December 2021

Greg Weiner is a political scientist at Assumption University who wrote a piece in The New York Times on November 29 that goes a long way to explaining why there is such a mess on Capitol Hill at the moment.

To summarize a long op-ed succinctly, passing legislation is supposed to be hard and take a while. The more transformative the legislation, the harder it should be to pass and the longer it should take to do so. Remember please that it took about 14 months to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and that legislation, watered down as it was, passed without a single Republican vote. This was not the case with the equally transformative Medicare and Medicaid legislation of the mid-1960s where some Republican support was gleaned by a very powerful President and a large Democratic majority in the Congress. Is that the case now? It is not.

It matters little what your personal beliefs are with regard to the legality of abortion. As of this moment, Roe v. Wade rules in the United States and no state can limit a woman’s right to legal and safe abortion services up to the time of fetal viability, usually set at 24 weeks of gestation.

On December 1, the Supreme Court heard a significant challenge to Roe in its having to determine the constitutionality of Mississippi’s law to limit abortion to pregnancies under 15 weeks in duration. If the Court, decides that the Mississippi law is constitutional, it would substantively overturn Roe.

Many Americans believe that we live in a democracy. We do not. If we did, then every vote cast would be equal to every other vote cast and that simply is not the case for a host of reasons.

First, there’s the Electoral College which magnifies the effect of voters in purple states as they really determine the outcome of the presidential election. Voting for Trump in New York and California or for Biden in Nebraska or Alabama was a meaningless activity. For those who did, their votes really didn’t count.

This phenomenon is even more critical in state and district wide races where state legislatures draw the maps of these districts and can gerrymander a current Congressman out of a job every ten years based on the need to redraw the districts after each census and the resultant redistribution of the American population.

In the most recent season of the superb drama The Morning Show on Apple TV, Jennifer Anniston’s character, a morning TV anchor not unlike Katie Couric, risks being cancelled on the internet because she reconnects with her disgraced former partner (Steve Carell) who plays a Matt Lauer like-lout who has sexually abused women and been ostracized for having done so. This cancel culture has to be on the minds of many in the public eye who risk criticism on social media doing what they think they should do or what they need to do for their own edification, sanity, or sense of ethics even as some deserve cancellation for heinous behavior (like Lauer).

I understand this. Cancellation (or what passed for it in the day) has happened to me twice. Both times it was awful.