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Bidencare Would Be a Big Deal |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51503"><span class="small">Paul Krugman, The New York Times</span></a>
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Tuesday, 06 October 2020 12:36 |
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Krugman writes: "On Monday morning America's most prominent beneficiary of socialized medicine, in the process of receiving expensive, taxpayer-financed care at a government-run hospital, was tweeting furiously."
Joe Biden. (photo: Hilary Swift/The New York Times)
Bidencare Would Be a Big Deal
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
06 October 20
Don’t dismiss it because it isn’t Medicare for All.
 n Monday morning America’s most prominent beneficiary of socialized medicine, in the process of receiving expensive, taxpayer-financed care at a government-run hospital, was tweeting furiously. One of President Trump’s manic missives particularly caught the eyes of health care experts: his exhortation to “PROTECT PREEXISTING CONDITIONS. VOTE!”
As always, it’s not clear whether Trump is merely being cynical or whether he is also genuinely ignorant.
He’s definitely lying when he claims to have a plan that’s better and cheaper than Obamacare. No such plan exists, and he has to know that.
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The Long Haul: Or Living Through Pandemic-Plus |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53125"><span class="small">Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 06 October 2020 12:36 |
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Berrigan writes: "After all these months and 210,000 deaths, you'd think I'd be used to it all, but I'm not. It doesn't seem even a little normal yet. I'm still full of absences, missing so much I used to take for granted: hugs and handshakes, rooms crowded for funerals and weddings, potluck dinners and house parties."
People in need of food wait in line at the Salvation Army in Chelsea, Massachusetts. (photo: David L. Ryan/Boston Globe)
The Long Haul: Or Living Through Pandemic-Plus
By Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch
06 October 20
After six months away with my children and grandchildren, I’m soon heading back to one of the safer places in pandemic America. I know this will sound strange, given that it once was a hub of death, but I’m talking about my hometown of New York City. What’s sad, however, is that, while I’ll be back in my apartment of 40 years, I already know that I won’t be back in my life of 40 years. How could I be? We’re now in another world in every imaginable sense and our former lives are undoubtedly unrecoverable.
At whatever age you may be -- I’m 76 -- and wherever you are, none of us can simply return to those previous existences (even if we never left them in the first place). We’re all having to learn how to live life as if from scratch. We’re in a pandemic world, with Covid-19 cases again rising in many states (as well as New York City) and an expected fall spike in the disease in a divided and over-armed America. We’re talking about the country in which, in an act that seems both unimaginably un-American and -- these days -- all-too-American, the mother of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounded a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, received a standing ovation from a Republican women’s meeting in that very state. Oh, yes, and the person who invited her to attend that event has been described as “associated with a variety of white supremacist figures and ideas, according to the Anti-Defamation League. She has defended Japanese internment and post-9/11 racial profiling of Muslims, the ADL says, and has called Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization and mocked [it] when its supporters got hit by cars.”
I may be old, but I know that in the America of Donald Trump, Amy Barrett, the Proud Boys, and Covid-19, my previous life has been hijacked and, even in New York City, I face a new and increasingly perilous land, one that regularly takes my breath away. As you’ll note today, it’s done the same to TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan who unmasks a small corner of an unnerving new world in which each of us has to figure out how to survive, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and... well, what passes for health in a distinctly diseased democracy.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 fter all these months and 210,000 deaths, you’d think I’d be used to it all, but I’m not. It doesn’t seem even a little normal yet. I’m still full of absences, missing so much I used to take for granted: hugs and handshakes, rooms crowded for funerals and weddings, potluck dinners and house parties. I miss browsing the stacks at the library and the racks at the thrift shop. I miss going to our Unitarian Universalist congregation and the robust community connection we enjoyed every Sunday.
I should count myself lucky, of course, that such human encounters and quotidian pleasures are all that I miss. I have yet to lose friends or family to Covid-19, I haven’t lost my job, and our home is not in danger of foreclosure. Still, I’m at a loss to figure out how to go on.
But that’s the work, isn’t it? Going on somehow because, if the experts are on target -- and they’re hard to hear above the din of the bombast and threats of carnage coming out of Washington -- they say that things won’t get back to normal for a year or longer. They say this is the new normal: masks, distance, existential dread over every sore throat.
Another year... at least. How do I pace myself and my family for the long haul of the pandemic? How do we figure out how to mitigate our risks and still live lives of some sort? Who do we trust? Who do we listen to? And who do we call if a spiking fall or winter pandemic hits us directly?
