Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Death Throws Fuel on America's Political Fires; Abraham Accords Transform Mideast Conflict; UN Unmasks Venezuelan Regime; Navalny Has a Message for Putin
As if America's tensions were not already on an explosive edge, the death of RBG raises the stakes even more. Can the year hold any more surprises?
Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t need a reminder, but she placed one strategically in her chambers at the Supreme Court. There, she hung the words from the biblical exhortation, “Justice, justice you shall pursue.”
Justice, justice she pursued. But will the people charged with naming her replacement do the same?
By all indications, justice and fairness will not guide the process with fewer than 45 days left until the elections, and the stakes, which were already unfathomable, NOW grown even greater.
The death of RGB, as she became known, changes the character of the election. Where the dominant theme was President Donald Trump’s appalling mishandling of the pandemic, more than 200,000 dead in the U.S. and new shocking information emerging daily – most recently the administration deliberately squelching life-saving advice from CDC, and blocking a plan to send masks to all Americans early on. Now, the Supreme Court battle doesn’t eliminate the pandemic from the debate, but it pushes it aside.
That’s good news for Trump. And it’s our lead story this week.
INSIGHT Highlights
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death Brings Political Battles to a Boil
How the “Abraham Accords” Have Transformed the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Venezuela’s Regime Implicated in Crimes Against Humanity
Russia’s Navalny, Pale, Awake, with a Message for Putin
RBG’s Death Throws Fuel on America’s Political Fires
Barely an hour after Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a shocking announcement. He would not allow President Barack Obama to fill the next Supreme Court seat because it was too close to the election.
McConnell, 2016:
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president”
If nine months was not enough time, then McConnell’s precedent means the six weeks between now and Nov. 3 should rule out choosing a new justice. But McConnell and Trump have already made it clear they will try to ram a new nomination through the Senate.
It is hypocrisy of the highest order. McConnell has offered a pointless justification, that his Scalia rule does not apply when then president and the Senate come from the same party. It’s plainly abuse of power. It further degrades America’s fast-eroding democracy. And it is a violation of a fundamental tenet of justice; that it be applied equally, without fear or favor.
Justice they are not pursuing, but power. A 6-3 Republican majority in the Supreme Court will decide issues of gun rights, abortion, environmental protections, immigration, and more.
Can McConnell pull it off? Will Democrats insist on “going high” when Republicans “go low”?
Democrats have some cards to play. They could paralyze the Senate; commit to expanding the court if and when they take power; eliminate the filibuster when Democrats have a majority. But Republicans are in charge now.
It’s all about arithmetic. Supreme Court nominees needed 60 votes to join the court, but McConnell changed the rules to save Trump’s nomination of Neal Gorsuch. That’s the seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee.
Now Republicans need a simple majority. They have 53 seats, plus a tie-breaker from the vice-president. They can afford to lose three.
Just before RBG’s death, Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she would not support a last-minute appointment. Maine’s Susan Collins has made similar comments in the past. Mitt Romney voted to impeach Trump. He’s shown independence.
Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, is on record saying he wouldn’t go along with a nomination on an election year, but who expects him to stand up to Trump? Are there others?
On the night Judge Ginsburg died – poignantly the first night of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year -- I wrote about the dying wish she dictated as she felt her life ebbing away.
"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."
I recounted her life’s work, fighting for the oppressed and the excluded; the brilliant, tenacious, inspiring way she fought against the entrenched discrimination that plagued not only her life, but every woman’s.
“The indignities she endured because she was a woman seem unthinkable to us today, and that's only because she was so successful in fighting against them.”
Read my article. But here’s my conclusion:
“Women such as today's sitting Republican senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Joni Ernst, Martha McSally, and others, whose careers were made possible by Ginsburg…now have in their power to grant her that dying wish by blocking their party's leadership from ramming through her replacement.”
At the Atlantic, David Frum suggested reasons to doubt McConnell will succeed.
“The polls do not favor Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, or Thom Tillis—senators from Maine, Colorado, and North Carolina up for reelection this cycle. Yet these competitors may not be ready to attend their own funerals. They may regard voting against McConnell's Court grab as a heaven-sent chance to prove their independence from an unpopular president—and to thereby save their own seats.”
Perhaps Frum is right. But the odds clearly favor McConnell and Trump in this battle. Nov. 3 is another matter. The Democrats have never been more energized.
Arab-Israeli Links Come Out into the Open
On Wednesday, Trump presided over a dramatic signing ceremony on the White House grounds, where officials from Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the so-called Abraham Accord, normalizing relations between Israel and the two Arab countries.
The deal, as I noted earlier, is in large part a response to strategic challenges in the Middle East, with Sunni-ruled Arab countries in the Arab side of the Persian Gulf joining forces against Iran and against an increasingly aggressive Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas – who reject Israel’s right to exist.
The timing of the event was an effort to bolster Trump’s electoral outlook, but the agreement itself is a big deal.
As I wrote in my weekly World Politics Review column, the agreement is both more and less than it seems. It is not a formal treaty, and it’s not a peace deal. The countries were not at war.
But it does upend the process. Now the Arab-Israeli conflict is becoming a conflict between Israel and Palestinians.
“For Palestinians, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. The old strategy, the pan-Arab approach, is dead. But there’s not much to mourn. It hadn’t produced any results.”
UN’s Scathing Venezuela Report
The horrors that have befallen the Venezuelan people have been well documented. But what we saw this week was on a different order. A panel of investigators appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council accused regime leaders of systematic human rights abuses that, if confirmed by a court, would meet the threshold for crimes against humanity.
Venezuelan citizens and journalists have been telling horror stories for a long time. But this puts the accusations on a different legal and diplomatic level.
In a 411-page report, listing 3,000 cases, the UN panel laid out the case, detailing a chain of command leading directly to President Nicolas Maduro, and saying he, along with his interior and defense ministers and the heads of the intelligence and security services were implicated in enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and torture of regime critics.
The report could be the foundation of an investigation by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Venezuelan officials dismissed the investigation as biased.
Navalny News
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny awakened from his coma in a Berlin hospital following what doctors said was poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok. The poison has been used in attacks against critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past.
Navalny posted a picture of himself in the hospital, surrounded by his family, looking very pale, but very much alive.
His spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said Navalny will return to Moscow despite the apparent assassination attempt, pointedly declaring
“No other option was considered.”
Navalny and his anticorruption brigades are fearless. Putin hasn’t heard the last from them.
Opposition activists close to Navalny said Novichok poison was found in a water bottle in the hotel room where he was staying in Siberia before falling ill on the flight back to Moscow.
That’s it for this week.
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Frida