The Corner

And we hope to see you, if virtually this year. We are honoring the great James Buckley, the very model of a conservative statesman, jurist, and thinker, and Virginia James, who has done so much to support liberty and our civilization. Our friends at NRI have come up with a lively, imaginative program, and we hope you’ll be part of it. You can find out more and sign up here.

1. 40 Days for Life begins today

40 Days for Life begins today! Join us in your community through November 1 and save lives from the devastation of abortion. Find a prayer vigil near you: https://t.co/CsSLDkrYYB

— 40 Days for Life (@40daysforlife) September 23, 2020

Pray for the end to abortion and for healing and conversions from wherever you are.

2. Frank Rocca in the WSJ: Vatican Pushes Against Growing Acceptance of Euthanasia 

The document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is here.

3. Loneliness During the COVID-19 Pandemic | Institute for Family Studies

Can confirm for my younger followers that if you marry and have children YOU WILL NEVER BE LONELY AGAIN. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. https://t.co/kgw3brLc3p

— SamuelGoldman (@SWGoldman) September 23, 2020

5. Charlie Camosy: Is Judge Barrett’s ‘kingdom of God’ different from Obama’s?

6.

Question. Do any of these Catholics believe what Pope Francis believes about abortion, marriage, and gender ideology? https://t.co/qbQm1rkgKA

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) September 23, 2020

7. Pope Francis blesses bell that will ring out in defense of unborn

8.

Dear Parents

If you have kids or children with any type of disabilities

My love message to you

I be thinking of your kids and children I know this is tough I love you very much please tell them that my love is with them

Love you parents ❤️

— Tank Schottle (@TankSchottle) September 23, 2020

9. Dan Darling: Christians Were Built for This Moment

10. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput: God Never Loses

11. Fr. James Bradley: Say What You Mean; Mean What You Pray 

12. Dan Mahoney reviewing Rod Dreher’s new book — Affirming Reality by Rejecting the Lie

13. John Tierney: The Moral Case for Reopening Schools—Without Masks 

14. Changing women’s lives in prison

15. Podcast on race and transracial adoption with my friends Naomi Riley and Malka Groden, and AEI’s Ian Rowe

16. An adoption announcement:

17. John J. Miller: An American president’s heretical Bible

18. I haven’t listened to this yet, but am very curious:

A fun and lively disagreement over the cultural reaction to #cutiesnetflix (including that GREAT take by @davidfrum 😍) https://t.co/ubp3rxren5

— Danielle Crittenden (@DCrittenden1) September 23, 2020

19. Terry Teachout in the WSJ: An Art Museum Sells Its Soul

20. Fr. Roger Landry: Living the Gospel in Truth and Spiritual Poverty

21. 12 Powerful quotes from Padre Pio you need in your life today

22. Patricia Heaton warns Christian followers about an ‘onslaught’ of ignorance as Supreme Court debate looms 

23.

"A good federal appellate judge is one who is impartial, who is unyieldingly committed to the rule of law, who gives equal rights to the rich and to the poor, who is willing to take the consequences of rulings that might be unpopular. So, one who is brave." –Amy Coney Barrett

— Elizabeth Kantor (@ElizabethKantor) September 23, 2020

Over at Vox, Alex Ward writes that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech before the Wisconsin State Legislature this afternoon touched “on themes that could easily be construed as a broader campaign pitch,” possibly breaching limits on political activity by government officials.

This has been a common line of attack in recent months, as Pompeo’s critics have alleged that he is using the advantages of his office to tee up a 2024 presidential run with trips to Iowa, Kansas, and Texas, among other places beyond the Beltway.

Some of these complaints are more credible than others: The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, for instance, has defended Pompeo’s practice of convening top political, diplomatic, and business figures for “Madison Dinners” at Foggy Bottom. However, the ethical implications of his decision to film a video address for the Republican National Convention while on an official trip to Jerusalem are tougher to explain away.

By any reasonable standard, the latest so-called controversy is a nothingburger.

Ward’s contention that Pompeo probably breached the Hatch Act and federal ethics guidelines seems to be a few lines from this afternoon’s address — which raised the alarm about Chinese influence operations targeting state lawmakers — mentioning this administration’s work on China policy: “The Trump administration is fighting to protect our wallets, hearts, minds, and our freedoms . . . Democrat or Republican, you have a friend in the Trump administration to help you push back against the [Chinese Communist Party’s] exploitation of our open society.”

