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Category Archives: Politics

It’s Been Coming. It’s Why Elections Truly Matter

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Two Washington Post columnists react. First, Monica Hesse:

This is for the girl right now hiding in the bathroom stall with two pink lines on a pregnancy test and the rest of her life in front of her.

On Monday evening, Politico published a leaked document that seemed to signal that the Supreme Court may soon overturn Roe v. Wade. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a draft opinion that would end federal protection of abortion access. The official decision won’t be announced until later this summer, and meanwhile, it’s time to think of the girl in the bathroom stall and everyone else who has been or ever will be in her position, and of everyone who put her there.

. . . Conservative voters elected conservative politicians who appointed conservative judges. A machine decades in the making, . . . a decision that cleanly establishes a divide in America: men, who will have control over the most intimate parts of their bodies, and women, who will have control over their bodies only in some states, at the whim of some legislators.

“A right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito wrote in the draft opinion. He makes no mention of the things that are rooted in the nation’s history and traditions: slavery, disenfranchisement, discrimination. . . .Bodily autonomy should not be granted to women because of history and traditions; it should be recognized because of their innate dignity as human beings. . . .

There were always abortions, after all. They happened with Mason jars, and they happened with knitting needles, and they happened in bedrooms, and they happened without painkillers, and they happened with women squeezing one another’s hands so tightly their knuckles were white, and they happened, and they happened, and they happened. The overturning of Roe would not mean the end of abortions. It would just mean the end, in certain states, of safe, legal abortions.

Alito’s opinion is barbarous and cruel. It is broad where it could have been narrow. It is scathing where it could have been compassionate. It is, as discussions about abortion often are, so preoccupied with scrambling for the moral high ground that it pays no attention to the women being trampled underfoot.

This is for the girl right now hiding in the bathroom stall with two pink lines on a pregnancy test. The girl who is going to find a way to not be pregnant anyway, no matter what the Supreme Court ends up saying in June. . . . 

Next, Paul Waldman:

. . .  Many have noted that this decision [assuming it holds] will be extremely unpopular; polls show that between 60 and 65 percent of Americans say Roe should remain. The draconian laws Republicans are already proposing at the state level could be even more unpopular.

But if those facts allowed [anybody to think] this day would not come, they were clearly misguided. The coming nightmare for reproductive rights is in large part a product of minority rule. It’s what Republicans have painstakingly constructed over the course of decades, and it might take just as long to dismantle it — if Democrats can do that at all.

Opinions on abortion have been remarkably resistant to change for the past 50 years. The antiabortion movement’s attempt to convince the public that abortion is murder was a failure, and that likely won’t change in the post-Roe world.

Conservatives know that perfectly well. But the whole point of building the apparatus of minority rule was for moments like this. To do popular things, you don’t have to twist the system in knots and eliminate democratic accountability. You do it to stop popular things you don’t like, enable yourself to do things the public doesn’t want, and hold on to power no matter what.

The details should be familiar by now. The Senate gives two votes to every state, so 40 million Americans in California, most of them Democrats, get the same representation as 580,000 Americans in Wyoming, most of them Republicans. That is then levered into the electoral college, which is why the past two Republican presidents took office despite having lost the popular vote.

That (plus unprecedented ruthlessness in refusing to allow a Democratic president to fill an open seat) gets you a conservative Supreme Court supermajority — appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, confirmed by GOP senators who represent a national minority — enacting a conservative legal revolution the public never asked for.

That court then validates nearly every effort by state Republicans to insulate their own power through voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. That will enable them to outlaw abortion over the objections of their own state populations, knowing that district lines have been drawn in a way that predetermines the outcome of elections.

It’s a closed loop, an interlocking system that insulates Republicans from accountability.

There are times when Democrats can overcome it, for example by electing governors in swing states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina. But because it’s almost impossible for Republicans to lose their hold on state legislatures, they can hamstring and undermine the governor much as congressional Republicans . . . will to President Biden if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections.

Now consider where they’re going now that Roe is apparently dead. Forget about 15-week bans and six-week bans; a couple dozen Republican-run states will probably outlaw abortion entirely, perhaps with a grudging exception to save the life of the pregnant woman . . . 

