[kenberg]

I finally decided to look up "gaslighting" and as I guessed it comes from the old Bergman Boyer movie. I can't recall hearing it used in the slangy way until a year or two ago.

I never like Charles Boyer in much of anything so it was good to see him play a complete villain.

[y66]

Rep Tim Ryan, (D-OH) said:

What you’re seeing here before the United States Congress is two clear, different visions of America and where we want to go and what we want to do. Our greatest strength has been we reinvested into the United States. We reinvested into our communities. We invested in the technologies, and we dominated the industries: steel, glass, aerospace. And now we're hearing from the other side, ‘Shut government down, don’t do anything. We don’t want to be an honest broker.’ Tyranny? What are you people talking about?

[kenberg]

The Tim Ryan speech is terrific, more detail at
https://m.facebook.c...74140139767602/

It is not necessary to agree with Ryan on everything to get what I see as the main point: Approximate quote "Our greatest weapon is a strong middle class"

And "Tyranny? What are you people talking about?" is a very good way of getting to the basic points.

If I were hired as a campaign consultant for 2022 I think I would just say "Listen to this Ryan guy".

[y66]

Eleanor Barkhorn at NYT said:

American politics is full of strange bedfellows, but none have been more fascinating to me in recent years than the alliance between Donald Trump and voters who oppose abortion. Equally fascinating are the arguments from some abortion opponents that this alliance is unacceptable.

As a man, Trump seems as if he should be repellent to the religious conservatives who tend to oppose abortion — his personal life choices do not suggest that he is a man of deep faith, or even strong character. But as a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, he promised to pick anti-abortion nominees for the Supreme Court. And to many abortion opponents, the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade was enough to throw their support to Trump.

Still, there was a loud faction of abortion opponents who refused to make this bargain. Russell Moore, then a top leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote in 2015 that to vote for Trump, fellow conservatives “must repudiate everything they believe.”

In the end, of course, the pro-Trump arguments won the day for most religious conservatives, as eight in 10 white evangelical Christian voters cast a ballot for him in 2016. And Trump delivered on his promises, nominating Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the court.

Last Wednesday, the court heard oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that could lead to the end of Roe. In the weeks before the arguments, I wondered how the so-called Never Trump conservatives were feeling about the former president. Would hearing Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett interrogate the constitutionality of Roe lead them to think that maybe the Trump bargain was worth it after all?

I reached out to Erika Bachiochi, a conservative legal scholar who refused to vote for Trump and also believes strongly that Roe should be overturned. In an essay today, she reflects on the “Was Trump worth it?” question. But she also looks ahead to the future of the Republican Party and casts a vision for what it ought to fight for if Roe is indeed overturned.

“If the G.O.P. wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere,” Bachiochi writes, “it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself.”

Read the full essay here.

Erika Bachiochi said:

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, the pro-life movement will need to redouble the efforts of pro-lifers on the ground who for a half century have offered support, assistance and care to pregnant women and their children, both born and unborn. And crucially, it should call men to task.

But it can also take its rightful place in the post-Trump G.O.P. — if the G.O.P., especially in red and purple states, can prove itself capable of policymaking on behalf of workers and their families. This will require that Republicans not fall back to doing the bidding of the business class whose own daughters will be, in the near term, anyway, a short flight or car ride away from legal abortion even after Roe.

If wishes were horses ...

[y66]

Katrin Bennhold at NYT said:

https://www.nytimes....chancellor.html

BERLIN — Last December, as he was plotting what most considered to be a hopeless bid to become Germany’s next chancellor, Olaf Scholz interrupted his campaign preparations for a video call with an American philosopher.

Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat, wanted to talk to the philosopher, Prof. Michael J. Sandel of Harvard, about why center-left parties like his had been losing working-class voters to populists, and the two men spent an hour discussing a seemingly simple theme that would become the centerpiece of the Scholz campaign: “Respect.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Scholz will be sworn in as Germany’s ninth postwar chancellor — and the first Social Democrat in 16 years — succeeding Angela Merkel and heading a three-party coalition government. Defying polls and pundits, he led his 158-year-old party from the precipice of irrelevance to an unlikely victory — and now wants to show that the center-left can again become a political force in Europe.

