Whereof One Can Speak đŸ‡ș🇩

Nothing special, one post at a time since 2012

This Former Republican Is Disgusted with the Media

Posted on by

Jennifer Rubin writes for The Washington Post. She was known as a conservative years ago but gave up on the Republican Party. She’s not happy with negative coverage of the economy:

“U.S. Economy Shows Surprising Vigor in First Half of 2023” a Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed this past week. On Axios, one read: “The economy’s latest upside surprise.” Yahoo Finance intoned, “Surprisingly Strong US Economic Data Keeps Recession Fears at Bay.”

You might find it remarkable that outlets touting their economic foresightedness and keen analysis could be continually surprised about the economy’s strength after 29 consecutive months of job growth, inflation steadily declining, durable goods having been up for three consecutive months, 35,000 new infrastructure projects, an extended period in which real wages exceeded inflation and outsize gains for lower wage-earners. It’s as though outlets are so invested in the narrative of failure and imminent recession that reams of positive data have had little impact on their “narrative.”

The most sanguine headline came from Fortune: “Economists scrambling to justify their recession predictions 
 but maybe they were just wrong.” Conversely, maybe the administration was right in its approach to building the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out” despite the histrionics from Republicans, hand-wringing from the media and negative opinion polling.

Part of the problem might be the media’s preference for political horse-race coverage over events on the ground. “What do voters think?” (about what? about the media’s own negative spin on the economy?) replaces “What is going on?”

We have seen far too little coverage of the economic transformation in little towns, rural areas and aging metro centers brought about by new investment in plants, infrastructure projects and green energy related to the Chips Act. It sure would be nice to know what’s happening in the heartland when a new chip manufacturing plant creates thousands of jobs or when a new bridge creates scores of construction jobs and then cuts commute times. So intent on hyping the politics of what the administration is doing, the mainstream media too frequently neglects coverage of what President Biden’s initiative are accomplishing.

When the media consistently gets the big stories wrong or fails to cover major economic changes, one would hope they’d look back to explain why their coverage diverged from reality and do a better job of covering actual developments rather than GOP talking points, process stories (how Biden is “selling” his plan) and polling. Unfortunately, waiting for the mainstream media to engage in self-reflection (e.g., maybe it overdid the “But her emails” in 2016; maybe there was no red wave in 2022), let alone self-correction, might be a waste of time.

If outlets are concerned about low trust in the media, explaining a historic economic transformation might help inform voters and leave the media less “surprised” when the data comes back. Instead, they are invariably on to the next groupthink exercise, the next round of gloom-and-doom and the next batch of credulous coverage of Republican talking points.

Good-bye, Supreme Court. Hello, Super Legislature.

Posted on by

President Biden doesn’t think we should expand the Supreme Court because it would “politicize” it. Pick a metaphor. That train has already left the station? That ship has sailed? That horse has left the corral? Republican senators destroyed the notion that the Court isn’t political when they refused to let Obama appoint a justice almost one year before the 2016 election and then rammed one through in 2020 when people were already voting.

The president needs to review recent events. Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC summarizes while asking “who died and made the Supreme Court a legislature?”

… It’s one of Republicans’ longest-running talking points: “Don’t legislate from the bench.”

Now that Republican appointees are a supermajority on the Supreme Court, you would think that this majority would steer clear of anything that might look like it was writing laws and thereby undermining the people’s representatives in Congress.

But you’d be wrong.

Today’s conservative justices are happily imposing their reactionary legislative vision on America, not just by interpreting laws, but by effectively rewriting them, in order to implement unpopular policies that could never get passed through Congress. Separation of powers be damned.

Take some of the biggest, most divisive, most consequential issues in American life right now: student loan relief, climate change, voting rights, labor laws and gun control. Now the Supreme Court decides what happens on those issues. Not you. Not me. Not our elected representatives.

Like on Friday when the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that 43 million Americans would not receive student loan relief under President Joe Biden’s plan.

The conservatives ruled the program had not been explicitly approved by Congress in the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act.

But that law allows the Education Department to “waive or modify” financial assistance programs “as the Secretary deems necessary” in a national emergency.

Like the Covid pandemic we were still in when Biden announced his plan last year.

In her dissent, liberal Justice Elena Kagan slammed her conservative colleagues, writing: “The result here is that the Court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness.”

Got crippling student debt from predatory loans? Tough. The Supreme Court says you can’t get relief.

On climate change, the Supreme Court has undermined Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency twice in the last year alone.

In West Virginia v. EPA, a 6-3 majority ruled the EPA exceeded its authority by regulating carbon emissions from power plants. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority: “It is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme. 
 A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself.”