But the secretary gave a sober, policy-oriented speech, alerting state-level officials about CCP attempts to interfere in state politics. It was more a nonpartisan call to action than a Trump 2020 surrogate’s stump speech. And it was a good one, too.

Pompeo reprised the theme of remarks he gave to a meeting of the National Governors Association in February. He made headlines then for his warning to the governors: “Whether you are viewed by the CCP as friendly or hardline, know that it’s working you, know that it’s working the team around you.”

His remarks today built on that, calling attention to united-front foreign influence operations, which are a crucial instrument of CCP influence that are only beginning to be understood by U.S. policy makers:

We see it all over in America in sister-city programs – like the ones in Door County, La Crosse, Milwaukee, and Richland Center.  They fall under the authority of something called the Chinese People’s Association of Friendship with Foreign Countries.  Sounds benign.  But that group is part of China’s United Front Work Department – the CCP’s official overseas propaganda tool.  It’s one of the CCP’s three “Magic Weapons,” in the words of Chairman Mao, along with “armed struggle” and “party-building.”

In other words, it may have “friendly” in its title, but it is not so when it comes to American interests.

On the substance, Pompeo’s speech was much-needed. The location was similarly appropriate: As he noted in his remarks, the Wisconsin State Legislature was the focus of an attempt by Chinese diplomats to encourage the adoption of a resolution praising China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The Wisconsin address seems more akin to Pompeo’s July visit to the Nixon Library in California to give a major China policy speech than it does to his previous speeches with a more political bent.

The upshot isn’t that Pompeo used his Wisconsin visit to promote the president’s reelection effort; it’s that he’s spurred conversation about CCP influence campaigns across the country.

Anyone calling today’s address a Hatch Act violation has failed to grasp the most important part of the story.

I would be fascinated to learn what rationale Twitter uses to decide which messages are acceptable and which are not. Twitter explains that its rules “prohibit the glorification of violence” and that its users “may not threaten or promote terrorism or violent extremism.” On these grounds, Twitter recently appended a notice to a Donald Trump tweet about Minneapolis. The site has also suspended users for making claims about the coronavirus of which it does not approve, on the grounds that such claims “could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.”

Twitter is a private company and, within the law, it can do as it wishes. But it seems odd that, for the last six hours or so, “Burn Louisville” has not only been widely posted on the site but has been featured prominently in the Trending bar, too.

Does that not count? The sole exception to the extraordinary protections that the First Amendment provides relates to speech that is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action.” I am not one to ask for censorship of any kind. Indeed, it would be fine with me if Twitter had no standards at all. But if the company is going to have rules, and if it is going to sanctimoniously and publicly enforce them, surely it is in exactly this sort of circumstance that they should be applied? Louisville is on the edge today. Is that “higher risk” different somehow because Jack Dorsey approves of it?

On February 15, 2016, Notre Dame law professor Amy Barrett talked on CBS about filling the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death two days previously. Because that interview is being misrepresented in various quarters, I’m going to go through what she said.

The first relevant portion comes at 3:20 in this clip. Barrett is asked about Senator Marco Rubio’s claim that presidents don’t nominate justices during election years. (Which was slightly different from what Rubio had said.) Barrett says she does not think that claim is true. She then says the precedents don’t establish a rule that favors either side of the partisan argument over the vacancy.

She notes that when the Senate and the White House are controlled by the same party, nominations in that situation are, unsurprisingly, more likely to lead to confirmation than when they are not. She brings up Justice Anthony Kennedy’s confirmation as an example of a confirmation under divided government in an election year. She says that the case of Kennedy is “distinguishable” from the vacancy of the moment because it had arisen before the election year and because Kennedy was, like the justice he replaced, a “moderate Republican.” It was not a nomination that could “dramatically flip the balance of power on the court.” Finally, she notes, “we live in a different time.” Confirmation hearings have gotten more contentious since the fight over Robert Bork.

“And so I think, in sum, the President has the power to nominate and the Senate has the power to act or not, and I don’t think either one of them can claim that there’s a rule governing one way or the other.”

Some media outlets are saying that Barrett had cautioned against changing the balance of the Court in an election year. (Newsweek’s headline, “In Resurfaced Clip, Amy Coney Barrett Says it Would’ve Been Inappropriate for Obama to Nominate SCOTUS Judge Who Could ‘Flip Balance of Power,’” fairly explicitly contradicts what she said.

But she didn’t say or even imply that. She wasn’t advocating any particular course of action. She was instead commenting on an unfolding debate.

