The little town of Quarrelsville lies on the outskirts of Malberg. The speed limit posted on Main Street is 25 mph, but most drivers passing through are too impatient to comply. Several children have been knocked off their bikes and injured. Thankfully, none have been killed.

The town council is equally divided, as they are on most issues, on what to do. Camp Blue, noting that speed signs are ignored, wants to put in three-inch-high, yellow-painted speed bumps.

Camp Orange disagrees. Three-inch speed bumps would exceed the town’s budget. Two-and-a-half-inch speed bumps would be acceptable, but only if they’re orange. 

“Okay,” said Camp Blue, “we’ll agree to your proposal. Will you now vote for it?”

“No,” said Camp Orange, “we still don’t like it.” 

“Why?”

“Because you’ll take credit for the idea.” 

I guess you can see the parallel to the vote just tallied in the US Senate. All fifty Democrat Senators voted for the Inflation Reduction Act; all fifty Republican Senators voted against it.

What? 

In part one of Gulliver’s Travels, shipwrecked Gulliver finds himself in the land of the little people of Lilliput. A civil war is about to begin over disagreement on the proper end of the egg to break. Obviously satire, Swift is trying to show the stupidity of the extent to which a silly, nit-picking argument can lead.

Our present situation is not so trivial. Our Congress is staunchly divided on a bill that would lower healthcare costs for all Americans and mitigate global warming that threatens all life on Earth. And one side is hung up on who gets credit for the progress!

Has there ever been an argument more inane? Objectors are saying “We don’t like your plan that saves our grandchildren because it makes you look too good. (Note: here I am assuming that the nay-sayers are actually educated enough to be aware that there is a problem). 

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. 

For those who may doubt we have a problem, I would be happy to elucidate. Though I myself am not a climate scientist, one of my best friends, now semi-retired, was head of NOAA’s global greenhouse gas monitoring system for many years. I could provide a not-too-technical translation of his summary of the global warming problem if you email me at khufubob@gmail.com.

This is not time to worry about the scorecard.

Bob Moores retired from Black & Decker/DeWalt in 1999 after 36 years. He was the Director of Cordless Product Development at the time. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins University.

The last Republican state comptroller in Maryland was one Phillips Lee Goldsborough, who served from 1898 to 1900, when William McKinley was president of the United States. So the odds definitely favor Brooke Lierman (D), the Baltimore City delegate, in the general election for comptroller this fall.

Not only does Lierman have history and party registration on her side, but she’s an indefatigable campaigner brimming with ideas for the office, who is poised to make history as the first woman elected independently to a statewide position in Maryland government. That fact alone gets a lot of people excited.

Lierman’s Republican opponent, Harford County Executive Barry Glassman, is the most solid and qualified GOP nominee in several generations. In addition to his eight years as executive, he has served in the General Assembly and local government. He’s a sheep farmer and also had a long career working for BG&E. He’s well known and well liked in Maryland political circles.

But all that could be blotted out by the turn the state Republican Party has taken this election, nominating seemingly unelectable candidates for governor and attorney general. That puts the squeeze on Glassman, who must figure out how to distance himself from Del. Dan Cox, the GOP gubernatorial nominee, and former Anne Arundel County councilmember Michael Anthony Peroutka, the GOP candidate for attorney general, without completely alienating base Republican voters.

You can imagine a scenario where day after day, Glassman will be asked to answer for the extreme positions and conspiracy theories espoused by his running mates. It cannot be a happy circumstance for one of the few bipartisan happy warriors left in Maryland politics.

But could this in fact be an unanticipated opportunity for Glassman, one that no one really imagined just a couple of weeks ago?

Consider an alternative reality in which former State Commerce Secretary Kelly Schulz, the choice of the Gov. Larry Hogan wing of the GOP, won the Republican nomination for governor. All the attention, money, and political energy would be behind Schulz, who would surely be a tougher general election opponent for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wes Moore than Cox will prove to be.

Under that scenario, Glassman, like all Republican nominees for comptroller decade after decade, would be subject to the vagaries of the state’s typical partisan performance. The comptroller’s race would be overshadowed by the gubernatorial election, and Glassman’s arguments for himself would undoubtedly be ignored. He might benefit from the resources devoted to Schulz’s campaign and the notion that she had a decent shot of winning, but would very much be the second or third banana in the overall Republican conversation.

