Abroad in America: It All Comes Down to the Senate

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/politics/explaining-the-senate-vote-supreme-court.html

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Greetings from the land of cognitive dissonance. Those strange and distressing sounds you hear are the sounds of a country tying itself in knots, and tearing itself to pieces, over the continuing, corrosive drama surrounding President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court.

You may have seen last week’s extraordinary hearing, either live or in video excerpts, in which a psychology professor named Christine Blasey Ford accused the nominee, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, of having sexually assaulted her when both were teenagers, more than 30 years ago.

In his own forceful, angry testimony, Judge Kavanaugh adamantly denied the charges. And what might have been a simple case of he said vs. she said (although such cases are never simple) has expanded into a hornet’s nest of issues — about credibility, about sexual assault and the #MeToo movement, about partisan politics, about possible small lies told in the service of greater truths — that have exposed the vast political, cultural, gender and social chasms splitting the United States. This ugly fight will have repercussions for the midterm elections, and beyond.

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It might be that the hearings were a kind of Rorschach test, with observers essentially having different interpretations of the same thing. But I think they were more akin to “Rashomon,” the 1950 film in which four witnesses to an event give completely different accounts of it, based on what they believe they saw.

And so it is that one (mostly Republican) group of Americans watched the hearings and saw a distinguished judge rightly defend himself against an unfair attack by an (at best) confused woman with a vague, unprovable story, while a bunch of vicious Democrats used even the most picayune details — yearbook quotations, college drinking, whether a particular word from the judge’s past referred to flatulence or to a sex act — to derail his nomination.

And so it is, too, that another (mostly Democratic) group watched the hearings and saw an angry judicial nominee intemperately rebut the account of an anguished woman who had bravely come forward to describe a deeply personal assault, while a bunch of Republicans, led by a president who has himself been accused of sex assaults, demeaned victims everywhere by ridiculing the one in front of them.

It all comes down to what happens in the Senate, the legislative body that votes on whether to elevate nominees to the Supreme Court and which is currently controlled by President Trump’s Republican Party with a whisper-thin majority of 51 out of 100 seats. (The Democrats have 47 seats; there are two Independents who generally vote with the Democrats.)

The vote is expected to take place this weekend. The Democrats would dearly like a Republican or two to defect, but both parties tend to stick to their party lines. It is becoming less and less likely that Republican senators will break ranks and vote against Judge Kavanaugh, a judge known for his conservative positions.

The real question now is how this whole sordid affair will play out in the midterm elections. Voters certainly care about the issue. A Reuters poll published this week showed that opposition to Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination increased after the hearings to 41 percent, an increase of four percentage points from a week earlier. (Thirty-three percent supported him and 26 percent were undecided.)

At the same time, a poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion showed that Democratic voters’ belief that the midterm elections are important has plummeted in the past month, while the opposite is true for Republicans: The Kavanaugh issue has galvanized the Republican base.

If the nomination is approved, though, outraged Democrats, particularly women, might be more motivated to vote in November. That feels like a long way away. We will have to wait and see.

“As Donald Trump was elected with a minority of the popular vote, why have I not heard any talk of at least reforming if not abolishing the Electoral College?” — Barry Rollinson, Ontario, Canada

“I look forward to you tackling the Electoral College because that is the most frequent question I get as in ‘But Clinton won, didn’t she, by 3,000,0000 votes?’” — Ron Witzke, France

“I think that the acid test for someone in your position is how well you explain the Electoral College.” — Dick Levinson

Oh, no, not the Electoral College! Those of you, and by “you,” I mean “us,” who feel annoyed by the continued existence of this institution will be relieved to learn that it plays no part in the midterm elections, and is relevant only during presidential elections. (And the next one is two whole years away, luckily.)

Still, you asked. So: There are 538 members of the Electoral College. Each state gets as many electors as it has in its congressional delegation — a number found by adding up the number of House members the state has, which varies based on population, plus the number of senators, which is always two. The District of Columbia, which is not a state, gets three.

Before the election, each presidential candidate has his or her own slate of party-based electors in each state. When citizens vote for president, they are actually voting for their state’s electors, although few among us pay attention to who these people actually are. (For the record, they are mostly elected officials or residents active in the party in their particular states.)

After a candidate wins a plurality of votes in a state, his or her slate of electors then become the official electors in that state. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition, so that no matter how close the state race is, the winning candidate gets all the electors in the state — except in Nebraska and Maine, which have their own ways of doing things.

All the electoral votes are then tallied up. To win, a candidate needs at least 270 votes.

That means that a presidential candidate can win the popular vote, as Hillary Clinton did, and still lose the presidency.

This is both confusing and irritating. People are always talking about reforming or abolishing the Electoral College, which is one of the more unpopular and least understood institutions in the United States (and that is saying a lot), but so far, no one has.

For a delightful discussion of these and other related topics, please visit the government website.

Not only did voters appear to be watching completely different movies when considering the events of the Kavanaugh hearings this week, but news outlets also published completely different responses.

At The Wall Street Journal, an editorial denounced the Democrats’ behavior during the confirmation process, saying that the left’s attacks on President Trump are actually thinly disguised attacks on conservatives as a whole.

“Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is too often divisive and dissembling, but no action in his presidency comes close to matching the partisan viciousness of the Senate ambush of Brett Kavanaugh,” the editorial read.

“Republicans across America can see, and certainly their senators voting on Judge Kavanaugh should realize, that the left hates them as much or more than they loathe Mr. Trump. Conservatives understand that, for the American left, they are all deplorables now.”

And in The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Wittes, a fellow of the Brookings Institution and editor in chief of the Lawfare blog, wrote that he knows and has respected Judge Kavanaugh for years, but believes his actions in the hearings should disqualify him from serving on the Supreme Court.

“I do not begrudge him the emotion, even the anger,” Mr. Wittes wrote. “But I cannot condone the partisanship — which was raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial — from someone who asks for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial actor.”

Finally, Judge Kavanaugh himself took the extraordinary step of declaring in an opinion piece in the Journal on Friday that yes, he does have a reasonable judicial temperament (“I have been known for my courtesy on and off the bench”), and no, he does not plan to make decisions based on partisan politics.