Her largest point, the one with which she started and ended, was that the Democratic president and the Republican Senate both had constitutional freedom of action. Her main subsidiary point was that politics influenced how that freedom would be exercised. An opposition-controlled Senate would look less favorably on a nominee; it would be especially concerned about an adverse shift in the balance of the Court. Note that she immediately segued to the changing political atmosphere of Supreme Court confirmations. I don’t think anyone would claim that she was endorsing the increasing heat of confirmation debates.

In the current case, it’s entirely reasonable for the opposition party to be especially concerned that a Trump nominee’s replacement of Justice Ginsburg would push the Supreme Court away from its preferred approach to judging. What she said in 2016 is still true: The president has the power to nominate, and the Senate has the right to take up the nomination or not.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Molly Roberts’s op-ed claiming that with Justice Ginsburg’s death we have lost “any hope of a future in which the Supreme Court is even viewed as an instrument of pure jurisprudence, rather than one of ideology.”

Roberts also writes that the court’s reputation “took a dagger to the heart when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to grant Merrick Garland so much as a hearing eight months before an election, and met its demise when Brett M. Kavanaugh snagged his post even after ranting and raving before Congress about a left-wing conspiracy.”

In the last Gallup poll on the Supreme Court taken before the Garland nomination, in September 2015, 45 percent of the public approved of its performance and 50 percent disapproved. In the most recent such poll, from July, 58 percent approved and 38 percent disapproved. Some dagger.

There is nothing wrong with having political preferences and intellectual priors. But sometimes they can lead you down some odd roads. In the New York Times today, Thomas Edsall quotes some observations made by Ian Haney López and Tory Gavito about Hispanic voters. Among them are that:

Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.

And that the majority of Hispanics

preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

Personally, I consider it good news that the fastest growing group in the country does not see itself as part of a cynical racial-slice-and-dice exercise, and even better news that it believes that it can get ahead through hard work in the same way as can anyone else. But, apparently, not everybody shares my delight. The fact is listed in Edsall’s “Five things Biden and his allies should be worried about,” while López and Gavito describe it as “sobering” for the candidate. What, I wonder, does that say about “Joe Biden and his allies”?

Later in the piece we are treated to some more López and Gavito investigations. Per Edsall, the pair asked:

eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

The responses surprised them:

As they expected, “almost three out of five white respondents judged that message convincing.”

More disconcerting to López and Gavito, both liberals, was that “exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.”

And yet, as surprised as they apparently were, it does not seem to have occurred to them that maybe those messages aren’t “dog-whistles” after all, but real concerns that are shared by people of all colors and backgrounds.

The piece is worth reading, but at points it reminded me of that immortal South Park episode in which the residents complain that when homeless people start buying homes, everyone else ends up with “no idea who is homeless and who isn’t.”

Two months ago, President Trump and Attorney General Barr announced a surge in federal law-enforcement agents to cities that were plagued by skyrocketing violent crime. The ramp-up was called “Operation Legend,” in honor of LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old boy who was shot to death while sleeping in his home in Kansas City. On Monday, Barr provided an update on what the operation has yielded so far.

I explained when Legend was announced that the feds’ strategy did not involve posses of agents descending uninvited by the states, as some reporting and Democratic commentary suggested. It was a beefing up of existing federal-state task forces. For decades, these joint arrangements have targeted gang and drug crime.

The plan called for the contribution of more FBI, DEA, and other federal law-enforcement agents, along with the provision of funds to make it easier for states and municipalities to contribute more police. The arrangement, in which the state and local officers are often deputized as special federal agents, gives investigators the option to bring the people they’ve arrested to either state or federal court.

The latter option is especially helpful in multi-defendant cases: Under federal law it is easier to prove conspiracy, the penalties are stiffer, and the pretrial supervision is stricter — demanding bail conditions or denial of bail for defendants who endanger the community or are real flight risks.

For example, in the Legend update on Monday, Barr touted the prosecution of a 26-defendant drug-trafficking gang in Milwaukee. Arrests were made starting Monday morning. In just that day’s seizures, 33 guns were recovered, along with $170,000 in cash, and quantities of heroin that were large by street-level distribution standards, as well as cocaine and marijuana. One of the alleged ringleaders is said to be a Mexican Posse gang member who runs a nationwide drug trafficking network.

