The Resistance: We Can Only Win the Hard Way

For 64 years, since Brown - or maybe 80 years, since Parrish, progressives have been on the ascendant.  Not without setbacks, but on a steady course of expanding the rights and freedoms of the Constitution to everyone - non-white, female, immigrant, poor, gay - left out of the 18th-century document.

And every one of those victories, those giant steps forward, came through the Supreme Court.  No matter what clusterfucks the repugs and conservatards created in the states, we progressives could always count on even the repug-led Courts to rescue us.

So over-confident were we that we didn't notice until far too late that the neo-confederates and the conservatives and the repugs were reacting to always losing at the Supreme Court by building up an electoral victory machine of unmatched power, even as we let our voters languish and drift away and give up.

Now the worm has truly turned, and we're the ones who have to start building an electoral machine to overcome the literally lethal rulings the Trump Court is going to issue over the next 50 years.

First, the polite version:

Josh Marshall:

Today’s High Court decision upholding the President’s anti-Muslim travel ban should focus us on a key, important fact: the federal judiciary is now heavily stocked not just with Republican appointees but conservative ideologues. This isn’t simply a commentary on this decision. It does include major exceptions – the Court’s jurisprudence on marriage, for instance. But we simply cannot rely on the Court’s as presently constituted to make rulings which are in line with the actual constitution or our national traditions. This is in significant part because of the corrupt appointment of Justice Gorsuch. But there’s no undoing that. We are on the cusp of what will likely be an even more dramatic example of rightwing judicial activism against labor rights. On issue after issue, change and justice or simple preservation will have to rely on building robust political movements. This is a point I plan and hope to see as a guiding premise of our upcoming voting rights and democracy series.

It’s not either/or. I spoke to a friend a few days ago who said flatly, the courts are a lost cause. It’s all about politics and elections. That’s wrong. It’s not a pure either/or. Courts and litigation remain still absolutely critical. We’ve seen that even in the last year. Critically important. But on many issues, in this period of testing, saving the country will come from robust political movements, ones which will have to succeed in the face of daunting challenges to the right to vote in order to eventually redeem those rights.

Now, the rude version:

Rude Pundit:

I've been saying this shit for nearly 15 years now. Democrats keep pretending there are rules. That didn't start with Trump. Democrats were playing badminton while Republicans were playing with flamethrowers during the Clinton administration. There are no rules except the ones Democrats keep making themselves follow. That's all so naive.

SNIP

We've been working on the fight in November for one or both houses of Congress. And that fight stands. But another fight is here now. Democrats have to be willing to fight dirty. Oh, sure, there are a lot of less dirty things that we can and should do. But these motherfuckers have gone too long without having their faces shoved in the mud.

Let's wallow in anger and shock for moment. Yet don't get caught up in the bullshit blame game. We have no time for childish things. I don't give a fuck about who voted for what in 2016 anymore, not in the election, not in the primaries. We either put that aside for this fight or we may as well just roll over and wait for the fucking. (By the way, that doesn't mean ignoring important election results this year or the utter failure of Democratic congressional leadership on this and other issues.)

Tomorrow, I'll get to how to fight dirty. Legal, yes, but fuckin' dirty, man. Getting chanted out of restaurants will look like a tiptoe through a meadow. Fuck chess. It's time for a barb wire cage match.