[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”]
From this article by Park MacDougald [my remarks in brackets]:
And in other dodged-bullet news, Jonathan Last of “The Bulwark,” the never-Trump Republican webzine dedicated to “defending democracy” and bilking large checks out of gullible liberal donors, expressed regret, as the results came on Tuesday night, that the Biden administration hadn’t been more “radical” in rigging the system against Trump. Here’s Last, as transcribed by Tom Elliott on X [I watched the video of Last and others, and was struck by the sentence MacDougald excerpts here]:
[The Biden Admin] should have been quite radical. They should have made D.C. a state, they should have actually expanded the Supreme Court, they should have done a whole bunch of stuff that would have been deeply unpopular, but … would have restructured the framework in such a way as to make it harder for the next authoritarian attempt.
To me, this encapsulates a lot of things about the present-day left. There’s the complete lack of realization that it was actually the administration’s radicalism that turned so many voters off. There is the embrace of actions that would be extremely authoritarian in a transparent drive for more power under the guise of stopping the right from being authoritarian. And there’s also the air of expertise coupled with what appears to be a complete lack of knowledge about what actually happened during the Biden administration regarding the very things that Last seems to think they didn’t attempt to do.
“They should have made DC a state,” says Last. Why does he think that didn’t happen? Is he even aware of how hard they tried to do exactly that? I bring you, Mr. Last, history in the form of HR51, a bill introduced on January 4, 2021 – the day after the new Congress resulting from the 2020 election took office. Sounds like it was a top priority, doesn’t it? The bill passed in the House on April 22, 2021, by a vote of 216 to 208. At the time, the Democrats had 221 seats and the Republicans 211, with some not present for the vote, which was on strict party lines. Here’s an excerpt from the bill’s summary:
This bill provides for admission into the United States of the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, composed of most of the territory of the District of Columbia. The commonwealth shall be admitted to the Union on an equal footing with the other states.
The Mayor of the District of Columbia shall issue a proclamation for the first elections to Congress of two Senators and one Representative of the commonwealth.
The bill applies current District laws to the commonwealth and continues pending judicial proceedings.
The commonwealth (1) shall consist of all District territory, with specified exclusions for federal buildings and monuments, including the principal federal monuments, the White House, the Capitol Building, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and the federal executive, legislative, and judicial office buildings located adjacent to the Mall and the Capitol Building; and (2) may not impose taxes on federal property except as Congress permits.
District territory excluded from the commonwealth shall be known as the Capital and shall be the seat of the federal government.
But guess what? The bill suffered a sad fate in the Senate, much as a previous bill passed by the House in 2020 had:
The House voted Thursday on a bill that would admit Washington, D.C., as the 51st state, although the measure is likely to fail in the evenly divided Senate. The legislation passed along party lines with a vote of 216 to 208, with no Republicans voting in favor. …
The House approved a D.C. statehood measure by a vote of 232 to 180 last year, but it did not get a vote in the Senate, which was then controlled by Republicans. Although Democrats now hold a 50-seat majority, most legislation requires 60 votes to advance, and this bill is unlikely to garner support from 10 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has committed to bringing the measure to the floor for a vote, but a motion to move forward with the legislation would almost certainly fail.
Ah, but Jonathan Last would no doubt say that they should have canned the filibuster and just passed it in the Senate, if they really meant business. And in fact:
Many D.C. statehood supporters are pushing the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow measures to advance with a simple majority. But this would require support from all 50 Democrats in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. Two Democrats say they won’t support it — all but dooming the prospects for H.R. 51.
I bet you can guess who the two were, even if you don’t remember the incident: Sinema and Manchin. If not for them, the filibuster would have been eliminated back in 2021.
The article goes on:
However, it’s unclear whether all Senate Democrats would support D.C. statehood, even if the filibuster was eliminated. The two Democrats who oppose eliminating the filibuster, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have not signed onto the Senate bill as co-sponsors. Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Mark Kelly, and independent Senator Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats, have also refrained from co-sponsoring the bill.
And then of course in the next Congress, Republicans got control of the House and no such bill was going anywhere.
I wonder what Last thought the Democrats and/or Biden should have done to have “made DC a state.” Just declared it, by royal decree? Threatened Manchin and Sinema with removal from office? Obiously, there was no way to do it democratically or Democratically, although my guess is that Last knows nothing about any of this history – including the makeup of the legislature – and thinks the problem was just lack of trying.
And what of Supreme Court packing? Last says, “they should have actually expanded the Supreme Court.” No doubt any such effort would have run into the very same roadblocks that HR51 encountered. But again, that’s not Last’s gig or his problem. They should have waved a magic wand.
And indeed, Biden tried as recently as this past July:
President Joe Biden on Monday proposed major changes for the U.S. Supreme Court: an enforceable code of ethics, term limits for justices and a constitutional amendment that would limit the justices’ recent decision on presidential immunity.
But alas, no magic wand was provided, and when last I checked, Biden was never made king:
There’s almost no chance of the proposal passing a closely divided Congress with Election Day looming, but the ideas could still spark conversation …
Almost no chance? Zero chance. But guess what? It was actually tried, and only about six weeks ago:
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today announced the introduction of new legislation to restore balance among the three branches of government, increase transparency to improve public trust in America’s courts, and modernize the courts to ensure greater access to justice for more Americans.
In the wake of recent rulings upending decades of precedent and evidence of unethical behavior, Wyden’s Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act would modernize the courts by expanding the Supreme Court to 15 justices over three presidential terms, prevent political inaction from bottling up nominations to the Supreme Court, and restore appropriate deference to the legislative branch by requiring a supermajority to overturn acts of Congress, among other modernizing provisions to improve access to justice.
“To restore balance” – that’s pretty funny. Not only does the bill feature court-packing, but note that it also requires a supermajority to overturn an act of Congress even though to pass such an act requires nothing of the sort.
The bill is still in committee; it obviously was going nowhere, but the intent was there. And a previous House version that had some different details was introduced in May of 2023 and met a similar fate.
You may wonder why I’m spending so much time on this. It’s because I can’t stand the combination of arrogance and ignorance that I see so often in people like Last who have all sorts of credentials. The credentials give them the arrogance; what gives them the ignorance? Laziness, preference bias, personality?
