The hip-hop icon will collaborate on the musical event as part of the NFL deal he inked in August 2019.
Jay-Z has tapped veteran live-event producer Jesse Collins to EP The Pepsi Super Bowl LV Halftime Show next year.
The Emmy-nominated producer will make history as the show’s first-ever Black executive producer.
Collins will join forces with award-winning director Hamish Hamilton for the halftime show of the biggest sporting game of the year, set to take place Feb. 7 in Tampa, Florida, per The Hollywood Reporter.
“Jesse Collins is innovative, creative and one of the only executive producers that speak fluent ‘artist vision.’ He‘s a true artist,” said Jay-Z in a statement. “Jesse’s insight and understanding create both extraordinary shows and true cultural moments. After working with Jesse for so many years, I look forward to all there is to come.”
(L-R) BET President of Programming Stephen Hill; BET SVP of Music, News, and Specials Connie Orlando; producer Jesse Collins; and BET Networks President of Media Sales Louis Carr attend the 2016 Soul Train Music Awards at the Orleans Arena on November 6, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for BET)
theGRIO previously reported… through his Roc Nation entertainment company, the hip-hop icon will co-produce the Super Bowl Halftime show as part of the NFL deal he inked in August 2019.
“As part of the agreement, Roc Nation will advise on the selection of artists for major NFL performances like the Super Bowl. A major component of the partnership will be to nurture and strengthen community through football and music, including through the NFL’s Inspire Change initiative,” according to the press release.
Said Jay Z of his NFL partnership, “With its global reach, the National Football League has the platform and opportunity to inspire change across the country,” he explained. “Roc Nation has shown that entertainment and enacting change are not mutually exclusive ideas — instead, we unify them. This partnership is an opportunity to strengthen the fabric of communities across America.”
Collins, founder and CEO of Jesse Collins Entertainment, called it “an honor to be a part of such an iconic show at such an important time in our history.”
Brian Rolapp, chief media and business officer at the NFL, added: “We look forward to our fans experiencing a memorable performance as part of the culmination of our 101st season.”
Jay Z previously caught heat for booking Jennifer Lopez and Shakira to headline the 2020 Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens.
Rap Legend Luther Campbell, also known as Uncle Luke, shared his thoughts in a Miami New Times op-ed post. He accused Jay Z and the NFL of “disrespecting” Miami’s music industry by failing to hire Miami-based acts on their home turf.
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During Tuesday’s first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, moderator Chris Wallace posed a question to the two candidates about the economy: is the US in a V-shaped recovery or a K-shaped recovery?
For those who aren’t familiar with the alphabet soup of economic terms, it seems confusing. But it’s not as complicated as it seems.
Essentially, those who say America is undergoing a V-shaped recovery mean, well, what it looks like — the economy is going to bounce right back to where it was pre-pandemic, like the letter V.
But others say what the United States needs to watch out for is a K-shaped recovery — one where the rich recover much faster than everyone else. It looks like the letter K — two lines starting together and then diverging as they branch out. Trump and the Republicans are V-shaped believers, focusing on measures like the stock market to argue that the economy is bouncing back.
Biden and the Democrats argue that what’s happening is a K-shaped recovery: maybe the market is doing well and rich people have recovered, but for others, it’s going to be a long slog.
The contrast is about more than what letter the economy looks like — it’s also about the policies Trump has in place and the policies a Biden administration would seek out. The president has taken a free-market approach, cutting taxes and deregulating businesses in an attempt to generate growth at the top (which is not always successful) that, he argues, will eventually help everyone else.
Biden’s platform would attempt to create a recovery for more people, more quickly: Instead of a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats approach, he wants everyone to row in the same direction.
The basic idea of the K-shaped recovery, briefly explained
The general concept behind the K-shaped recovery is that if you were to draw a graph of how the economy is doing, the line representing rich people would go up and the line representing poor people would go down.
Vox’s Matt Yglesias recently outlined the idea. Basically, wealthier people and those with white-collar jobs are doing fairly well during this — their jobs are sticking around, they’re cutting some spending, and life is generally fine. And stockholders’ wealth is even going up.
