You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet by Reed Richardson

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/eric-alterman

These fears for our country’s democratic well-being are rooted in more than just a few individual Supreme Court rulings, however radically tilted toward the powerful though they may be. It’s only by putting the Roberts Court’s sharp rightward turn into a broader political context—something the mainstream press routinely fails to do, but the public is starting to—that the true stakes for this November’s elections become clear. Though it may be obvious to us liberals, it nonetheless bears repeating: a Romney victory this November (and the GOP majorities in the both the House and Senate that would likely accompany it) would mean that conservatives will have now firmly gained control over every branch of our federal government. And if one cringes at the memory of the desolate, middle four years of George W. Bush’s administration (when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor basically kept the right-wing wolves at bay), the prospect of our nation’s political health completely under the care of a President Romney, Chief Justice Roberts, and Rep. Paul Ryan should be enough to trigger full-on heart palpitations.

Over time, this kind of undue concentration of political influence can’t help but perpetuate a vicious cycle for our democracy, one where rich and powerful actors grow even more rich and powerful thanks to payback from the like-minded members of the government that they hand-picked to run it. In state after state, conservatives have already previewed how they plan on rewarding their benefactors and abrogating the rights of the many, whether it’s through ‘voter-ID’ disenfranchisement and right-to-work laws or the de-funding of Medicaid and passage of xenophobic immigration rules. A Republican sweep at the federal level this fall would only serve to supercharge this agenda and possibly cement the GOP’s consolidation of power for a generation or more. Consider, for a moment, the ideological bent of the Supreme Court nominee that Romney would be able to get past a GOP-led Senate populated with more Deb Fischers. (And here’s where, if you’re the praying type, you might offer an extra one that this prediction about Justice Ginsburg doesn’t come true with Romney in the White House.)

One would search in vain, however, to get a sense of this big political picture from most of the current campaign coverage. Horserace reporting, by its very nature, tends to sweat the small stuff and, when it does take off its blinders, still views ascending to office as an end unto itself rather than the means by which one can then exert political power. As a result, the stark choice our nation faces this November—either Obama confronting a divided Congress and a hostile Supreme Court or Romney acquiescing to an assertive Congress and friendly Court—rarely gets explored. But it should. And this may be the biggest story of the election that the press is missing so far—that the Republicans are actually right to warn the public this election could fundamentally distort the nature of our democracy, it’s just that, like Chief Justice Roberts in the Citizens United case, they don’t want to admit that they’re the ones who would be doing it.