But even that will not be enough. GOP state legislators are working to ban abortion in other states; in Missouri, one Republican state legislator has introduced a bill to allow anyone to sue over an abortion that occurred anywhere if “sexual intercourse occurred within this state and the child may have been conceived by that act of intercourse”. . . .

And it isn’t just abortions. In the antiabortion movement, most forms of birth control — including birth control pills, Plan B and even IUDs — are widely and wrongly considered “abortifacients,” the moral equivalent of abortion. Once laws outlawing abortion are passed, this is where the movement will likely turn its attention — and Republican legislators who worry only about primary challenges from the right will face pressure to go after birth control.

Meanwhile, the next time Republicans have complete control in D.C., they’ll push for a nationwide ban on abortion. The planning is already underway.

If your response is to say, “That would never happen — it would be too unpopular,” remember, that’s exactly what some said about overturning Roe. The whole point of minority rule is that you don’t have to worry about what’s unpopular.

Part of the sinister genius of minority rule is that if it is constructed with enough care and comprehensiveness, it can be demoralizing to the majority, which sees no way around it, at least in the short term. . . .

Overcoming that demoralization will require a psychological fortitude on the part of Democrats, and a commitment to do what Republicans did: to work not just for the next election but for a project that will unfold over decades. Even if you don’t get what you want from one president or one Congress, you have to take small steps until you reach your ultimate goal, knowing victory is never assured and will be a long time in coming.

That’s what the people who wanted to outlaw abortion committed themselves to, and now their victory is here. It can be reversed, but it will not be easy. . . .

Unquote.

Americans, mainly women, fought for years to make abortion legal so women would have more control over their bodies and thus their lives. The court decisions talk a lot about whether there’s a right to privacy, but it’s always been a contest between individual freedom and religious dogma. Here in America, unlike most places, freedom is losing:

The story of abortion rights in the 21st century can be seen in two world-shaking developments this past week [this is from the New York Times in September].

In the first, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld drastic new abortion restrictions in Texas. A few days later, Mexico’s high court paved the way for nationwide legalization.

It may be tempting to see Mexico’s ruling as the more surprising, catapulting the world’s second most populous Catholic country on a deeply contentious social matter.

But experts say it is the United States that stands out. Since 2000, 31 countries, many just as pious as Mexico, have expanded access to abortion. Only three have rolled it back: Nicaragua, Poland and the United States.

Elections matter.

Why Gas Prices Are High When There’s Plenty of Oil

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Believe it or not, but there’s no shortage of oil. The Guardian explains: 

Gasoline prices at the pump have surged, reaching a US national average of $4.34 on 21 March, and remain more than 70% greater than at this time last year. At the same time, global supplies of oil have actually increased, including from Russia, even amid the war in Ukraine.

So if high prices are not being driven by scarcity, what’s going on?

Experts are warning that little-publicized energy traders, most of whom work for the world’s largest oil companies, banks and privately held trading houses, are partly to blame.

The amount of trades – and the profits associated with them – have been skyrocketing, reaching record highs in 2021 and 2022. This inadequately regulated activity is hitting Americans’ pockets and represents a “market emergency”, according to Michael Greenberger, a former US government trading regulator.

“My instinct tells me that a very careful analysis of this market would show that the price is not reflective of supply chain problems, that there’s just too much leeway for the big banks and the big producers to manipulate if no one is looking and watching what they’re doing,” says Greenberger, the former division director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the main regulator of US energy markets.

Veteran oil analyst Philip K Verleger has warned that supply and demand “fundamentals have been rendered almost irrelevant” for oil prices, a key determinant of the price of gasoline at the pump.

He has pointed to a dramatic rise in speculation driven by artificial intelligence rapidly buying and selling massive energy bets based on minor or even nonexistent changes to real-world supplies. “Under these circumstances, a change in [supply and demand] fundamentals that might have moved prices by 50± or $1” will cause a change of as much as $10 a barrel of oil, he has written.

