This morning I’m feeling a vague sympathy with a certain class of elite liberal law professors who I think imagined they were engaged in a contest of ideas with their conservative counterparts. I’m by no means talking about all of them. I mean the folks who write high profile OpEds which tell us that even though they strongly disagree with this or that Circuit Court or Supreme Court nominee they are nevertheless eminently qualified, a sterling mind and of judicious temperament. Across the country over the last week and with extra punch last night we are seeing Republican federal judges showing that they will mix and match any theories, manufacture theories, ignore basic traditions of constitutional interpretation all to arrive at decisions which boost Republican partisan advantage as much as possible. I’m speaking precisely when I call them Republican judges.

In a clutch – and this is a clutch – they’re dispensing with the formalities and appearances, to the extent they existed.

With the help of his Senate Republican lackeys (mostly Mitch McConnell) President Trump has shoved through not only a record number of judges to lifelong appointments, but he’s done it at an unprecedented pace — more than lapping his predecessor.

Looking at the totality of the polls, the big story still seems to be an essential stability. In our conversation with Guy Cecil of Priorities USA yesterday, he said that their internal polls showed much more stability than the more scattershot public polls. But even those public polls seem quite consistent. The thing you see in these last few days is that the density of polling is so great that a lot of the randomness and bounciness created by different pollsters with different methodologies and house effects releasing polls at different times gets washed away. The picture doesn’t necessarily change but it can come into clearer focus.

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TPM Reader TB looks to some advantages if Democrats do well on Tuesday …

Thanks for your coverage of the campaign and of the Trump Presidency over the last 4 years. Like you and your readers, I have spent most of the last 4 years being dismayed and deeply concerned about the country with Trump in the White House. There have been many moments, however, when I have felt like Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi when he said “everything that has transpired has done so according to my design”. That specifically related to Palpatine himself leaking the location of the shield generator to the Rebels, thus leading them into a trap. If the election goes well like the polls currently predict, there is an argument to be made that the Dems couldn’t have designed a more devious plan for 2020.

I think there’s something to this. From TPM Reader JK …

I know that this hasn’t necessarily been an active debate on the site, but I remember reading recently a comment suggesting impeachment was not worth it. I know it was not the explicit goal of impeachment, but there can be no doubt that the impeachment proceedings have been a tremendous benefit to Biden (and probably Democrats in general) in this election. The impeachment proceedings provided the Democrats a chance to educate the country on the ratfuckery Trump was up to with respect to manufacturing those incomprehensible allegations against Biden and Hunter Biden. I believe those proceedings gave the media a preview of the bullshit that was coming their way and it allowed them to have their guards up when it inevitably did get pushed. And when the nasty bile did come their way, they mostly laughed it off. In my mind, it was the impeachment proceedings that made that happen.

Republicans are shifting course in their attempts to seize victory from the jaws of potential electoral defeat.

We now have another case in Texas where the state Republican party is going to court to attempt to throw out roughly 100,000 ballots cast via curbside voting in Harris County, Texas. They lost their bid in state courts. So now they’re rushing to federal court where a thoroughly corrupted federal judiciary is likely open to this wholesale disenfranchisement. Federal judges are buying into the theory proposed by four justices on the pre-Barrett Court that only state legislatures can make any changes to voting procedures. Mark Joseph Stern of Slate says state Republicans have drawn one of the most partisan federal judges in Texas to hear the case.

In the chaotic rush of news you may have noticed this headline that another laptop of Hunter Biden’s was found in a February DEA raid. Read a little further and you learn it was a raid on the office of a “celebrity psychiatrist.” One might legitimately ask just how many laptops Hunter Biden owned and why he seemed to be leaving them all over the country – this one was in Massachusetts. But one would look long and hard for any clear reference to the fact that this “celebrity psychiatrist” was in fact a high profile former Fox News commentator named Keith Ablow.

From TPM Reader NL …

I think there is a small subset of the Democratic universe that appreciates that court reform is vital to sustaining small-d democracy over the near term given the very unhidden corruption of the federal judiciary.

However, as a party, I worry that a loser’s mentality is baked into how we operate. My spouse is a former government attorney with connections through the DC legal community. You cannot imagine how many creative ideas for court reform I have had passed on to me. The one defect with all these proposals is a desire to find the “fair” solution now. This completely mistakes how power works. Without a show of force that establishes that Democrats finally have the intestinal fortitude to do what the moment demands, there is no reason for anyone (let alone McConnell) to take them seriously. Is there a way to break through this academic approach to change? I have no idea. I would not normally care, except that this subset of Democrats manages to be extraordinarily well-connected.

President Trump’s personal lawyer has been on various conspiracy tears for months. His initial fever-swamp stoking about Hunter Biden backfired dramatically, which, in his brain, is apparently just cause to double down.