Kennedy was the showy performer in that ugly spectacle, but Senator Biden, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was the stage director. Prior to Bork’s nomination, Biden had in fact said that he would support it: Bork was, after all, a distinguished legal scholar with a long history in public service. Bork had many challenges in front of him: For one thing, he was very sharp-elbowed in intellectual disputes, which had not won him very many friends.
.. The Senate majority leader at the time was Democrat Robert Byrd, a man who had rejoiced in the title of Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, and who held a grudge against Bork for his role in the Watergate scandal, during which Bork had fired special investigator Archibald Cox on the orders of President Richard Nixon.
.. The Senate majority leader at the time was Democrat Robert Byrd, a man who had rejoiced in the title of Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, and who held a grudge against Bork for his role in the Watergate scandal, during which Bork had fired special investigator Archibald Cox on the orders of President Richard Nixon.
.. The Democratic primary field was very full: There was Biden
.. Biden could not afford to stand by his earlier assessment of Bork and announced his opposition to the nomination shortly after it was made formal.
.. The 14 hours Senator Byrd had spent filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not prevent him from becoming the Democratic leader in the Senate.
.. The Bork nomination, on the other hand, was an ordinary piece of government business elevated by Democrats to the status of national emergency in the service of narrow partisan interests. Biden was running for president, Kennedy was running for conscience of the Democratic party, and Byrd, frustrated by Republicans’ lack of cooperation on a number of his spending priorities, had promised: “They’re going to pay. I’m going to hit them where it hurts.”
.. The hysteria and vitriol directed at Bork were of a sort rarely seen since the early 19th century. But they quickly became commonplace.
.. But the rules of the game are not all there is to the game. What in another context might be called “sportsmanship” is in politics a question of prudence and even of patriotism, forgoing the pursuit of every petty partisan advantage made possible
.. The progress from Robert Bork to Merrick Garland is a fairly obvious story, but there is more to it than that:
- The increasing reliance upon legislative gimmicks such as omnibus spending bills and retrofitting legislation to fit with the budget reconciliation process,
- the substitution of executive orders and open-ended regulatory portfolios (“the secretary shall . . . ”),
- the prominence of emergency “special sessions” in the state legislatures,
- the absence of regular order in the legislative and appropriations process —
all are part of the same destructive tendency. Procedural maximalism in effect turns the legislative system against itself, substituting the exception for the rule and treating every ordinary item of business as a potential emergency item.
.. at the time, their numbers in the Senate were enough to secure their victory without a filibuster. But the course they set in those hearings — one of maximal confrontation, of reaching for whatever procedural cudgel is close at hand — led directly to our current state of governmental dysfunction.
.. at the time, their numbers in the Senate were enough to secure their victory without a filibuster. But the course they set in those hearings — one of maximal confrontation, of reaching for whatever procedural cudgel is close at hand — led directly to our current state of governmental dysfunction.
.. The recently proffered Republican health-care bill instantiates much of what is wrong with our politics:
The bill was constructed through an extraordinary process in which there were
- no hearings,
- no review from the Congressional Budget Office, and
- no final text of the legislation until shortly before the vote.
- The process is erratic and covert rather than regular and transparent.
- It was put together in a purposeful way to avoid substantive debate and meaningful public discourse,
making the most of the majority’s procedural advantages for purely political ends.
.. As Rod Dreher recently put it, Republicans will have to choose whether they love the rule of law more than they hate the Left.
.. Republican populists who argue that the GOP must play by the same rules in the name of “winning” have very little understanding of what already has been lost and of what we as a nation stand to lose.
The United States will not thrive, economically or otherwise, in a state of permanent emergency.
.. What’s truly remarkable about our current constant national state of emergency is that no one can say exactly what the emergency is. But we all seem to be very sure that something has to be done about it right now, that we must rouse ourselves to excitement about it, and that the ordinary rules of lawmaking and governance no longer apply.
There is not much political mileage to be had from arguing for regular order, transparency, and procedural predictability — but that’s part of what makes those things so valuable. Order in the little things is a necessary precondition of order in the big things. Orderly government cannot be built on a foundation of procedural chaos.
