After 27 years of praiseworthy public service on the US Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer has announced his retirement from the court, which will reportedly take effect this summer after the Supreme Court’s current term ends.
California-born Stephen Breyer’s surprise retirement has sent conservative politicians in Washington, D.C. into a terrified tailspin in their knowledge that the possibility of the Republican Party winning a majority in the US Senate in November has now just come to an end. Too bad for them.
Due to the historical pattern of the incumbent US President’s party losing congressional seats in the first mid-term election after that president takes office, combined with the numerous announced retirements of incumbent Democratic US House members, recent redistricting, and extreme congressional gerrymandering by blatantly racist Republican state politicians, it’s probably unlikely at this point that the Democratic Party will be able to maintain their narrow majority in the US House of Representatives after November’s general election.
However, all of the time and public tax dollars wasted by racist GOP politicians in Republican-controlled red states (whose blatantly discriminatory and illegally gerrymandered congressional political maps are being torn up by one court after another) will not have any appreciable impact whatsoever on the outcome of US Senate races in 2022, because statewide US Senate elections can’t be gerrymandered since all voters in any state get to vote for or against their state’s U.S. Senate candidates.
What will impact the 2022 US Senate elections is the fact that the current 6-3 partisan Republican majority on the US Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade prior to this November, which will spell certain political doom for anti-Choice Republican US Senate candidates across the country, not just in swing states or in Democratic-controlled blue states.
Even red state Republican candidates have much to fear this year from what is sure to become a historically large voter turnout in November by women furiously focused on protecting their right to choose from misogynistic male GOP jurists and from right-wing religious extremist Republican politicians who are personally obsessed with controlling, regulating, and restricting female sexuality at the point of a gun.
The Republican Party is going to have some explaining to do to its criminal corporate donors and to its fascist foreign sugar daddies (like Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabian despot Mohammed bin Salman) when 2023 dawns on at least several red states inaugurating Democrats as their new governors, etc.
In fact, Justice Breyer’s retirement, along with the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade by the current US Supreme Court prior to November will probably result in multiple red states becoming swing states just in time for this year’s general election, not to mention those flipping to blue states in time for the 2024 presidential election (like Texas and Ohio for instance), which will hand a second four-year term in the White House to President Joe Biden & Vice President Kamala Harris.
Maintaining their current slim majority in the US House of Representatives is likely to be a heavy lift for the Democratic Party this year. However, don’t be shocked if the redirection of American voters’ attention toward the US Supreme Court come election time will make fools out of those in the corporate media who have already mindlessly handed victory to the GOP in 2022, without a single vote having been cast yet! “Conventional Wisdom” isn’t wisdom after all, y’all. It’s simply groupthink.
JAKE PICKERING, Arcata, Calif.
Hal Crowther’s 2/1/22 article, “Amber Waves of Gain ...” is excellent. Two thoughts: nnWhen you worry about “Russia on the warpath ...” you commit the same error as most Americans by not understanding the geopolitical situation. Russia’s moves are reactive, countering aggression by the usual suspects, America and NATO. You know this, so please don’t perpetuate further warmongering.
After WW II, the Americans realized they possessed an inordinate share of the world’s wealth and their foreign policy goal was to keep it that way. To do so, they killed, harmed, and destroyed while selectively building allies to help them stay inordinately wealthy. I believe that the current social chaos and massive wealth inequality is a direct result of this decision, i.e. the chickens come home to roost.
TED TRIPP, Apalachicola, Fla.
We are all familiar with evil heads of state, those most responsible for widespread death, destruction, and disarray, all for their self-aggrandizement. Names like Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and especially Adolf Hitler come to mind.
But perhaps we should start making a list of corporate despots, whose exploits have caused every bit as much harm to the world as the worst leaders of nation-states. I submit three names for this proposed hall of shame: Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. This is the modern axis of civilization’s decline.
All three men dig away at the moral and legal foundations of representative government and cohesive communities, and replace them with greed, fear, anger, suspicion, superstition, and bigotry. This results in a crippling intransigence and dysfunction, such that problems can only fester.
This movement (not that they work in concert, but they don’t seem to get in each other’s way) is counterfactual, because facts are not in their favor. Popular opinion is not in their favor, either; so they roll a golden apple of discord amongst us, and we foolishly take the bait.
Their lust for dominion over the world makes them indifferent at best to the problems of humanity. So their quest for control can incidentally lead to real harm, even death, to millions around the world. Oh, well—fortune favors the ruthless.
Koch, Murdoch and Zuckerberg are far from being the only global reprobates, but they are the best known and most influential. May their juvenile reign of terror blow back on them soon.
JEFFREY HOBBS, Springfield, Ill.
You know, I’m really tired of hearing Republicans spew out their BS about illegal drugs pouring across the southern border and ruining our country. Hey, if the dumbasses in this country didn’t buy them, there would be no problem and I’m sure there are plenty of Republican dumbasses buying them.
So let’s take it a Republican step further and let corporate America take over the drug trade to stop the flow of illegal drugs pouring into this country. Then things would go back to normal. Problematic drugs would be legal, Mexico would pay for treatment of all pre-existing drug addiction problems in our country, corporate America would make billions selling drugs and a fractured America would be told, “Don’t look up.”
MIKE EKLUND, Mercer, Wis.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2022
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