The Justice Department elaborates that, after originating in Kansas City, Chicago, and Albuquerque, Operation Legend has been expanded to Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Memphis, and Indianapolis. More than 3,500 arrests have been made, about 815 of them federal. Approximately 200 of the total arrests involve homicide cases. Of the 815 federal prosecutions, over 440 charge firearms crimes, and over 300 involve drug crimes. The penalties for these offenses are severe, especially when they occur together (as usually happens in gang cases).

The DOJ further reports that “more than 1,000 firearms have been seized; and nearly 18 kilos of heroin, more than 11 kilos of fentanyl (enough to deliver more than five million fatal doses), more than 94 kilos of methamphetamine, nearly 14 kilos of cocaine, and more than $6.5 million in drug proceeds have been seized.”

These could be significant results. How significant can only be determined when we see whether crime rates in these cities ebb. That will take some time, but when crime spikes, it is not materially suppressed unless the criminals are convinced that anti-crime operations are going to be sustained.

The DOJ provided a press release (here) which breaks down Operation Legend cases by city.

Marquette Law School released some fascinating results of a survey measuring what Americans think — and what they know — about the Supreme Court.

Most voters have limited familiarity with the justices. Prior to her death, Justice Ginsburg was the most widely recognized of the nine justices, with 63 percent saying they knew enough to have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of her. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation in 2018 followed a contentious debate, was almost as well known, with 60 percent able to give an opinion about him. These are the best-known justices and, in the survey, 24 percent were unable to give an opinion of any of the nine justices, and just over half, 52 percent, could give an opinion of only three justices or fewer. Thirty percent could give an opinion of six or more justices.

Despite extensive news coverage, documentaries, a Hollywood biopic, T-shirts, action figures, a board game, and various other forms of pop-culture celebrity, 17 percent of respondents said they had never heard of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Perhaps most surprisingly, 39 percent of Americans don’t have an opinion about Brett Kavanaugh. (Among those who did, 28 percent felt favorable, 32 percent felt unfavorable.) His confirmation hearings were not exactly quiet or obscure; his nomination was arguably the biggest and most contentious fight in American politics in 2018, full of lurid accusations and vehement denials. And yet two years later, two out of every five Americans don’t have an opinion about him; 16 percent of respondents said they had never heard of him.

And those are the well-known justices. The survey found 53 percent of respondents have no opinion about Sonia Sotomayor, 55 percent have no opinion about Clarence Thomas (!); 58 percent have no opinion about John Roberts; 66 percent have no opinion about Neil Gorsuch; 73 percent have no opinion about Elena Kagan; 74 percent have no opinion about Samuel Alito and 81 percent of respondents had no opinion about Stephen Breyer.

During every big Supreme Court fight, pundits speculate about the long-term political effects of the fight. Considering how little Americans know or choose to remember about the Supreme Court, there is good reason to think that those effects are overstated. It is particularly fair to wonder if Supreme Court nominations really motivate the Democratic Party’s base. In 2016, Democrats did not mention Merrick Garland at their convention or much on the campaign trail; in 2020, Democrats barely mentioned judges at their convention.

Should Joe Biden blow the lead he has held virtually all year and President Trump be reelected, we will of course be treated to ringing choruses insisting the outcome was illegitimate because of (take your pick) Russian interference, Facebook, nefarious voter-suppression schemes, and so forth.

But anyone who has ever watched a football game can tell you that the prevent defense is an excellent way to prevent your side from winning. I think that if Biden loses, Americans will properly reject all stolen-election theories and place the blame squarely on Biden himself and his bizarrely somnolent campaign strategy. Night after night, while Team Trump goes out knocking on doors and Trump himself frequently ventures out to plead his case with the voters, Joe is bidin’ his time. His campaign isn’t knocking on any doors to plead his case for fear of coronavirus and this month Biden has already “called a lid” on eight different mornings, meaning he is . . . taking lots of days entirely off. Yesterday he called a lid at 9:22 a.m. Who calls it a day at 9:22 a.m. besides Homer Simpson? Is Biden trying to win or just expecting victory to be delivered by the UPS man?

With less than six weeks to go, Biden’s behavior is either baffling or justified by some factor we don’t yet know about. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has not done a single interview or formal press conference in the six weeks since she was tapped as Biden’s running mate. Remember when Sarah Palin was similarly tapped and the press relentlessly hounded John McCain’s campaign to make her take questions from somebody? (And when she did agree to speak to Katie Couric, things didn’t go well for her.) Harris might as well be cloistered in an abbey.

