One takeaway from all this is that if I can find two Members of Congress to go listen to while on vacation, you can keep up with where your representatives are appearing in your area and go hear them and meet them yourself.
Capitol Hill is usually quiet in August although this time the Senate finally passed the President’s infrastructure bill and the House briefly came back from vacation to set the stage to pass that bill and to begin debating the similarly enormous human infrastructure bill in September. One piece of good news for the secular agenda is that we now have a Senator who will introduce the
Do No Harm Act after Labor Day. Until now the bill has only been introduced in the House.
We have started asking other Senators to cosponsor the bill as soon as it is introduced.
Sometimes in a slow August in Washington you end up reading tea leaves about future events, such as future
Supreme Court vacancies. We are seeing many issues concerning church/state separation decided there, and the liberal wing is already down to three justices. One of them, Justice Stephen Breyer, gave an interview in which he gave some hope to those who would like him to retire while there is a Democratic President to nominate his successor and a Democratic Senate to confirm him or her.
At 83 Justice Breyer is the oldest member of the Court. Justices often announce their retirement at the end of a Court term in early summer, but he did not do so. Earlier this year he sounded like he enjoyed what he was doing and didn’t think politics should enter into this type of decision. (His new book is titled, “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics.”) However, in a recent interview he allowed that he was including his successor in his retirement deliberations.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was encouraged to retire while President Obama could choose her successor, but she did not and President Trump made the choice. Justice Breyer knows that. He also knows that if the Republicans pick up one seat in the Senate next fall, Senator Mitch McConnell will be the majority leader again. And it has become obvious that when Mitch McConnell is majority leader, Republican Presidents always get to fill Supreme Court vacancies, no matter when they occur, and Democratic Presidents never do.
If you are planning to see one of your representatives at an event or in their office you can find information on SCA policy positions
on the website. You can find a handout to give them on the
Do No Harm Act here. If you have questions about setting up a meeting or about our policies you can contact me at
[email protected].