Overall, global oil production is nearly 5m more barrels a day greater in 2022 than in 2021, yet US politicians on both sides of the aisle have called for even more drilling. Oil exports from Russia into the global market have not been slowed by either the war or sanctions. Instead, they’re rising and are expected to end April higher than at any time since before the Covid pandemic, according to research firm Kpler. . . .

There are certainly other factors putting upward pressure on prices, including fears that Russian supply could decline in the future. But the price of oil, natural gas, and other vital fossil fuel commodities are today primarily set by energy traders, whose actions are stoking rising prices and volatility.

Little physical oil actually changes hands with such trades, which take place on two main exchanges in the US, CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange. Instead the trade is in futures contracts, a commitment to purchase a set amount of oil in the future for a price agreed in the present. But because the virtual trading has come to dwarf the physical trade, it now determines the price of oil.

Greenberger estimates that “something like 13 times the physical amount of oil is traded” via these purely financial contracts. And commercial trades – those based on the actual use of oil – have been pushed out, he says, replaced almost entirely by speculators looking to make a quick buck, which is in turn increasing excessive speculation and volatility.

According to data provided to the Guardian by CME Group, the amount of crude oil futures contracts traded daily on its platform rose in 2022 over 2021, and is nearly double that of a decade ago.

Rising prices and volatility have been on display since the day before Russian troops went to war against Ukraine, when the price of a barrel of oil was $90. Since the invasion, despite no change in supply, it has vaulted to a $124, fallen to $95, shot back up to $114, before sliding down to $103 a barrel today – over 60% higher than the price one year ago.

All the major oil companies, leading US banks, and lesser known private trading houses led by Vitol, Trafigura, Mercuria, and Glencore, are involved in speculative energy trading. Some have been found guilty of illegal trading over the years. But determining their exact level of involvement is not easy, as there are few reporting requirements allowing the public into this largely opaque world.

In a 2020 earnings call with analysts, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden called Shell’s trading “core to the success of our company, it actually makes the magic in many cases”. Shell typically earns as much as $4bn annually from this trading.

“We’re seeing just massive volatility, in terms of trading activity, in terms of pricing, where you’ve got big bounces between prices, and so something is wrong,” says Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, a non-profit consumer advocacy organization. Slocum, who also serves on the Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee to the CFTC, calls for greater regulation and transparency into a broken system where “speculators are allowed to reign free”. . . .

Slocum argues that the federal government has ceded too much authority to the futures exchanges. With profits based on volume of trades, they have little incentive to reign in traders, including excessive speculation, he alleges.

Asked to respond to these allegations, both CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange declined to comment. . . .

Their Plan to Steal the 2024 Election (While Simply Following the “Law”)

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J. Michael Luttig, a conservative appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was a US Court of Appeals judge for 15 years. He advised Mike Pence on January 6. Here he explains the Republican plan to “legally” steal the next presidential election. From CNN:

Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about.

Fewer still understand why former President T____ and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the “stolen” election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen.

January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual voting fraud. It was always and only about an election that T____ lost fair and square, under legislatively promulgated election rules in a handful of swing states that he and other Republicans contend were unlawfully changed by state election officials and state courts to expand the right and opportunity to vote, largely in response to the Covid pandemic.

The Republicans’ mystifying claim to this day that T____ did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious objective.

That objective is not somehow to rescind the 2020 election, as they would have us believe. That’s constitutionally impossible. T____’s and the Republicans’ far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if T____ or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest.

The last presidential election was a dry run for the next.

From long before Election Day 2020, T____ and Republicans planned to overturn the presidential election by exploiting the Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, the Electoral College, the Electoral Count Act of 1877, and the 12th Amendment, if T____ lost the popular and Electoral College vote.

The cornerstone of the plan was to have the Supreme Court embrace the little known “independent state legislature” doctrine, which, in turn, would pave the way for exploitation of the Electoral College process and the Electoral Count Act, and finally for Vice President Mike Pence to reject enough swing state electoral votes to overturn the election using Pence’s ceremonial power under the 12th Amendment and award the presidency to T____.