Except that Congress did explicitly give the EPA the authority to use the “best system of emission reduction” when it passed the Clean Air Act in the ’60s.

As Kagan put it in her dissent, “The Court will not allow the Clean Air Act to work as Congress instructed. The Court, rather than Congress, will decide how much regulation is too much.”

Then in May in Sackett v. EPA, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority in a precedent-setting opinion that the Clean Water Act only allows the EPA to regulate wetlands that have “a continuous surface connection” to “waters of the United States.”

Except that’s not what the law says. The law applies to “all waters of the United States” and explicitly wetlands “adjacent” to those waters. But instead of applying the law as written, Alito just changed the meaning of the word “adjacent” to mean “adjoining.”

You want Congress to decide how to protect our air and water? Tough. The Supreme Court decides that now.

Next, look at voting rights, where in the last 10 years, the Supreme Court effectively rewrote the core protections of the historic Voting Rights Act, first passed by Congress in 1965.

Congress passed the VRA explicitly to force southern states with a history of disenfranchising Black  voters through seemingly neutral voting requirements to get approval from the federal government before they could implement any new voting laws.

This “preclearance” was such a crucial part of the VRA that Congress voted overwhelmingly to extend the preclearance provision in 1982 and again in 2006.

But in 2013, a 5-4 majority led by Roberts decided that voter suppression laws were no longer a problem in those states. That ruling in Shelby County v. Holder effectively voided the preclearance provisions that Congress had voted overwhelmingly to extend just seven years earlier.

In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, the 6-3 majority upheld an Arizona election law that imposed burdens upon Native Americans living on reservations because the majority felt the burdens alleged were “modest when considering Arizona’s ‘political processes’ as a whole.”

As Kagan noted in her dissent, “The Court has (yet again) rewritten—in order to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses.”

Do you want Congress to protect voting rights and stop racist rules from suppressing minority votes? Tough. The Supreme Court is writing the laws now.

Now look at labor rights, where this anti-worker, anti-union court has legislated from the bench to create new rights for corporations, and against their employees, in two major cases.

In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined the right of workers to join unions and to organize orderly strikes. To resolve disputes between workers and employers, the law also established the National Labor Relations Board.

This court has hacked away at that system.

This happened most crucially in 2018 with Janus v. AFSCME, when the Roberts court struck down the long-standing practice of mandatory union “agency fees” being deducted from employees’ paychecks.

“There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this Nation’s law—and in its economic life—for over 40 years.”

You want Congress to protect labor rights? Tough. The Supreme Court has other policy ideas.

In the absence of much meaningful action by Congress, this Supreme Court has done more than any legislature to radically alter gun policy.

In Washington, Chicago and New York state, over more than a century, lawmakers passed tailored gun regulations, but in recent years, the Supreme Court has gutted them.

In 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, five justices struck down a Washington, D.C., handgun ban, deciding that the Second Amendment wasn’t about colonial militias but about the right of the average Joe to brandish a Glock.

In 2010, that ruling was extended to the rest of the country with McDonald v. Chicago.

Then in 2022, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the court went a step further and decided that the Second Amendment also says Americans are guaranteed a right to carry guns in public, contradicting New York’s century-old law requiring gun owners to show proper cause for doing so and obtain a license.

As liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it during oral arguments, describing the implications of a court stepping in on a state’s legal turf, “You’re asking us to make the choice for the legislature.”

The six conservative Supreme Court justices were more than happy to make that choice for the state Legislature. States only get to put limits on really dangerous things, like voting rights and abortion.

You want Congress to stop mass shootings? Tough. This Supreme Court is calling the shots.

Making the choice for the legislature — that’s exactly what this Supreme Court now does, on a regular basis, and on a range of key issues. It takes issues decided by the people’s representatives and then re-decides them in a manner that pleases the conservative supermajority on the bench. So an elected, and Democratic-controlled, Congress can write and pass a progressive law, but an unelected and very conservative Supreme Court can just rewrite it.

Confidently. Brazenly. Shamelessly.

These are not neutral judges. These are politicians in robes.

Unquote.

Too late for Hasan’s article, a radical judge appointed by the last president has issued an injunction that stops various parts of the Executive Branch from talking to social media companies on the ludicrous theory that right-wing voices are being censored. It may be the most ridiculous ruling yet from the recent batch of Republican federal judges.

It was 1869 when Congress and President Grant increased the Supreme Court from 8 to 9 justices. At the same time, they created 9 circuits or courts of appeal spread around the country, one for each Supreme Court justice to partly administer.