I’m full of missing and longing, but the thing I miss most poignantly and sharply isn’t something (or someone) you could see or touch. What I miss is the privileged (and ultimately false) notion, almost an article of faith for white, middle-class people like me, that the future is predictable, that there is a “normal.” I miss good old-fashioned American optimism, that “aw shucks” sentiment that absolves and salves and says with a twang or lilt: It’ll be okay. They’ll figure it out. Things will get back to normal. This is only temporary.
Pandemic Plus
While most of the developed world has been dealing with the impact of the pandemic in a reasonable fashion -- caring for the sick, burying the dead, enforcing lockdowns and the sort of distancing and masking that seems so necessary -- it’s played out differently here in the good old U.S. of A. Here, we have a pandemic-plus -- plus a broken social safety net, a for-profit healthcare system, a war of disinformation, and that’s just to start down a list of add-on disasters.
In addition, parts of the United States have been beset by record wildfires, hurricanes, and deadly storms. So add on the impact of catastrophic climate change.
Here in the land of the fearful and the home of the riven, it’s been a pandemic plus poverty, plus staggering economic inequality, plus police violence, plus protest, plus white supremacy. It’s a nightmare, in other words and, despite those more than 210,000 dead Americans, it’s not slowing down. And no matter the facts on the ground, and the bodies below the ground, the president’s supporters regularly deny there’s the slightest need for masks, social distancing, shutdowns, or much of anything else. So, it’s a pandemic plus lunacy, too -- a politically manipulated lunacy spiced with violence and the threat of violence heading into an increasingly fraught election, which could even mean a pandemic plus autocracy or a chaotic American version of fascism. In other words, it’s a lot.
Still, it’s also the fall and, after this endless summer, my three kids have started school again -- sort of. They are in first, third, and eighth grade. Right now, there’s more coaching around masks and distancing than instruction in math and the ABCs. Still, the teachers are working hard to make this happen and my kids are so happy to be away from us that they don’t even seem to mind those masks, or the shields around their desks, or the regimented way lunch and recess have to happen. Over the whole experiment, of course, hangs an unnerving reality (or do I mean unreality?): that in-person schooling could dissolve in an errant cough, a spiking fever, and a few microscopic germs catapulting through the air. In fact, that’s already been happening in other areas of Connecticut where I live.
After all these months of lockdown, my husband and I automatically wear masks everywhere, arranging the odd outdoor gathering of a handful of friends and trying to imagine how any of this will work in winter, no less long term. Still, bit by bit, we’re doing our best to quilt together an understanding of how to live in the midst of such a pandemic -- and that’s important because it’s so obvious that there’s going to be no quick fix in the chaotic new world we’ve been plunged into.
Seven months in, I’m finally realizing what so many marginalized people have always known: we’re on our own. It came to me like a klaxon call, a scream from the depths of my own body, all at once. I still whisper it, with sorrow and wonder: we are on our own.
It’s as if our small city of New London and the state of Connecticut had been untethered from the federal government and, despite the crazy game of telephone that passes for federal public-healthcare policy, are faring better than most due to a mixture of our state’s reputation as the “Land of Steady Habits,” our small-city web of mutual aid, and our own family’s blend of abundance and austerity. Still, the fact that, relatively speaking, we’re doing okay doesn’t make the realization that we’re on our own any less stark or troubling.
It’s not complicated, really. You can’t beat a pandemic with a mixture of personal responsibility and family creativity. Science, policy, and a national plan are what’s needed. My own vision for such a plan in response to Covid-19 would be the passage of a universal basic income, robust worker protections, and Medicare for all. But that's just me... well, actually, it's probably the secret dream of the majority of Americans and it’s certainly the opposite of the position of Trump and his ilk. It says that we really all are in this together and we better start acting like it. We need to take care of one another to survive.
In spite of it all, I’m doing my best to manage this new normal by focusing on what I actually can do. At least I can feed people.
Our city was poor even before the state ordered a lockdown in mid-March and few had the extra money to panic-buy. So the food justice organization I work for started planting extra carrots, peas, and collards back in March. We built public garden boxes and painted signs telling people to harvest for free. We distributed soil and seeds to people all over the city and gave them some gardening 101 guidance.
And now, as October begins, we’re still finishing harvesting all that food and distributing it every week. On Fridays, I also help pack boxes of milk and eggs, meat and vegetables, which we then deliver to more than 100 families. The rhythm involved in harvesting the produce and packing the boxes, each an immersive physical task, helps banish my darker thoughts, at least for a while.
