February 26, 2020
Last night we watched six Democratic presidential candidates, in a desperate effort to boost their anemic poll numbers, attack Bernie Sanders as an extreme leftist. Spooked by Sanders’ decisive win in the Nevada caucuses, on the heels of his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, the other candidates clearly saw the debate as their last chance to blunt his momentum heading into South Carolina and Super Tuesday. The criticism ranged from fair- Biden’s critique of Bernie’s five previous votes against gun control legislation- to ridiculous – Buttigieg’s derisive accusation that Bernie was nostalgic for the “revolutionary politics of the sixties,” conveniently overlooked the fact that the sixties gave us the Voting Rights Act and the Stonewall Rebellion!
The problem with the debate was twofold. First, Sanders’ positions- that healthcare is human right, that workers deserve a living wage and that college debt is unsustainable, are positions shared by most of the candidates on that stage. Sanders is the front runner because he was the first to articulate many of these positions and move the party to the left. Yet the punditocracy acts as though Medicare for All is a scarier prospect than four more years of a Trump presidency, and covers Sanders accordingly.
Trump’s acquittal by his craven co-conspirators in the Senate has accelerated America’s transformation into a fascist dictatorship. No president in American history has so brazenly attacked the Rule of Law and the very concept of an independent judiciary. In the last week, Trump has savaged the federal prosecutors, the judge and the jury foreperson in the Roger Stone case, (Source: “Judge expresses concern for jury foreperson’s safety as Trump continues attacks,” by Ali Dukakis, abcnews.com). Trump’s actions prompted an emergency meeting of the Federal Judges Association to address his “intervention in politically sensitive cases,” (Source: “Federal judges reportedly call emergency meeting in wake of Stone case intervention,” by Fred Barbash, The Washington Post, 2/18/20).
There is no indication that anyone in the legislative or judicial branch will step up to check Trump’s escalating abuse of power. In fact, on Monday, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court issued an opinion so deferential that it prompted a sharply worded dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In Wolf v. Cook County, 589 U.S. ___(2020), the majority granted the administration’s request for an emergency stay of a lower court injunction prohibiting enforcement of the administration’s newly expanded “public charge” rule which significantly broadens the definition to make it easier to deem immigrants inadmissible.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent averred that the conservative justices were granting the Trump administration stays too frequently, a fact confirmed by a recent analysis by Stephen Vladeck published in The Harvard Law Review, (Source: “What Sonia Sotomayor actually wrote in her dissent that inflamed Trump,” by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, 2/26/20). In response, Trump angrily tweeted that Justices Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg should recuse themselves from cases involving him or his administration, baselessly accusing them of bias. Meanwhile, Ginni Thomas, the right-wing zealot spouse of sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is busy compiling a list of disloyal officials to be purged, (Source: “Trump slams Sotomayor and Ginsburg, says they should recuse themselves from Trump-related cases,” by Meagan Flynn and Brittany Shamas, The Washington Post, 2/25/20).
The fact that the moderators and candidates spent two hours talking about anything other than the full scale assault on democracy being waged by this president reveals a frightening level of obliviousness to the danger we face. No matter who you support, if you want to actually have the chance to vote for them in November, we’d better hit the streets now.