In the two weeks before what proved to be a very grim July 4 weekend, the Supreme Court went on a tear. The right-leaning bench dropped one radical ruling after another, wiping out Miranda rights and Roe v. Wade, making guns easier to carry in public, crippling the EPA and more. But people haven’t only been angry with the Court. They’ve been angry with Democratic leaders, who’ve seemed ill-prepared — even disinterested — in doing, well, anything. The lack of urgency has even shocked Republicans.
One of them is Brian Fallon, a longtime party insider, who’s worked for the likes of Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Eric Holder. Now he’s an activist, running the advocacy group Demand Justice, and in an interview with Vanity Fair, he was not kind to the party’s leaders, including some of his former employers.
For instance, when asked if he was “surprised” by the Supreme Court’s radical new rulings, he said, “No,” then turned on Democratic leaders. “The thing that surprised me,” he said, “is how little evidence there is that anybody on our side took advantage of the two months lead time, since the leaked Roe draft, to get our response coordinated and aligned behind a vision of what we’re going to do about it next.”
Fallon speculates that the Biden administration may have been distracted by the host of other problems plaguing the country, including a baby formula shortage, inflation, rising gas prices, and more. But their lack of urgency, he says, may be more holistic:
Biden is a politician of a particular vintage. He was a Senate judiciary committee member for many years. He wants to defend the institution and always see the legitimacy in it, even when it’s behaving illegitimately. The other thing is, I think Democrats of that age have only known the courts issue to be one that mobilizes Republican voters. So the idea that the pendulum is now swinging and Democratic voters are now motivated by the court more than Republican voters, which polls are showing is the case, that’s a new phenomenon that I don’t think is factoring into the thinking of these people, that it’s actually a winning issue now to wield a cudgel against the court and call it out.
Fallon concludes that Democratic leaders are not meeting the GOP on equal terms. Citing Biden’s recent kowtowing to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell by appointing an anti-abortion judge, he says, “It just goes to how we always bring a butter knife to a gunfight. I mean, Mitch McConnell would never throw somebody a bone in this way.”
Not all is lost. Fallon offers a couple solutions, including “taking on the court rhetorically as a political villain and as an institution that is out of touch with a majority of the American public.” (Though some, like Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, have already been doing that.) He also suggests being more open to bold moves, like opening abortion clinics on federal lands, which has already been poo-pooed by Biden’s team. “It’s very dispiriting when lawmakers and outside experts propose things and the Biden administration rules them out within 48 hours,” Fallon says.
In any case, reading poems and singing songs ain’t cutting it.
(Via Vanity Fair)