The only thing that remains to be seen is how deep our official levels of asshole will go. Multiple states are changing their unemployment systems to if your job is open but you refuse to go back because of fear of infection it counts as a voluntary quit. Which means those people would be ineligible for unemployment.
In Texas, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a lack of immunity to covid19 was not a valid reason to request an absentee ballot. They delivered this decision after hearing the case remotely so not to risk potential infection from covid19. This will be one of many such cases in the months to come with potentially similar outcomes in red states. As Trump said, if you allow mail-in voting, you'll never get Republicans elected again.
Usually, flagrantly saying the quiet part out loud like this will bite you in the ass but, given that election rules are the purview of the states, it is unlikely to lead to a negative outcome. There's enough political cover for Chief Justice Roberts to say that since Trump is merely expressing a political opinion and has no capacity to create discriminatory rules, there's no infringement on the people's right to vote.
Since Roberts has the daylight, he'll take it- but he'll probably assign Kavanaugh or Gorsuch to write the opinion, if it comes to that. He may cast the deciding vote, but Roberts won't want to get his hands dirty to validate the reasoning.
Which brings me back to a horse I feel compelled to keep beating until election day. Biden is in a deep hole against Trump. Yes, I know he's up in the polls. So what? Polls are a measure of who the general public prefers as a person. What they don't measure is how effectively campaigns deliver their message to mobilize its supporters to donate, phone bank, canvas, etc. etc. that makes up the actual work that gets people elected. Being liked more than Trump isn't a game changing asset- you could put up a rotting corpse in a head-to-head against Trump and odds are the corpse comes out on top.
It seems the cornerstone of Biden's campaign is that he isn't as bad as Trump, which is the exact same mistake the Clinton campaign made in 2016. So far, Biden has told people that if they believe Tara Reade's accusations they shouldn't vote for him, that any black people who hesitate to support him aren't really black, and has failed to gain any traction among Bernie's supporters.
If you tell people not to vote for you because of a moral quandary surrounding you, you're giving people license to won away from supporting you. They may not denounce you, exactly, but their silence will be noticeable. Also, if you tell black people that their concerns over your long history of cementing institutional racism that you aren't really apologizing for is making them hesitate is actually all their fault not yours, that won't end well. Also also, the idea of a white dude getting to dictate black people's level of blackness because they won't let the harm he's done to their community go is bound to be a winning issue.
Lastly, if you want Bernie supporter's you have to adopt his policies. They won't come along without a convincing commitment to their policy goals which Biden can't deliver, sooooo yeah, there's a good chance a large portion of voters under 45 for show up, which obviously doesn't bode well.
All of these are factors are looming over the Biden campaign but don't appear dangerous because there's no pressure yet. But once the summer is over and Trump and Biden start going at it, all these weaknesses will manifest and drag Biden into a statistical tie if he's lucky until November. Since the best idea the Biden camp can come up with to get younger voters on their side is glorified online hangouts, I'm not optimistic they'll get a handle on things.
What should be especially concerning is that Biden doesn't have any avenue to shore up his weaknesses. Usually, candidates use their VP picks to cover any holes in their appeal. This is actually why Obama picked Biden as his VP; Biden was a sign to the conservative wing of the party that all the hope and change talk wouldn't go too far or change too much.
But who could do that for Biden? His biggest weaknesses are from the left-wing of the party and left-leaning independents but he can't exactly placate them given that the entire philosophy of his campaign is a rejection of everything those voters believe in. Even if he picked Elizabeth Warren, she's so thoroughly trashed her reputation that she's nothing but a liability at this point. Sanders is obviously a no-go because the establishment figures who fought so hard to deny Sanders the nomination won't abide him being a heartbeat away from the presidency.
So who does that leave? The only people Biden can pick are other centrists which only compounds the problems with his campaign. Anybody who could plug the holes in Biden's campaign would end up being more dynamic, influential, and personable than the man himself so, that's also a limiting factor.
Funnily enough, the literal week long affair of Amy Klobuchar highlights the problem Biden faces. Just on its face, who cares about Amy Klobuchar? Who among you even bothered to learn how to pronounce her name or remembered it after she flamed out in the primaries? The only reasons she was a serious contender were-in order- she's a woman (which Biden promised as his VP), she's a centrist who appeals to the same people as Biden so there's no threat of her taking her ball and going home if Biden doesn't agree to policy demands.
Even if things went well, at best she adds nothing to his campaign so there's no real point to her being there in the first place. But things did not go well because a Minnesota policeman named Derek Chauvin murdered Gregory Floyd. Chauvin has killed people on the job before, you see, and the prosecutor who declined to bring charges against him and dozens of other cops was none other than our dear friend Amy Klobuchar.
This ultimately is the greatest weakness Biden and his ilk face. They spent their entire careers chasing the reputation of being respectable, of not being soft-hearted liberals out to save pathetic losers from a world they were too weak to survive in on their own. They did this by creating policies like the Crime Bill or the Welfare Reform which caused an insane amount of suffering in minority and poor communities on purpose. They saw that the true test of being a respectable, serious politician was the willingness to fuck over black people so they grabbed that ball and ran with it.
So while centrist Democrats rail against Trump's bigotry, the uncomfortable truth Biden et al. are desperately trying to avoid is that Trump is merely escalating the policies and attitudes Biden staked his entire career on.
Even so, the most annoying thing about pointing out all these flaws is inevitably the argument becomes "He can't be worse than Trump." Which, I know. Pretty much everyone who doesn't like Joe Biden knows that Trump is worse. However, Trump being Trump doesn't erase the consequences of Biden's career or the philosophy that drives him to this day.
Brow beating people into voting for Biden with no guarantee that he'll be different is effectively telling those people that their suffering doesn't matter, that asking for protections and guarantees that the harm won't be perpetuated is selfish.
What you're telling these people is that you don't care.
You're telling them that the life and death struggle against Trump is an abstract one about democracy, the soul of the republic, the Constitution, or the Supreme Court. Blood is too messy in such pristine, rarefied air, so it gets left out. Sure 100,000 and counting are dead, yes what happened to Gregory Floyd was tragic, but let's not be untowardly angry about the whole thing. Won't someone consider the property damage?
There's no point in saying this election is the biggest fight for the country's soul if you're going to get squeamish. If you think people stealing shit out of a Target is morally comparable to a cop murdering someone in broad daylight on fucking camera, shut up. If protesters breaking the windows of a precinct is worse then the cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas into the peaceful protests which started the riots, give up.
If things like Minnesota bother you, if they make you uneasy, then please be courteous and come to terms with your defeat, now. You don't have the guts to fight for the world you want in the way it needs to be fought for, so it'll never come to pass. If you don't like the protests because they make you uncomfortable in the same way Trump makes you uncomfortable, then you can't distinguish against the legitimate anger of the oppressed and the whims of a dictator. You want the fight of the century but you want it done politely, comfortably, where no one steps out of line.
You're right about one thing, though. We're about to have one of the most defining elections in recent times. It's going to be a brutal, nasty fight. And because of you we're walking into it timid, crippled, and afraid. I hope you're happy.
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