Day 195…
My mother’s iPad is up and running.
It was not easy. She hasn’t worked on Apple hardware before this, so I had to set up everything. So much of the setting up of stuff like this is completely counter intuitive and unnecessarily complicated.
The external keyboard wasn’t working, until I finally realized that it needed to be charged. (mine doesn’t). Now it is. The Zoom app has been downloaded and set up. After a lot of false starts, when it wouldn’t let me activate her account, we were actually able to Facetime with my sister in North Carolina. Our phone numbers are now loaded into her contacts.
All we need to do now is have a tutorial so that I can show her how to use it and trouble shoot a bit when I’m not here.
We will be doing that later today. Pre-five o’clock wine.
The rest of the day we spent reading out on the lanai and trying to avoid the news. That was not easy, either.
While the country continues to mourn Justice Ginsburg, the President expressed his opinion that her last wish, that her replacement not be voted on until after the election, was fake.
"I don't know that she said that, or was that written out by Adam Schiff and Schumer and Pelosi. I would be more inclined to the second ... But that sounds like a Schumer deal or maybe a Pelosi or Shifty Schiff."
The Republican Senate Majority leader made it abundantly clear that he is more than happy to just make up rules that serve him in the moment then jettison them when they don’t.
Here is what the Senator from Kentucky said in 2016 when President Obama put forward his nominee Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice, therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” At the time, the, now President, then candidate, completely agreed with him.
This was nine months before the election. When it is an election year, you let the people decide, is what the Republicans argued for and won four years ago.
Four years later, they are arguing the exact opposite.
Even before they have a candidate to vote on, a majority of Republican Senators said yesterday that they will support a vote before the election. Two have come out and said that the election should wait. We will see if they stick to it. Given her history, Senator Collins from Maine’s vow is not one that can be trusted.
2016 was then, I guess. This is now.
We all grew up playing with kids who behaved that way. Once they started losing a game, they would change the rules of it so that they could win. As kids, the way we got around that is that we stopped playing with them and found other friends to play with. Hopefully, we will be able to do the same thing with the Senator from Kentucky and his cynically hypocritical compatriots.
Truth be told, if the Republicans had any confidence that they were going to win, they would not be doing this.
For the first eighty years of its existence, the number of Justices appointed to the Supreme Court fluctuated several times. It went up and down from a low of five to a peak of ten. The current number, nine, was ultimately settled on in 1869.
The Founding Fathers didn’t really provide much in the way of guidelines for appointees. There are no explicit requirements for age or experience, or even citizenship outlined in the Constitution. There is also no discussion about how many Judges there should be.
The Judiciary Act of 1789 signed into law by President Washington established the initial court. That Act said that a panel of six Justices would be responsible for making sure that laws enacted by the legislative and executive branches followed what was stated in the Constitution.
It established a tiered system of courts. On the lowest level was a federal judge in each state who oversaw different districts within their state. Then all of those districts in each state were organized into three large geographical districts where appeals and certain cases could be heard.
At the top, were the six justices who oversaw all of it. Those six justices were assigned, two per each of these three large districts. They had to spend a large part of the year traveling a circuit through their given area and adjudicate on the road.
Eleven years later, that changed. John Adams, our second President, signed the Judiciary Act of 1801 into law. That law restructured things so that the Supreme Court Justices no longer traveled around, and their number was reduced from six to five.
This law was signed AFTER Adams had lost his reelection bid to Thomas Jefferson. At the time, it was seen as a political move on Adams part designed to limit the power of his successor to make appointments to the court. It wasn’t very effective as Thomas Jefferson immediately repealed the Act when he took office and the six Justices were restored and resumed their travels.
The number of Justices grew over time as the country expanded westward and more were needed to fulfill the responsibilities in the greater area. Because of this, by 1837 under Andrew Jackson there were nine.
After the Dred Scott decision which said that Black people were not and could not become US citizens, Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans added a tenth Justice to try and move the court further to the left.
When Lincoln was assassinated, his Vice President, Andrew Johnson, a southern Democrat assumed the office. Remember the ideologies of the two parties were basically reversed from what they are today. Whereas Lincoln was progressive, Johnson was decidedly not.
