September 13, 2019
A whittled down field of ten candidates took the stage at last night’s Democratic debate and featured the three frontrunners sharing the stage for the first time. For the most part, the candidates refrained from attacking each other, preferring to split hairs over the arcana of Bernie’s Medicare for All bill and whether various candidates’ Medicare option would leave people uncovered. Kamala Harris helpfully interjected that Democratic quibbling missed the point — Trump and the Republicans are busily trying to strip healthcare from everyone.
In the main, each candidate performed according to expectations, for good or ill. Biden was rambling and slightly racist. Andrew Yang promised people a cash giveaway. Bernie was hoarse and yelled a lot, while Warren was wonky but warm. Kamala trained her zingers on Trump, rather than fellow Dems and Buttigieg leavened his image as a wunderkind technocrat with a moving coming out story.
The moderators, once again spent too much time asking questions about the minutiae of healthcare policy before pivoting to questions on gun violence, immigration, trade policy and the scourge of white supremacy. Once again, there were no questions on reproductive rights or voter suppression. All in all, it was a debate from a parallel universe where democracy is not under constant daily attack from one of the two major political parties. There was barely a whiff of the grave crisis that our country is facing and what will be required to end it.
Consider what has unfolded in the twenty-four hours preceding the debate. In North Carolina, craven Republicans in the state legislature used a 9/11 commemoration to trick Democrats into missing a session so that they could override the Democratic governor’s budget veto, (Source: “North Carolina House overrides budget veto in surprise vote with almost half of lawmakers absent,” by Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan, Lauren Horsch and Paul A. Specht, Charlotte News & Observer, 9/11/19). Then, on Wednesday evening, in an unsigned order, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision blocking Trump’s effort to “halt nearly all asylum applications,” upending, as Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent, “decades of settled asylum practices and affect[ing] some of the most vulnerable people in the Western hemisphere, without offering the public a chance to weigh in,” (Source: “The Supreme Court just let Trump close the Mexican border to nearly all migrants seeking asylum,” by Ian Millhiser, Vox.com, 9/11/19). The Trump administration’s rule change was notable, not only because of the obvious racism of its substance, but also because it flouted the law governing the rulemaking process itself. The Supreme Court’s cowardly decision co-signed both the underlying cruelty and contempt for the Rule of Law evidenced by the policy.
As the pace of the Republican assaults on democracy accelerates, it becomes increasingly clear that it will take more than smart, progressive policies to dig us out of this abyss. We need leaders who are clear-eyed about how debased and hate-filled the Republican party has become. We need leaders who are ruthless, not romantic, and who will end the filibuster, investigate who paid off Brett Kavanaugh’s debts, and get rid of the Electoral College, if need be, to make this country the multicultural democracy it is intended to be. Vote accordingly.