News: September 2020 Archives
Well that was weird and unpleasant.
Wallace's questions were stacked against Trump overall. Wallace did ask Biden a couple of tough questions, but then let him get away without answering.
Oddly, Biden was much ruder to Trump than vice versa, calling the President a "clown" and "the worse president ever", and even telling him to "shut up". Trump interrupted a lot, which is also rude, but not in the same way. I think most viewers would have expected Trump to be ruder than Biden.
Biden didn't seem senile. He's leading in the polls without much effort. That seems likely to continue.
Trump was combative and aggressive, which I assume is what he was going for. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't as funny or effective as he often is.
I think Michael Brendan Dougherty is right about Trump's biggest tactical weakness:
By far Trump's most self-defeating habit in these debates is to refer to stories rather than tell them. He speaks as if he's talking to people who, like himself, spend hours a day watching Fox News and have a shared folklore of scandal stories that can be referred to in shorthand. He refers to events, like ballots found in a wastepaper basket, but doesn't tell the story of where they happened, or why they matter.
Most people won't get these references and may think Trump is just blustering.
Both sides are spinning this as a win, but surprisingly to me 2/3 of Telemundo Spanish-language viewers gave Trump the victory. I presume all the crosstalk couldn't be translated in real-time, so maybe that helped Trump come off stronger?
Every time a Supreme Court seat opens up the ensuing political fight reminds us that the Supreme Court shouldn't be so important.
The point isn't whether the Court got the questions right. The point is that it decided these important [political] issues and, having done so, took them off the table for democratic politics. When Congress decides an issue by passing a law, democratic politics can change that decision by electing a new Congress. When the Court decides an issue by making a constitutional ruling, there's no real democratic remedy.That makes the Supreme Court, a source of final and largely irrevocable authority that is immune to the ordinary winds of democratic change, an extremely important prize. And when extremely important prizes are at stake, people fight. And get hysterical. ...
So to break it down: All the hysteria about a Ginsburg replacement stems from the fact that our political system is dominated by an allegedly nonpolitical Court that actually decides many political issues. And that Court is small (enough so that a single retirement can throw things into disarray) and unrepresentative of America at large.
I'm actually not against "packing" the Supreme Court. There's no reason it needs to have exactly nine justices. Pack it out to 100 and we might gain two advantages: first, higher throughput for our court system; second, less political fighting over SCOTUS nominations. Reynolds suggests that each state governor nominate a justice:
In an earlier article, responding to Democrats' plans to "pack" the Court with several additional justices whenever they get control back, I suggested going a step further, and add fifty new justices, one each to be appointed by every states' governor. My proposal wasn't entirely serious, being meant to point up the consequences of opening the door on this topic. But on reflection, maybe it was a better idea than I realized.
Sounds like a fine plan to me. Put some power back in the hands of the states.
