As Senate Democrats diddle, piddle and fiddle, their time to act slips quietly away

If the Democrats lose control of the Senate in the 2022 elections, the Republicans will probably not consent to even one federal judge nominee. At present, all Senate Republicans vote against judges that Biden nominates. The Hill writes:

President Biden’s nominee to serve as the first Black woman judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals failed to win confirmation in the Senate Tuesday after two Democratic senators missed the vote: Sens. Maggie Hassan (N.H.) and Tammy Duckworth (Ill.).

Public defender Arianna Freeman’s nomination to the appeals court failed by a vote of 47 to 50. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) voted “no” to give him the procedural flexibility to bring her nomination back to the floor at a future date.

Hassan and Duckworth were absent, as was Republican Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.).

Every Republican present voted against the nominee.

If both absent Democrats had been present and voted “yes” along with Schumer, Freeman would have won confirmation in a 50-49 vote. Democrats also could have won Freeman’s confirmation in a 49-49 vote, with Vice President Harris breaking the tie because of Young’s absence.

The Democrats in the Senate appear to be unable to get their effing act together. That is on them.

How Russia attacks democracy and corrupts democracy and politics worldwide

For some years now it looked as if political corruption should rank as an existential threat to modern civilization, democracy, the environment and maybe even to the human species. Civilization because political corruption tends to flourish best when there is conflict. Democracy because corruption works best in secrecy under cruel, immoral-evil tyrants, theocrats and kleptocrats. The environment because it is easiest and fastest to generate major wealth and revenues by exploiting easy to access natural resources and polluting the planet in the process.

The New York Times reports on how Russia exports pro-tyranny, anti-democratic political corruption on a vast scale worldwide.

Russia Secretly Gave $300 Million to Political Parties and Officials Worldwide, U.S. Says

Russia has covertly given at least $300 million to political parties, officials and politicians in more than two dozen countries since 2014, and plans to transfer hundreds of millions more, with the goal of exerting political influence and swaying elections, according to a State Department summary of a recent U.S. intelligence review.

Russia has probably given even more that has gone undetected, the document said.

“The Kremlin and its proxies have transferred these funds in an effort to shape foreign political environments in Moscow’s favor,” the document said. .... The State Department document was sent as a cable to American embassies around the world on Monday to summarize talking points for U.S. diplomats in conversations with foreign officials.

U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate who defeated Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. Its methods included the use of cyberoperations to spread online disinformation. U.S. intelligence officials also found that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized a campaign to try to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he ran for office against Mr. Trump in 2020.

The Russians pay in cash, cryptocurrency, electronic funds transfers and lavish gifts, the document said. They move the money through a wide range of institutions to shield the origins of the financing, a practice called using cutouts. Those institutions include foundations, think tanks, organized crime groups, political consultancies, shell companies and Russian state-owned enterprises.

The money is also given secretly through Russian Embassy accounts and resources, the document said.  

The State Department said in the summary that it was urging governments to guard against covert political financing “not just by Russia, but also by China and other countries imitating this behavior.”

As one can imagine, countries doing this corruption business are not going to support pro-democracy politicians or political parties. They are going to support corrupt autocrats, kleptocrats and theocrats. That is why Russia supports Trump and the Republican Party and its politicians, not Democratic politicians or the Democratic Party.

This post is intended to be just another warning about the many avenues of attack on worldwide democracy and honest governance that are now being used to advance the cause of corrupt tyranny.

Christian nationalists are dropping a gigantic nuclear bomb on democracy and secular law

Fear the the radical Christian 

nationalist Supreme Court

This true horror story will curdle your blood, milk and cottage cheese. It will also dry your laundry, and burn your house and country to the ground. 

The bottom line is that Christian nationalists on the Supreme Court, led by the hyper-radical fundamentalist Sam Alito, want to exempt all religious people and organizations from essentially all legal obligations that now exist for everyone. The reason for exempting the religious crowd is to block burdens on their freedom of religion that Christians claim unduly burdens their religious beliefs and practice. The sleight of hand the Christian nationalists use for a “rationale” is that if one can imagine the possibility of a hypothetical, nonexistent government program that could substitute for the legal obligation, e.g., to provide birth control to employees by a Christian employer who sees contraception as offensive to his Christianity, then the Christians can opt-out of laws they dislike. 