But for less well-off Americans and people who have lost their jobs, it’s different — the stock market isn’t helping them, and for those who are unemployed, expanded unemployment benefits dried up at the end of July. With Congress not in a particular hurry to provide fiscal support, that means a drag on the economy.
The divide isn’t just rich versus poor — it’s also white versus Black and people of color. For example, the overall unemployment rate is 8.4 percent. But when you break it down by racial lines, the story on what’s happening is quite different: white unemployment is 7.3 percent, and Black unemployment is 13 percent. White workers are the only ones with an unemployment rate below 10 percent. Vox’s Aaron Ross Coleman recently outlined the distinction and its impact:
But now, as the top-line unemployment numbers have come down, Congress has failed to come to any consensus on aid for its most vulnerable citizens, particularly minorities. And this failure has left these Americans with no aid at all, abandoning them to suffer the effects of high unemployment in this unprecedented recession. And despite past warnings about the difficulty people of color have in recovering from recessions, lawmakers are repeating the mistakes.
Donald Trump wants to talk the stock market. Joe Biden would rather talk the broader economy.
When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in March, the government shut down the economy in an effort to try to get the virus under control. Businesses shuttered, millions of people lost their jobs, and activity ground to a halt. Activity is starting to recover, but the economy looks different depending on the measure you’re considering — if you look at the stock market (which is in large part being driven by the Federal Reserve), it looks pretty good.
If you look at small businesses that are permanently closing their doors or millions of people still on unemployment, not so much.
To talk about the contrast between Trump and Biden on the economy is to talk about the type of recovery the US wants to have. Whoever is president come January 2021 is going to have a lot of work to do to rebuild what has been lost during the pandemic. And reopening can only do so much — like it or not, plenty of people just are not falling over themselves to get on an airplane or go to a restaurant when a deadly virus is still spreading. The longer the government waits to act, the worse the economy gets, and the harder recovery becomes.
Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that disproportionately benefited corporations and the wealthy the year he took office, and while he’s promised more tax cuts, it’s not clear what they’ll be. The president has talked about middle-class tax cuts around elections in the past, only for them to dissipate once votes are cast.
If you look at it closely, the economic recovery, even through the rosiest of glasses, is looking more like a check mark than a V. But regardless of the shape, it’s important to keep in mind when talking about what’s happening in the economy who it is and isn’t happening for.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
Kamala Harris participates in the Democratic presidential debate at Tyler Perry Studios November 20, 2019, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) will face off in the next 2020 debate on October 7, with Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief for USA Today, moderating.
The debate will air live on ABC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox, NBC, and PBS Utah from 9 to 10:30 pm ET from the University of Utah’s Nancy Peery Marriott Auditorium in Salt Lake City, where there will be a small live audience of students. (That’s 8-9:30 pm CT, 7-8:30 pm MT, and 6-7:30 pm PT.) Debate organizers have secured the Cleveland Clinic as a health adviser to ensure that the debates can continue safely amid the pandemic.
Vice presidential debates haven’t historically attracted much fanfare, drawing much lower viewership than presidential debates. But Democrats are hoping that Harris — a former San Francisco district attorney who earned a reputation for being a strong debater during the Democratic primaries and who is known for her incisive style of questioning witnesses during congressional hearings — will go on the attack.
Her most notable debate performance during the primaries was when she criticized Biden, now her running mate, for opposing mandatory school busing during the 1970s, which she argued created an obstacle to desegregation efforts. Harris, as the most junior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also famously grilled Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in 2018 regarding his stance on abortion and about whether he had inappropriately discussed the Mueller investigation with Trump’s personal attorney.
In preparation for the upcoming debate, Harris reportedly has been practicing with former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who has been playing the role of Pence in mock debates.
Pence, for his part, has enlisted the help of former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who served at the same time that Pence was governor of Indiana, the Washington Post reported. Page, the moderator, hasn’t announced debate topics yet, but Pence, as the leader of the White House coronavirus task force, will likely be called on to answer for his role in failing to prevent the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans amid the pandemic. He recently told the public to “anticipate that cases will rise in the days ahead,” predicting another surge.