Mr. Scholz won for many reasons, not least because he persuaded voters that he was the closest thing to Ms. Merkel, but his message of respect resonated, too. For the first time since 2005, the Social Democrats became the strongest party among the working class. Just over 800,000 voters who had abandoned the party for the far left and far right returned in the last election.

“Scholz touched a nerve,” said Jutta Allmendinger, president of the research institute WZB Berlin Social Science Center and an expert on inequality who has known Mr. Scholz for almost two decades. “Many see him as a Merkel clone,” she noted. “But he is a Social Democrat to the core.”

Mr. Scholz served as finance minister in Ms. Merkel’s conservative-led coalition government and has promised continuity and stability. Yet he also intends to make Germany a political laboratory of sorts, to try to repair the bridge between the Social Democrats and the working class, an effort with parallels to President Biden’s political agenda in the United States.

For the center-left in Europe, Mr. Scholz’s victory comes at a critical moment. Over the past decade, many of the parties that once dominated European politics have become almost obsolete, seemingly bereft of ideas and largely abandoned by their working-class base.

The political energy has been on the right, especially the populist far right, with many American conservatives flocking to countries like Hungary to study the “illiberal democracy” of Viktor Orban, that nation’s far-right prime minister.

“Everyone is looking at us,” said Wolfgang Schmidt, Mr. Scholz’s longstanding adviser, whom he has picked to head the chancellery. “If we do things right, we have a real chance. We mustn’t make mistakes, we mustn’t disappoint expectations.”

In her final years in office, Ms. Merkel, a conservative, was at times regarded as the lone defender of liberal democracy in an age of global strongmen, whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia or President Donald J. Trump. Yet Germany was not immune to populist fury, and the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won seats in Parliament and became a political force in the country’s east.

“The biggest concern in politics for me is that our liberal democracies are coming increasingly under pressure,” Mr. Scholz says about himself on the Social Democrats’ website. “We have to solve the problems so that the cheap slogans of the populists don’t catch.”

Mr. Scholz has traveled extensively in the United States, including in the years before the 2016 election. One of his advisers recalled that in a private conversation he even predicted a Trump victory. Then he spent months analyzing why the Democrats lost and reading a raft of books by authors from working-class backgrounds in the United States, France and Germany.

“He studied very carefully what happened in the United States,” said Cem Özdemir, a prominent member of the Greens who is a minister in Mr. Scholz’s incoming government. “He studied the losses of the Democrats in the U.S. Why didn’t Hillary win?”

When Mr. Scholz’s own party collapsed in the 2017 election, losing for the fourth time in a row, he wrote an unsparing paper concluding that one reason the Social Democrats had lost their core voters was that they had failed to offer them “recognition.”

Last year, in the middle of the first Covid-19 lockdown, Mr. Scholz read Professor Sandel’s latest book, “The Tyranny of Merit” in which the Harvard philosopher argued that the meritocratic narrative of education as an engine of social mobility had fueled resentment and contributed to the rise of populists like Mr. Trump.

“The backlash of 2016 vividly expressed that simply telling people, ‘You can make it if you try,’ was not an adequate response to the wage stagnation and job loss brought about by globalization,” Professor Sandel said in an interview. “What Social Democratic elites missed was the insult implicit in this response to inequality, because what it said was, ‘If you’re struggling in the new economy, your failure is your fault.’”

During the last Social Democratic government in Germany, the chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, cut benefits and undertook a painful overhaul of the labor market from 2003 to 2005 in a bid to bring down a jobless toll that had surpassed five million. Mr. Scholz, then the party’s general secretary, became the public face of the changes.

Unemployment did gradually fall, but the program also helped create a sprawling low-wage sector and prompted many working-class voters to defect from the Social Democrats.

Professor Sandel argues that it was around this time that center-left parties, including the Democrats of President Bill Clinton, embraced the market triumphalism of the right, became more closely identified with the values and interests of the well-educated and began losing touch with working-class voters.

Mr. Scholz, once a fiery young socialist who joined his party as a teenager, defended workers as a labor lawyer in the 1970s before gradually mellowing into a post-ideological centrist. Today he is considered to be to the right of much of the party’s base, not unlike Mr. Biden, with whom he is sometimes compared, even though, like Mr. Biden, he has demonstrated some liberal reflexes.