Limbaugh: ‘Energy’ Focused on Donald Trump Jr an Attempt to Destroy His Political Career Before It Starts
“We had the caller who said the Trump kids are good-looking and leftist don’t like that,” Limbaugh said. “And that’s certainly true. But, you note the energy with which the media is going after Donald Trump, Jr. And there’s reason: They want to dirty him up. They want to destroy the guy before he gets started on his own political career. He has an obvious interest in politics. I don’t know if you have heard this guy speak. Folks, he is what his dad isn’t in that he is an ideological conservative. And if you have heard him speak, he has got it down. He knows his stuff. And he can sell it, and he can be persuasive with it. And he is the exact kind of conservative they want to destroy before he gets started, especially given they don’t have a bench of their own. That is an added reason for all of this energy in destroying Donald Trump, Jr. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
The Washington Post Seeks a Right-Wing Scapegoat for Left-Wing Violence
Spend much time in left-wing circles — especially the kind of deep-blue progressive urban centers that produce our nation’s mainstream media — and you’ll find a sincere, abiding fear that “angry white-wing rhetoric” is on the verge of spurring a wave of murder and violence. I’ve had multiple conversations with otherwise smart people who are just convinced that people like my Rush Limbaugh–listening friends and neighbors are so seething with rage that they’re a hair’s breadth from snapping.
.. At the same time, many of these same folks are utterly unconcerned with the effects of angry left-wing rhetoric. Politician after politician can accuse Republicans of killing people with their health-care plan, and that’s just “speaking truth to power.” When Hillary Clinton calls Republicans the “death party,” then that’s just the #Resistance in action. When left-wing riots break out across the land, then the resulting chaos is glossed-over as “mostly peaceful” protest.
.. There is, in fact, a problem with far-left violence, and the roots of that rage should be explored with at least the same energy the media devotes to perceived right-wing threats.
Is American Childhood Creating an Authoritarian Society?
More so than any other generation, parents and educators have instilled in millennials the idea that, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it, “life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm.”
.. kindergartens have “changed radically in the last two decades.” Exploration, exercise, and imagination are being deemphasized and play has “dwindled to the vanishing point.” Instead, kindergartens are introducing “lengthy lessons” and “highly prescriptive curricula geared to new state standards and linked to standardized tests”—curricula often taught by teachers who “must follow scripts from which they may not deviate.”
.. parents since the mid-1980s have purchased fewer multi-purpose, unstructured toys like clay and blocks that “encourage play that children can control and shape to meet their individual needs over time.” Today’s bestselling toys like action figures and video games “promote highly-structured play.”
.. practically every declining health outcome in children can be traced to the sedentary, indoor, micromanaged lives that now define American childhood.
.. children with mothers fearful of neighborhood safety are more likely to watch over two hours of TV per day, instead of playing outside. When American students are moving for only 18 minutes per day at school, it’s hardly a surprise that we’ve seen since the 1970s a more than threefold increase in the number of overweight 6 to 11 year olds.
Experts meanwhile are linking increasing rates of anger, aggression, and severe behavior problems to a lack of free play. These outcomes are consistent with evolutionary psychology theories that consider play to be a critical part of child development, teaching children to cope with, and ultimately master, fears and phobias.
- .. Angst over hypercompetitive college admissions.
.. University of Chicago law professors Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg ask whether the United States is at risk of democratic backsliding. Huq and Ginsburg found that the risk of incremental but ultimately substantial decay in democratic norms has “spiked” and now presents a “clear and present” danger. The authors argue that a “larger shift toward an illiberal democracy” is well within the cards.
.. social scientists have long argued that the origins of authoritarian societies can be discerned in childhood pathologies.
.. In the case of Nazi Germany, Miller is convinced that Hitler would not have come to power but for turn-of-the-century German childrearing practices that emphasized “unthinking obedience” and discouraged creativity. The millions of Germans who ultimately supported Nazism, in Miller’s views, were coping with the legacy of a “hidden concentration camp of childhood”—one enforced by the “clean, orderly citizens, God-fearing, respectable churchgoers” who comprised the ranks of Germany’s authority figures.
.. More so than any other factor—identity, religiosity, income etc.—it was voters’ attitudes on childrearing that predicted their support for Trump. Those who believe that is more important for children to be respectful rather than independent; obedient over self-reliant; well-behaved more than considerate; and well-mannered versus curious, were more than two and a half times as likely to support Trump than those with the opposite preferences.
.. This shouldn’t be surprising considering that few institutions in American society have embraced authoritarianism as decisively in recent years as academia—the arena where helicoptered millennials increasingly get their first taste of independence.
.. Behind these authoritarian efforts are an army of “chief diversity officers”—75 of whom have been hired between 2015 and 2016 at colleges and universities. Their mandate: train students against “subtle insults,” “environmental microaggressions,” and “microinvalidations.”
.. Jonathan Chait sees not simply a “rigorous commitment to social equality” but rather an “undemocratic creed” and a “system of left-wing ideological repression.”