Now, however, Glassman is a man on his own, and that has its advantages and disadvantages. Yes, he may have undesirable ballot mates in the eyes of many political professionals, but he also has an opportunity to chart his own course. Perhaps some of the GOP establishment enthusiasm that would have been attached to Schulz’s campaign can now be focused his way.

Glassman can credibly argue that he’s the last sane Republican standing — and the only Republican standing in the way of Democratic hegemony in Annapolis. He can pledge to be a nonpartisan fiscal steward of Maryland’s treasury, and hint that Lierman’s agenda is too woke and too costly — and that she’ll try to use the job as a stepping stone to higher office. Some editorial boards will no doubt be responsive to this argument.

Glassman will need some Democratic validators, and there are probably a few of them out there, mostly older white men. He will have Hogan and some of Hogan’s top advisers on his side, and that can’t hurt. But he’ll need the media to pay attention, which will be a challenge with all the Republican crazy to keep tabs on.

You wouldn’t want to bet against Lierman in the general election. But you might want to pay attention to Glassman and how he operates in the spotlight. Sounding a warning against Lierman is still the longest of long shots, but it’s the only play he has.

Maryland Matters founding editor Josh Kurtz is a veteran chronicler of Maryland politics and government. He began covering the State House in 1995 for The Gazette newspapers, and has been writing about state and local politics ever since. He was an editor at Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, for eight years, and for eight years was the editor of E&E Daily, which covers energy and environmental policy on Capitol Hill. For 6 1/2 years Kurtz wrote a weekly column on state politics for Center Maryland and has written for several other Maryland publications as well.

“Who’da Thunk It?”

I don’t know why, but that vintage quip, sometimes attributed to Mortimer Snerd, the dummy for the 1940s ventriloquist and radio host Edgar Bergen, popped into my head last week when I was told that I had tested positive for Covid. 

My wife, Lynn, and I, who are pushing 90 and 91, had followed all the rules—vaccinated, boosted twice, masked for large portions of the past two years, keeping our distance at the post office and supermarket, Zooming church services, skipping the movies, vigilant about washing hands—you know the drill. 

But, truth be told, we had throttled back a bit in the past few months. Seemed to us everyone was doing that. We were shaking hands, forgetting about masks, dining out (what a joy that was). Sure, we heard the news. A new Covid variant was beginning to appear and it was highly transmissible. We did not pay much attention to the news. 

Last week, when Lynn woke up with “a scratchy throat” accompanied by a cough, and a runny nose, I thought we should take her temperature.  101+ degrees.  Not good.

We have the good fortune of living in a retirement community with excellent in-house medical assistance. We called the clinic. Chad, a tell-it-like-it-is, indefatigable nurse practitioner, came to our cottage door. “I don’t want to come in,” he said. So, while standing just outside our door, he reached out to test us with nasal swabs. Lynn was positive.  I was negative. “You’re next. Positive tomorrow,” he said to me.  And I was, just as he predicted. 

Just as Covid invaded our lives that morning we learned that on the same day it had worked its way into the White House and captured President Biden. It turns out that our progress toward recovery seems to be moving at about the same pace as his own journey back to good health.  We chuckled when newscasters reported that his sore throat had healed. “Mine, too,” I said to Lynn.

We don’t know what cutting edge medicines and therapies the President has been receiving—only the very best, we presume.  But, for us, the new drug, Paxlovid, Acetaminophen, lots of liquids, rest and the elixir of the ages, chicken soup, seem to have stopped this weird illness in about five days. 

All in all, a good outcome for a trio of old timers–the President and us. “Who’da Thunk It?”

Ross Jones is a former vice president and secretary emeritus of The Johns Hopkins University. He joined the University in 1961 as assistant to President Milton S. Eisenhower. A 1953 Johns Hopkins graduate, he later earned a Master’s Degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Prior to the onslaught of the COVID-19 Pandemic, rural areas of the United States were seeing modest economic growth, while most populations stayed at 2010 levels. The national total of rural residents was some 46 million or about 14% of the US total., These statistics rather sharply contrast with the urban data, which showed considerably higher increases in both categories. 

In terms of poverty rates, there was a similar result. Rural poverty rates declined from a high of 18.4% (2013) to 16.1% (2018), still higher than urban rates at the time, on average about 12.6%.  