“We Are Going to Be in Very Good Shape”
The president held a news conference on March 30th. Of course, that’s ancient history now, separated as it is from the present by long months of deaths and hospitalizations, layoffs and political in-fighting. The CEOs of Honeywell, Jockey, MyPillow, United Technologies, and other companies were gathered alongside administration officials that day. It should have been a briefing on where we Americans were a month into what was clearly going to be a long slog. Above all, it should have honored those who had already died. Instead -- no surprise looking back from our present nightmarish vantage point -- it proved to be an extended advertisement for those companies and a chance for their CEOs to spout patriotic pablum and trade compliments with the commander-in-chief.
I was crying a lot then. When the president said, “We have to get our country back to where it was and maybe beyond,” I began to sob and dry heave. After I finally wiped away the tears and blew my nose, I checked out the website of a company that makes homeopathic remedies. A friend had sent me a list of ones doctors were supposedly using to treat coronavirus symptoms in Germany, Italy, and China.
“Get these if you can,” she texted. It wasn’t science. I admit it. It was desperation. As one of millions of Americans on state insurance with no primary-care doctor or bespoke concierge service, I feared the worst.
As the CEO from MyPillow was telling the American people to use the time of the shutdown to “get back in the Word, read our Bibles,” I made my own faith gesture and pressed the buy button. When the order arrived, it was full of tiny, archaic vials labelled with names like Belladonna and Drosera. Even now, when I feel anxious and cloudy, I rummage through that box of vials and read the names like incantations. Better that than heeding the president’s assertion on that long-gone day that “we are going to be in very good shape.”
A Handful of Chickens
We are not in very good shape and it’s getting worse every day. As the November election looms and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death (as well as the grim Republican response to it) casts an ever more massive shadow over the country, the subtext of the administration’s message -- however convoluted its delivery -- is simple enough: you’re on your own. Over the last half-year, whether discussing the pandemic or the vote to come, Donald Trump has made one bizarre, bombastic, patently untrue assertion after another. In the process, he’s vacillated between a caricature of a dictator from some long-lost Isabel Allende novel and of an insecure middle manager (The Office’s Michael Scott on steroids).
Critical medical information, public health guidelines, and the disbursement of necessary protective equipment have all been thoroughly messed up and politicized in ways that are harmful today and could be devastating for years to come. As Peter Baker of the New York Times reported in September, so many of us are indeed confused:
“With Mr. Trump saying one thing and his health advisors saying another, many Americans have been left to figure out on their own whom to believe, with past polls sharing that they have more faith in the experts than their president.”
That’s me! I do have faith in the experts. I’m wearing a mask and digging into the idea that mask wearing is going to be a part of our lives for at least the next year or so. In other words, the new normal will be ever more of the same, which means careful, awkward, tentative engagement with a wildly unpredictable world full of pathogens and unmasked “patriots.” The new normal will mean trading in the old sock masks my mother-in-law fashioned for us and investing in more high tech and effective masks. Beyond that, my answer to all this couldn’t be more feeble. It’s taking care of my backyard chickens and my front-yard garden and adding strands to our small web of mutual aid.
This spring and summer, I dug up more of my lawn to plant carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash in an ever larger garden, while learning how to store rainwater from the gutters of our roof in big barrels. I joked with my friends about growing rice -- and might even try it next year. I acquired a chicken coop, built a rudimentary run, and ordered six beautiful chickens from a farm in a quiet corner of Connecticut: two Golden Copper Marans, two Black Marans, and two Easter Eggers. The kids named them after characters in the Harry Potter series, which they’ve all but memorized during the shutdown. One chicken ran away and one died, but I love everything about taking care of them and harvesting the perfect magical protein orbs they produce with religious regularity.
These things bring me pleasure and a feeling of accomplishment, while leaving me with a set of tasks that I have to complete even when I feel despondent and overwhelmed. That’s all to the good, but a handful of chickens and a few collard plants don’t add up to self-sufficiency. They are not a bulwark against national insanity and ineptitude. They will not solve the problem of Donald Trump and Company.
Still, in bad, bad times, at least they keep me going and let’s face it, all of us -- at least those of us who survive Covid-19 -- are in it for the long haul.
Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. She is a TomDispatch regular and writes the Little Insurrections column for WagingNonviolence.Org. She has three children and lives in New London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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RSN | Here's a Thought: Have Presidential Candidates Debate Serious Issues |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 06 October 2020 12:04 |
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Boardman writes: "The first thing to be said about the 'presidential debate' on September 29 is that there was no Presidential Debate on September 29."
