Why should they get the court too?

Yesterday Neil M. Gorsuch was sworn in to the Supreme Court of the United States. He will serve a lifetime appointment from now until most likely at least 2048, the year he turns 80, very possibly beyond. There are two current members of the court who are older than that.

Today more than most I feel it is important to ask, why should they get the court too?

The Republicans have the House of Representatives. A prize won through the collection of state legislators to properly sequester or dilute Democratic votes in as many states as possible during redistricting. Allowing them to hold a strong and defensible majority, if not one that is entirely impenetrable to ideological disagreements, within the lower house.

Add to that the simple fact that Democratic states are more populous, while Republican states are more numerous. This means that on average, more states will send Republican Senators to Congress as their allocation is a constant two per state no matter how sparse.

This advantage in number of states has played out at the presidential level as well. Democrats have won 6 of the last 7 popular votes for president (‘92, ’96, ’00, ’08, ’12, ’16). However they have only won 4 of the last 7 Electoral College votes. To be clear, those have produced legitimate presidents as those are our rules. They could not be considered truly democratically elected though.

The Democrats are not particularly good at actually winning elections. 2016 should have been a clear indication of that. Even while indicators were pointing to a large Democratic victory, the party failed to deliver. That is made even worse by the notion that democratic ideas and policies often poll much higher than Republican ones. They are just not sold as well when the time comes. Gay Marriage, the Public Option, Marijuana legalization, supporting education, climate change, all public polls show the country siding with the Democratic platform, yet we have a Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican President.

So why should they get the court too?

Shouldn’t one branch of government actually reflect the people? Shouldn’t the minority be protected? Or majority represented? It doesn’t follow that this country should be governed by regressives trying to hold the country back from the direction which it is naturally heading.

Judge Gorsuch is not the coming of the apocalypse, he is a conservative, and some might say that it is a “conservative seat” which he sits on. That logic should not follow, just because the predecessor was a conservative, or an originalist, does not mean that the successor needs to be. If you’d like to find out if the gender of the judges should remain the same, I believe Ruth Bader Ginsburg enjoys answering that question.  The court must be allowed to evolve. It should reflect the practice of law for its own time, but it should also reflect the country for which it is interpreting those laws.

Just because Justice Scalia may have liked the person who replaced him, does not mean that we owe it to him to have Judge Gorsuch on the court. The country deserves to have a Justice that will dispense justice in a way that it recognizes.

The Atlantic reminds us all to rise above controversy

            Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic that “Pepsi’s New Ad is a Complete Success.” By all conventional standards he would be wrong. The ad was likely not cheap to produce and could only be aired for all of a day before getting attacked so thoroughly that they could not get value out of it before getting pulled. He is also more right than anyone else who has weighed in on this controversy.

            Pepsi has created something not meant to actually be an advertisement but a stunt. Bogost does an excellent job of breaking down how this is more an act of capitalism than politics. How we are treated by corporations reveals their ideological bent, consumerism first everything else second.

            The article politely brings you the realization that whether outraged or not, you are playing in to the trap that Pepsi has set for you. It does not lay out the trope of not thinking of a purple elephant, though it could easily be excused if it did. Bogost even calls himself out for being part of the machine that has eaten the controversy and allowed it to live out its lifecycle.

            Universalized, the message is much more profound. We live in a time of great outrage. There are things happening within our political and social spheres that are worthy of outrage. We are inundated by all sorts of things that could make us angry. Everyone knows that the superlative emotions get the clicks. Which is why no one does anything that you will think is generally kind of neat, they do things that will totally blow you away. We live with our whole lives on max outrage. Which is why we can be at full breath screaming that the president of Syria is gassing his own citizens, but what wins the news cycle is a cola ad. Why? Well Middle East politics are a tricky mine field of terrible choices and less than ideal allies. Going full blast at a cola company is something we can change today. (Also, land mines are still totally a thing, which we might be rid of by 2025 but I wouldn’t count on it.)

            The lesson here though is we need to focus on the decisions and the policy behind things. Pepsi wanted you to be mad, or to be mad at the people who were mad, so we would all be talking about them. Did it work? Sure. Did we spend our time well? Depends how you define it. Yes we managed to take down a tone deaf ad. But we still didn’t fix the issues that the protests the ad was parodying were about to begin with. So in a week when we should have been teaching ourselves about infrastructure, and whether or not it’s racist (hint: kinda), we something something omg Kendall Jenner.

            So please stop being outraged, calm down enough to decide what matters, and choose to care about it. And even if you do get taken in by something from the outrage machine, at least be honest with yourself that you are being frivolous. If we admit it, then later we can go back to what really matters.