AUTHOR – Your submission is compliant, but I believe you made a mistake because the author’s name is not appearing correctly. We will close this attempt expecting you will correct the problem on any resubmit. Thank you – NV
With the death of the US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday, the stakes of November’s election are more obvious than ever. If Trump retains control of the presidency, most likely through a win in the electoral college but loss in the popular vote, that will cement minority Republican rule for a generation. Abortion rights, healthcare legislation, labor protections and voting rights will all be directly impacted.
…
The problem with treating the election as a referendum on the supreme court is that, as Anne Applebaum recently argued, it “organizes the electorate along two fronts of a culture war, and forces people to make stark ideological choices. Instead of focusing voters on the president’s failure to control Covid-19 or the consequent economic collapse, the culture war makes voters think only of their deepest tribal identities.
…
Though they obviously overlap, the 64% of Americans who think the rich should pay more in taxes to support public programs are a firmer basis to build a political coalition than the quarter of Americans who identify as “liberal”, or, for that matter, the probably tiny number of former Trump voters who can be won over to Biden by outrage at the president’s behavior. Rather than talking about “packing the courts”, Biden would be wise to appear credible on this bread-and-butter agenda and then use his mandate to “do whatever it takes” in the way of structural reform to accomplish it.
Article URL : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/26/scranton-park-avenue-joe-biden-donald-trump-campaign-supreme-court