We Gave These Clowns Way Too Much Leash for Far Too Long

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

07 January 19

The Trump administration hires an awful lot of Civil War enthusiasts.

ate Friday afternoon, there was a potentially ominous announcement from the Supreme Court of the United States. From the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court once again will take up unresolved constitutional questions about partisan gerrymandering, agreeing Friday to consider rulings from two lower courts that found congressional maps in North Carolina and Maryland so extreme that they violated the rights of voters. The North Carolina map was drawn by Republicans, the Maryland districts by the state’s dominant Democrats...

The Supreme Court has never found a state’s redistricting map so infected with politics that it violates the Constitution. It passed up the chance last term to settle the issue of whether courts have a role in policing partisan gerrymandering, sending back on technical rulings challenges to a Republican-drawn plan in Wisconsin, and the challenged Maryland map.

So, what's so ominous, you may ask. Well, among other things, that old running buddy of PJ and Squi is on the court now.

But there will be a new set of justices considering the issue. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who had held out the belief that some gerrymandering could be so political as to be unconstitutional, has been replaced with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who may have a more conservative view on the issue.

Kavanaugh has no judicial record on the subject, so who knows what he may do, but I feel fairly certain that he will not be even as open as Kennedy was.

Back during the previous term, the Court ducked the issue, but several justices made it plain that the Wisconsin map in particular was so egregious that the Court might have to step in. Now, though, we have one Republican and one Democratic map, and, if you believe that, through the Kavanaugh nomination, the Court is utterly politicized, you can't feel comfortable dismissing the possibility that, somehow, the Republican North Carolina map would be found to be constitutional while the Democratic map from Maryland would not.

Remember that the court that threw out the North Carolina map did so because it found that the state legislators had targeted African American voters "with almost surgical precision." Remember, also, that Chief Justice Roberts already has declared the Day of Jubilee. Remember those things in March, when the Supreme Court looks into this again.

The other day, the president* took to the electric Twitter machine to boast that he had won "the greatest election ever." Now, a narrow electoral college win in an election where three million other citizens voted the other way may not qualify as the Greatest Ever by your standards, but we all have our crochets. But it does open the question of what actually was the greatest election ever.

Limiting it to this country, and to presidential elections, I think you have to go with Abraham Lincoln's having been re-elected in 1864, in the middle of the Civil War. As late as midsummer of that year, even Lincoln thought his cause was doomed. One of his own Cabinet officials, Salmon B. Chase, was intriguing to hijack the Republican nomination. But successes on the battlefield, and the support of the soldiers in the Union Army who went home to vote, pushed him to another term, and made possible the greatest speech ever given by an American president. He also won both the electoral and popular vote.

Speaking of the Civil War, how does this administration find so many re-enactors? From CNN:

CNN's KFile reported in December that [Robert] Wilkie, who was confirmed by the Senate as VA secretary in July 2018, gave a speech to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2009 and, in 1995, praised Confederate President Jefferson Davis in a speech at the US Capitol. Wilkie was also at one point a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, The Washington Post previously reported...

Wilkie attended events honoring the legacy of Robert E. Lee and service of Confederate veterans as recently as 2009. In a section on public statements, Wilkie was asked for "any speeches or talks delivered by you, including commencement speeches, remarks, lectures, panel discussions, conferences, political speeches, and question-and answer sessions. Include the dates and places where such speeches or talks were given."

Wilkie provided general answers, writing, "Multiple remarks, panel discussions and speeches as a congressional staffer and as Under Secretary of Defense, Personnel & Readiness." He did not give details of any of his specific speeches. Wilkie delivered two speeches on Robert E. Lee in 2009, one to a branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the DC area and one at Arlington National Cemetery.

His speech on Davis took place in the US Capitol in 1995.

Oh, OK. Now I know. We gave these clowns too much leash for much too long.