Pence has faced criticism over his handling of the pandemic even from within his own camp: Olivia Troye, his former top aide on the coronavirus task force, went so far as to endorse Biden publicly, joining the group Republican Voters Against Trump.
There are still two more presidential debates
There will also be two more presidential debates on October 15 and 22 in Miami, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee, respectively. C-SPAN editor Steve Scully will moderate the Miami debate, and NBC anchor Kristen Welker has been selected to do so in Tennessee.
With just weeks to go before the November 3 election, Biden remains ahead in the polls, besting Trump nationally by a margin of about 7 points on average, according to FiveThirtyEight. He also appears to be carrying a narrower lead in critical swing states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. At this point, it doesn’t seem like those polls will move significantly ahead of Election Day given that the biggest crises facing Americans — a pandemic that shows no sign of slowing down, an economic downturn, and a national reckoning over race — aren’t going away anytime soon.
It remains to be seen how much — or little — the Tuesday night debate and the three remaining shift those numbers.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
No president in recent memory has done more to change the judiciary than Donald Trump.
In less than four years as president, President Trump has done nearly as much to shape the courts as President Obama did in eight years.
Trump hasn’t simply given lots of lifetime appointments to lots of lawyers. He’s filled the bench with some of the smartest, and most ideologically reliable, men and women to be found in the conservative movement. Long after Trump leaves office, these judges will shape American law — pushing it further and further to the right even if the voters soundly reject Trumpism in 2020.
Let’s start with some raw numbers. Both Obama and Trump appointed two justices to the Supreme Court, but Trump’s impact on the highest Court far exceeds Obama’s, because Trump replaced the relatively moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy with the hard-line conservative Brett Kavanaugh (after appointing conservative Neil Gorsuch to fill Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat). Obama’s appointees — Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — largely maintained the balance of power on a conservative Court, while Trump has shoved that Court even further to the right.
And that’s not counting Trump Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who is likely to be confirmed soon.
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
President Obama and Vice President Biden applaud Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice, Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, at the White House on May 26, 2009.
Christy Bowe/ImageCatcher News Service/Corbis via Getty Images
President Obama and Vice President Biden announce US Solicitor General Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court nominee at the White House on May 10, 2010.
On the courts of appeal, the final word in the overwhelming majority of federal cases, more than one-quarter of active judges are Trump appointees. In less than four years, Trump has named a total of 53 judges to these courts, compared to the 55 Obama appointed during his entire presidency.
In their first terms, Obama appointed 30 appellate judges; President George W. Bush filled only 35 seats on the federal appellate bench; President Clinton, 30; President George H.W. Bush, 42; and President Reagan, 33.
On the district courts, the lowest level of federal courts, Trump’s impact has been less significant, although he’s still appointed judges far faster than Obama. Obama appointed 268 federal trial judges in eight years, while Trump has appointed 210 so far. But district judges deal far more often with routine matters like individual criminal sentences and trial schedules, and far less often with the kind of blockbuster cases that shape thousands of lives. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a candid moment while she was still a lower court judge, “the court of appeals is where policy is made.”
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
UC Berkeley professor Goodwin Liu swears an oath of truth before testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing to be US circuit judge for the Ninth Circuit on April 16, 2010.
It’s tempting to assume that Trump’s judicial appointees share the goonish incompetence of the man who placed them on the bench, but this assumption could not be more wrong. His picks include leading academics, Supreme Court litigators, and already prominent judges who now enjoy even more power within the judiciary.
Before he became president, Trump promised to delegate the judicial selection process to the Federalist Society, a powerful group of conservative lawyers that counts at least four Supreme Court justices among its members. “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump told a radio show hosted by the right-wing site Breitbart while he was still a candidate.
The Federalist Society spent decades preparing for this moment, and they’ve helped Trump identify many of the most talented conservative stalwarts in the entire legal profession to place on the bench.
There’s no completely objective way to measure legal ability, but a common metric used by legal employers to identify the most gifted lawyers is whether those lawyers secured a federal clerkship, including the most prestigious clerkships at the Supreme Court. Approximately 40 percent of Trump’s appellate nominees clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and about 80 percent clerked on a federal court of appeals. That compares to less than a quarter of Obama’s nominees who clerked on the Supreme Court, and less than half with a federal appellate clerkship.