The independent state legislature doctrine says that, under the Elections and the Electors Clauses of the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary [i.e. absolute] and exclusive power over the conduct of federal presidential elections and the selection of state presidential electors. Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under this theory.

The Supreme Court has never decided whether to embrace the independent state legislature doctrine. But then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in separate concurring opinions said they would embrace that doctrine in Bush v. Gore, 20 years earlier, and Republicans had every reason to believe there were at least five votes on the Supreme Court for the doctrine in November 2020, with Amy Coney Barrett having just been confirmed in the eleventh hour before the election.

T____ and the Republicans began executing this first stage of their plan months before November 3, by challenging as violative of the independent state legislature doctrine election rules relating to early- and late-voting, extensions of voting days and times, mail-in ballots, and other election law changes that Republicans contended had been unlawfully altered by state officials and state courts in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan.

These cases eventually wound their way to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2020, and by December, the Supreme Court had decided all of these cases, but only by orders, either disallowing federal court intervention to change an election rule that had been promulgated by a state legislature, allowing legislatively promulgated rules to be changed by state officials and state courts, or deadlocking 4-4, because Justice Barrett was not sworn in until after those cases were briefed and ready for decision by the Court. In none of these cases did the Supreme Court decide the all-important independent state legislature doctrine.

Thwarted by the Supreme Court’s indecision on that doctrine, T____ and the Republicans turned their efforts to the second stage of their plan, exploitation of the Electoral College and the Electoral Count Act.

The Electoral College is the process by which Americans choose their presidents, a process that can lead to the election as president of a candidate who does not receive a majority of votes cast by the American voters. Republicans have grown increasingly wary of the Electoral College with the new census and political demographics of the nation’s shifting population.

The Electoral Count Act empowers Congress to decide the presidency in a host of circumstances where Congress determines that state electoral votes were not “regularly given” by electors who were “lawfully certified,” terms that are undefined and ambiguous. In this second stage of the plan, the Republicans needed to generate state-certified alternative slates of electors from swing states where Biden won the popular vote who would cast their electoral votes for T____ instead. Congress would then count the votes of these alternative electoral slates on January 6, rather than the votes of the certified electoral slates for Biden, and T____ would be declared the reelected president.

The Republicans’ plan failed at this stage when they were unable to secure a single legitimate, alternative slate of electors from any state because the various state officials refused to officially certify the T____ slates.

Thwarted by the Supreme Court in the first stage, foiled by their inability to come up with alternative state electoral slates in the second stage, and with time running out, T____ and the Republicans began executing the final option in their plan, which was to scare up illegitimate alternative electoral slates in various swing states to be transmitted to Congress. Whereupon, on January 6, Vice President Pence would count only the votes of the illegitimate electors from the swing states, and not the votes of the legitimate, certified electors that were cast for Biden, and declare T____’s reelection as President of the United States.

The entire house of cards collapsed at noon on January 6, when Pence refused to go along with the ill-conceived plan, correctly concluding that under the 12th Amendment he had no power to reject the votes that had been cast by the duly certified electors or to delay the count to give Republicans even more time to whip up alternative electoral slates.

Pence declared Joe Biden the 46th President of the United States at 3:40 a.m. on Thursday, January 7, roughly 14 hours after rioters stormed the US Capitol, disrupting the Joint Session and preventing Congress from counting the Electoral College votes for president until late that night and into the following day, after the statutorily designated day for counting those votes.

T____ and his allies and supporters in Congress and the states began readying their failed 2020 plan to overturn the 2024 presidential election later that very same day and they have been unabashedly readying that plan ever since, in plain view to the American public. Today, they are already a long way toward recapturing the White House in 2024, whether T____ or another Republican candidate wins the election or not.

T____ and Republicans are preparing to return to the Supreme Court, where this time they will likely win the independent state legislature doctrine, now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Court and ready to vote. Barrett has not addressed the issue, but this turns on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and Barrett is firmly aligned on that method of constitutional interpretation with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, all three of whom have written that they believe the doctrine is correct.