There are now 13 circuits and many more Americans, lawyers and cases. The Democrats should add 4 justices next time they hold the White House and both houses of Congress. Thirteen circuits, thirteen justices.

That will require at least 50 Democratic senators who are willing to ignore a Republican filibuster. Let the Republicans complain that the Democrats are politicizing a Court that’s already political.

We Need To Declare Independence from the Founding Fathers

Posted on by

Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman is one of the most sensible people writing about politics today. (Is it a coincidence that I almost always agree with him?) This Fourth of July, he advises us to respect the Founding Fathers but not worship them (and not pretend to worship them like some of our most prominent right-wingers do):

Two hundred and forty-six years ago, Americans did something extraordinary, declaring their independence from a colonial rule enforced from a great distance with the cruel and arbitrary hand of oppression. And now it’s time for us to declare our own independence, from Founding Father fetishism.

This is not a call to repudiate the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution. We don’t have to tear down every statue of them (though frankly the statues don’t do anyone much good), or cast them only as villains in our national story.

But we need to liberate ourselves from the toxic belief that those men were perfect in all things, vessels of sacred wisdom that must bind our society today no matter how much damage it might cause.

As we’ve seen recently, the American right has found in the framers an extraordinarily effective tool with which they can roll back social progress and undermine our democracy. It may have found its most ridiculous manifestation in the tea party movement that emerged when Barack Obama was president, when people started prancing around in tricorn hats and every Republican was supposed to have a favorite Founder. But today it has gone from an affectation to a weapon, and a brutally effective one.

We saw it in the recent Supreme Court decisions that supercharged the legal philosophy of “originalism” on abortion and guns. Reproductive rights, said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., are neither found in the explicit words of the Constitution nor “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” so they don’t exist as rights. As for states that want to regulate guns, said Justice Clarence Thomas, only regulations that have “a distinctly similar historical regulation” from the 18th century will be allowed. The America of 1789 becomes a prison the conservative justices can lock us all in whenever it suits them.

Originalism was a scam from the start, a foolproof methodology for conservatives to arrive at whatever judicial result matches their policy preferences: Cherry-pick a few quotes from the Federalist Papers, cite an obscure 1740 ordinance from the Virginia colony one of your clerks dug up, then claim that scripture leads us inexorably to only one outcome.

By happy coincidence, that outcome is always the one Republicans seek. Anyone who disagrees, or who shows how absurd the right’s historical analysis is even on its own terms, simply isn’t respecting the divine will of the framers.

I am no spirit medium, able to communicate with the framers through the mists of time, and neither is anyone on the Supreme Court. But I suspect they themselves would find the originalist project as practiced on the right to be utterly absurd. Imagine you could travel back and describe to them the idea that hundreds of years hence we’d all be bound to their utterances and the condition of their society. They’d probably say, “That sounds insane.”

But this is the conceit of today’s right: The Founders were essentially perfect, and only we conservatives are capable of interpreting their will.

One of the lies conservatives tell — and to which they cling all the more fiercely in the face of new understandings of history — is that the founding and the men who drove it were straightforward and easy to understand.

But like the country they shaped, they were complicated. They were brilliant and visionary, and weak and compromised. It does not diminish their accomplishments to see that they were human beings.

So what do you do about a figure such as Thomas Jefferson? He had one of the most extraordinary minds of his age, capable of crafting brilliant works of political philosophy we read to this day and designing structures that still stand. Yet he also owned other human beings.

The answer conservatives have is that we must shield our eyes from Jefferson’s shortcomings (along with those of the other enslavers among the Founders). If you’re Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, you bring public school teachers to a “civics education” seminar where they’re told to instruct children that Jefferson and George Washington were principled in their opposition to slavery; maybe the kids won’t bother asking why that opposition was never so firmly held that it extended to the men, women and children they held in bondage.

But trust me, kids can handle complexity. They want complexity. They walk every day through a rapidly changing world, and they deal with that change much better than adults do.

That’s the thing about America: It’s all about change, and always has been. At its best, it’s about imagination, and dynamism, and progress. That’s what it was in 1776, and that’s what it is now.

We are a country filled with achievements and shortcomings, virtues and vices. We have more Nobel Prize winners than any other nation, yet we’re the only highly developed country that doesn’t provide health coverage to all its citizens. We invent new sports and musical genres and see them spread throughout the world, yet alarmingly few of us speak more than one language. People everywhere thirst for American culture and dream of coming here, yet they look at our unreal levels of carnage and don’t understand how we can live in a society drowning in guns.