They’re young, too. “The average age of circuit judges appointed by President Trump is less than 50 years old,” the Trump White House bragged in early November, “a full 10 years younger than the average age of President Obama’s circuit nominees.”
Trump’s nominees will serve for years or even decades after being appointed. Even if Democrats crush the 2020 elections and win majorities in both houses of Congress, these judges will have broad authority to sabotage the new president’s agenda.
There is simply no recent precedent for one president having such a transformative impact on the courts.
How Trump’s judges will change America
In an age of legislative dysfunction, whoever controls the courts controls the country. In the past decade or so — or more precisely, since Republicans took over the House in 2011 — Congress has been barely functional. You can count on one hand, and possibly on just a few fingers, the major legislation it has enacted.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Justices of the United States Supreme Court sit for their official group photo at the Supreme Court on November 30, 2018. Seated from left, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts. Standing from left, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan.
When Congress has been unable to function, the executive branch has relied on existing federal laws that delegate some policymaking authority to federal agencies, in order to deal with many of the nation’s pressing needs. But with the Supreme Court poised to give judges a veto power over these agencies’ actions, the courts could in effect strike down any regulation they dislike. In a Republican-controlled judiciary, this likely means that Republican administrations will retain broad discretionary authority, but Democratic administrations will be hobbled.
And here’s the thing: We probably will not fully understand just how much power Trump’s judges will wield until after Trump leaves office. Right now, the executive branch is ideologically aligned with Trump’s judges, so those judges are less likely to object to the Trump administration’s actions than more liberal jurists. But it’s a fairly safe bet that Trump’s judges would spend an Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden administration wreaking havoc on the new president’s agenda — and that any future Democratic president will face similar opposition.
Two reasons Trump has been able to stack the courts
Broadly speaking, there are two reasons Trump has had such an outsize influence on the federal courts.
The first reason is the effective blockade Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell imposed on appellate court confirmations the moment Republicans took over the Senate. McConnell’s effort to block Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is well-known. Less well-known are the many lower court nominees who received similar treatment. Under Trump, McConnell has turned the Senate into a machine that churns out judicial confirmations and does little else — he’s ignored literally hundreds of bills passed by the House. Under Obama, by contrast, McConnell’s Senate was the place where judicial nominations went to die.
The numbers here speak for themselves. In the final two years of the Obama presidency, when Republicans controlled the Senate, Obama successfully appointed only two federal appellate judges — and one of those judges, Kara Farnandez Stoll, was confirmed to a highly specialized court that primarily deals with patent law.
By contrast, 10 such judges were confirmed during the same period in the George W. Bush presidency, a period when Democrats controlled the Senate.
Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, left, and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch share a laugh before the start of the State of the Union address in the US Capitol on February 5, 2019.
The second reason for Trump’s outsize impact on the judiciary is that when Democrats last controlled the Senate, one especially important Democrat — Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (VT) — took an unusually expansive view of the rights of the minority party.
An informal tradition known as the “blue slip” sometimes gives home-state senators an exaggerated influence over who gets confirmed to federal judgeships within their states (the tradition gets its name from blue pieces of paper that home-state senators use to indicate whether they approve of a particular nominee).
Traditionally, the Senate Judiciary Committee showed some level of deference to senators who disapprove of their home-state nominees, although the level of deference given to these senators varied wildly depending on who chaired the committee and whether that committee chair was politically aligned with the incumbent president.
Leahy, who chaired the Committee for most of the Obama presidency, gave home-state senators a simply extraordinary power to block judicial nominees. Under Leahy, a single senator of either party could veto any nominee to a federal judgeship in their state (although federal appeals courts typically oversee multiple states, each individual seat on these courts is traditionally assigned to a particular state).
Before Leahy, just one committee chair imposed such a rigid blue slip rule: Sen. James Eastland (D-MS), an arch-segregationist who took over the committee not long after the Supreme Court’s school integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). A strict blue slip rule allowed Southern senators to block judges who might try to desegregate public schools.
