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SEPTEMBER

**24, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

The One Minority Group Republicans Go to Bat For: Themselves

Ever since 1964, when Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights
Bill and went on to become the Republican presidential nominee that
summer, the Republicans' solicitude for the civil rights of minority
groups has dwindled to near-nonexistence. It was the Republican justices
on the Supreme Court who nullified the potency of the Voting Rights Act,
Republicans who revived a bigoted nativism, and, more recently,
Republicans who've endeavored to re-run the anti-Black law-'n-order
and preserve-white-suburbia campaigns of the 1960s and '70s.

But a transformation has come over Republican ideology in recent years.
Long the opponent of minority rights, they have now become opponents of
majority rule as well. Even a cursory glance at the nation's shifting
demographics has convinced them that they themselves have become a
minority, which explains the party's attempts to lock in its power
now, before electoral verdicts sweep it away. Hence its hysterical zeal
to pack the one branch of government that is supposed to protect
minority rights - the courts - in the expectation that the one
minority their judges and justices can be counted on to protect will be
themselves, the Republican Party.

As liberals once looked to Brown v Board of Education as the
paradigmatic example of what the Court could do to advance minority
rights, conservatives look to Bush v Gore as their own paradigmatic
example of what the Court could do to advance Republican interests in
elections. And by striking down the Voting Rights Act, ruling for big
money in Citizens United, and refusing to undo patently partisan
gerrymandering in a host of cases, successive Republican Court
majorities have perpetuated Republicans' political control, even as
actual voters have increasingly been rejecting it at the polls.

The determination that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell have shown to
place one more diehard Republican on the Court before Election Day
reveals the full extent of their concern for minority rights. Both need
a Court that will enable or, if needs be, fabricate Republican
victories. Surely, this must be what the Founders had in mind.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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When Going Green Collides With the Free Market

Texas's chaotic, deregulated energy market was key to Georgetown's
claim to be the nation's renewable-energy leader. It's also the
reason their project backfired. BY MARA KARDAS-NELSON

Re-Fund the EPA

In order to save the planet, the next administration must hire thousands
of people to implement climate policy. BY YEVGENY SHAPIRO

6 Crucial Races That Will Flip the Senate

Here's where to spend your time and money before Election Day. BY
ROBERT REICH

Unsanitized: Disaster on the Horizon for the Long-Term Unemployed

Potentially tens of millions of workers will lose all unemployment
benefits by December. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for September
24, 2020. BY DAVID DAYEN

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Liberalish: The Complex Odyssey of Lael Brainard

Biden's leading choice for Treasury secretary is somewhat more liberal
than she used to be. Is that enough? BY ROBERT KUTNER

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