We Now Know the Stakes of This Election

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

10 June 16

Thursday's endorsements drew the battle lines.

ong about 10:10 Thursday night, after an altogether remarkable day of political rhetoric and fence-mending in Washington, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times said that Senator Professor Warren would not be Hillary Rodham Clinton's vice presidential candidate because, now that the general election pretty much has begun, HRC will have to "tack toward the middle."

Everybody drink!

(And here is where I always tell you bastids to leave my senior senator alone. We found ours. Go find yer own!)

From a certain perspective, and I'm fairly sure it's not the perspective he had in mind, Kristof was correct. HRC will probably edge back toward "the middle." However, "the middle" is not where it used to be, blessings be unto Baal. 

"The middle," for example, is not where it was when HRC's husband had the big job. "The middle" is not even where it was when this president was inaugurated. Right now, as even the president admitted last week while talking about expanding Social Security (in Indiana), "the middle" is a place that has slid decidedly to port. The reason it has done so is that the old Bill Clinton solutions—many of which merely amounted to survival strategies, for his party and, ultimately, for himself—now represent the dogmas of the quiet past which are insufficient to our current stormy present. 

There were great shifts in the tectonic plates beneath our politics during the near-collapse of the entire economy. The tremors out in the country may have eluded the smart folks who organize campaigns in Washington, but they knocked down millions of lives in thousands of places. There was an awful lot of energy whirling around in the population ready to be tapped. I'm not sure HRC knew how strong it really was until Bernie Sanders went out there and marshalled it against her. 

She knows now. 

She saw it Thursday, when the remarkable murderers' row of surrogates she will have at her disposal all took their turn lining up with her. You'd have to be a blind and tone-deaf politician not to be affected by that—or by the inchoate rage that has animated the campaign of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Or stupid. HRC is none of those things.

The power of this new message, which has sprung unbidden from the unimaginable fraud that nearly killed the world, was best exemplified by the fire-and-ice speeches given to a gathering of progressive lawyers last night by SPW and Vice President Joseph Biden. SPW was in full roar, hanging Trump's assault on Judge Gonzalo Curiel around the necks of every Republican leader, and linking it to a well-financed and decades-long attempt by conservatives to lard up the federal judiciary with safe judges who were guaranteed to provide legal cover for the money power.

Where do you suppose that Donald Trump got the idea that he can personally attack judges regardless of the law whenever they don't bend to the whims of billionaires and big businesses? He's a Mitch McConnell kind of candidate ... He is exactly the kind of candidate you'd expect from a Republican Party whose script for several years has been to execute a full scale assault on the integrity of our courts, blockading judicial appointments so Donald Trump can fill them. Smearing and intimidating nominees who do not pledge allegiance to the financial interests of the rich and powerful. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell want Donald Trump to appoint the next generation of judges. They want those judges to tilt the law in favor of big businesses and billionaires like Donald Trump. They just want Donald Trump to quit being so vulgar and obvious about it.

For his part, after doing his customary and endearing tour of stuff that popped into his head at the moment, Biden's treatment of the same material was cold-eyed and almost mournful.

"What does the court have? It has its reputation that it is in fact impartial. That it is in fact prepared to rule on the merits. It is not subject to intimidation. That's a precious, precious, precious commodity that in our separation of powers the court cannot afford to be undermined. All of these protections were designed to do two things—reinforce in the minds of the public the absolute impartiality of the federal judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, and protect the judiciary from being influenced by the two political branches…It sounds almost like a high school civics class, but it's real. It matters…For a candidate to call a judge a 'hater,' 'a total disgrace,' because he allowed people victimized by the candidate in his capacity as a private citizen to proceed, and because the judge dares to unseal some documents, which is in his power to do, detailing their victimization…Mr. Trump is not unique in his attempt to intimidate the federal judiciary. Other private citizens have attempted to pressure the federal judiciary, but not private citizens who are placed in close range of the White House by one of our great political parties…My view is that a presidential candidate who publicly attacks a sitting federal judge who ruled against his own economic interests cannot be trusted to respect the independence of the judiciary as a president….Let's look at what that presumptive nominee said. His own words. After calling the judge presiding over a fraud suit against him a 'total disgrace,' Mr. Trump said, and I quote, 'But we will come back in November, and won't that be wild, if I'm president and I do a civil case.' He went on to say, and I'm quoting, 'Wouldn't it be wild, as president, to come back in November and do a civil case?' How can that be interpreted as anything but a direct threat?...These are the words of someone who would defy the courts if they ruled against him in a case."

In a country just now still emerging from a scandalous looting of the national wealth, and in a country in which the feeling that every institution of government is an elaborate bag job, the Republican Party is preparing to nominate a dangerous and reckless amateur to the most powerful job on earth. 

That is the alpha and omega of the election. Those are the only stakes that matter. That battle began Thursday.