Only last month, in a case from North Carolina the Court declined to hear, Moore v. Harper, four Justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) said that the independent state legislature question is of exceptional importance to our national elections, the issue will continue to recur and the Court should decide the issue sooner rather than later before the next presidential election. This case involved congressional redistricting, but the independent state legislature doctrine is as applicable to redistricting as it is to presidential elections.

The Republicans are also in the throes of electing T____-endorsed candidates to state legislative offices in key swing states, installing into office their favored state election officials who deny that Biden won the 2020 election, such as secretaries of state, electing sympathetic state court judges onto the state benches and grooming their preferred potential electors for ultimate selection by the party, all so they will be positioned to generate and transmit alternative electoral slates to Congress, if need be.

Finally, they are furiously politicking to elect T____ supporters to the Senate and House, so they can overturn the election in Congress, as a last resort.

Forewarned is to be forearmed.

T____ and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine (thus allowing state court enforcement of state constitutional limitations on legislatively enacted election rules and elector appointments) and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.

Although the Vice President will be a Democrat in 2024, both parties also need to enact federal legislation that expressly limits the vice president’s power to be coextensive with the power accorded the vice president in the 12th Amendment and confirm that it is largely ceremonial, as Pence construed it to be on January 6.

Vice President Kamala Harris would preside over the Joint Session in 2024. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have any idea who will be presiding after that, however. Thus, both parties have the incentive to clarify the vice president’s ceremonial role now.

As it stands today, T____, or his anointed successor, and the Republicans are poised, in their word, to “steal” from Democrats the presidential election in 2024 that they falsely claim the Democrats stole from them in 2020. But there is a difference between the falsely claimed “stolen” election of 2020 and what would be the stolen election of 2024. Unlike the Democrats’ theft claimed by Republicans, the Republicans’ theft would be in open defiance of the popular vote and thus the will of the American people . . .

Unquote.

Millions of Americans chose a monstrosity to lead us. Millions would have him lead us again. They must never be forgiven.

“We Don’t Expect Him To Be There”

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The Department of Justice is taking its own sweet time prosecuting the January 6th insurrectionists, but apparently getting closer to the former president and his co-conspirators. Meanwhile, a member of the House January 6th committee says they’ll have big news starting in June. From NBC News:

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., suggested that the House Jan. 6 committee’s upcoming hearings will be dramatic and include explosive revelations that the panel has been piecing together behind the scenes for months.

“The hearings will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House,” Raskin said Thursday at an event . . . in Washington.

Members of the committee plan to hold those hearings in June and aim to have a report out about their investigation by the end of the summer or early fall, said Raskin, who sits on the panel.

“No president has ever come close to doing what happened here in terms of trying to organize an inside coup to overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order,” he said. “And then also use a violent insurrection made up of domestic violent extremist groups, white nationalist and racist, fascist groups in order to support the coup.”

Raskin said the committee will present “evidence” that proves there was coordination among then-President D____ T____ and his inner circle and his supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The plan was to use then-Vice President Mike Pence to try to get President Joe Biden’s electoral vote tally below the 270 majority needed for victory, Raskin said, which under the 12th Amendment would shift the contest to a vote in the House. If that occurred, he said, Republicans would have the majority to seize the presidency because the votes would be cast by the state delegations, and the GOP controls more state delegations than the Democrats do.

“It’s anybody’s guess what could have happened — martial law, civil war. You know, the beginning of authoritarianism,” Raskin said, speculating on what might have unfolded if the plan was successful. “I want people to pay attention to what’s going on here, because that’s as close to fascism as I ever want my country to come to again.”

“This was not a coup directed at the president,” Raskin said. “It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and against the Congress.”

The plan was coordinated “most tightly by T____ and his inner circle,” Raskin said, adding that the committee faced the most difficulty in this aspect of its probe. The panel has interviewed more than 800 witnesses, but he said, “The closer you get to T____, the more they refuse to testify.”

Speaking about the threats to Pence on Jan. 6 and the chants by rioters to hang him, Raskin said the vice president’s Secret Service agents — including one who was carrying the nuclear football — ran down to an undisclosed place in the Capitol. Those agents, who Raskin said he suspects were reporting to T____’s Secret Service agents, were trying to whisk Pence away from the Capitol.

