A Crisis on Top of a Crisis

Making a bad year worse, we’ve lost RBG. If the Supreme Court has to weigh in on an election decision on the order of Bush v. Gore or some variant of it with five right-wing ideological justices, it’s practically a foregone conclusion what the outcome will be regardless of the merits. Then there’s the whole raft of cases that would likely be decided on their religious nationalist authoritarian power-aggregating utility. In principle, I’m against packing the court, but I agree and then some with Michelle Goldberg in this morning’s New York Times — if Republicans jam through another ideologue under these circumstances, it will be required to save democratic governance.