I’ve never been more fearful for the future of America than I am today; there are good reasons to believe that the democracy we began to fashion two and a half centuries ago may not survive the next decade. And the people most eager to strangle it are the same ones who most loudly proclaim their devotion to the Founders.

So we need to liberate ourselves from those men. We should study them, and understand them, and honor the great things they did. But they were not gods. They can’t take us to a future of freedom and justice. We have to do it for ourselves.

They’re Not Going To Help Deal With the Climate Crisis

Posted on by

Our local air quality has improved to “Poor” now that some of the Canadian smoke has drifted elsewhere. The climate crisis is manifesting itself in ever more disheartening ways. Wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe. Ninety percent of Antarctic ice is gone. Mosquitoes that spread malaria are moving north.

At the same time, people who call themselves “conservative” are opposed to conserving a climate we humans have evolved to live in. The environmentalist David Roberts has an explanation for their opposition:

I have a fairly unpopular opinion that has grown stronger throughout my career, to wit: Conservative opposition to acknowledging and acting on climate change is not a contingent accident of history. The two — climate change and modern conservatism — are intrinsically at odds. 

In other words, the situation wouldn’t have been substantially changed by Al Gore not making his movie, or John McCain winning, or environmentalists talking more about national security and less about polar bears, or any of the other glib explanations that have been offered over the years. 

[There are] two basic reasons. First, at a more abstract level, solving (or just dealing with) climate requires a) concern for people distant in space and/or time, b) global cooperation across lines of race/nationality/etc., c) short-term sacrifice for future benefits, and d) planning. It requires that we think and plan as a species. It requires solidarity and cooperation. That’s just not compatible with nationalism amd other forms of in-group/out-group tribalism. It’s not compatible with extreme “there is no such thing as society” individualism. 

Slightly more concretely, clean energy is, relative to fossil fuels, more networked and infrastructure-based, more distributed, more about sharing, more reliant on long-term contracts, more reliant on solidarity and social trust. 

Basically, the structure of the climate problem and its solutions require more cooperation and solidarity and planning, less competition and nationalism and trust in markets. There’s no clever rhetorical way around that. And yes, I realize that conservatives can acknowledge climate change and still double down on reactionary shit like hoarding and wall-building — that is, in effect, what they’re currently doing — but that’s not a solution. Conservatism has no solution. 

“The two tasks – preventing Earth systems collapse and preventing the rise of the far right – are not divisible. We have no choice but to fight both forces at once.”  It’s a little crazy that George Monbiot is the only one saying this clearly.

Georoge Monbiot writes for The Guardian. Here are the first and last paragraphs of the column Roberts quoted from:

Round the cycle turns. As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programmes are shut down, heating accelerates and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times….

It is easy to whip up fascism. It’s the default result of political ignorance and its exploitation. Containing it is much harder, and never-ending. The two tasks – preventing Earth systems collapse and preventing the rise of the far right – are not divisible. We have no choice but to fight both forces at once.

The Republicans on the Supreme Court Screw America Again

Posted on by

It was only this week that I learned there are wedding websites. I don’t mean the kind that tell you how to have the perfect wedding. I mean websites devoted to a specific wedding, i.e., the one you and your prospective spouse plan to have. A site for brides explains:

A wedding website provides a hub for important information regarding a couple’s big day. It can house venue details, dress code specifics, and your registry wishes. Plus, it provides a space to keep guests easily updated and to collect wedding RSVPs. But with a number of options out there, which are the best wedding websites?

Okay, that makes sense. We use the internet for a whole lot of stuff these days.

But if you’re not a web designer, how do you get a site for your wedding, something like, say, (don’t click on it) http://www.Mary_and_John_Are_Having_a_Wedding.org? Fortunately, there are lots and lots of companies that make it easy to do just that. If you visit the link above for brides, you’ll find this list:

8 Best Wedding Websites of 2023

The first one on the list, Joy, offers this:

  • Price: Free
  • No. of templates: 601
  • Custom domain? Yes, separate domain purchase required

So you can use the site for free, they have 601 designs to choose from, and if you want a designated domain name (like Mary_and_John_Are_Having_a_Wedding) you have to give them a nominal sum, maybe $20 a year.

As I said above, there are lots of companies that offer this service to people getting married. And it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of money to be made by doing so.

Yet, a woman in Colorado with a web design business called 303 Creative apparently decided that she wanted to begin offering this service. But wait! Wouldn’t that require her company to sell her services to prospective spouses who happen to be gay? Yes, it would.