“He was an idealist in his youth, then became a technocrat and even a hyper-technocrat, but I think he might be getting more radical again, at a more advanced age,” said Kevin Kühnert, a prominent figure in the Social Democrat’s left wing who is the party’s new general secretary.

During the pandemic, Mr. Scholz, then finance minister, impressed critics on the left when he unleashed hundreds of billions of euros in state aid to help struggling workers and businesses. The pandemic, in turn, highlighted how those suddenly deemed essential — nurses and social care workers, but also trash collectors, supermarket cashiers and delivery workers — often are not paid very much.

“The pandemic has shown whose shoulders our society is built on, who works hard and still benefits too little from an economic upswing,” Mr. Scholz told reporters on the campaign trail.

Mr. Scholz will now lead a three-party government with the progressive Greens and the libertarian Free Democrats. Their governing treaty calls for raising the minimum wage to 12 euros, or about $13.50, an hour, from €9.60 today — an instant pay rise for about 10 million people. Mr. Scholz has also promised to build 400,000 homes a year, 100,000 more than was previously planned, and to guarantee stable pension levels.

More abstract, but equally important, is his promise of another “industrial revolution” that will aim to make Germany a manufacturing power for the carbon-neutral age and provide the economic bedrock for the welfare state of the future.

“We need to tell people two things,” Mr. Scholz said during the campaign. “First, that we need respect, we need good pay and proper recognition for work. And second, we have to ensure that there are good jobs in the future.”

[Winstonm]

I worked for Southwestern Bell in the late 1970s, and a married couple without college degrees also worked there. Together, they made a very comfortable middle class living. That doesn't seem that many years ago to me but in Populist years it is eons.

[mycroft]

Note: massive cynic mode on. It's looking scarily possible, though.

Erika, "[t]his will require that Republicans" simply switch from Roe and Casey to Obergefell, potentially Griswold, and if necessary, Loving (although, even for Trumpicans, that might be more than they feel comfortable admitting to publicly). Those cases will go down quickly, on the same argument as Dobbs. But this only has to last for the next 11 months; but to be safe, keep it up for 3 years. The "wheels of justice" grind slowly if desired, they can pace it well enough. After that, they'll have enough capable people behind the Leader that the next attempt will succeed, at which point "convincing the voter" won't matter all that much...

The pro-life movement has always been a patsy for the "bidding of the business class". Even the movement's masters, the descendants of the Moral Majority, are either patsies for the "bidding of the business class" or the business class themselves (witness the "rules for thee, but not for me" attitude of the descendent-of-record of the creator of the Moral Majority, for instance). That isn't going to change, they're just going to find the next box on the list that their followers have been trained to consider wrong (and slip another one in at the back end, one that is currently considered, but might not be, unspeakable. Gotta keep that queue full, boys; if we don't keep the mob pointed at someone, they might look at us instead...)

And Erika, you know that. And you also hope they keep snowing the useful proles. I hope you're rich enough and connected enough to stay afloat when they need to point the mob at you...

(totally off topic, sometimes being a Night Vale stan causes some serious cognitive dissonance. Angels aren't real™.)

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2021-December-07, 15:07, said:

I worked for Southwestern Bell in the late 1970s, and a married couple without college degrees also worked there. Together, they made a very comfortable middle class living. That doesn't seem that many years ago to me but in Populist years it is eons.

Here is another way story with a similar point.
When I was 20 (summer, 1959) I loaded farm machinery onto boxcars for $2 an hour, $3 hen we worked on Saturdays. Even holding it to a 40 hour week, that would be $4,000 a year. When I was 21 I got my B/S and took a job with NASA for a bit over $5,000 a year, also with overtime opportunities. Yes, 5 is more than 4 but it's in the same ballpark. Not equivalent but both livable.
I briefly had some thoughts of quitting school and just loading boxcars for a living, I enjoyed the work, I was fine with working Saturdays, but I decided I might not like it so well when I was 40.
Academic life is not a choice for someone who wishes to be rich but that was never high on my wish list. We do need to pay the bills. That applies to profs and it applies to people who load boxcars.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2021-December-08, 08:36, said:

