Not long after Trump got elected I wrote "everything is now permitted." Referring to an attempted murder by a Q-Anon supporter, I meant it in a very general sense, that of accepted norms and standards being destroyed. I meant in in a scary-sad way, a "we're well and truly fucked" way.
With Supreme Court justice Amy Coney-Barrett taking less than a day between swearing in and then filming a literal Trump campaign video, I am -- surprisingly -- a little more sanguine and a little more focused on what could be positives moving into 2021.
After four years of this unending avalanche of Republican-enabled hatefulness and stupidity, of dire incompetence, I mean "Everything is now permitted" in a much more Congress-specific sense: fuck the filibuster, fuck the sacred norm of only nine justices, fuck the banal congeniality of the U.S. Senate, fuck the fakey bullshit hypocrisy of a "neutral and apolitical" Supreme Court forever.
You don't need to read Dostoevsky (you should, but you don't need to) to understand this attitude cuts both ways. It honestly hurt for the past four years. But now it's time to redirect the pain onto those who actually deserve it.
Biden's first act as president, Spaghetti-Monster willing we also win the Senate next week, is to put up Merrick Garland for the SCOTUS immediately.
And that's just for starters -- DC statehood, Puerto Rico statehood, automatic registration of all US citizens as voters, voting day as a national holiday all come next.
All of that by the end of 2021. Then we really get down to work making the necessary structural changes to maintain our Democracy, without a damn drop more of counter-majoritarian compromise with a GOP that stands for nothing beyond tax-cuts for the rich and white identity politics.
Is Biden up to the task? Maybe. Harris could pull them there. The outrageous actions of ACB could. Pelosi certainly seems game. But if not, he doesn't deserve a hypothetical second term. Fuck cowardly hypothetical Biden and fuck David Brooks too.
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