DL Open Thread: Saturday, July 2, 2022

Have I mentioned recently that Delaware’s Tom Carper voted to end the filibuster on Justices Roberts and Alito?  He did.  Voted against their nominations, but they clinched their robes thanks to Democrats like Carper killing the filibuster.  Put that old horse out to pasture before he does any more harm.

A Blip In Favor Of Democrats? Polling of generic ballot says yes.  Of course, that’s no thanks to anything the Democrats have actually done.  And/or the Democrats who haven’t done anything.  Apparently, some independents are afraid of the imminent demise of democracy.  That’s something, I guess.

Ohio To 10-Year Old Rape Victim:  “No Abortion For You”:

On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio.

Hours after the Supreme Court action, the Buckeye state had outlawed any abortion after six weeks. Now this doctor had a 10-year-old patient in the office who was six weeks and three days pregnant.

Could Bernard help?

Indiana lawmakers are poised to further restrict or ban abortion in mere weeks. The Indiana General Assembly will convene in a special session July 25 when it will discuss restrictio ns to abortion policy along with inflation relief.

Hey, God wants 10-year-old rape victims to suffer. Amirite?

‘The Great Divergence’: Is It Permanent?:

“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”

Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s. Like other analysts who study democracy, he views the Trump faction that now dominates the Republican Party—what he terms the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support. “The structural attacks on our institutions that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy will continue to progress,” Podhorzer argues, “with or without him at the helm.”

All of this is fueling what I’ve called “the great divergence” now under way between red and blue states. This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station. What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support.

Longhurst And Mitchell’s Statement On KMG. I think they’ve got the procedure wrong.  Carney can’t do anything unilaterally:

Longhurst and House Majority Whip Larry Mitchell, in a joint statement Friday night, called for McGuiness to step down, since her being guilty of several crimes “call into question her fitness to serve in this office.”

Longhurst and Mitchell called on Carney to “exercise the powers he has to ‘remove from office any public officer convicted of misbehavior in office'” if McGuiness does not resign.

“She cannot continue to serve in this position, and the governor can take action to remove her from office should she refuse to resign,” they said.

That’s wrong–although it would let the House off the hook if true.  In actuality, the Governor may remove a public official “if the General Assembly presents a bill of address to the Governor, after a vote of two-thirds of each House.”  Can’t Longhurst and Mitchell read?  Oh, and the action must start in the House, according to the State Constitution.  So, either the House initiates the process, or its leaders are, per usual, full of shit.

What do you want to talk about?