Here is another way story with a similar point.
When I was 20 (summer, 1959) I loaded farm machinery onto boxcars for $2 an hour, $3 hen we worked on Saturdays. Even holding it to a 40 hour week, that would be $4,000 a year. When I was 21 I got my B/S and took a job with NASA for a bit over $5,000 a year, also with overtime opportunities. Yes, 5 is more than 4 but it's in the same ballpark. Not equivalent but both livable.
I briefly had some thoughts of quitting school and just loading boxcars for a living, I enjoyed the work, I was fine with working Saturdays, but I decided I might not like it so well when I was 40.
Academic life is not a choice for someone who wishes to be rich but that was never high on my wish list. We do need to pay the bills. That applies to profs and it applies to people who load boxcars.

The trick is to be able to see yourself at older ages - a trick not easy to master when young.

Odd that one of my favorite part time jobs was also simple - cleaning the bakery at a Safeway , pots, pans, and the floor. There is something about completing well a simple task that is gratifying to me. Maybe that’s why you still mow your own yard.

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2021-December-08, 09:06, said:

The trick is to be able to see yourself at older ages - a trick not easy to master when young.

Odd that one of my favorite part time jobs was also simple - cleaning the bakery at a Safeway , pots, pans, and the floor. There is something about completing well a simple task that is gratifying to me. Maybe that's why you still mow your own yard.

These very simple observations of life are, I believe, very important. Early on I understood that I liked physics, I liked mathematics, I liked working on cars. I did not like poetry (I have partially changed my mind about that but don't ask me to quote Byron), and I definitely did not like a job where I was closely supervised. Tell me what to do and then buzz off and let me do it. Setting pins in a bowling alley was fine, delivering papers was fine, stocking shelves in a grocery store was not fine. "You should have put this can 2 inches to the right". Oh, Sorry, My error. I'm outta here.

Some college students, and I know I have said this before, have no feeling for why they are there. Someone told them that after they graduate from high school they are supposed to go to college. I have two daughters, one has a Ph.D., the other finished high school and worked to buy and run a boarding kennel for dogs. . Both are doing fine. Most everyone can learn to do, and then enjoy, doing, something useful, Who enjoys what, and who is good at what, varies greatly. Apparently, we need more truck drivers right now. I would have been happy, or happy enough, earning a living driving a truck.

Young people need to discover their interests and their talents, and then develop these interests and talents to do something useful, and then we need to respect that work and we need to pay them decently.

This is all pretty obvious but we sometimes forget.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2021-December-08, 10:51, said:

I liked mathematics, I liked working on cars. I did not like poetry

It is hard for me to believe that you of all people would not have liked this had you been exposed to it:

Whose woods these are I think I know
his house is in the village though;
he will not see me stopping here
to watch his woods fill up with snow

My little horse must think it queer
to stop without a farmhouse near
between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year

He gives his harness bells a shake
to ask if there is some mistake
the only other sounds the sweep
of easy wind and downy flake

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep

As for me, Robert Frost, Bob Hamman, Claude Monet, Bobby Fisher, and many others exemplify the excellence I have been unsuccessfully chasing my entire life. I am finally o.k. that I am missing whatever that "something" is that allows a meaningful representation left to posterity. More than likely, my boot hill tombstone will simply read:

Here lies Munna
Gone for good
never did nothin'
he hoped he was gonna.

[y66]

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic said:

The Great Resignation isn’t really about burnout. And it’s not really about what most people think of as resignations. To put it as concisely as possible: The Great Resignation is mostly a dynamic “free agency” period for low-income workers switching jobs to make more money, plus a moderate surge of early retirements in a pandemic.

https://www.theatlan...896ed87b2d9c72a

[y66]

Suggested alternative epitaph (after a fashion):

Quote

Here lies Munna who also had a lover's quarrel with the world.

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2021-December-08, 19:32, said:

It is hard for me to believe that you of all people would not have liked this had you been exposed to it:

Whose woods these are I think I know
his house is in the village though;
he will not see me stopping here
to watch his woods fill up with snow

My little horse must think it queer
to stop without a farmhouse near
between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year

He gives his harness bells a shake
to ask if there is some mistake
the only other sounds the sweep
of easy wind and downy flake

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep

As for me, Robert Frost, Bob Hamman, Claude Monet, Bobby Fisher, and many others exemplify the excellence I have been unsuccessfully chasing my entire life. I am finally o.k. that I am missing whatever that "something" is that allows a meaningful representation left to posterity. More than likely, my boot hill tombstone will simply read:

Here lies Munna
Gone for good
never did nothin'
he hoped he was gonna.

