1) Seth Masket on how the presidential race is unlikely to, but could, change. We’ll be hearing a lot about the SC this week, so:
The Supreme Court Nomination
A final matter which could affect the race is last week’s passing of Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’ll be at least a few more days before we know if this had an effect on the race. This does have the potential to change this contest, although in which direction is difficult to say.
Each of Trump’s Court nominations so far have been highly dramatic and norm-shattering events. This one promises to be no different. Traditionally, Supreme Court nominations have been considered better drivers of Republican voter turnout than Democratic voter turnout – this was part of the reason Republicans in the Senate held open the Supreme Court seat in 2016 – but that’s not obviously true today. The Kavanaugh confirmation fight was likely a net benefit to Democratic turnout efforts in 2018. Also, Ginsburg was a popular icon on the political left, and her replacement by a conservative justice puts a lot of longstanding Democratic accomplishments, including legal abortion and the Affordable Care Act, in jeopardy.
What this nomination fight does have the power to do is shift the focus of the election away from the coronavirus, on which Trump is very unpopular, to an area where he is somewhat more competitive. If the presidential election is very close and contested and ends up in court, as the 2000 presidential election did, Trump would be on better legal footing with his third nominee on the Supreme Court, giving conservatives a 6-3 majority there. Of course, it will be difficult to steer voters’ attention away from the virus that has affected so many of their lives in very direct and personal ways, but this nomination will surely capture a great deal of attention, and will be at the fore of many voters’ minds.
In sum, I think we’re looking at a bunch of game-samers, to borrow Lynn Vavreck’s term. Combine that with the effect that people are already voting, and it really blunts the idea that the overall state of the race is going to be altered.
2) Even though my Civil War history professor was an older Southern gentleman, he got it right on what he taught us with the latest scholarship and not the Lost Cause. But, somehow, I had not realized just how wrong Ken Burns‘ Civil War (which I did not watch until 1995) got things.
3) I’ve read a lot, of course, on efforts to develop rapid antigen-based diagnostic Covid tests. I didn’t even know that a home-based PCR could be a thing. It’s not yet, but one may may get us there.
4) Given that I’m in a profession where we would desperately like to hire more Black PhD’s to teach political science, but there just aren’t nearly enough of them, I sympathize with the sentiments for which the Wells Fargo CEO had to apologize:
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf apologized Wednesday for a remark he made in June about the talent pool of senior Black banking executives that set off a wave of criticism when the quote resurfaced Tuesday…
In the second bullet of the third line-item of the memo, Scharf made a remark about the issues he said the bank had seen in hiring Black leaders to the bank’s operating committee, a group of senior leaders that steer the bank’s direction.
While he wanted more diversity on this committee, Scharf said “while it might sound like an excuse, the unfortunate reality is that there is a very limited pool of Black talent to recruit from with this specific experience as our industry does not have enough diversity in most senior roles.”
After a Tuesday
story from Reuters about the remark and another like it that Reuters said Scharf made, the Wells Fargo chief apologized for the remark Wednesday in another companywide message.
“I apologize for making an insensitive comment reflecting my own unconscious bias,” Scharf said, more than three months after he sent the first memo.
An inartful choice of words, but I don’t doubt that there’s not a lot of Black people with a lot of experience in banking. The reasons that there’s not? All sorts of systemic racism which we should work on. But, that doesn’t change the fact that there really probably are not a lot of Black people with the experience that it takes to get on a bank’s operating committee. As someone in an area with a definite pipeline problem, I’m really not a fan of those who would pretend the pipeline problem does not exist. The key is to actually address all the reasons there’s a shortage in the pipeline (and really, we should!), rather than castigate those for admitting it exists.
5) And as long as I’m on race, Conor Friedersdorf on Princeton labeling itself as racist and the federal government taking them up on it:
The president of Princeton is in a pickle. This summer, Christopher L. Eisgruber received a letter from more than 300 faculty members at the university asserting “indifference to the effects of racism on this campus.” They called on him “to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive” there and “to block the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations.”
Princeton graduate students made similar claims. At the architecture school, an open letter asserted the existence of “ongoing anti-Black racism” and “white supremacy.” At the public-affairs school, a different open letter said, “The presence of an overwhelmingly white faculty creates an environment where instances of racism within the classroom often go unaddressed.”
In response, President Eisgruber directed university leaders to spend the summer compiling reports on how to identify and combat “systemic racism.” And he declared in early September that while the institution long ago committed to being more inclusive, “racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by conscious intention but more often through unexamined assumptions and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions and policies.”
Those words arguably met the faculty letter’s demand to publicly acknowledge anti-Black racism at Princeton. But the same language was then cited by the Trump administration as justification for a Department of Education probe into whether the university has violated federal law.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 declares that at institutions that receive federal funds, no person shall be subject to discrimination or denied the benefits of any activity on the basis of race.Princeton administrators have long affirmed that their institution is complying with those requirements. Given Eisgruber’s claims that racism persists at Princeton, that racist assumptions are embedded in its structures, and that systemic racism there damages the lives of Black people, the Department of Education says it wants to know if the university has been lying.