And then Covid struck in the winter of 2019 – 2020, leading eventually to over 1 million American deaths and a national economic crisis that only began to abate in spring 2022. In July 2022 the economic concern is inflation. The spread of Covid infections and deaths over the past 2 plus years has also differed at different times in rural and urban regions  

Initially, the cities were harder hit, while the non-metro regions reflected a more predictable 14%  of national cases and 11% of the deaths. These figures eventually rose to 21% and 27% respectively in 2021.  

The general explanations offered for the later, persistent spikes in rural areas, include: (1) more residents with underlying health conditions, (2) fewer people with health insurance, (3) longer distances to hospitals and (4) substantially fewer vaccinated/boosted people.  Other  contributing factors creating “super spreader” situations in both city and farm country, has been crowded work and home environments and too many mask-less people at indoor holiday and other events. 

Yes, the Pandemic severely affected lives in Kent, Somerset, Dorchester and Talbot Counties, but it only exacerbated conditions existing in the four. It is those conditions that over years can and do  lead to shrinking demographics. The following chart provides background data on each county, offering  facts to review and tentative answers to be offered.  

The following provides four important national and Maryland data points from the 2020 Census  to provide a partial basis for comparison with the counties.  

One common measure of a community’s health and well being is its “viability”, that is will it continue to work as a functioning place for people to live. The answer is “it depends” because age, health, job opportunities, available training and education, affordable housing and quality of life all affect residents’ opinions.   

All four counties are losing residents and those remaining are, to a significant extent, senior citizens. These are not, per se, encouraging viability factors. Economic development in all four is something of an issue, but particularly for Dorchester, Somerset and Kent, as is evident by their lagging median incomes. 

These three have also lost businesses, i.e., employers, that have not been replaced, nor have many new ventures opened. Affecting the latter, may be the level of skill sets and experience offered by  local work forces. 

The relatively high poverty rates and median ages translate into heavier demand for county, city and town public services. In 2022, the costs of providing them are rising, particularly for public school systems. Shrinking numbers of taxpayers, clearly impact public revenue streams.   

It is clear, these counties need to understand the dimensions of the work required to reverse current adverse demographic trends and to satisfy the shifting needs of their populations in the decades ahead. I have no doubt their leaders comprehend the work that lies ahead and will meet the viability tests.

Tom Timberman is an Army vet, lawyer, former senior Foreign Service officer, adjunct professor at GWU, and economic development team leader or foreign government advisor in war zones. He is the author of four books, lectures locally and at US and European universities. He and his wife are 24 year residents of Kent County.

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The words of our forefathers are a breath of fresh air. We’ve come a long way since 1776, but we’re now hearing suggestions from a recently formed organization, Battlefront, that “those of us temperamentally disposed must lay siege to our nation’s institutions.”  It’s time, they say.

Back in 2012 Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institute and Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute had suggested, “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science and dismissive of the legitimacy of political opposition.”

We were awarding Pinocchios then, but it has since become clear that our Grand Old Party no longer finds it convenient to hold truths self-evident or derive its powers from the consent of the governed. As former acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen and deputy Attorney General Richard P. Donoghue have testified, advised that he had lost the 2020 election, President Trump instructed his Department of Justice, “Just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

The violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, the first of its kind since 1812, resulted in nine deaths, 114 officers injured, and $1.5 million in damages.

Representative Adam Schiff echoed our forefathers at a recent January 6 Congressional Committee hearing: “For more than 200 years, our democracy has been distinguished by the peaceful transfer of power. Raising their right hand and taking the Presidential oath of office transforms an ordinary citizen into the most powerful person in the world, the President. This is an awesome power to acquire. It is even more awesome when it is handed on peacefully. When George Washington relinquished the office of the presidency, he set a precedent that served as a beacon for other nations struggling against tyranny.”

It might also be worth noting that this bipartisan commission, formed by a government deriving its power from the consent of the governed in order to secure our rights, is relying in large part upon sworn testimony from Republicans and members of President Trump’s inner circle. This hearing has also been a profile in courage about women. Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson are being compared to Margaret Chase Smith.

White House lawyer Pat Cipollone warned that Trump would be charged with “every crime imaginable” if he were to go to the Capitol on January 6. Cipollone has been invited to either confirm or deny that account under oath.

Assured of no evidence of voter fraud by Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows concluded, “So there’s no there, there.”