Gay people are one of the “protected classes” referred to in federal and/or state laws. In particular, Colorado has a “public accommodations” law that says:

It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person, directly or indirectly, to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, national origin, or ancestry, the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation.

And a “place of public accommodation” includes any business that sells its services to the public.

So what? Well, the owner of 303 Creative claims to be the kind of non-Christian “Christian” who abhors the idea of gay marriage. She says she could never bring herself to sell her services to a gay couple. What to do?

A reasonable person might say to themselves, all right, given my particular (albeit peculiar) religious beliefs, I guess I’ll skip the wedding web design business. There are weddings I wouldn’t want to handle and I don’t want to break the law.

This is where the Alliance Defending Freedom enters the picture. (I don’t know if this Colorado woman contacted them or they contacted her — maybe they went looking for a web designer with a hatred for gay marriage — it doesn’t really matter.) Here’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center says about the ADF:

Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.

ADF also works to develop “religious liberty” legislation and case law that will allow the denial of goods and services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion. [ADF was] one of the most influential groups informing the [previous] administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights.

The ADF helped 303 Creative’s owner file a lawsuit to stop the state of Colorado from enforcing its public accommodation law against her, assuming that (1) she one day began offering wedding website design services, (2) a gay couple tried to buy her services, (3) she refused to sell to them and (4) the state of Colorado was interested enough to prosecute her.

Apparently, it’s an interesting legal question whether 303 Creative had “standing” to sue. Usually, you need to say you’ve suffered an injury in order to sue somebody. But the six reactionaries on the Supreme Court don’t worry much about details like that anymore. They decided the Dobbs forced-birth case in favor of doctors who said they might one day have patients who were upset after they had an abortion.

To make this long story shorter, 303 Creative’s owner sued Colorado in federal court; she lost; she appealed that decision; she lost again; and (as ADF hoped all along) the Supreme Court decided to accept the appeal, after which the Renegade Six decided in her favor. As usual it was 6-3. The majority’s main “justification” for voting that way was that making her accept a gay couple as customers would somehow interfere with her First Amendment right to free speech. Whatever.

Here’s some of Justice Sotomayor’s response to the Six’s radical decision (her dissent begins on page 33):

Five years ago, this Court recognized the “general rule” that religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage “do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law”.

… Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. Specifically, the Court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples…. The Court also holds that the company has a right to post a notice that says “no [wedding websites] will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages”.

… “What a difference five years makes.” Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities. New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar. When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims. 

Now the Court faces a similar test. A business open to the public seeks to deny gay and lesbian customers the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on the owner’s religious belief that same-sex marriages are “false.” The business argues, and a majority of the Court agrees, that because the business offers services that are customized and expressive, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment shields the business from a generally applicable law that prohibits discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services.

That is wrong. Profoundly wrong…. The law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment. Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group….

The people of Colorado have adopted the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act… A public accommodations law has two core purposes. First, the law ensures “equal access to publicly available goods and services”…. For social groups that face discrimination, such access is vital…. Second, a public accommodations law ensures equal dignity in the common market. Indeed, that is the law’s “fundamental object”: “to vindicate ‘the deprivation of personal dignity that surely accompanies denials of equal access to public establishments.’

… Preventing the “unique evils” caused by “acts of invidious discrimination in the distribution of publicly available goods, services, and other advantages” is a compelling state interest “of the highest order”…

A public accommodations law does not force anyone to start a business, or to hold out the business’s goods or services to the public at large. The law also does not compel any business to sell any particular good or service. But if a business chooses to profit from the public market, which is established and maintained by the state, the state may require the business to abide by a legal norm of nondiscrimination.

In particular, the state may ensure that groups historically marked for second-class status are not denied goods or services on equal terms.
The concept of a public accommodation thus embodies a simple, but powerful, social contract: A business that chooses to sell to the public assumes a duty to serve the public without unjust discrimination….

The unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is this: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different. It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes. And for that to be true, it must be true in the public market. For the “promise of freedom” is an empty one if the Government is “powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of [one person] will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of [another]”. Because the Court today retreats from that promise, I dissent.

Republicans outnumber Democrats by six to three on the Supreme Court. With even five votes, they can do whatever they want. One way to fix this problem is to expand the Court. We now have thirteen federal judicial districts, instead of nine. We should have at least thirteen justices on the Court to handle the additional workload and, more importantly, restore some sanity to the institution. Together, the Congress and the President can add justices. We need to keep a Democrat in the White House and add motivated Democrats to Congress. Otherwise, the renegades will keep whittling away at our society. There’s nothing to stop them as long as they have enough votes.