Obviously, with Republicans in congress able and happy to block essentially all expansions of all government domestic spending programs, the government could not step in and provide the obligation that Christianity denies them, e.g., birth control. In essence, Christians would be free to discriminate almost as much as they wanted against whoever they choose, with no government protection for those discriminated against.

What Christian nationalists want is almost absolute freedom of religion (specifically Christianity) from almost all laws and obligations that any Christian (real or fake) says offends their beliefs. In the hyper-radical Christian fundamentalist world, it may even be the case that Christian nationalists will eventually demand exemptions from criminal laws that offend their religious sensibilities. For example, one can envision an argument that because God is OK with it, they can legally engage in insider stock trading that would amount to a felony for the rest of us. 

I do not know how far this horror show could go, but I strongly suspect it is a lot farther than even mindlessly blabbermouth Christian nationalists would be willing to admit in public. In essence, Christian nationalists are elevating religious freedom above all other rights, making the law religious and Christianity the core of theocratic law. 

The Hill writes in an opinion piece by Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University:

Religion and Samuel Alito’s time bomb

An irresponsible sentence that Justice Samuel Alito wrote eight years ago may now excuse religious people from nearly every legal obligation they have, so long as a hypothetical, nonexistent government program could substitute for it.

That became clear this week when Judge Reed O’Connor declared in Braidwood Management v. Becerra that employers with religious objections may offer health plans without drugs that prevent transmission of HIV, contraception, the HPV vaccine and screenings and behavioral counseling for STDs and drug use. The employers claim that providing such coverage makes them complicit in homosexual behavior, drug use and sexual activity outside of marriage.

The plaintiffs obviously were shopping for a favorable judge when they brought their case to O’Connor, who has repeatedly stretched the law in ways that disrupt ObamaCare. Here, however, his extravagant conclusion may well be sustained by the Supreme Court, which has embraced an increasingly extreme account of religious liberty.

[In a 2014 Supreme Court decision, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores] opinion [Alito] mused that the “most straightforward way” of providing coverage “would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections.” He rejected the Obama administration’s claim that “RFRA cannot be used to require creation of entirely new programs.”

The court [in Hobby Lobby] split 5-4, and the swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy, declared that he was skeptical about the “imposition of a whole new program or burden on the Government.” In Hobby Lobby, he declared, there happened to be “an existing, recognized, workable, and already-implemented framework” for accommodating the religious objection. This fact “might well suffice to distinguish the instant cases from many others in which it is more difficult and expensive to accommodate a governmental program to countless religious claims based on an alleged statutory right of free exercise.”  

Kennedy has since retired, replaced by Neil Gorsuch, who has never voted to deny any religiously based claim. He is willing to expose frail patients to COVID-19 for the sake of religious liberty. Alito now proposes, on the basis of weak originalist evidence, to constitutionalize RFRA and require religious exemptions for all laws, state and federal alike.

Alito’s dictum was the basis for Judge O’Connor’s decision last week. Quoting “Hobby Lobby,” O’Connor wrote that the Biden administration had not “shown that the government would be unable to assume the cost of providing [HIV preventive] drugs to those who are unable to obtain them due to their employers’ religious objections.”

And that was that. With this one sentence, the employees’ coverage disappeared. Gone are Kennedy’s concerns about the difficulty and expense of demanding entire new programs. Or the certainty that those programs will not in fact ever be enacted, so that the employees must simply do without. And a majority of the new, extremely conservative court appears likely to agree with Alito.  

[In her dissent in Hobby Lobby, Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg was right that there is no stopping point. Perhaps emergency rooms in religious hospitals can turn away women hemorrhaging from failed pregnancies, because government could always build emergency rooms of its own.

There is today a serious danger to religious liberty. But it is coming from the Supreme Court, which has been construing it to mean a right to hurt people. If this is now its authoritative meaning, then the longstanding, broad consensus that supported it will collapse.

Professor Koppelman’s bland assertion that “the longstanding, broad consensus that supported it will collapse” is a gross understatement. Democracy and pluralistic secular law will both collapse if hyper-extremist Alito and Christian nationalists get their way. Democracy and secular law will be replaced by bigoted Christian fundamentalist theocracy backed by cruel, aggressive, vengeful Christian Sharia law. 

This is how threatening and aggressive American Christian nationalism and our Christian nationalist Supreme Court are toward democracy and pluralistic secularism. Short of a modern version of full blown civil war, our situation can’t get much worse than this.

Do we have a crisis among young men?

 

Questions, comments, war stories?

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