Make John Roberts Squirm

Matt: What’s your read on Schumer…succeeding in coaxing Janet Mills in the Maine senate race? I feel like Platner gives Dems a better chance at reaching voters who have written off the party, but I also like him ideologically so I don’t want to just be confirming my own biases. Does Mills being 77 and very establishment outweigh her being a popular governor?

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I like what I’ve seen from Platner, and would almost certainly vote for him over Mills if I lived in Maine. Her record there seems OK. Her age is a problem, as is the fact that she and Susan Collins occupy similar niches—or so my gut tells me¹. If you’re a Biden-Collins or a Trump-Golden voter, which kind of candidate will make you give the Democratic Party a second look? I’ll be interested to see if Collins tips her hand as to which candidate she’d rather face in the general election, but if I were her, I’d be more fearful of the new, outsider guy with distinct politics than of the reluctant septuagenarian who’s basically Susan Collins only slightly more liberal and a reliable vote for the Democratic establishment.

That’s my read on the candidates. To your first question, I’m less concerned with the fact that Platner will have a serious primary opponent than with Schumer’s determination to run Platner off, despite a theory of candidate recruitment that has a mixed record. I can intuit why Schumer thinks Mills is a safer bet. And it’s probably good for Platner to have to prove himself in a primary. If the national party would allow it to be a fair fight instead of thumbing the scale like this, I’d see no harm. Even still, if Platner, with all his buzz, loses to Mills, that’ll be a pretty decent indication that he wouldn’t have been a huge improvement over a standard-issue Dem against Collins.

My concern is that Schumer’s actually just doing factional politics at a time when every voter matters. I am not a fan of progressive murder-suicide politics; I’m equally unimpressed with Democratic machine pols, always trying to stanch fresh blood from the left. If Schumer thought Platner would be a standard issue Dem, he wouldn’t be recruiting a spoiler. If he was worried about the fact that Platner is untested, they could meet, discuss staff and campaigning and so on. Why not just let chips fall? Which is all to say I’m less annoyed that Platner will have to win a competitive primary than I am about what it says about the people who are still in charge of the Democratic Party.

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Bill: In your October 7 post on SCOTUS reform you advocate for a Democratic President to ignore Court ruling(s).

Explain to a skeptic why this will be the end of it, that a sufficiently chastened Court will reign itself in.

For those who missed it, the key paragraphs of the article Bill referenced read:

There are tons of accomplished lawyers in and adjacent to Democratic politics. They can recite the Roberts Court’s hypocrisies and bad faith, chapter and verse. They could and should create a compendium of every instance over the past 10 or 20 years when the court really bared its ass: Every time it moved conspicuously to advantage Republicans and disadvantage Democrats, every ruling rooted in fictional doctrines, every inconsistency between precedent and shadow-docket ruling.

And Democrats should cite that record in asserting they won’t be bound by rules that apply unequally.

Jawboning is, to my mind, more important than any particular proposal for court reform. Specificity is the enemy of success in this case, because any detailed plan can be picked apart and organized against. Promising a reckoning for the court’s abuses sets us on a course for reform without dividing the party or tying anyone’s hands. In victory, the reckoning will have been “litigated by the voters,” freeing Democrats to move with as much abandon as Trump did. When the justices try to impose a different set of rules on the incoming administration, they will be ignored, or their power diluted, or both.

And to clarify, my preference would be for a new Democratic government to expand the court by at least four seats. But at a baseline level, Democrats just really need to be prepared in their hearts and minds to cast off the handcuffs of the Roberts Court, whether they win enough power to reform the judiciary by statute or not.

I think an affect like that would have a dramatic impact for a bunch of reasons...