Moderator Chris Wallace listens as President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden participate in the first presidential debate Sept. 29, 2020, in Cleveland. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Here's a Thought: Have Presidential Candidates Debate Serious Issues
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
06 October 20
 he first thing to be said about the “presidential debate” on September 29 is that there was no Presidential Debate on September 29. We don’t have Presidential Debates in the United States any more and haven’t for years. We have TV quiz shows of a sort that are demeaning to any serious candidate, who is forced to put up with the more or less uninformed preening of news performers with no persuasive credentials for questioning much of anyone. Thoughtful discussions, according to the reigning conventional wisdom, make for “bad television,” meaning lower ratings, meaning less income, so the TV industry that exists only because it uses public airwaves avoids substantive, reliable discussion at the expense of the public good. This sham political theatre is all the result of the 1987 takeover of the debate franchise by the country’s two major parties under the guise of the Potemkin leadership of the Commission on Presidential Debates. But that’s a long, sordid story for another day. It’s enough for now to see how calamitously the process has devolved.
The TV show starring Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Chris Wallace was an out-of-control mud fight from the start and never got better. We had orange-faced Trump blustering and acting “strong.” We had pale-faced Biden speaking meekly and trying to act “reasonable.” And we had Wallace, apparently surprised by the play, caught in an untenable position of being expected to control the top two contenders for “leader of the free world.” Realistically, it’s a wonder anything coherent at all crept out of that 90-minute fiasco, not that much did. Do we have any clearer understanding of the candidates’ true intentions with regard to health care, race relations, police violence, poverty, or climate change, among other major issues? I don’t think so.
The intellectual barrenness of the event can also be measured by what was omitted, such as our participation in a genocidal war or our criminal treatment of immigrants.
Since March 2015, the US has supported Saudi Arabia and its allies in their unmitigated bombing of Yemen, killing civilians with disregard for the laws of war and creating the world’s most devastating humanitarian crisis. Worthy of mention in a US Presidential TV show? No.
For most of the past decade, the US government has visited cruelties and horrors upon immigrants along our southern border – men, women, and especially children fleeing frighteningly violent conditions in their home countries that the US was instrumental in creating in the first place. We’ve known for years that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is particularly cruel to children, even denying girls sanitary products for their menstrual periods. Now we’re learning that ICE has been carrying out US policy of forcibly sterilizing immigrant women against their will. Forced sterilization is what the Nazis did. Forced sterilization is what the US did in the early 20th century. Forced sterilization is a crime against humanity. Isn’t it worth a mention in a US Presidential TV show? No.
For all that Chris Wallace floundered and failed to raise important issues, it’s really not up to the moderator to make the candidates perform. Trump and Biden both claim to be worthy of being President, so it’s up to them to demonstrate their worth. Trump performed predictably, consistent with past performance going back years. Biden and his handlers could and should have known Trump’s capabilities and prepared to meet them effectively. Did Biden demonstrate the kind of strength we want in a President facing an obnoxious foreign leader? Not so much.
Some say the September 29 performance was “unlike anything we have seen before.” That’s nonsense. If you haven’t seen it before, then you haven’t been looking. When Trump was allowed to prowl the stage behind Hillary Clinton and no one even made an effort to challenge him, we knew he was capable of doing whatever he felt like. He might as well have grabbed her pussy – the theatrical effect was the same. Maybe then she would have reacted.
American debates have not always been like carnival sideshows. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 offer a stark contrast to the clownery of our time. Abraham Lincoln was challenging Stephen Douglas for his seat in the US Senate. They agreed to hold seven joint debates in different Illinois counties. The format was simple: one candidate would speak for 60 minutes, the other would speak for 90 minutes, then the first would close for 30 minutes. They alternated going first at different locations. There was no moderator. The candidates performed unmediated. These debates were immensely popular and received national coverage. Douglas won re-election, but the debates helped Lincoln win the Presidency two years later. The main subject of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was slavery, the most pressing issue facing the nation.
It is all but impossible to imagine such a series of debates today, on race relations or any other crucial issue. What politician can we imagine speaking coherently for an hour or ninety minutes? There are a few. But what audience can we imagine sitting attentively for three hours? That is a sad measure of American culture today, where too much of the public is distracted by shiny irrelevancies while the party in power loots the government and rescinds the laws that protect us.
