May her memory be a blessing. It’s a sin and a shame that she had to spend her last years constantly grinding, unable to rest and recuperate and recover. It’s a crime that an 87-year-old woman was the last defense against a tide of corruption and malfeasance unparalleled in our history. And it’s an outrage that the GOP will, inevitably and undoubtedly, claim they must fill this seat forty-six days before Election Day after denying Barack Obama his last pick for eleven months before an election.
I’m officially terrified, in a way I managed to avoid all year. The fear is exactly where it was on November 9, 2016, and for the same reasons. All bets are off – a stuffed Supreme Court with the willingness to act on behalf of Dolt 45 in the same fashion as Bush v Gore. It means that judicial remedies will have a thumb on the scale all the way up the line, and that legal manipulation could easily be used to take what could not be won at the ballot box fair and square. The last safety catch was John Roberts’ tentative sense of maintaining the legitimacy of the court, and if a third Tr*mp appointee is seated, he will be surplus to requirement. And the Senate GOP does not have enough members with the backbone to stand for anything but what Moscow Mitch tells them to, so now matters are worse.
So now the challenge is even greater: this election has to be won, handily, on the day of the election in public view. Anything that depends on hand-counted votes after the fact will be challenged in court and in all likelihood will not survive a challenge. It’s Florida 2000 without controls or shame. Ambiguity means losing. Complications mean losing. Explaining means losing. Every set of rules depends on the notion that you will follow the rules, or else there are consequences. The tragedy of the 21st century is that the GOP has learned and internalized that there are no consequences for breaking unwritten rules, and as a result, they are now in a position to dictate the written rules and break those as well.
We have to win, somehow. I don’t know what I’m going to do if we don’t.