At the end of a football game, the pundits sometimes say things like, “It was clear who wanted it more.” If Biden loses on November 3, the answer to the question “Who wanted it more” will be obvious to everyone.

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s partisan legal “analyst,” seems anxious about the future of abortion. Today, when Alisyn Camerota asserted that “obviously” abortion would be outlawed if SCOTUS overturns Roe v. Wade,” Toobin responded, that the “central goal of the conservative legal movement to get that case overturned.”

First of all, overturning Roe v. Wade wouldn’t mean the “outlawing” of abortion. This is a popular misconception. If Roe, a decision whose legal reasoning has been widely criticized, was overturned, states would take up the issue in their legislatures and their state constitutions, just like almost every other political issue.

The same Democrats who are constantly griping about our allegedly corroding “democracy” seem awfully nervous about letting people engage in a debate on the specifics of the practice rather than leaning on the fiction that it is an inalienable “right.” As Charles pointed out this morning, if “most Americans support its legality in all or most cases,” as some argue, there should be little problem keeping it legal. Camerota is factually wrong.

Toobin’s scaremongering over abortion is nothing new, either. When Anthony Kennedy retired in June of 2018, he predicted that the abortion would “be illegal in twenty states in 18 months.” Instead, we have the most pro-abortion ticket in presidential history.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Roe is important for many conservatives — myself included. But when I hear originalists and Federalist Society folks talking about the courts — and I listen to them quite often — they speak about array of issues. It’s liberals who seem obsessed with Roe. When it comes to the Supreme Court, they rarely seem to talk about anything else.

At the New York Times, Peter Baker breathlessly reports that “When news broke on Friday that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died, President Trump was just five minutes into a campaign rally in Minnesota and aides opted not to pass word to him onstage. If he announced the death of the liberal justice from the lectern, they feared the crowd would cheer.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted out Baker’s piece and used the above excerpt as a caption. There’s something galling about journalists fantasizing about conservative incivility while Joy Reid, the host of an MSNBC show, endorses and laughs at the suggestion that the late, great Antonin Scalia is in hell.

The Trump folks look at Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania as the key states — if they win those, Trump wins the presidency again. And that’s not a wild scenario. Trump has clearly closed the gap in Pennsylvania. GOP internals show him down about two to four points now, when he was losing by about six to eight points roughly six weeks ago. Meanwhile, Trump leads by four points among likely voters in Florida in the new ABC/Washington Post poll and by one point among likely voters in Arizona.

On the other hand, other polls have Biden leading in Florida and Arizona, and he could conceivably expand the map elsewhere. A Des Moines Register poll has him tied with Trump in Iowa. A Rasmussen poll had him ahead in Ohio a couple of weeks ago. If he wins in places such as Iowa and Ohio, it’s going to be a huge night for him.

So here we are, with the range of realistic possibilities that includes another Trump win or, in electoral terms, a Biden landslide. A small shift one way or the other, and races can easily tilt one way or another right at end, could make an enormous difference.

Rush Limbaugh has suggested that Republicans should skip over the committee hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and go straight to a vote:

“I want the Judiciary Committee — that could be great if it were skipped,” Limbaugh said Monday on his daily radio program. “We don’t need to open that up for whatever length of time, so that whoever this nominee is can be Kavanaugh’d, or Borked, or Thomas’d. Because that’s what it’s going to be, especially when it’s not even required.”

Ins and outs of Senate rules aside, if Republicans like the nominee and have the votes, and if they are worried about delays or controversies that could derail a swift confirmation, there is an arguable case for skipping a hearing, similar to the case for skipping live witnesses at the impeachment trial. After all, nothing in the Constitution requires hearings, which were not held until 1916 and not a matter of regular practice until after World War II. Hearings are for the benefit of the senators to make a decision, so if their minds are already made up, the hearings are superfluous. That is why it would have been a pointless charade in 2016 to call Judge Merrick Garland away from his day job on the D.C. Circuit to grill him over a nomination the Senate majority had already decided to reject. And it is likely that the nominee here will be a woman who was already grilled once by the Senate Judiciary Committee within the past three years.

That said, informing the senators is not the only reason why a majority party might choose to hold hearings. Just as is true with oversight hearings, part of the function of modern hearings is to put on a case to persuade voters. In this case, that would be persuasion on two fronts: showing that Trump has chosen a good and sympathetic nominee, and offering Senate Democrats an opportunity to misbehave for the cameras. That latter objective, which played such a large role in firing up conservatives during and after the Kavanaugh hearings, is of particular use because one of the very worst Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee is the vice presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. There is a reason why Harris has kept such a low profile since the convention.

