The Senate, Sotomayor, and Kagan

At the moment, the Senate electoral map for November is extremely grim.

West Virginia is gone, the nine most competitive races feature eight Democratic incumbents and Ted Cruz, and the Texas race is the least likely to flip of those nine seats.

So that’s basically drawing to an inside straight.

It’s just astounding, or ought to be, how biased the US governmental structure has become in favor of right wing white people. Fifteen years from now, states with 30% of the nation’s population will control 70% of the Senate’s seats. This is in a legislative body where, because of self-dealing by its members, you need 60% of the votes to pass anything.

I mean if you run the probabilities, the chances that Democrats will be able to fill a SCOTUS seat between 2025 and 2028 are, optimistically, 5%! (A Republican-controlled Senate will never confirm a Biden nominee, assuming Biden wins. God knows how many megatons of dynamite it will take to blast that insight into the consciousness of The Institutionalists, feat. the NYT Op Ed Page).

Given this, it’s just very sad that Sotomayor, and really Kagan as well, aren’t resigning this summer, subject to their successors being confirmed. Yes I know Manchin says he won’t vote for somebody who doesn’t get a Republican vote. You don’t need his vote assuming Manic Pixie Girl on the Grift doesn’t defect, plus it’s a hell of a lot easier to get one GOP vote, from say St. Susan of the Furrowed Brow or Romney or Murkowski, than to try to confirm somebody starting in January, which is almost certainly going to be impossible.

But norms, guardrails, and delusions oh my.