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History was made this week, as Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman ever confirmed to a seat on the Supreme Court. It's rare that such a milestone is reached, and it is unquestionably worth celebrating when it does finally happen. Especially since the first Black woman ever to become vice president was the one presiding over the Senate as it cast this historic vote.
Donald Trump's Big Lie continues to reverberate through American politics. The latest iteration of this is a growing Republican push to ban all machines used in the elections process and instead hand-count all the ballots. They've even got a snappy slogan: "Vote Amish!" I suppose that's better than "Vote Luddite," since it has a distinctly American flavor. But the entire concept is so unworkable and ridiculous (and downright dangerous) that it would be a near-guarantee of more election chaos, longer waits before the counts are complete, and lots and lots of new opportunities for challenging vote results that Republicans don't like (when Republicans lose, in other words). Which could be the entire point, of course.
Lo, how far the moralistic mavens of the Republican Party have fallen! They keep attempting to take the moral high road so they can piously point out all the failings of their political opponents in this realm... but they keep being undermined by fellow Republicans who have embraced the new amoralism Donald Trump ushered in to the GOP.
Iowa's prominence among the states that hold early voting in the Democratic presidential primaries seems to now be in some jeopardy. Party officials are openly discussing whether to revamp the process of selecting which states get to hold the earliest votes, which continues a reform effort that has been ongoing for quite a while now. Once the primary system replaced the "smoke-filled back rooms" in the party's selection of a nominee in the 1970s, there have been efforts to tinker with who goes first. Iowa and New Hampshire fended off most of these reform efforts and held their position as, respectively, the first caucus state and the first primary state to vote in the nation. More recently, the party acknowledged the dearth of minorities in these two states by adding South Carolina (with a high percentage of Black voters) and Nevada (with many Latino voters) to balance things out a bit.
Something rather astonishing happened on Capitol Hill this week. The Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent, acting with such blinding speed that some senators weren't even aware of what was happening. Contrast this to the Senate's usual modus operandi, which is for things to move so slowly that a glacier would be seen as zipping along by comparison. Arcane parliamentary procedures are routinely used to gum up the legislative works, which often leads to nothing at all happening -- after spending enormous amounts of time and energy in the attempt.
Let's start with some good news this week, because we could all use some, right? Two years ago today Tom Hanks announced to the world he had contracted COVID-19, on the same day that the virus people were then largely calling "the novel coronavirus" was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. This was when it all hit home for many -- that this could quite possibly be a very big deal indeed, even though the president of the United States was desperately trying to get the American public to believe otherwise. Salon provides a good rundown of what we all went through next:
But back to the speech. Biden's delivery was awesome both at the start of the speech and at the end. He showed honest heartfelt emotion when denouncing Vladimir Putin and Russia and metaphorically standing with the people of Ukraine. At the end, he spoke louder than the building applause when he called for what is best about America overcoming our worst impulses. Barack Obama couldn't have done a better job with Biden's closing paragraph, and that's high praise indeed!
President Joe Biden will give his second speech to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, in his first official State Of The Union address. That seems like a contradiction, due to the quirk that the first time a president gives such a speech it is not officially known as the State Of The Union, but few care about splitting such hairs. After being in office for over a year now, the president will inform Congress and the American people what his view of the country is, looking both backward at his first year's accomplishments and forward to what he hopes to achieve in the coming year. This is normally a balancing act, but this year's speech will be unusual in that large portions of it are being rewritten at the last minute, due to the developing situation in Ukraine.
That headline is specific because I have my own personal bias from living in California, but it really could have been generic instead: "All States Should Vote The Way Alaska Votes." Because Alaska (of all places) seems to have come up with the best mix of new ideas in redesigning how people get to vote. They've combined the "jungle primary" system with "ranked-choice voting" and by doing so eliminated the worst aspects of both while keeping the best parts intact. That's quite a feat, which is why I am so strongly endorsing their concept.
Did what happened at the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021 constitute "legitimate political discourse" or not? That was the question that has divided the Republican Party all week, and may serve to be the one memorable phrase that sums up the difference between those in the GOP who have completely surrendered all their morals and thought processes and attachment to reality to Donald Trump -- and those who have not. Because that's what it all boils down to, really.