Oh yes, I do like Stopping by the woods.... As to "exposed to it", I am pretty sure we had to read it, and maybe partly memorize it, in high school. Did we have to understand it? Ah, there's the rub.
Of course it's pretty straightforward, sort of, maybe. Analysts analyze it to death.

Society is more than a bit screwed up and poetry might help.

I mentioned before that my older daughter gave me a copy of The Nix, a novel she liked and thought I might like. I did.
See https://www.npr.org/...ery-human-heart


The book is ostensibly about Samuel as an adult but there are extended passages about him as a child, about his mother as an adolescent, about his father coming to the US and a lot more.

There is his mother as an adolescent girl, very much an outsider, about to be conned into making a mistake. She lives in a small Wisconsin town, she is leaning against the schoolhouse wall, reading poetry.
Subflower Sutra, Allan Ginsburg.
An excerpt:

Quote

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past

and later

Quote

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

Full poem at https://www.poetryfo...sunflower-sutra

If poetry can help us, I'm all for it. And perhaps I am for it even if it doesn't help us.

In the 50s, we had to read Frost and were forbidden to read Ginsberg. I favor being allowed to choose. A case can be made for reading both.

[y66]

Corey Robin, professor of political science at Brooklyn College said:

No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden. With a razor-thin congressional majority — far smaller than that of Barack Obama — President Biden has delivered two enormous spending bills, with another, the Build Back Better act, likely on its way. Elements of these bills will have a lasting effect on the economy into the next decade; they also push the country to the left.

Every president since Reagan has tacked to the rightward winds set in motion by the conservative movement. Even Mr. Obama’s stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act owed as much to conservative nostrums about the market and runaway spending as they did to liberal notions of fairness and equality. Mr. Biden has had to accommodate the demands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but their intransigence has not had nearly the constraining effect that the voices of austerity and market fetishism had on Bill Clinton or Mr. Obama.

Yet over the past several months, Mr. Biden’s presidency has been dogged by a sense of failure. Critics, friendly and not so friendly, point to what he has not delivered — voting rights, immigration reform, a $15 federal minimum wage, labor law reform and a path to freedom from personal debt and fossil fuels. Democrats fear that Mr. Biden’s plummeting approval ratings and the party’s losses in the November elections indicate that the Republicans will take back Congress in the midterms.

No president, however, achieves his entire agenda. And presidents have suffered first-term losses greater than those currently anticipated for 2022.

The real cause of the unease about Mr. Biden lies elsewhere. There is a sense that however large his spending bills may be, they come nowhere near to solving the problems they are meant to address. There is also a sense that however much in control of the federal government progressives may be, the right is still calling the shots.

The first point is inarguable, especially when it comes to climate change and inequality. The second point is questionable, but it can find confirmation in everything from a conservative Supreme Court supermajority to the right’s ability to unleash one debilitating culture war after another — and in the growing fear that Republicans will ride back into the halls of power and slam the doors of democracy behind them, maybe forever.

There’s a sense of stuckness, in other words, that no amount of social spending or policy innovation can seem to dislodge. The question is: Why?

https://www.nytimes....tical-time.html

[y66]

From The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens (1937)

Quote

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

[y66]

With respect ...

Peter Cook said:

Yes, I could have been a judge but I never had the Latin. I never had the Latin for the judging. I didn't have sufficient to get through the rigorous judging exams . . . And so I managed to become a miner - a coal miner. I managed to get through the mining exams - they're not very rigorous. They only ask you one question. They say, 'Who are you?' And I got 75 per cent on that.

[Winstonm]

To clarify, I don’t like all poetry, but I think if you like one poem then you do like poetry. And I certainly like the excerpts my fellow w/c posters have shared.

Besides, without poetry I doubt I would know the meaning of the word “surcease”. Do they still teach that word ? Nevermore .

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2021-December-09, 11:52, said:

With respect ...

They only ask you one question. They say, 'Who are you?' And I got 75 per cent on that.