The government’s letter concludes with intrusive demands to interview Princeton employees under oath and generate sensitive documents, including a list of each Princetonian who has been discriminated against on the basis of race since 2015, as well as records related to Eisgruber’s claims about “systemic” or “embedded” racism.
The investigation is absurd. Princeton is highly sought after by Black applicants. In admissions it uses the race of minority applicants, who are admitted at higher rates, as a “plus” to achieve greater diversity in a way that very likely benefits Black applicants. It spends lavishly on “inclusion” efforts, holds events to celebrate (and name a building after) Black alumni, and dedicates resources to recruiting and hiring Black faculty and staff. No reasonable person deciding where federal officials should look for anti-Black civil-rights violations would probe the Ivy League University. But trolls waging a culture war against critical race theory might.
As far as I can tell, the strategy is to force Princeton to either admit to serious anti-Black discrimination, risking devastating financial penalties, or else mount an affirmative case that the institution is not guilty of “systemic” anti-Black discrimination, exposing the racism claims of many administrators, faculty, and students as hyperbole. In its absurdity, then, the probe exposes the performative nature of some anti-racist rhetoric at Princeton and other elite universities…
Academic stakeholders ought to eschew strategic hyperbole when doing the important work of diagnosing and remedying problems related to racial inequality on their campuses. If they keep inflating their claims, the term racism will lose whatever power it has to grab a community’s attention and prompt urgent remedies, even in the instances when racism is in fact operating.
I object to the entire witch hunt of an investigation, which Republicans would recognize as a flagrant abuse of federal power were it aimed at Liberty University. No reasonable person could conclude that an onerous probe of Princeton for anti-Black racism is the best use, or even a good use, of scarce resources to safeguard civil rights. The decision to grapple with racism should not trigger a federal investigation, whether or not that grappling is totally honest.
The Trump administration’s action has drawn wider attention to real rhetorical excesses. But if it doesn’t really believe that civil rights are being violated, then it is violating the First Amendment by misusing investigative power to punish speech. A president who weaponizes the administrative state against private institutions because he dislikes their public profile is a danger to the country.
6) And since I believe in reading/sharing those things which challenge what I’ve written, here’s, “I’m a former prosecutor. The charge in Breonna Taylor’s death is pathetically weak.” He makes a good case that the cops actually should be charged with at least manslaughter. I’m unsure, but open to that. I would still argue, though, that this is overwhelmingly a failure far beyond the actions of the cops that actually served the warrant.
7) Noah Feldman has rightly been pilloried for his embrace of Amy Coney Barrett (especially as he completely elides the larger context of her appointment). But I had to highlight the textualism of her legal approach that he describes:
Barrett, a textualist who was working for a textualist, Justice Antonin Scalia, had the ability to bring logic and order to disorder and complexity. You can’t be a good textualist without that, since textualism insists that the law can be understood without reference to legislative history or the aims and context of the statute.
That’s facially nonsense!! But, this is what so many conservatives hang their intellectual hats on. I’ve got a lot of mantras in my approach to life, but one is, “context, damnit!” And, at it’s core an approach to understanding that intentionally ignores context strikes me as intellectually bankrupt. Especially when it somehow almost always seems to result in decisions that favor modern conservatism.
8) DJC sent me this interview with Yglesias on his new book. Little did he know, One Billion Americans is already sitting on my shelf (to be read after I finish the novel I’m on).
9) And SMOTUS again on the Republican Party and minority rule:
Before the end of the year, Amy Coney Barett will probably be sworn in as a Supreme Court justice — and she may serve for decades. She will have been appointed by an impeached president who lost the popular vote in 2016 and may well continue in office after losing it again in 2020. She will almost certainly be approved by senators representing less than 45 percent of the American population.
Our nation is moving even deeper into minority rule: The House aside, the U.S. government is controlled by the less popular party in a polarized two-party system. We may call this unfair, but that would trivialize the problem. It is entirely permissible under the Constitution, and it is dangerous. When the majority of a nation’s citizens can’t get its candidates elected or its preferred policies passed, the government’s legitimacy is compromised and destabilizing pressure begins to build.
The tendency toward minority rule in the United States, present since the founding, has become more acute. That’s certainly true in the Senate: California has 68 times as many residents that Wyoming has, but the same number of senators. The disparity in population size between the biggest and smallest states is far greater than anything the founders knew.
Residents of rural, sparsely populated states are vastly overrepresented in the Senate. And because the electoral college is based on the number of federal representatives, this rural-state overrepresentation plays out in the selection of presidents, as well. Former vice president Joe Biden could well win the popular vote by three or four percentage points, or even more, this fall and still not be elected.
The House, the most democratic institution in the three branches of government, has no role in selecting Supreme Court justices. That’s the purview of the president and the Senate, which means that the composition of the high court has a minoritarian, rural-state bias built into it as well. (According to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll, only 38 percent of Americans say the replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be nominated by Trump and confirmed by the current Senate; 57 percent say the nomination should be left to the winner of the presidential election, and put to a Senate vote next year.) Should a Trump nominee be confirmed, the Supreme Court will consist of six justices appointed by Republicans, even though the party has won the popular presidential vote only once in the past seven elections (George W. Bush, in 2004).