Johnson tried to veto the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which granted full citizenship to all people born in the United States regardless of race. Congressional Republicans were able to override that veto and to make sure that they weren’t overturned by the Court they then passed another Act reducing the number of justices to seven. The hope was to establish more of a balance so that the Court wouldn’t sway decisions in favor of the Southern states.
The next President, Ulysses S. Grant, also a Republican, then passed yet another act in 1869 that raised the number back up to nine and required a quorum of six to be present to make decisions.
It’s been nine ever since.
Franklin Roosevelt tried to raise the number to 15 when the Court started striking down his New Deal laws. Everyone, even his supporters, accused him of attempting to pack the court and the Senate voted against him.
Now we are here, yet again, in a fight for the balance of the Supreme Court. The Senator from Kentucky is doing everything he can to try and sway the court to the right while he and his fellow Republicans are still in power. The Democrats are trying to figure out how to stop him.
It is worth noting that the current slate of Republican appointed Supreme Court Justices has not always voted in the way that this current Administration wanted them to. They have, at least some of the time, voted seemingly based on their interpretation of the law, rather than whatever their personal feelings might be. Please note that I said SOME of the time.
It is also worth remembering that this President is a master of distraction. He is betting that his “win” on the question of this appointment will completely distract us from other things. His complete failure in dealing with the pandemic comes to mind.
The uproar has already pushed the virus to page two right at the point where we are about to lose our 200,000th citizen to COVID-19.
The President is paying attention even while it seems he isn’t. The CDC, yesterday, published an addition to their coronavirus guidelines, saying that the virus can, indeed, as many have said, be transmitted through the air. By the end of the day, that addition was deleted, and the CDC said that it had been posted erroneously.
This has the President’s fingerprints all over it.
From here on in, it seems, the CDC and other Federal Health agencies are now going to have to run any changes to information posted to their websites past the White House. We can probably take as fact that this virus can be transmitted through the air. That may be the last actual fact we get out of them.
The fight for this seat on the Supreme Court is extremely important. It is going to get bloodier and more intense in the weeks to come.
As can readily be seen from its history, the pendulum of the Court has a long history of swinging from the left to the right. For those of us who are afraid about what is going to happen to it in the next few months, we should take comfort in the fact that we can change it all. Whatever happens now can potentially be repaired in January, but we have to make sure that we do the groundwork now to get people out there to vote in November.
This kind of political battle galvanizes some people but also makes some others shut down. The more intense this gets, and it is going to get extremely intense, the more a lot of people will simply just tune it out.
Be patient with those people and be patient with yourself. This is hard. We are up against extraordinary issues that were unimaginable four years ago.
It seems like there is a new crisis every day. All of them either created by or compounded by the fact that we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has, so far, infected 31.2 million people and killed 963,000. To say the least, it’s a lot and we can all be forgiven for feeling a bit raw around the edges.
It was well worth the long drive down here to hang out with my Mom on her lanai. I do hope the iPad thing works so that the whole family can Zoom in together or Facetime (we will see which works better).
More than just setting it up, I also just wanted to be able to sit outside and read with her for a couple of days.
We used to do that at the table together when I was a kid. All four of us, my mother and father and sister and I would each have a book and we’d all read as we ate.
I wouldn’t dream of doing that with Michael’s mostly Italian family. Meals are loud and boisterous events filled with chatter. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy every second of it.
A couple of days down here with my mother, though, is a meal for my soul. Quiet, yes, but just as full.
My mother is definitely not avoiding the news.
She tapes Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell at night and watches them when she wakes up in the morning. She reads the The Week magazine and has just re-subscribed to the New York Times.
She’s requested her mail-in ballot and already has plans to drive over with friends to a ballot box to drop it off when the time comes.
My mother is on it. She’s not going to let this election go down without a fight.
I brought her down a facemask with the word ‘Vote’ on it. Last night she wore it into the restaurant that we ordered dinner from.
“I like your mask,” said the guy behind the counter.
You’d better have.
❤️....more moments of meals with your soul
and your Mother who is on it as her son has set this up!
❤️❤️❤️❤️🙏