Tomorrow Doesn't Matter

 I have been seeing a lot of stories in the last couple days claiming that the republican party is doomed if they ram through a 30 something fascist to steal RBG's seat on the Supreme Court. Dueling editorials in the USA Today typify the latest portent of destruction:

It’s not an exaggeration to say that how her seat gets filled could be as consequential for the continued political health of the republic as the election itself... The issue here isn’t fairness or consistency. It’s consequences. Filling that seat would be the most disastrous thing Republicans could do, not just to the country but to themselves.

 The Great Supreme Court Betrayal would infuriate Republicans and make the fight over Obamacare seem like a pre-pandemic day at the beach. But that’s the nature of these things. Every new [republican] outrage is justified by the previous one and the cycle never ends.

 There is simply no way congressional Democrats are going to smile ruefully at their Republican colleagues and let bygones be bygones. There will be retribution, and that retribution will be expressly calculated to teach Republicans the meaning of powerlessness. It won’t be pretty to watch. It won’t be good for the country. But it will happen, nonetheless.

These words were written by the spokesperson for another electoral rounding error called "republicans for the rule of law" for whom the good old days were when his party was going berserk over the Black Man overwhelmingly elected to the White House. He seems confused about the disaster unleashed by giving republicans any power, as though what has happened to the country as a direct result of republicans having power has been "good". He runs through some scenarios detailed by the "liberal" opposing view editorial that would indeed begin to correct the asymmetrical polarization in America today as "retribution" namely structures that allow for minority rule and minority obstruction in our politics.  Some points from the other side in USA Today include:

 But the fact of minority rule — and the fiction of one person, one vote — can’t last forever.  

Conservatives lost the country long ago. Yet they already have a Supreme Court majority, and now it looks like they could have one for generations. But they lost the country long ago. 

And liberals helped give it away. 

Where was the Democratic money, where was the Democratic president, where was MSNBC and “Merrick Garland Held Hostage, Night 237” when Mitch McConnell’s Senate refused to consider his nomination throughout the final 10 months of President Barack Obama’s term? Where were the Democratic strategists who could and would play hardball at the same level as McConnell? 

She then states some basic reforms that would help overcome minority rule and force the republicans to adapt or die such as; finally addressing the Constitutional absurdity that accords so much power to stop progress in each senator and the apportionment of senate seats which gives the same power to Wyoming as California. The need to finally get rid of the filibuster and enact anti-corruption laws to replace all of the norms that doughfacedonny has brazenly broken. And whether a President Biden will realize "this asymmetry is not healthy? That it’s destructive to the American political system to have one party that’s passive and rule abiding, and another that’s cold blooded, power hungry and fine with ghastly hypocrisy?" And rightly worries that no outrage will empower and embolden Democratic leadership to finally do something to make republicans pay for what they have done.

Why I titled this post "tomorrow doesn't matter" is that for republicans, it really doesn't. What price did republicans pay for lying the country into war? Or the Great Recession? Or unprecedented obstruction during the Obama administration? Or now with the daily outrages of doughfacedonny and $7 trillion in new national debt and 200,000 and counting dead from a pandemic that could have been prevented?

Exactly. Nothing. I don't even know what punishment could possibly balance the scales of justice for a party that began as anti-slavery and has now fully transformed into the slave power. Electoral defeats do less than nothing when mainstream media never asks republicans uncomfortable questions and instead hold Democrats to an impossibly high standard. Watergate sank Nixon, four years after his term would have ended began Reaganomics. When turn of the millennium pundits declared that demographic shifts meant that the republican party would never again hold the presidency, Bush ratfcked Gore hard enough to let his daddy's supreme court simply install him as president. The incredible energy and work that went into retaking the House in 2006 was undone 4 years later, along with 100s of state legislative seats. And so on. 

The point is that republicans don't give a shit about rules, have no fear of punishment, have no respect for an opposition that never holds them to account. Tomorrow is tomorrow's problem, today we take what we want and shit all over democracy and the rule of law. If they finally steal the supreme court for a generation by ramming through that 30 something fascist, it won't matter how many republicans lose their seats in the election. That is the final prize.