Today is Primary Day for Colorado and that means we get treated to the latest bloviating from Rep. Lauren Boebert, who told a religious service this past Sunday that she is “tired” of the U.S. separation of church and state, a long-standing concept stemming only from a “stinking letter” penned by one of the Founding Fathers.
Of course, she skipped over that pesky First Amendment thing, but it's always been useful to pick and choose among your "sacred" documents, whether the Constitution or the Bible.
This pseudo-campaign speech was literally preaching to the choir, with an audience of white CINO cheering every attack on what we used to think of as basic rights and democracy.
Her primary opponent is Don Coram, who was co-sponsor of our state's updating of our student free expression law to include protections for advisers simply doing their job. He is smart and consistently works across the aisle on legislation that western Colorado needs.
I assume he will get slaughtered. Reasonable is out of favor in the Republican Party.
Today also brings to an end the peculiar and expensive negative ads attacking a somewhat reasonable Joe O'Dea (who is what we might call Classic Republican) and urging voters to choose the wacko Ron Hanks, who embodies the Trumpist mentality in all its glory. The peculiar thing is that a PAC funded by Democrats is paying for those ads... and they have been everywhere.
The apparent strategy is to get Hanks nominated today and thereby pit Democratic incumbent Michael Bennett against a "weaker" candidate. Hah! I thought Trump would be easy to beat when he started his circus-atmosphere campaign seven years ago. By sheer bad (or good, depending on your perspective) luck, Trump was thumped in the popular vote but became president, a beneficiary of the peculiar American Electoral College.
Something about this strategy just doesn't sit well. And once a wacko is on the ballot...
The deference to small, rural states and populations within states is yet another of the lingering problems that slavery, our original sin, continues to impose on us. The system was built as part of bringing southern slave states into the union, part of an unholy compromise that eventually led the nation to a civil war.
Trump got three "originalists" on the Supreme Court, and the Republican radicals got everything they wanted without having to tick people off by drafting legislation to end abortion. After all, five members of the court are bought and paid for.
Trump may never regain any power, beyond his pop culture allure, but those court picks will torment the majority of Americans for decades to come. Now the country must hope for different luck, perhaps in a debilitating disease or sudden (and, of course, tragic) death of one or two of the current arch conservatives. But even having some court openings won't help if Dems don't control the Senate.
Trusting in luck is not a solid political strategy, just as it's not a great strategy in Vegas.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg, for all her sterling qualities, must have really wanted to be on the court when our first female president was in office (ha!)... but her personal wishes backfired on us all when she refused to retire during Mr. Obama's second term, despite her long battles against cancer.
More appalling was Senator McConnell pulling the most extreme power play in the history of our government by denying Merrick Garland even a hearing when he was nominated a full year before the 2016 election. Today McConnell brags about stacking the court as his supreme achievement in a long legislative career. Shameful.
Whatever the combination of luck, political machinations, and an imbalance of power in our Congress, particularly the Senate (California's two senators represent 39 million people, while North Dakota's two senators represent 770,000), we are stuck in a constant state of turmoil and anger. We are stuck with a Supreme Court that guarantees rule by the privileged minority of our citizens.
The one glimmer of good news is that those ugly and always deceptive TV ads will finally give way this evening, bringing back the barrage of Frank Azar law firm ads.
Ah, normalcy.
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