#like we can go all the way back to RBG and Hillary Clinton like SHIT

[cometrose]

the supreme court is so comically evil like you really have to vote blue across the board they made it legal to criminalize homelessness, overturned chevron which means the extremely conservative courts get to override health officials and environmental regulations

like infant mortality has increased by 8% in some states post roe, they will avoid the trump immunity case as long as possible, they essentially shielded all the jan 6 rioters

if biden loses we could be stuck with 6-3 or 7-2 extremely conservative judges for decades!!! that could mean 40 years of social rights regulations and health codes thrown out the door!!! look how much we’ve lost in 8 years?

and what about pack the courts? you can’t pack the courts with this split congress you can’t pass roe laws with this split congress you really have to vote blue all the way

[qqueenofhades]

Trump's SCOTUS pick scares the ever loving shit out of me. I'm trying not to have a full blown panic attack actually.

Sigh. I know.

I’m not going to say that picking someone literally, un-exaggeratedly out of The Handmaid’s Tale for SCOTUS, especially to replace someone like RBG, isn’t mother fucking terrifying. It is.  Especially since Mitch McConnell is trying to set her final confirmation vote for October 29, literally five days before the election. Yes indeed, that would be a third Supreme Court seat filled by an impeached president who lost the popular vote by three million votes, (possibly) confirmed by Republican enablers (some of whom are absolutely going to lose their seats in this election) who represent a sizeably smaller fraction of the US population than their Democratic counterparts, in a display of outright, staggering, truly breathtaking hypocrisy about the protocol of election-year vacancies on SCOTUS, which they themselves shouted about to no end with Merrick Garland in 2016. This is how tyranny by minority rule works, and... yeah. It’s bad. It’s awful. When is this going to end.

That said, however: we do not yet exist in this theoretical grimdark future where some dystopian 6-3 (or even 7-2) conservative SCOTUS strips us of our rights at every turn, with no recourse except for us to sit passively and take it, and there are a lot of things that we ourselves can do between now and then to make sure that it never happens. First off, House Democrats have proposed a bill to introduce 18-year term limits for SCOTUS justices, rather than it being an automatic lifetime appointment. This would also give every president the ability to appoint two justices per four-year term. Because SCOTUS has become such an instrument of partisan warfare, and because the obvious implications of having a partisan head of state pick the senior federal judges for a lifetime is part of what has fucked us up now, this would be a GREAT improvement. House Dems can’t make it into law right now, because Democrats do not hold a majority in both chambers of Congress and they do not hold the presidency. You know how this COULD be passed? If Joe Biden was elected with a blue House and Senate. That way, even if God forbid the GOP horror show snuck Coney Barrett onto the bench just before the election, this could be fixed.

Here’s another way to think about it. I myself have a HUGE problem with catastrophizing: a bad thing happens, and then it seems like an inevitable chain of nonstop bad things until everything gets irredeemably, unfixably even worse. This year, obviously, has not done much to help that, because yes, the bad things keep coming. But they’re still individual events and have not yet crystallized into some unbreakable, unavoidable future. History is made up of thousands of millions of choices, accidents, unforeseen developments, total random bullshit, and much more, as much or more as it is made up by the macro-scale actions of oligarchs. Obviously, globalization and capitalism have made us all more connected to each other, and thus changes to the system can ripple more broadly, but they are not the only people who make history. If there’s one thing I can tell you as a historian, it’s this: the future is just history that hasn’t been made yet, and it is subject to the exact same unpredictable bullshit that has constituted history throughout, well, history. Nothing is unavoidable and we have never existed in a world where we can’t do anything at all. Also, authoritarian regimes (especially those imposed without the consent of the people -- willing subjection to authoritarianism is one thing, but the other, yeah) have a relatively short shelf life, historically speaking. That won’t help all of us who could be hurt right now (though we can STILL fight back and speak up and help our neighbors), but it’s the truth. Authoritarian rule (especially when it’s not balanced by economic security, which sure as hell isn’t happening right now) can last for a while, sure. But it is always its own worst enemy, and it will always be ended. How that ends is a choice we can make.

This isn’t the “get out on the streets and Start The Glorious Revolution!!!” nonsense that the armchair internet leftists, none of whom are actually starting a glorious revolution or doing anything except bitching on Twitter about how Biden and Trump are alike, are fond of. This is an active choice to realize that there are always things you can do, that there are things you can do right now, and one of them, most obviously, is voting. This mess was all completely goddamn avoidable if people had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But well, they didn’t, and we get one last shot to fix this by democratic process. Trump is already openly setting up to contest the election results/try to invalidate them/throw out ballots. This is all old-school fascism. This is what is happening. He is counting on another razor-thin margin of votes that he can then contest in his hand-picked SCOTUS; he wants another Bush v. Gore very, very badly. The only way to blow away any legitimacy for anything like this is to vote in such overwhelming numbers that there’s no question of Biden’s victory, no need to wait for mail-in ballots (another reason the GOP has been trying so hard to destroy the post office) or anything else. At heart, Trump is a coward. He’s also an egomaniac. If it comes to stepping aside peacefully or being dragged out of the White House by the FBI for everyone to laugh at for the rest of time, hmm, I doubt he’s going to go for that. (And if he does, well, I will also savor the sight of him in handcuffs for all eternity.) However, that doesn’t mean the GOP machine won’t TRY, because Trump is not just Trump, but is his entire miserable cabal of enablers. I have written my fingers raw about how badly people need to vote. This is literally your last chance to do it.

I’ve seen a lot of the-sky-is-falling, we’re-doomed, they-have-the-votes-so-don’t-even-bother handwringing in the last few days. To some degree, yes. We all feel doomed. We have all been asked to find strength to deal with massive and unending waves of terrifying bullshit past anyone’s normal capacity, and we’re tired. We want it to end. But it’s SO CLOSE to ending, if we can all just get out and vote for Joe Biden in massive numbers on November 3 (or if your state has early voting, sooner; BANK YOUR VOTE). That’s such an easy thing to do. Nothing is set in stone. We can still fix things and make it so, you know, we’re not living in a fascist state ruled by Gilead. (And besides, all this Chicken Little rhetoric is super easy for the Russian troll farms to exploit. Don’t listen to it. Shut it down. Reject it.)

They want you to think you’re powerless. You’re not.

They want you to think this will never end. It will. We decide how.

They want you to think this is a foregone conclusion and you should just go back home and let it happen. You don’t have to.

They want you to think your vote doesn’t matter. It does.

They want you to think your rights are gone. They’re not.

They want you to think this future is inevitable.

IT’S NOT.

Hang in there.

Lots of hugs.