Respected lawyer and former judge J. Michael Luttig, long a pillar in conservative legal circles, professed his loyalty to our Constitution and warned, “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,”

Requests for preemptive pardons suggest laws have been broken. Attorney John Eastman emailed his request to the White House, and Mo Brooks took the extra step of requesting “all-purpose” pardons for himself and “every Congressman and Senator who voted to reject the electoral college submission of Arizona and Pennsylvania.”

Adam Schiff also reminded us, “The system held, but barely. And the question remains, will it hold again? If we are able to communicate anything during these hearings, I hope it is this: We have been blessed beyond measure to live in the world’s greatest democracy. This is a legacy to be proud of and to cherish. But it is not one to be taken for granted.”

These are challenging times, but things may be trending in a positive direction.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a dedicated young Republican who had interned with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) before becoming an executive assistant to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, offered this testimony:

With evidence that the Trump administration had been warned of violence and was aware of weapons in the crowd on January 6, President Trump told officials, “You know, I really don’t care if they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the mags away, and let my people in.”

He then went onstage told them several times, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol.”

Trump criticized her. That was expected, but Fox News anchor Bret Baier noted, ”She’s under oath, and he’s on Truth Social.”

Let justice and our democracy prevail.

Carol Voyles is a graphic designer/illustrator who retired to the Eastern Shore and became interested in politics. She serves as communications chair for the Talbot County Democratic Forum and lives in Easton.

***

Federal insurrection statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2383, applies to “whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto.”

Federal seditious conspiracy statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2384, applies to persons who “by force prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States.”

Federal perjury statute, 18 U.S. Code § 1621, finds anyone “guilty of perjury shall, except as otherwise required by law, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”

In six years – roughly covering one presidential and approaching an off-year election – we’ve witnessed two of the three branches of the federal government subvert foundations of our democracy, seeking in their arrogance and disrespect for the constitution and legal precedent to place personal ambition and bias – whether political or religious – over the majority will of the people. Abetting the executive and judicial branches in their lust for imposing authoritarian power, the legislative branch, particularly the U.S. Senate under the Republican leadership of Mitch McConnell, usurped the prerogative of two U.S. presidents – each elected by popular-vote majorities – to nominate associate justices to open Supreme Court seats.

As a result, a Supreme Court with a 6-3 majority of Republican-nominated justices, made two of the most egregious decisions in high-court history on back-to-back days near the end of its delegitimizing term. But then, the “Ruthless Six” – made possible by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and, ironically, that of her friend and judicial opposite, Antonin Scalia – capped that pair of undemocratic and essentially  unconstitutional atrocities with a decree crippling the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb fossil-fuel burning that threatens human habitability of our planet. And, oh yes, just to thumb their noses at the fundamental constitutional principle separating church and state, the 6-3 majority sanctified the Christian right to hold prayer vigils at midfield of high school football games. What if the case involved an Hispanic coach conducting Voodoo sacrifice of hens instead? Would Justice Clarence Thomas and others in the majority vote to protect that religious practice? I suspect not.

It’s doubtful that these cases, risking loss at the highest level, even would have been presented had the first Trump pick (Neil Gorsuch, whose mother sought to defund the EPA as Ronald Reagan’s pick to run the agency) and the last (Amy Coney Barrett, a follower of Christian charismatics espousing “Handmaid’s Tale” anti-feminism) had been nominated instead by Barack Obama and Joe Biden – and had received constitutionally required consideration.

Here’s how Republicans cheated us – a clear majority of Americans – of our rightful day in the Supreme Court. When Associate Justice Scalia, an “Originalist” mentor to fellow ultra-conservative Thomas, died of natural causes on Feb. 13, 2016, Obama nominated U.S. Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland, now the U.S. Attorney General, to Scalia’s seat. But McConnell claimed a made-up precedent in refusing Garland even so much as a hearing, much less an up-or-down vote, with nine months left before Election Day, and 11 months remaining in Obama’s term as president. In fact, McConnell said of his defiance: “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’ ” This is the same guy who said in more-or-less the same terms that his top legislative priority shortly after the 2009 inauguration of Obama and the 2021 inauguration of Biden was to make each one a single-term president.

My thought at the time of the McConnell-initiated stalemate was that Obama, arguing that the Senate abdicated its constitutional advice-and-consent duty, should APPOINT Garland and let judges sort it out. With the Supreme Court, short-handed with four justices leaning conservative and four leaning liberal following Scalia’s death, any decision by lower courts might have prevailed. But with everyone, including FBI Director James Comey, expecting Hillary Clinton to be elected president, Obama’s people figured such a provocative step would benefit Trump. And then Comey reopened the email investigation of Clinton just over a week before Election Day 2016.

