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Ironies in The Offing

As long as I'm indulging in speculation...

1.) It's going to be interesting to see how the Senate Rethuglicans square their discomfort at being asked to install as Attorney General the likely child molester and sexual sleazo (R Florida) with their unflinching support for putting a rapist in the White House and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. Will Susan Collins hold out until the last minute, demand a private meeting with Gaetz, and then announce that she is satisfied with his assurances that he never did it and won't do it again?

2.) It's been observed by some that Pussygrabber is going to have considerable difficulty accomplishing anything that requires action by Congress, if the Democrats grow enough spine to follow the Rethuglicans' example in using the filibuster as a general tool of obstruction. So, assuming that Pussygrabber's royal magnanimity extends so far as to allowing Congress some version of its constitutional role, it will be interesting to see if the Rethuglicans get rid of the filibuster. Will they do so on the grounds that it thwarts the will of the majority and is obnoxious to their democratic principles, after all?

3.) This one is somewhat wonky, but bear with me. If the filibuster survives, it can be expected that Pussygrabber's administration will attempt to achieve many of their objectives by the same means that Biden used to achieve his, that is, going around Congress by having agencies issue regulations. For example, Congressional action would be needed to get rid of the Department of Education, but regulatory action could diminish it to the vanishing point. Such regulatory actions would undoubtedly be challenged in the courts. The stakes would be such as to ensure that the litigation would reach the Supreme Court. Here's where the irony enters in. The Pussygrabber Court's "conservative" majority has been making war on the administrative structure through which our federal government has operated since the New Deal almost a hundred years ago. Recent years have seen the triumph of this reactionary, troglogytic jurisprudence in several Supreme Court decisions. One such decision abolished what was known as "Chevron deference," a rule of thumb whereby courts were supposed to defer to the reasonable interpretations by administrative agencies of the statutes under which they operated, based on the idea that expert knowledge and experience are worth something in technical and complicated settings. Not so, said the Pussygrabber Court; judges know everything. In another decision, the Court decided that regulatory agencies cannot issue regulations interpreting and implementing a statute if the regulation involves a "major question" of interpretation that is not clearly addressed by the statute. What is a "major question"? Something of "vast economic and political importance." Who decides what that is? The Supreme Court, that's who. (See any pattern, here?) Without going into the weeds, it's fairly easy to see how the "major questions" doctrine can be used to kneecap administrative rulemaking. It's been used to rule that the FDA can't regulate tobacco products; that the EPA can't set clean air emissions standards based on phasing out fossil fuels; and so on. Still with me? It's going to be interesting to see how the Court squirms around the problem of deferring to Pussygrabber's regulations without reviving Chevron deference, and how the Court will avoid finding any major questions in the vast overreach involved in using regulations to destroy the departments Congress established to promulgate them. Considerable judicial contortionism will be exhibited, as the Court majority struggles not to give back the ground they've gained in their campaign to return us all to the 1890s. (It's even more ironic than that, because the Court would be giving up that ground in order to defend Pussygrabber's campaign to return us all to the 1690s.) It should be amusing, in a grim way; so long as one can put aside the fact that the results effect real people's lives.