conservative political parties such as Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU), but rather as an extremist party like Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, or Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey, which “actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.”
In this series of articles we’ll trace the evolution of today’s white nationalist authoritarian Republican party from its origins in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, through the party’s nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and his “Southern Strategy” appealing to racial fears of southern white voters, to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” to the Tea Party, and Donald Trump. In conclusion we’ll look at predictions by Zilitsky and Ziblatt and others, and their prognoses for the Republican Party and American democracy.
On day two of Amy Coney Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing , Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham asked, “You say you’re an originalist. Is that true?” “Yes,” Barett replied. “What does that mean in English?” Graham continued. “… [T]hat means that I interpret the Constitution as a law, that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it,” Barrett replied, reciting a now familiar mantra.
Some time later that day Senator Mike Lee of Utah probed further: “Tell me why textualism and originalism are important to you.” “… I think originalism and textualism, to me, boil down … to a commitment to the rule of law," Barrett said, "to not disturbing or changing or updating or adjusting ... in line with my own policy preferences what that law required.” “And is it the subjective motivation, the subjective intent of an individual lawmaker or drafter of a constitutional provision that we’re looking at?” Lee continued, “Or is it original public meaning? And if so, what’s the difference between those two?” “It’s original public meaning, not the subjective intent of any particular drafter,” Barrett predictably replied. “So one thing I have told my students in constitutional law is that the question is not what would James Madison do? We’re not controlled by how James Madison perceived any particular problem. That’s because the law is what the people understand it to be, not what goes on in any individual legislator’s mind.”
These exchanges present the rote formulation of originalism and textualism – legal jargon that has seemingly improbably found its way into popular media. Writing in 2011 on the occasion of members of the House of Representatives reading the Constitution aloud at the opening of its legislative session, University of Chicago’s Eric Posner noted with some surprise at the ascendance of originalism signaled by the House’s homage. “Although originalist ideas have floated around since the Founding,” Posner wrote in the New Republic, “the modern theory was produced by a small group of mostly marginalized (conservative) academics, whose ideas were rarely taken seriously by the most influential (liberal) scholars in the top law schools.”
On June 26, 2020 the New York Times reported that, in the midst of the peace talks to end the war in Afghanistan, Russian military intelligence offered bounties to the Taliban for killing US troops. While Russia is understood by US and Afghan officials to support the Taliban, a bounty for killing US servicemen in Afghanistan would represent what the Times called "a significant and provocative escalation," and would be the first time Russian intelligence was "known to have orchestrated attacks on US troops."
Two days later Trump tweeted "Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP," and that Pence had suggested it was “Possibly another fabricated Russian Hoax.” Congressional Democrats were briefed on the topic on June 30 by White House staffers, but House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters they "... did not receive any substantive new information." Hoyer also said he had told chief of staff Mark Meadows that he wanted to hear directly from the intelligence sources." On July 1 Trump again called the reports a hoax "by the newspapers and the Democrats," and asserted that "the intelligence people ... didn't believe it happened at all."
To read the ABC News headline you'd think the nation was awash in vast protests decrying the stay-at-home orders implemented in many states. From a survey of protests over the weekend, however, Forbes found relatively few participants. For example, in Austin TX, a city of approximately one million people, only a few dozen showed up to protest. In Franklin, KY, Raleigh, NC, and Columbus, OH, about 100 protesters each appeared. And in New York City only about 30 protesters could be found. Protests such as that in Lansing, MI, which attracted several thousand cars and around 100 people on the state Capitol lawn, were apparently the exception....
"Nobody ever expected a thing like this,” Trump said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday, March 23. To the contrary, starting in 2016, in the aftermath of the Ebola crisis of 2014-2015, the National Security Council had initiated a project to develop a "Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents," aka "the pandemic playbook." The playbook outlines hundreds of tactics and decisions to be considered when confronting a pandemic including consideration of availability of personal-protective-equipment (PPE) for healthcare providers, recommendation that the federal government work to detect potential outbreaks, and consider invoking the Defense Production Act.
The Trump administration was made aware of the document's existence in 2017, but -- whether by choice or ineptitude -- it was "thrown onto a shelf" according to a government official interviewed by Politico, who worked in the Obama and Trump administrations.
Among its many recommendations, the playbook contains a set of key questions and decisions to be addressed as soon as there is a "credible threat" of a pandemic, which in the case of COVID19 would have been in early to mid January when the virus was spreading in China....
Democratic Party action page. Volunteer opportunities relating to a range of issues and communities.
Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions
Democracy 2025 | The united legal frontline in the fight for our democracy
Vaccine Information Statements (VISs) Overview
Health-data analyst Charles Gaba has posted links to copies of CDC data archived most recently prior to the Trump admin at his site acasignups.net
American Medical Association (AMA) YouTube page.
Some of the information previously available from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Find a Mutual Aid Group.
Lamda Legal's Helpdesk: information and resources relating to discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.
Indivisible.org is coordinating action with several unions and other community groups.
See also:
Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles (hope and optimism)
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
American Civil Liberties Union
People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch
Anti-Defamation League - You may also wish to read the Forward's recent article on the ADL and its critics.
