Donald Trump may have been as surprised as anyone when he won the 2016 presidential election. He got 46.1% of the vote, finishing second in the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, who got 48.2%, 2.8 million ahead of the reality TV star. But because of the peculiarities of the Electoral College, Trump’s narrow victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a margin of less than 80,000 votes across those three states put him in the White House.
No sooner was Trump inaugurated than he started his re-election campaign. But he never tried to win over the people who voted for Clinton, instead writing them off as enemies. He campaigned on a populist platform of protecting American jobs, but he ruled as an autocrat. More than 300,000 American manufacturing jobs were lost during Trump’s presidency, as his trade war alienated our allies, China found new sources for commodities such as pork and soybeans and the trade deficit increased 22% since 2016.
Meanwhile, Trump loaded his Cabinet with corporate lobbyists who cut regulations and threatened worker safety and public health. He passed a tax cut that mainly benefitted billionaires and corporations, but also created a new tax incentive to offshore jobs. His lackeys sabotaged the US Postal Service. He proposes to defund Social Security and Medicare if re-elected. Of course, he has shown himself incapable of controlling the coronavirus — even in the White House.
Trump’s approval since his inauguration peaked at 45.8% in April, in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls, while disapproval has mostly stayed above 50% since a few weeks after his inauguration.
We certainly aren’t going to call the election in advance, after what happened in 2016, but we are guardedly optimistic. Joe Biden, who would repeal those tax cuts for corporations and individuals making more than $400,000 a year, is leading Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Biden also is narrowly ahead in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and even in Texas. And early voting is at record levels, with nearly 60 million casting their ballots as of Oct. 25, suggesting a surge of support for Democrats. But it will take a strong finish to crush the Great Misleader by a margin that makes it impossible for Republicans to steal the election.
Democrats need to flip at least three Senate seats to regain the majority. Dem challengers are leading in Arizona, Colorado and Maine and are in tossups for two Georgia seats, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina and South Carolina. Democrats also making strong races in Alaska, Kansas and Texas. On defense, Gary Peters faces a tough re-election race in Michigan and Doug Jones faces a tougher race in Alabama.
Biden says he wants to work with both parties in the next Congress, but former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid advised his longtime Senate colleague to take “no more than three weeks” to test bipartisanship before moving to end the filibuster, so Democrats can overcome Republican obstruction. In an interview with the Associated Press, Reid said there is just too much that needs to be done in the country to wait around trying to reach agreements under the decades-old Senate practice of requiring 60 votes to advance legislation.
When he was majority leader, Reid was forced to end the filibuster on administrative and most judicial nominees in November 2013 after then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell used the filibuster to block virtually all of President Obama’s executive and court appointees. Democrats still kept the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, as well as legislation. When Republicans gained the majority in 2015, McConnell resumed blocking Obama’s court appointees, including seven appeals court vacancies and 42 district court vacancies.
In the most notorious case, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused to allow the Senate to consider Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland, Chief Judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in March 2016 to replace Scalia on the Supreme Court. McConnell argued that a Supreme Court nominee should not be considered during an election year.
Republican senators never gave Garland a hearing and threatened to keep the Supreme Court seat open through a Hillary Clinton administration, if necessary. That threat became moot when Trump was elected, but McConnell further greased the skids by eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, allowing the Republican Senate majority to barrel over Democratic opposition to confirm Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
In his first debate with Biden, Trump said it was Obama’s and Biden’s fault that he was able to name so many judges. “I’ll have so many judges because President Obama and [Biden] left me 128 judges to fill,” he said Sept. 29. “You just don’t do that.” (The actual number of judicial vacancies he inherited was 105, PolitiFact noted. Many of those occurred too late to be filled by Obama, even if the Republicans hadn’t been blocking them.)
Republicans blew off their claimed principled opposition to filling a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Sept. 18. On Sept. 26, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, who was finishing her third year on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Her nomination was rushed through the Judiciary Committee.
During four days of hearings, Barrett evaded answering Democrats’ questions about her positions on issues that might come before the court. Then Republicans changed the rules on the Judiciary Committee to approve Barrett’s nomination with no Democrats present for the vote. Senate Republicans voted 51-49 to cut off debate Oct. 25. The next day they confirmed Barrett Oct. 26 with a 52-48 vote, followed by her swearing in at the White House.
Meanwhile, McConnell still has not found enough time on the Senate agenda to consider bills for coronavirus relief, despite bills that have been on his desk since May. The House bills would provide relief for people who have lost jobs during the economic collapse, as well as money for local and state governments that have lost revenue and face the prospect of laying off essential workers, stimulus checks for families and money to pay for COVID-19 tests and contact tracing.
Supporters of the filibuster say it encourages bipartisan consensus by requiring bill sponsors to get at least 60 senators to allow the legislation to proceed. However, the filibuster was instituted in the early 20th century to let conservative senators thwart popular initiatives.
Barack Obama has endorsed the effort for change. During the funeral this year for Rep. John Lewis, Obama announced his support for ending the filibuster, calling it a Jim Crow-era relic that was used to stall voting advances for Black people.
Of course, there is a risk in doing away with the filibuster, since Republicans could do a lot of damage if they got control of the White House and both chambers of Congress again, but that means people must get out to vote regularly to promote and keep senators who support the public good.
Under Trump, Republicans have packed the courts with partisan right-wing hacks at every level. Biden, resisting efforts to draw him into endorsing the expansion of the Supreme Court, has proposed a bipartisan commission to study reform of the federal judiciary.
Biden also has resisted calls to expand Medicare to cover everybody, preferring to improve the ACA, but he supports lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60. If, as expected, the radicalized Supreme Court invalidates the Affordable Care Act, Democrats should replace it with Medicare for All that covers all medical expenses, as the Canadian system does. Biden can explain that the Supreme Court made him do it. (Biden can also blame the greedy insurance companies. If they don’t like working under Obamacare rules, let’s see how they like losing the market entirely.) — JMC.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020
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