Some Democrats seem to recognize that they have a problem with their recurring habit of attacking the religion of Catholic judicial nominees, a problem that could be especially acute in a year when Joe Biden is trying very hard to court the Catholic vote. That is an especially high risk with Amy Coney Barrett, whose nomination three years ago to the Seventh Circuit was met with direct attacks on her religion (Dianne Feinstein famously telling her that “the dogma lives loudly within you”) and who is already the subject of Reuters and Newsweek assaults on her faith comparing her to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Newsweek had to correct a false report claiming that a group Barrett purportedly belongs to was the inspiration for Atwood’s book).

Manu Raju of CNN talked to Democratic Senators and found some, such as Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, running away from a reprise of that, while Feinstein demurred. But Hawaii’s Maisie Hirono bluntly answered “No” when asked if Barrett’s faith would be off limits. And Raju did not get comments from Harris, Democratic whip Dick Durbin, or Sheldon Whitehouse, three of the worst past offenders in this area. The temptation will simply be too great to keep everyone in line.

Republicans should have the confidence to see the hearings — which Lindsey Graham has said will run the week of October 12, after Harris’s October 7 debate with Vice President Pence — as a plus. While there are always risks, the Democrats have more to lose by drawing a contrast between the nominee and the Judiciary Committee’s Democrats.

Jonah Goldberg writes for The Dispatch that Republicans have missed out on their chance to exchange the opportunity to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s vacant seat on the Supreme Court for a promise from Democrats that they will not pack the Court should they take back the White House and Senate in November. Ramesh Ponnuru has explained why such a deal does not make any practical sense for Republicans, while Alexandra DeSanctis and I have already taken issue with it on principle. Ponnuru has been vindicated as Democrats are already backing down on the court-packing question.

The question Goldberg poses in his piece is: “What happens when both parties embrace the doctrine of ‘do whatever you can get away with?’” I share Goldberg’s concerns about power worship in American politics, but a Republican president putting forward, and a Republican majority confirming an eminently qualified nominee is not the raw, in your face, exercise of power that Goldberg paints it as. And it’s certainly not comparable to court-packing in that regard.

The case against moving forward with a nomination is that Republicans are breaking the precedent they set by refusing to grand Merrick Garland so much as a hearing in 2016. Mitch McConnell has been consistent in arguing that Garland should not have been confirmed because the White House and Senate were controlled by opposite parties then. However, Goldberg notes that other Republicans, such as Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham, have been openly hypocritical. Goldberg says that by not reaching a deal, party leaders have disregarded the “long-term good of the country.” I don’t understand how it is in the long-term interest of the country to hold off on confirming a justice who will interpret the Constitution as written. Especially if it is for the sake of bailing out the Democrats on their empty but still irresponsible threats and not making a liar out of Lindsey Graham.

Under sustained pressure, Scotland’s Justice Secretary, Humaz Yousaf, has slightly diluted his dismal hate-crime bill, admitting that it could undermine free speech. In its current form, the bill could land a person found guilty of “stirring up” hatred (whatever that means) with a seven-year prison sentence. From today’s Sun:

Today, Mr Yousaf said he would change the Bill so a crime would only be committed if there was “intent” to stir up hatred against minority groups based on characteristics of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex.

Yousaf said:

I hope this fundamental change will provide necessary reassurance that the new stirring up hatred offences strike an appropriate balance between respecting freedom of expression while protecting those impacted by people who set out to stir up hatred.

Well sorry, it doesn’t. The bill is intrinsically authoritarian and ought to be rejected outright. James Gilles, the spokesperson for the Free to Disagree Campaign, a coalition of civil-liberty groups and free-speech proponents, commented:

Crucially, the government and other proponents have not demonstrated how these specific proposals would reduce hate-related crimes, or lend greater protection to citizens. Existing laws already catch violence, harassment and abuse. The Criminal Justice and Licensing Act criminalises those who intentionally or recklessly cause fear or alarm. And there are aggravated offences for crimes motivated by hatred and prejudice.

Tackling hatred and prejudice can be achieved by other means – good education and support for families and communities and training for public bodies, rather than punitive measures. In championing these things, the Scottish Government can help to engender an atmosphere of kindness, tolerance and respect in Scotland, without undermining other important rights. We call on Mr Yousaf to reconsider and take this better approach.