McConnell and Trump celebrated their undeserved presidential/Supreme Court bonanza by granting Gorsuch an associate justice seat he would not have received except by circumstances including, among other things, Vladimir Putin’s hacking to Trump’s electoral benefit.

Now, let’s turn to the very end of Trump’s two-impeachment/deserving-of-three single term. Ignoring the so-called precedent he deployed to rob Obama of his Supreme Court nomination, McConnell shamelessly jammed through the nomination of Barrett barely a week before Election Day 2020. Never mind his 2016 Presidential Election Year “precedent” that left incumbents, apparently only Democrats, ineligible to make a Supreme Court pick. 

So that’s how we got to a place where the Supreme Court ruled on successive days that babies not otherwise likely to have been born in certain states might live just long enough to be shot in grade school. The grisly irony, I suppose, is that AR-15s may be hard to conceal, letting these Second Amendment Supremacists off the hook. Think of the rich hypocrisy. For the near-half-century since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, opponents cried foul over judges who made law from the bench while ignoring states’ rights. And now they rule from the bench that states who passed laws protecting its citizens from those who carry concealed firearms on the streets must now submit to the opinions of judges protected by round-the-clock U.S. Marshals Service. Worse, if that’s possible, four male justices, one faith-based female and a semi-concurring white male chief justice presume to rule for all women who face what should be her choice of procreative prerogative. Freedom of religion, anybody? Six Catholic justices of nine on the Supreme Court. (One Catholic, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, issued her vociferous dissent.) Let’s rebalance the court by adding one atheist, one Jew and a Muslim. Oh no, but that would be an even dozen. So throw in a Unitarian to break the tie.

***

Regarding RIP Roe v. Wade: My wife’s personal experience and my participation in her decisions inform me in just a few of the myriad issues facing many pregnant women. My wife is and was then a mature adult with the full support of a then-gainfully employed, now-retired husband. Still, our difficulties were not insignificant. Her (I like to say “our”) first pregnancy went very well until delivery, when our soon-to-be-first-born’s shoulders and turn of the child’s head were not aligned with the birth canal. After 18 hours of pushing so hard the whites of her eyes turned bloodshot-red, her obstetrician declared a C-section emergency. Another two hours later our son was delivered, unscathed, while my wife looked as though she’d been in a prize fight.

“Our” second pregnancy ended way too prematurely. Ignominiously, for sure, if you consider a three- to four-week embryo a viable human life. For my wife it was a sharp pain in the belly and a trip to the bathroom where she expelled a pool of blood. Summoned as a witness, I could detect nothing more definitive than a bloody swirl in the toilet. Our pediatrician told us the expelled embryo would have been between the size of a pinpoint and a poppy seed at the time. Ours was a shared disappointment, for sure. But we never considered it the loss of a human child. More likely this was a rejection, common with any introduction of foreign organisms into one’s body, resulting in this case in miscarriage. Bur imagine women in some states being prosecuted for suspected abortion under such circumstances. Or their enablers. Outed by nosy neighbors with an agenda.

With no possibility of criminal investigation back there in the more enlightened 1980s, we recovered from our early miscarriage disappointment quickly enough to achieve a third pregnancy. Again, it went well until a procedure known as amniocentesis to detect birth- and life-threatening defects that might risk either or both the fetus and the mother. As it happened, my wife again felt a sharp pain one evening and, during a scheduled pediatric visit the next day, no fetal heartbeat was detected. The four-and-a-half month fetus was dead, strangled we later learned by strands of the amniotic band that also cut off formation of its hands and feet. But my wife still had to deliver the body. I alone asked to see it. Him it turned out. He would have been a son. I secretly named him Luke. As I viewed Luke’s pre-born remains, my wife was still sleeping in recovery of her 40-hour delivery alleviated only by drugs that might now have been unavailable to her had a half-formed fetus maintained a heartbeat.

