Dana Milbank: An explosion is coming

[MBS]

I usually think of Dana Milbank as a moderate/centrist/DC insider kind of guy, which to me makes this piece all the more stunning.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-explosion-is-coming/2018/06/29/c3301b66-7ba2-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html?

. . . We see Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowing to ram through the Senate the confirmation of the decisive fifth hard-right justice on the Supreme Court, quite likely signaling the end of legal abortion in much of the United States and possibly same-sex marriage and other rights Americans embrace, in far greater number, than they ever did Obamacare.

One wants to cry out: Hell no, you can’t! But Republicans can. They have the votes. Democrats can and should fight, but the GOP controls the schedule, sets the rules and already eliminated the procedures that gave the minority a say in Supreme Court confirmations. . . Now we have a Supreme Court nomination — the second in as many years — from an unpopular president who lost the popular vote by 2.8 million. The nominee will be forced through by also-unpopular Senate Republicans, who, like House Republicans, did not win a majority of the vote in 2016.

Compounding the outrage, each of the prospective nominees is all but certain, after joining the court, to support the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade, which has held the nation together in a tenuous compromise on abortion for 45 years and is supported by two-thirds of Americans . For good measure, the new justice may well join the other four conservative justices in revoking same-sex marriage, which also has the support of two-thirds of Americans. And this comes after the Republicans essentially stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.
You can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it. Republicans have been defying gravity for some time. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait reminds us in a smart piece, they lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. Electoral college models show Republicans could plausibly continue to win the White House without popular majorities.
. . Control of the judiciary, and the resulting protection of minority rule, has been the prize for Republicans who tolerated President Trump’s starting a trade war, losing allies while getting cozy with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, flirting with white supremacists, paying off a porn star and attacking the justice system while his former advisers are indicted and convicted.
. . .
The backlash is coming. It is the deserved consequence of minority-rule government protecting the rich over everybody else, corporations over workers, whites over nonwhites and despots over democracies. It will explode , God willing, at the ballot box and not in the streets. You can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.

And here's the piece by Jonathan Chait, cited in Milbank's oped:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/anthony-kennedy-the-trump-court-and-minority-rule.html
Chait's conclusion:

The central drama of the Trump era is a struggle to defend American democracy against an authoritarian leader. The Republican Party’s comfort with the crude authoritarianism of its president, though, did not spring out of nowhere. It is the culmination of a party increasingly comfortable with, and reliant on, countermajoritarian power.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Yes, this one surprised me a bit, too.

Milbank always seemed like one of those kind of wishy-washy, carefully treading the center line, both-sides-do-it kind of writer, but I guess he's finally seen the light - and good for him.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Another huge powder keg, slower burning, is the gaping wealth & income gap. But TRs wedged it wider.

TR = Trump-Republicons

[pecosbob]

3. Anybody who hasn't seen this coming since the days of Reagan

hasn't been paying attention. Republicans declared long ago that rules do not apply to them in politics. If you need examples as illustrations of this, again, you clearly haven't been paying attention. The Democratic Party (in my opinion) has long been bringing knives to gunfights.

[bucolic_frolic]

4. The Founding Fathers

were deeply protective of the rights of the minority in parliamentary rule but I doubt they intended what is happening here, they could not imagine monied interests growing exponentially, and they didn't fear propertied classes - they were the propertied class.

Milbank as usual doesn't know what he's talking about. Backlash. Demonstrations are the backlash. We're juggling so many issues to demonstrate against that our influence is diluted.

The problem is not the GOP minority, it's the GOP minority's rule by oligarchy. That wise old white men would rule in the Senate, House, and judiciary was a given. They just didn't think it would be old white men who worshipped power and money and were not very wise politically. Statemanship, the common good, the long term best interest of society has been lost here.