Leahy, to be clear, is not a segregationist. He’s a reliably liberal Democrat. But he nonetheless reinstated the Eastland Rule during his tenure as chair of the Judiciary Committee.
Leahy says that he did so to protect the “rights of the minority.” And protect Republicans he did. Red-state Republicans used the power Leahy gave them to hold many judicial seats open until Obama left office. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) effectively held a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit open for eight years until Trump could fill it.
It’s tough to estimate the full impact of Leahy’s adherence to the Eastland Rule. The rule often stopped the Obama White House from nominating anyone to a vacant judgeship. According to Daniel Goldberg of the liberal Alliance for Justice, Obama “did not even make a nomination” to two seats on the Fifth Circuit because the blue slip would have doomed anyone he named; those seats were eventually filled by Trump nominees.
In other cases, the blue slip allowed Republicans to drag out negotiations over a particular vacancy until McConnell took over the Senate in 2015 and imposed a blockade on nearly all of Obama’s appellate nominees.
The Eastland Rule also weakened Obama’s hand in negotiations with Senate Republicans, and sometimes forced him to name relatively conservative judges in order to placate senators who could veto judicial nominees. Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA), for example, effectively held one of Obama’s Eleventh Circuit nominees hostage until Obama agreed to also name Judge Julie Carnes — a George H.W. Bush district court appointee — to a second vacancy on that same court.
Republicans did not reciprocate when they came to power. Not long after Trump took office, then-Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) started confirming appellate court nominees over the objection of their home-state Democratic senators. (Republicans, for what it’s worth, have largely honored the blue slip tradition when a home-state senator objects to a district court nominee.)
Leahy continued to defend the Eastland Rule well into the Trump administration. In a 2018 Senate floor speech, he touted the fact that he was “criticized by advocacy groups and even the editorial page of the New York Times” for allowing Republicans to veto Obama’s nominees, and he painted himself as a hero who “resisted such pressure.” Leahy also warned in the 2018 speech that Republicans were “failing to protect the fundamental rights of home-state senators.”
By that point, Leahy’s adherence to the Eastland Rule had denied Obama the opportunity to fill many seats forever.
Filibuster reform fundamentally changed who gets to be a judge
In 2013, in a preview of how they would later treat the Garland nomination, Senate Republicans filibustered three Obama nominees to the powerful DC Circuit in an effort to keep Democrats from gaining a majority on that court. In response, Democrats fundamentally altered the filibuster to allow lower court judges to be confirmed by a simple majority.
Under the old rules, the minority party could block a vote on any nominee, and it took 60 votes to end that filibuster. Now, only 51 votes are required to move forward to a confirmation vote.
One consequence of filibuster reform is that it enabled Democrats to fill seats that Republicans held open with a filibuster. Democrats controlled the Senate for more than a year between the November 2013 reform vote and January 2015, when Republicans took control of the Senate.
So filibuster reform prevented Republicans from holding many judicial vacancies open until Trump could fill them. It also fundamentally altered who gets to be a federal judge.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Then-House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) swears in the newly elected members of the first session of the 113th Congress in the House Chambers on January 3, 2013.
Democrats controlled the Senate for less than 14 months after filibuster reform. Yet nearly half of the former Supreme Court clerks Obama appointed to federal appellate judgeships were confirmed during this brief period — nearly as many as Obama appointed in the almost five years before filibuster reform.
Similarly, nearly three-quarters of Obama’s post-reform appointees to the federal appellate bench clerked for a court of appeals judge — as compared to less than 38 percent of Obama’s pre-reform judges. One immediate impact of filibuster reform, in other words, is that it made it far easier for nominees with elite credentials to become federal judges.
By filibustering plausible Supreme Court nominees before they got on the bench in the first place, the opposition party could diminish the governing party’s pool of potential justices and make it harder for the governing party to find an ideologically reliable Supreme Court nominee when the time came.
As the 2016 election drew nigh, then-10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch looked like he was openly campaigning for a promotion. During this period, the Federalist Society grew increasingly obsessed with limiting the power of federal agencies to create binding regulations — an agenda that could hobble government bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency. Gorsuch signaled his loyalty to this anti-regulatory agenda by writing gratuitous opinions laying out new limits he hoped to impose on federal agencies. In one case, Gorsuch even attached a separate concurring opinion to his own majority opinion.