“Our” fourth pregnancy in four years took my wife past her 40th birthday. Medical notations cited “advanced maternal age” as a recommendation for amniocentesis. Despite bad previous experience, we needed to know what we might expect in terms of health and survivability on what was likely our last chance. No problem on that account, we were told. But we also wanted my wife’s mother, in leukemia death throes, to hear the name and gender of her second grandchild. That part was achieved. However, unexpected spotting revealed that my wife was exhibiting “low-placenta” symptoms possibly resulting in her bleeding to death if such an episode were to occur when someone else was not available, such as myself, who was then working full-time. As a result of her diagnosis, my wife was confined to Stony Brook Hospital for nearly three months, alternating between pediatric and delivery floors, where she was pharmaceutically discouraged from delivering a baby with under-developed lungs. With no family on Long Island where we lived at the time – her parents and mine lived in Maryland – we sent our 3-year-old son to live with my parents in Easton. I visited him only for his birthday on Dec. 3, not long after preparing a Thanksgiving dinner shared with my wife at the hospital. My parents drove our son to Long Island on Christmas Eve in time for our daughter’s birth on Dec. 27. Choosing vaginal birth over another cesarean, my wife and baby were home in one day instead of six.

***

Ours was a happy ending with two healthy babies, now 30-something adults, and complications not uncommon in pregnancy. Yet a court, any court, but particularly one of mostly elderly males, including one likely misogynist and pornography pervert, presumes with no credentials other than a law degree and a warped sense of Christian morality, to stand between a woman, her womb, her doctor and the presumed father-to-be. Listen to what Clarence Thomas says comes next on the nullification list: same-sex marriage, contraceptives (sex for pleasure or love to be reserved only for begetting birth) and certain sex acts labeled “sodomy” – even in the privacy of consenting adults’ bedrooms. If you want a Supreme Court definition of obscenity, this is it. Everything we can horribly imagine is on the wish list of Clarence Thomas, excepting that of his miscegenist marriage. Perhaps he and his wife qualify for the “Insurrection Exception.” Ginni Thomas’ husband was the only justice to vote against forcing Donald Trump to surrender documents that the Jan. 6 Committee is now using to make its case against presidential treason.

Impeaching Clarence Thomas, a richly deserving but ultimately futile congressional effort, would nevertheless send a warning shot to get the attention of the chip-on-his-shoulder justice who now favors hearing a case favoring state legislatures over courts in deciding election disputes. (Presumably that would not apply to 2020, but no affront to legal precedent would shock me with this cadre of life-appointed anti-(D)democrats – small and capital Ds intended. Other than that, the best remedy is to vote, Vote, VOTE for Democrats in any election for any office. Republicans have grotesquely abused their unearned minority power, amplified by House district gerrymandering, the Electoral College and the two-votes for every state represented in the U.S. Senate. Not to mention the filibuster.

Here’s what’s at stake and can be, even if it’s a long shot: Democrats, with the White House and the deciding vice-presidential tie-breaker on their side, could pass laws codifying national abortion-rights if two more Democrats were elected to the Senate. Filibuster objections by Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema be damned. But perhaps the longest shot: Democrats must prevail in holding the House majority. Beyond that, each state and local race requires every American who values preserving democracy and the freedom of women to choose and the rest of us to choose against a gun-toting carnage of children and innocent bystanders to stand and be counted. You can choose an attorney general who will decide against, regardless of Roe v. Wade’s demise, criminally prosecuting women seeking abortions or those charged as “accessories” for giving them a ride to a clinic or  to cross state lines.

Beyond that, we as the “American Majority” can decide to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience in the Martin Luther King Jr. tradition. We can encourage prosecutors in states where abortion is now a crime to issue tickets to violators instead of imprisonment. And then suspend the fine. Take that Justice Samuel Alito! Or how about flooding districts in which such abortion-related prosections are being pursued with prospective jurors who can exhaust voir-dire exceptions, thereby guaranteeing a hung jury or acquittal. Not to mention the futility – considering our generations-long losing war on drugs – of preventing medical abortion pills from being sent to women in need, even if they have to spring for a post-office box drop-off. Go ahead and try to raid the post office, Republicans. That’ll work in your local community.

The Supreme Court, no doubt unintentionally in its grab for moral power, has gifted Democrats with just what they need to survive and even benefit from a bleak midterm-election prognosis. Everybody assumed Hillary would win in 2016. Now everybody assumes Republicans will prevail in the 2022 midterms. The Supremes may have vetoed that assumption if Democrats, particularly women, show up in record off-year numbers.

It can be done. Republicans may well have overplayed their hand – particularly if they think Trump is a trump card.

Steve Parks is a retired daily newspaper journalist now living in Easton.