Serious as the coronavirus pandemic is, it’s also been the source of shiny irrelevancies of all kinds. Currently, there are those who claim that Trump is not sick and his Covid-19 hospitalization is an elaborate hoax. On the other side, the candidate who challenged Nancy Pelosi for her House seat and came out with 2% of the vote has now claimed that Democrats gave Trump the virus. DeAnna Lorraine, a QAnon-promoting Infowars personality, tweeted on October 2:
I’m just going to say what we’re all thinking. Trump was fine until the debate, where they set up microphones & podiums for him. Incubation period is usually 2-3 days. He tests positive a couple of days after the debate. I put nothing past the left. NOTHING….
Does anyone else find it odd that no prominent Democrats have had the virus but the list of Republicans goes on and on?
That’s a thought to feed paranoia, but there may be another explanation. Lorraine herself elsewhere offered a possible reason for Republican vulnerability:
Biblically, God does not want us wearing masks… If you have a mask on, it means you actually don’t trust God. You don’t have faith.
Given the level and variety of discourse in this country, even at its best, one may be tempted just to trust God. But it’s probably still a good idea to wear a mask around others, especially around all those unmasked believers. And it’s also probably a good idea to vote, based on your best guess of what’s real at the moment.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Could the Coronavirus Stop Amy Coney Barrett's Confirmation? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51709"><span class="small">Jane Mayer, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Tuesday, 06 October 2020 11:08 |
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Mayer writes: "Ten days ago, Amy Coney Barrett's path to the Supreme Court seemed almost as rosy as the famous White House garden in which President Donald Trump nominated her. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seemed sure that he had the votes necessary to get her confirmed, regardless of the looming November 3rd election."
Amy Coney Barrett. (photo: Julian Velasco)
Could the Coronavirus Stop Amy Coney Barrett's Confirmation?
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
06 October 20
en days ago, Amy Coney Barrett’s path to the Supreme Court seemed almost as rosy as the famous White House garden in which President Donald Trump nominated her. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seemed sure that he had the votes necessary to get her confirmed, regardless of the looming November 3rd election.
But, in a plot twist that would likely be rejected in Hollywood as too contrived to be believable, the White House ceremony, on September 26th, in which Trump announced Barrett’s nomination may have spread the coronavirus to enough Republican senators to imperil her confirmation. Some hundred and fifty people attended the festive outdoor ceremony, including five members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Virtually all of them ignored the Trump Administration’s own public-health guidelines by sitting shoulder to shoulder and, for the most part, without masks. Many of the guests also mingled inside the White House, again without masks.
A week later, the President had been hospitalized with COVID-19, which had also infected the First Lady, several top White House advisers, and, more crucially for Barrett’s confirmation vote, two Republican Senators who are members of the Judiciary Committee: Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, and Mike Lee, of Utah. (Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican of Wisconsin, also tested positive for the coronavirus last week, but he is not a member of the Judiciary Committee.) Two other Republican Judiciary Committee members—Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, and Ted Cruz, of Texas—said that they had tested negative but, on medical advice, were self-quarantining.
Few if any would bet against McConnell, given the Republicans’ three-vote majority in the Senate and his lifelong devotion to winning at any cost. The Senate’s arcane rules give an overwhelming procedural advantage to the Majority Leader. And McConnell can be counted on to use every parliamentary trick in the book. Further, he has staked his legacy on stocking the Supreme Court with conservative Justices, and the chance to fill the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat with her philosophical opposite has given him the political opportunity of a lifetime.
But, despite all this, several experts say that Barrett’s path has grown narrower. The Republicans still hold almost every procedural advantage, but they are up against two forces of nature: time and COVID-19.
On Saturday, McConnell announced that, for the safety of its members, the Senate would not meet this week, as had been originally planned. The recess, however, did not extend to Barrett’s confirmation process. The Senate Judiciary Committee, McConnell said, would continue to push ahead with hearings, even if it meant that some members had to participate virtually, rather than in person.
Senator Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, objected, arguing that it was “too dangerous to have the Senate in session” and “also too dangerous for committee hearings to continue.” In a statement released on Monday morning, he demanded that all senators on the Judiciary Committee, as well as relevant staff members, test negative for COVID-19 on two consecutive days before participating in any hearing. If Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and McConnell don’t implement “a thorough testing approach,” Schumer wrote, it would be “intentionally reckless, and could reasonably lead some to wonder if Chairman Graham and Leader McConnell may not want to know the results because it could delay this already illegitimate process.”
