A couple of days ago, just hours before we got the news about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing, I wrote a piece about the state of the race with 45 days to go. I listed five things that were good news for Democrats and Joe Biden: 1. the resiliency of Biden's lead over Trump this year compared to Hillary's lead over Trump four years ago; 2. his growing lead in some of the swing states; 3. the irrelevance of third-party candidates who in 2016 cost Hillary the White House; 4. the low undecided vote; and 5. the strength of the down-ballot candidates running for the Senate.
I inadvertently forgot to mention perhaps the best thing Biden and Democrats have going for them: message discipline. In short, the Biden campaign has been incredibly focused and disciplined throughout this entire campaign. While it has not been perfect, it has resisted any and all temptations to veer off message. It is the primary reason why Biden's lead has been as resilient as it's been.
Think about it: For over a year Trump has desperately tried to define Biden in ways that would be advantageous to him and has utterly failed. First he tried calling him Sleepy Joe. That didn't work because, as it turns out, compared to the chaos that has come to define this administration, a lot of voters are actually looking for someone who can dial it down a couple of notches, and that person just happens to be Biden.
Then, after Kamala Harris was announced as the running mate, the Trump campaign went with the "radical / socialist" tag hoping voters would be naive enough to believe that the junior senator from California was the love child of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. That fell flat on its face because no one except his most ardent sycophants believes Harris is anything more than a younger, female version of Biden, which is to say, a centrist Democrat.
They next turned to the Richard Nixon playbook and employed the old law and order schtick, believing that suburban voters, appalled at the looting and rioting they saw going on in the cities, would blame Biden and flock to Trump. There were two inherent problems with this strategy: 1. Biden himself condemned the violence; and 2. As has been brought up on numerous occasions, unlike Nixon, who was the challenger in 1968, Trump is the incumbent. These demonstrations are happening on HIS watch, not Biden's, and the voters are smart enough to figure that out.
It's obvious that Team Trump is flailing away in a desperate attempt to find anything they can throw at the blackboard that will stick. They're frantically looking for a wedge issue that will get them back in the game; a game they are - in spite of the handwringing from the nervous Nellies in the cheap seats - decidedly losing.
Enter Ginsburg's death Friday. Look, there's no way to sugar coat this. Democrats are fucked, and as I pointed out in my last piece, they had a hand in their own fucking. If the people who voted for Jill Stein in 2016 had voted instead for Hillary Clinton, she and not Trump would have nominated three judges to the Supreme Court. Elections have consequences, and all too often, Democrats fail to grasp that simple concept.
The fact is all Mitch McConnell needs is 50 "yes" votes and whoever Trump picks as a replacement will be appointed this year. Obviously, Chuck Schumer and the rest of the beleaguered Democratic leadership know this. That's why they're saying that everything is on the table, including ending the filibuster and, yes, even expanding the Supreme Court if they regain their majority.
I have no problem with the former. That relic should've been put out of its misery a long time ago. The Senate, as I've said many times, has become known as the place where bills go to die. Any senator from the minority party can ostensibly kill a piece of legislation just by threatening a filibuster. Mind you, they don't have to actually filibuster, like Jimmy Stewart in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or, it pains me to even mention this, Ted Cruz with his rendition of Green Eggs and Ham a few years back, they just have to threaten to filibuster. This is not the way our Founders intended the legislative branch to function, so, yes, blow the fucker up, I say.
But ixnay on the latteray. Expanding the Court by four justices, which is the scuttlebutt I'm hearing, may be a tempting proposition to many progressives, but politically it would hand Trump the wedge issue he's been looking for ever since Biden got into the race, and it could cost Democrats the White House and the Senate. I'll explain.
Consider this: right now a majority of Americans do NOT approve of either this president or his party. Unlike in 2016, when conservatives saw the death of Antonin Scalia as a threat to their majority, this time around there's no such threat. Whether or not Trump appoints a replacement for Ginsburg, there will still be a conservative majority on the Court. Republicans will have a difficult time revving up their base to go from five conservative justices to six.
On the other hand, progressives will be fighting to stave off political annihilation. Make no mistake about it. If you think only having three liberal justices on the Court is bad, try having only two. Justice Stephen Breyer just turned 82. That's only five years younger than Ginsburg was when she died. How many more years do you think he has left? And then there's Clarence Thomas, a conservative, yes, but hardly a spring chicken if you know what I mean. Trump could well be the first president since Eisenhower to appoint five justices to the Supreme Court. If ever there was an issue ripe for Democrats to run on it's this one.
All that goes out the window the minute Biden agrees to this hair-brained scheme to "pack" the Court. Conservatives will immediately go to defcon one; every Republican senator up for reelection will have the cover they need to vote to confirm Trump's pick, not to mention the wind at their back; and independents - the group Biden needs to help him across the finish line - will see it for what it is: an aggrieved party looking to get even. That's why it is essential that Biden not only reject calls to expand the Supreme Court, but to denounce them as well. It is sheer lunacy to even contemplate it.
There's no way to get around this: when it comes to underhandedness, Republicans wrote the book. Like it or not, there ARE two sets of rules for both parties and, sadly, both presidential candidates. Trump and the GOP get to act like adolescents in serious need of a timeout, while Biden and the Dems have to behave like honor students looking to make the Dean's List.
I don't like it anymore than you do, but to coin a phrase Trump used to describe the Coronavirus fatalities, it is what it is. To apply a baseball metaphor, it's the bottom of the ninth, Biden is rounding third and the outfielder (Bunker Boy) is bobbling the ball. The last thing Biden and his party need is for him to trip over his own two feet before reaching home plate.
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