The morning after...
Why I'm not in as big a state of existential despair as I was last night
I know a lot of friends who decided to spare themselves from watching last night’s debate, and honestly I wish I had. But as a political junkie I just couldn’t.
It was painful. Here’s some live footage of me watching:
To paraphrase Britain’s Lord Buckethead: “It was a shitshow.”
Or as my favorite satirist Alexandra Petri (gift link) put it:
“How was Thursday’s presidential debate on CNN,” you ask? I would compare it unfavorably with childbirth. Childbirth was unpleasant, but at least at the end of it I got a child.”
Biden came out of the gate sounding weak voiced and extremely confused. At several points he didn’t even use his entire allotted time. Between that and the fact that the moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, kept allowing Trump to speak 100% of his time off-topic and then asked him the question again, it resulted in Trump speaking for an additional five minutes — and still not answering the question.
The moderators still haven’t learned lessons from 2016 and 2020. I mean they could have followed up with a question asking Trump what exactly he meant by talking about the Democrats “supporting abortion after birth.”
SMH.
Biden had so many opportunities to call out Trump’s many, many lies, but failed to capitalize on them - and his weak and forgetful demeanor did nothing to quash the “he’s too old and he’s losing it” accusations.
I’m dying to see a transcript of the debate to fully parse Trump’s mendacious word salads. But he delivered them with much more energy than an extremely listless Biden.
There were so many low points, but it reached peak old white guy when they started arguing about their golf handicaps….
I went to bed full of anxiety and despair. My husband was away, he texted me saying maybe we should revisit a potential exit plan we’d been looking at while Trump was in office.
But as I sat down to write this, I got an alert that Biden was speaking at a campaign rally in Raleigh, NC. Apparently, I’m a masochist (otherwise known as a political junkie) so I tuned in to watch. (Biden starts at 1:30)
HOLY CRAP, STATE OF THE UNION JOE BIDEN IS BACK!!!!
It’s like watching an entirely different person. Aides said he had a cold, and you can hear that in a few chesty coughs during today’s speech. This is the guy we needed last night when 51 million people were watching.
Still, I urge you to take a gander before throwing up your hands in despair and saying we need to replace him at this late juncture. Am I concerned? Yes. But who is going to replace him? And can you imagine the infighting?
Look, like most people I wish we had different candidates. But here’s the thing - I will vote for Biden despite my concern about his age, and here are a few important reasons why:
SCOTUS and the Federal Judiciary - I still can’t forgive the progressives who voted third party in 2016 and brought us Trump, because they threw American women under the bus. Without Trump (and the venal Mitch McConnell) we wouldn’t have had three ultra conservative judges tipping the balance on the Supreme Court to allow the overturning of Roe vs Wade. We see the impact this has had on maternal and wellbeing. I’m old enough to remember Republican’s fighting ACA because “politicians shouldn’t come between us and our doctors.” What a difference a decade and a half makes - now Republicans are falling over themselves to to come between women and their doctors, as we see in Texas and elsewhere.
But folks, that is only a fraction of the damage the Trump/McConnell alliance did to our nation’s judiciary.
Trump’s 226 successful appointments to the trial, appellate, and Supreme courts in a single term will stand as one of his foremost legacies, and all but certainly his most enduring.
When Trump left office, his picks comprised one-third of the Supreme Court, 30% of the 13 circuit courts, and more than one-quarter of the judges presiding over the nation’s 94 district courts. He appointed 54 judges to the circuit courts that are the final word on most appeals—just one less than Obama selected over eight years.
Trump’s choices for judges at all levels had one thing in common: proven conservative bona fides. As McConnell had boasted to the Federalist Society, ending the Senate filibuster of judicial nominees had opened the door even to “crazy right-wingers,” who couldn’t have been confirmed otherwise. Democrats have no analog to the 60,000-member Federalist Society, with its deep coffers and nationwide institutional strength.
Some of Trump’s appointees, with life tenure and most of them young, will be on the bench long into this century. Were Barrett to serve on the Supreme Court until her late 80s as Ginsburg did, she would be there until about 2060. His other high court picks, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, could be there past 2050.
We simply cannot afford another Trump presidency when it comes to the judiciary. Just look at the decisions coming out of SCOTUS this week.
My late friend Irene Hahn grew up in Nazi Germany, and I asked her what it was like. One of the things that really stuck with me from our conversation was her observation that the Nazis took over the judiciary and the civil service, so when they started taking away rights, there was nowhere to go. Please don’t let your concerns about Biden’s age help create that situation.
PROJECT 2025 - If you haven’t read up on this, DO IT NOW. Or watch John Oliver’s piece on it.
If that doesn’t convince you, listen to the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, when he says that Heritage aims to "institutionalize Trumpism" which it views as the "new version of conservatism."
CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM/WHITE SUPREMACY
Forget about dog whistles. Trump isn’t even pretending now. He and so many others in the GOP have aligned themselves with outright extremists like Nick Fuentes.
FUNDAMENTAL DECENCY
We can have fundamental disagreements with Biden on policy. But he basically a decent man. He’s a long-time public servant. He’s not a narcissistic convicted felon. He has empathy, something his opponent has never once exhibited.
We have the candidates and the system we have. We can argue about the need for change and how to go about it, but it’s an election year and we have to make the best of what we’ve got.
Not voting isn’t a strategy. And if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about the outcomes.