On its own, a rural state bias in representation is potentially problematic but not invidious. Plenty of issues in rural states should receive national attention, of course. But the problems mount when one party dominates the rural areas and the other dominates the urban ones, which is where we stand today. Republicans essentially get bonus points: They can be the less popular party and still get to govern.
10) I was trying to explain about the Reichstag fire and parallels to today to my oldest son. He should just read this from Dana Milbank, “This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning.”
11) I love science. “Nothing Eats Viruses, Right? Meet Some Hungry Protists”
On the dinner plate that is planet Earth, there exists a veritable buffet of viruses — an amount of biomass that is the equivalent of about 25 billion human beings.
So perhaps it’s a bit baffling that scientists have yet to pinpoint a species that deliberately eats viruses for energy.
But mounting evidence suggests that at least one group of organisms might nosh on nutrient-rich viruses: protists, microscopic and often single-celled organisms that scientists have struggled to place on the tree of life. Like viruses, protists seethe in seawater by the billions and trillions — and some might slurp up marine viruses, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.
If the findings pan out, they could help flip a centuries-old dogma on its head: Rather than acting only as disease-causing agents of chaos and snuffing out life, viruses might in some cases play a role in fueling and sustaining it.
The new study alone can’t nail the consumptive connection between protists and viruses, said Rika Anderson, a microbial ecologist at Carleton College in Minnesota who was not involved in the study. But protists have been found in a mind-boggling array of habitats, from the rotting stumps of trees to animal guts, and may have evolved at least as many strategies to keep themselves fed.
“They are kind of eating everything,” Dr. Anderson said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if viruses were being consumed.”
A team led by Ramunas Stepanauskas, a microbial ecologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, started the project more than a decade ago. They initially intended to study the prey preferences of marine protists, many of which chow down on bacteria.
12) Oh, I wish I had known about this little brain test when my kids were under 7. Try it with yours!
13) Some interesting social science on Covid response:
Context: Social distancing is an essential but economically painful measure to flatten the curve of emergent infectious diseases. As the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spread throughout the United States in early 2020, the federal government left to the states the difficult and consequential decisions about when to cancel events, close schools and businesses, and issue stay-at-home orders.
Methods: We present an original, detailed dataset of state-level social distancing policy responses to the epidemic, then apply event history analysis to study the timing of implementation of five social distancing policies across all fifty states.
Results: The most important predictor of when states adopted social distancing policies is political: All else equal, states led by Republican governors were slower to implement such policies during a critical window of early COVID-19 response.
Conclusions: Continuing actions driven by partisanship, rather than public health expertise and scientific recommendations, may exact greater tolls on health and broader society.
14) I love this post from a scientist who came around to understanding the role of aerosols and the role of the “aerosols = measles” fallacy. Because I fell for that fallacy because I’m actually a political scientist and didn’t know any better. But I soon learned from Linsey Marr and others. What’s amazing is how long it has taken so many others who should know better to come around on this.
15) Of course Biden and Democrats winning the election would be better for the economy. Don’t take it from me, take it from Moody’s (via Drum)
In every possible category, a Democratic sweep is better for the country than any other scenario. Moody’s even projects that Democrats would be better for the budget deficit than Republicans.
You can read the full report here, but it’s pretty easy to summarize. If Democrats win, they’ll spend money to stimulate the economy out of its COVID-19 funk and this will help everybody. The spending will largely be financed by taxing the rich, which has only a small negative effect on the economy. But if Republicans win, they’ll keep the purse strings closed and instead pursue yet more tax cuts for the rich and trade wars with China. Neither one is especially good for the economy. It’s so simple.
16) OMG this demographic swingometer is fun to play with. Just try it.
17) Donald Ayer worked with Bill Barr under GHWB. He tells us that Bill Barr is an unhinged fanatic .
The crucial point for Barr is his claim that the thinking of the Founders, and therefore “the American government” they created, “was predicated precisely on this Judeo-Christian system” of values handed down by God. According to Barr, “the greatest threat to free government, the Founders believed, was not governmental tyranny, but personal licentiousness—the abandonment of Judeo-Christian moral restraints in favor of the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites.”
To put it in polite terms, this is a complete misreading of the Founders’ views. Barr largely ignores many of the most central elements of the American founding—especially those concerning freedom of thought and speech, and the individual pursuit of happiness. Nor does he see as significant the fact that the members of the founding generation, although mostly self-described Christians, had also been greatly influenced by the secular and rationalist outlook of the Enlightenment, and rejected most of the supernatural elements of literal Christian doctrine.
18) I’ve been watching The Simpsons (mostly) from the beginning with my kids the past month. I love how much they love it. I love how much I remember (“wow, little meatloaf men!” from episodes that it’s been nearly 30 years since I’ve seen. The writing by season 3 (which we are know on) is just consistently brilliant and holds up terrifically nearly three decades later. The kids were real skeptics at the beginning due to the animation, but, damn if this isn’t proof of the power of great writing.
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