For now, the Republicans are ignoring the Democrats’ objections and pressing forward at breakneck speed, regardless of past statements from McConnell defending intransigence and inaction in the Senate. He famously obstructed the confirmation of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, in 2016, arguing that the seat should not be filled because only nine months remained before the election. Until now, McConnell has fashioned himself as an institutionalist, proclaiming, in a 2016 memoir, that the Senate should be “allowed to work the way it was designed to—meaning a place where nothing is decided without a good dose of deliberation and debate, as well as input from both the majority and minority parties.”
A glance at the timeline explains why McConnell is in such a rush. Were Graham to stick to the original schedule, the Senate Judiciary Committee would hold four days of public hearings, beginning the week of October 12th. Once those hearings end, any member of the committee can ask for a “holdover” for an additional week before the committee votes. If the Democrats exercise that option, the committee vote would then be pushed back until around October 22nd. After that, McConnell would face additional hurdles on the Senate floor, which likely would delay the final confirmation vote to the very end of October, conceivably even Halloween. Any slippage, and it would collide unacceptably with the election on November 3rd, delaying the vote until the so-called lame-duck session.
Because of the time crunch, experts say that the Democrats could try to use a parliamentary ploy to throw a wrench in the works. The Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee could demand a quorum vote. No nomination can be advanced to the Senate floor without a majority of the twenty-two members of the committee, twelve of whom are currently Republicans, being physically present to vote. The math is a bit complicated, but if all but one of the ten Democrats “took a walk,” as the move is called, leaving just a single Democratic member to demand the quorum vote, and at least two Republicans continue to be absent owing to the coronavirus, there wouldn’t be enough members present to provide the quorum. In theory, the nominee could stay bottled up in the Senate Judiciary Committee until the numbers change. One Democratic Senate aide familiar with the process told me, “It’s almost a battle of attendance.”
But all of this would depend on an interpretation of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s rules. As written, they say that no nomination can move forward “unless a majority of the committee is actually present.” But does “actually present” mean the members have to be present in the flesh, as opposed to remotely? Could infected senators participate while wearing personal protective equipment? In the past, “actually present” has meant physically in the room. But, during the pandemic, the standing rules have been altered to enable remote participation for much of the Senate’s business. Research provided by Senate Republicans shows that, since the spring, the Judiciary Committee has held twenty-one hearings in which there was some virtual participation, including hearings, in May, on Justin Walker’s nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals. But in none of those instances did Democrats demand a quorum vote, or report out a bill or nomination, situations that traditionally have required the members’ physical presence.
Thom Tillis and Mike Lee, who have tested positive for the coronavirus, and Ben Sasse and Ted Cruz, who are observing self-imposed quarantines, have said that they expect to be able to participate in an in-person committee vote by October 22nd. If, however, Senators Tillis and Lee are still absent when the committee needs to send the nomination forward, or if other Republican members of the committee fall ill, it’s conceivable that the Democrats on the committee will call for a quorum, and delay Barrett’s nomination—perhaps decisively.
Faced with such a roadblock, McConnell might find a way to sidestep the Senate Judiciary Committee entirely. He could file a motion to discharge, and send the nomination directly to the Senate floor. But this would break with both precedent and the Senate’s norms. If the oversight function of the committee of jurisdiction was simply shoved aside when it was deemed inconvenient, during a confirmation of a lifetime appointee to the country’s highest court, it could very well damage the legitimacy of the whole process. It surely would unleash a huge outcry. Short of that, the Republicans on the committee could always try to change the rules. Or, if two Republican members of the Judiciary Committee were too incapacitated to vote in person, McConnell might be able to name replacements.
Assuming that Barrett’s nomination reaches the Senate floor—which is a pretty safe bet—it could still encounter difficulties because of the coronavirus. Republicans have a 53–47 majority. But two Republican senators, Susan Collins, of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, are on record opposing any vote on a Supreme Court nominee so late in the campaign season. This shaves down the majority to a perilous point. If three Republican senators are still absent at the end of the month, and if Murkowski and Collins hold firm, McConnell would be short of the necessary votes to confirm Barrett. It’s possible that McConnell could try to allow senators to vote remotely, but that would require a change in the standing rules of the Senate and would upend so many norms that it would likely prove incendiary—not that that would necessarily stop McConnell.
In other words, Barrett’s chances are slightly less good than they were ten days ago, but it would still take an awful lot of extraordinary conditions for her nomination to falter. Clearly, the odds are long for the Democrats. But, if the Trump Presidency has taught us anything, it’s that almost no plot twist, no matter how wild, is beyond belief.
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hen Republicans gathered at the White House on Sept. 26 to celebrate the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, they placed themselves at the epicenter of a 
