Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Clashing Political Realities in the US Senate

In the Senate hearing of Amy Coney Barrett yesterday two of the Senators used some of their time to paint two radically different political realities. Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island) described what one can call hell, while republican Ted Cruz (Texas) also painted a vision of hell. The two visions were shocking and utterly partisan but probably mostly factually true. If one ignores the partisanship, the two hells merge into one to some extent.

The two sides made each other look bad at best and at worst, something akin to horrendous or deeply immoral and deceptive. How politics is working today seems to describe what people call making sausage. Who knows what all is going into the grinder, but we do know that one thing that is going in is hundreds of millions of dark money dollars from people who want to radically remake American law and society. The two visions of political hell are described below. Are they fundamentally the same or different? Is the logic of one vision more flawed than the other, or are they both about the same in their validity and soundness? Is the legality of all of this something to be concerned about? Do both sides equally respect facts, true truths and sound reasoning?


Whitehouse



Cruz describes hell at ~7:00 to 13:20


At ~21:00 to 23:53, Whitehouse discusses 80 5-4 decisions that have come out of the Roberts court. All of them were straight party line votes in favor of the republican position. In all 80 cases, the republican donor interest won at the Supreme Court. Does that cast the comments that Cruz made in his attack on the staggering amount of dark money going to democrats in a different light, or does that make no significant difference? It also raises the question of why so much corporate dark money is flowing to democrats in this election. What is going on here?

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