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From TPM Reader PJ …
I’m with a lot of your readers. While I think the day to day is less punctuated by evental feelings of panic and worry, things are bad and not sure to get worse. We have a very undemocratic political system. The more democratic elements of our system carry most of their potential in how a judiciary might find them to be very expansive, but that judiciary is owned by the right. I think in 2009 the GOP triggered the Doomsday Machine. The rabid anti-Obama partisanship, the debt ceiling debacles in the years that followed, right-wing enthusiasm for racist police killings, GamerGate, Trump’s rise, the final removal of the mask of respectability of the Republican Party…the white masculine death machine is on the march. Just consider the judiciary….even if we got the Fantasyland Biden of our dreams, how much of what he does will hold up to right-wing judicial review? We’re talking about a court system that might take us back to a pre-Lochner territory, eliminate the governmental ability to delegate regulatory authority to executive agencies…this is return to Medieval stuff.