Pence then “uttered what I think are the six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far: ‘I’m not getting in that car,'” Raskin said.

“He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do,” Raskin said.

Unquote.

So Pence didn’t want to leave the Capitol. The scary interpretation is that he thought he was being kidnapped by the Secret Service. At a minimum, he knew that if he wasn’t at the Capitol, the Electoral College proceedings would go on without him, allowing Republican senators to disqualify the votes of selected states, the first step in overturning the election (the plan his corrupt boss had been trying to convince him to go along with for weeks). It hasn’t received much attention, but the oldest member of the Senate, 88-year old Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) admitted as much the day before the insurrection:

During an exchange with reporters on Tuesday [Jan. 5th], Grassley was asked how he plans to vote [on Jan. 6th].

“Well, first of all, I will be — if the Vice President isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate,” according to a transcript of his remarks sent by a spokesperson.

Grassley serves as the president pro tempore of the Senate and will preside over any portion of the debate that Pence does not attend.

“We don’t expect him to be there.” Those words are just as chilling as “I’m not getting in that car”.

Give the Guy a Break!

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Back when the NY Times was merely a paper newspaper, I’d always look at the letters to the editor. I turned every page to see if there was anything interesting and they were printed on the same page as the editorials. They were hard to miss. They’re much harder to miss now that the Times presents itself as one long digital page with lots and lots of links (in fact, too many links). Another reason for not reading the letters is that in this modern world there are so many digital opinions available. Who needs more opinions?

But today, in search of good news, I saw this link:

Untitled

So here are some opinions.

To the Editor:

Most of those giving President Biden low marks in polls are the same ones who voted for D____ T____ twice and believe he won in 2020. President Biden got us out of Afghanistan, has turned the corner on Covid, signed the American Rescue Plan and infrastructure bill, appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, united the West against Vladimir Putin, and has had to deal with intractable forces like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, the “Squad,” Republicans and right-wing media along the way.

Mr. Biden, who is facing more challenges than anyone since Franklin D. Roosevelt, is doing a good job! Give the guy a break and let him run the country!

John E. Colbert
Arroyo Seco, N.M.

To the Editor:

Charles Blow suggests that President Biden’s low approval rating is due to his being a poor messenger. It’s really discouraging that many Americans want a showman, a reality TV star or a celebrity to lead them.

Mr. Biden is generally known as a decent man and has actually done a lot to rescue this country from the decadence of the last four years with D____ T____. Americans need a president like Mr. Biden to tell the truth and focus on what we need, like voting rights reform, gun control and lowering of drug prices.

Why then do Americans appear to be drawn to celebrities, like the two who are running for office in Pennsylvania and Ohio, Dr. Oz and J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy”? The Democratic Party needs to reverse this trend and get the real message out to the public about how much better our country has become under Mr. Biden’s administration.

Anne M. Johnston
New Providence, N.J.

To the Editor:

The Democrats need a “writers’ room” to hone their message, to make it more memorable and targeted, and, most important, to get the message out in a timely fashion — refined every day. Look at what Volodymyr Zelensky has done on a daily basis. The entire world admires his leadership, and the Ukrainian people could not be more united behind him. Much of that is because his message is renewed daily and is carefully crafted, both by Mr. Zelensky himself and a cadre of writers, including ones from his past life as an entertainer.

True, Mr. Zelensky’s opponent presents an existential threat to his country and his people, but the threat the Republicans present to our democracy is scarcely less significant. The Republicans have blatantly advertised the platform of regression they plan to implement if returned to power. The Democrats must begin getting a unified and memorable message out daily to stave that off.

Tom Welsch
Bozeman, Mont.

To the Editor:

While Charles Blow makes an attempt to be objective, he brings me back to a question: “When will all the ‘Biden bashing’ stop?” President Biden inherited an unusually large plate of problems and crises. And yet media commentators continue to hold Mr. Biden personally accountable for not fixing all the problems immediately and perfectly.

President Biden is a patriot and a good man. Needlessly undermining him opens the door wider for D____ T____ to return. Is that what we want?