As David Kaplan reports in The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court’s Assault on the Constitution, one of these anti-regulatory opinions “proved decisive in clinching” the Trump White House’s decision to name Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch’s opinions, according to Kaplan, were “a way for Gorsuch to call attention to himself, and it worked.”
When I speak to judges, I often hear them use a derisive term to describe this kind of behavior: “auditioning.” In a world without the filibuster, ambitious judges have less to fear from the opposition party. So they have every incentive to audition for the job that they want. After all, the best way to win the prize that Gorsuch captured for himself is to catch the eye of the Federalist Society and its adherents.
The future of the judiciary favors Republicans
While Trump has been very successful at filling the bench with brilliant Republican partisans, a Democratic president is unlikely to enjoy similar success.
A badly malapportioned Senate means that to get even a bare majority in the Senate, Democrats have to win commanding popular vote majorities — and if Democrats don’t control the Senate, Democratic nominees could face the Merrick Garland treatment. Just look at the last two years of the Obama presidency if you want to know how a Republican Senate is likely to treat Democratic judicial nominees.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Judge Merrick Garland, Obama’s pick to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, was blocked by Senate Republicans who refused to hold a hearing and vote on his nomination.
Even if Democrats do overcome the odds to capture a majority, moreover, the balance of power is likely to be held by red-state Democrats who could be vulnerable to pressure from conservative interest groups hoping to keep Democratic nominees off the bench.
In other words, it’ll be a long, long time before Democrats can undo the work Trump and the Republicans have done to turn the judiciary rightward.
In the early months of the Trump presidency, so-called “Never Trump” Republicans often directed a derisive phrase against Trump supporters: “But Gorsuch.” It was a taunt that mocked the idea that it was worth selling your soul to a manifestly unfit TV celebrity who has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by more than a dozen women in order to keep control of the courts.
But, as conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt wrote in 2018, “this bit of childish taunting always struck me as an unknowing admission of ignorance about the role assumed by the Supreme Court in modern American governance.” Certainly, McConnell understood this role. It’s why he was willing to use any means necessary to ensure Republican control of the judiciary.
The truth is, by worshipping at the altar of Trump, Republicans haven’t simply ensured conservative dominance of one branch of government. They may have entrenched conservative governance for decades.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
Joe Biden during the first presidential debate. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
An absurd moment from an absurd night.
There was one moment in Tuesday’s chaotic presidential debate that really crystallized the entire awful experience: an exasperated former Vice President Joe Biden saying, “Will you shut up, man?” to President Donald Trump.
The context was, as with most of the debate, strange. The moderator, Fox News’s Chris Wallace, asked Biden whether he would abolish the filibuster and add new justices to the Supreme Court if elected. Such measures would depend heavily on who wins the Senate, but the president would set the tone and the Democratic nominee has been cagey on where he stands. At the debate, he launched into a seemingly canned response designed to dodge commitment one way or another.
During Biden’s answer, Trump interrupted and heckled him — as he had throughout the entire debate. Eventually, when Trump interrupted to accuse Biden of preparing to add “radical left” justices to the high court, Biden seemed to have had enough — and told the president of the United States to “shut up.”
Nobody looks good here. Biden’s answer was evasive and boring, politician-like in the worst way. Wallace proved himself incapable of preventing this from descending into chaos.
But let’s not lose track of what really caused Biden’s retort. Trump seems to have used interruption as his central strategy, attempting to fluster Biden and prevent him from making actual substantive arguments. Instead of engaging on the merits, Trump deliberately turned the first presidential debate into a carnival.
In that sense, it felt good to have Biden tell Trump off. He really deserved it!
But in another, deeper sense, it felt awful. Remember, Trump is the incumbent. The character of the man currently leading our country was on display tonight, and it wasn’t pretty.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
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Kamala Harris participates in the Democratic presidential debate at Tyler Perry Studios November 20, 2019, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
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Joe Biden during the first presidential debate. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