Overachiever.

[y66]

Nancy Gertner and Laurence H. Tribe said:

https://www.washingt...bAalsrMnb0405do

We now believe that Congress must expand the size of the Supreme Court and do so as soon as possible. We did not come to this conclusion lightly.

One of us is a constitutional law scholar and frequent advocate before the Supreme Court, the other a federal judge for 17 years. After serving on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court over eight months, hearing multiple witnesses, reading draft upon draft of the final report issued this week, our views have evolved. We started out leaning toward term limits for Supreme Court justices but against court expansion and ended up doubtful about term limits but in favor of expanding the size of the court.

We listened carefully to the views of commissioners who disagreed. Indeed, the process was a model for how people with deeply diverging perspectives can listen to one another respectfully and revise their views through genuine dialogue. We voted to submit the final report to President Biden not because we agreed with all of it — we did not — but because it accurately reflects the complexity of the issue and that diversity of views. There has never been so comprehensive and careful a study of ways to reform the Supreme Court, the history and legality of various potential reforms, and the pluses and minuses of each. This report will be of value well beyond today’s debates.

But make no mistake: In voting to submit the report to the president neither of us cast a vote of confidence in the Supreme Court itself. Sadly, we no longer have that confidence, given three things: first, the dubious legitimacy of the way some justices were appointed; second, what Justice Sonia Sotomayor rightly called the “stench” of politics hovering over this court’s deliberations about the most contentious issues; and third, the anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian direction of this court’s decisions about matters such as voting rights, gerrymandering and the corrupting effects of dark money.

Those judicial decisions haven’t been just wrong; they put the court — and, more important, our entire system of government — on a one-way trip from a defective but still hopeful democracy toward a system in which the few corruptly govern the many, something between autocracy and oligarchy. Instead of serving as a guardrail against going over that cliff, our Supreme Court has become an all-too-willing accomplice in that disaster.

Worse, measures the court has enabled will fundamentally change the court and the law for decades. They operate to entrench the power of one political party: constricting the vote, denying fair access to the ballot to people of color and other minorities, and allowing legislative district lines to be drawn that exacerbate demographic differences. As a result, the usual ebb and flow that once tended to occur with succeeding elections is stalling. A Supreme Court that has been effectively packed by one party will remain packed into the indefinite future, with serious consequences to our democracy. This is a uniquely perilous moment that demands a unique response.

None of the reforms that have been proposed precisely fit the problem that needs remedying. Term limits cannot be implemented in time to change the court’s self-reinforcing trajectory. And while much can be said in favor of the narrower repairs the commission addressed — such as increasing the transparency of the court’s proceedings, reducing its discretion over its docket or imposing constraints on its use of emergency procedures (“the shadow docket”) — none is adequate.

Offsetting the way the court has been “packed” in an antidemocratic direction with added appointments leaning the other way is the most significant clearly constitutional step that could be taken quickly. Of course, there is no guarantee that new justices would change the destructive direction of judicial doctrine we have identified; respect for judicial independence makes that impossible. Of course, successive presidents might expand the court further, absent an unattainable constitutional amendment fixing its size at a number such as 13. But the costs are worth the benefits.

Though fellow commissioners and others have voiced concern about the impact that a report implicitly criticizing the Supreme Court might have on judicial independence and thus judicial legitimacy, we do not share that concern. Far worse are the dangers that flow from ignoring the court’s real problems — of pretending conditions have not changed; of insisting improper efforts to manipulate the court’s membership have not taken place; of looking the other way when the court seeks to undo decades of precedent relied on by half the population to shape their lives just because, given the new majority, it has the votes.

Put simply: Judicial independence is necessary for judicial legitimacy but not sufficient. And judicial independence does not mean judicial impunity, the illusion of neutrality in the face of oppression, or a surface appearance of fairness that barely conceals the ugly reality of partisan manipulation.

Hand-wringing over the court’s legitimacy misses a larger issue: the legitimacy of what our union is becoming. To us, that spells a compelling need to signal that all is not well with the court, and that even if expanding it to combat what it has become would temporarily shake its authority, that risk is worth taking.

Quote

Nancy Gertner is a retired U.S. District Court judge. Laurence H. Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University Professor emeritus and professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School. Both served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court.