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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#16501 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2020-October-12, 19:31

View PostZelandakh, on 2020-October-12, 18:51, said:

The most likely end at this point is the election of JB and a blue Congress,


So you feel that the arson, looting, statue toppling, defund the police, "peaceful" protests, etc. will all end if JB wins the election? Why so?
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#16502 User is offline   Zelandakh 

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Posted 2020-October-12, 20:24

View PostChas_P, on 2020-October-12, 19:31, said:

So you feel that the arson, looting, statue toppling, defund the police, "peaceful" protests, etc. will all end if JB wins the election? Why so?

Perhaps you missed the rest of my post?

View PostZelandakh, on 2020-October-12, 18:51, said:

The most likely end at this point is the election of JB and a blue Congress, the removal of racist policies at national level, widespread and near unanimous condemnation of white supremacy groups and a government that starts actually caring about how many Americans die. If a JB administration were somehow to find a way of working together with moderate Republicans, even if he did not really need to, that would be even better but that would probably just be wishful thinking. A return of the Republican party to true conservative policies rather than straight-up racism and voter suppression would be very helpful here.

(-: Zel :-)
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#16503 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-October-12, 20:38

Quote


A new book by a psychology professor and a former lawyer in the Nixon White House argues that Trump has tapped into a current of authoritarianism in the American electorate, one that's bubbled just below the surface for years. In "Authoritarian Nightmare," Bob Altemeyer and John W. Dean marshal data from a previously unpublished nationwide survey showing a striking desire for strong authoritarian leadership among Republican voters.

They also find shockingly high levels of anti-democratic beliefs and prejudicial attitudes among Trump backers, especially those who support the president strongly. And regardless of what happens in 2020, the authors say, Trump supporters will be a potent pro-authoritarian voting bloc in the years to come.


https://openpsychome...org/tests/RWAS/

https://www.washingt...arian-research/


Quote


Right-wing authoritarians want society and social interactions structured in ways that increase uniformity and minimize diversity. In order to achieve that, they tend to be in favour of social control, coercion, and the use of group authority to place constraints on the behaviours of people such as political dissidents and ethnic minorities. These constraints might include restrictions on immigration, limits on free speech and association and laws regulating moral behaviour. It is the willingness to support or take action that leads to increased social uniformity that makes right-wing authoritarianism more than just a personal distaste for difference. Right-wing authoritarianism is characterized by obedience to authority, moral absolutism, racial and ethnic prejudice, and intolerance and punitiveness towards dissidents and deviants. In parenting, right-wing authoritarians value children's obedience, neatness, and good manners.


"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#16504 User is offline   helene_t 

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Posted 2020-October-12, 20:42

View PostZelandakh, on 2020-October-12, 18:51, said:

[....] near unanimous condemnation of white supremacy groups

Nah. I predict Biden will win but the trumpists (who will continue to control the Republican party) will make the next four years unpleasant and Ivanka Trump will defeat Harris in 2024.
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#16505 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-October-12, 20:57

As kenberg foretold eons ago, it will end like On The Waterfront in which the mob boss gets pushed into the river and the workers unite behind Brando. What happens after that is not clear but I don't think it's likely any of the Trumps will have a future in politics.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#16506 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-October-13, 02:43

View Posthelene_t, on 2020-October-12, 20:42, said:

Nah. I predict Biden will win but the trumpists (who will continue to control the Republican party) will make the next four years unpleasant and Ivanka Trump will defeat Harris in 2024.

I had to wipe down my keyboard because I was drinking some water when I read this :) Actually, one of the Kardashians will be the GOP candidate, but I don't know enough about them to tell you which one.
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#16507 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2020-October-13, 07:54

View Posty66, on 2020-October-12, 20:57, said:

As kenberg foretold eons ago, it will end like On The Waterfront in which the mob boss gets pushed into the river and the workers unite behind Brando. What happens after that is not clear but I don't think it's likely any of the Trumps will have a future in politics.


I don't recall saying that but it does sound a bit like me. Seeing Trump as Johnny Friendly is easy enough. I am having more trouble thinking of Biden as Terry Malloy, being portrayed by Marlin Brando.

Just rambling while having coffee. I think Waterfront, in 1954 when I was 15, was the first Brando film I saw. I did see both viva Zapata and Streetcar, which were filmed earlier, but I think I saw then as re-runs after Waterfront was such a success.

Waterfront was a great movie for fifteen year old me, but at 81 I still like it. Brando, Lee J Cobb, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, introducing Eva Marie Saint (who, I see, is now 96), directed by Kazan, written by Schulberg, I guess it has some credentials. From the script:

Edie: I want you to stay away from me.

Terry: Edie you love me, I want you to say it to ,me.

Edie: I didn't say I didn't love you. I said "Stay away from me."

It was Eva Marie Saint's best role, in my opinion.

Ok, back to the docks and Johnny Friendly, aka Donald Trump.
Ken
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#16508 User is offline   Zelandakh 

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Posted 2020-October-13, 08:42

View Posthelene_t, on 2020-October-12, 20:42, said:

Nah. I predict Biden will win but the trumpists (who will continue to control the Republican party) will make the next four years unpleasant and Ivanka Trump will defeat Harris in 2024.

I see Nikki Haley as the front runner for 2024 if DJT loses as Republicans make a big effort to win back female voters. I would also not be surprised to see a serious presidential bid from Tim Scott, particularly if conservative strategic thinkers decide that the demographics of Trumpism are a dead end and they need to redirect the party to compete for the minority vote. I think Trumpism would most likely be represented by Pence rather than Ivanka. She is more likely to be a viable candidate in 2028 or 2032 when memories of how badly DJT mishandled things have faded somewhat. Her chances would be significantly enhanced if NH were to win in 2024 and 2028 and successfully led a popular administration.
(-: Zel :-)
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#16509 User is offline   PassedOut 

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Posted 2020-October-13, 10:55

The absentee ballot I received was correct and I voted by mail. But Constance, my son, and my daughter-in-law all received absentee ballots for the wrong district. Constance posted about the problem on our neighborhood website in case we're not alone in that. The election officials apologized and are sending them new ballots today, with instructions to destroy the incorrect ballots.

Fine, so far. But now I'm engaged in discouraging the use of the ballots to be destroyed as an art project that involves marking them for Trump, discarding them in some creative way, and making sure that their discovery is filmed. Seems like my aging has diminished my sense of humor.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
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#16510 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-October-13, 11:03

Senator Whitehouse is giving an amazing presentation on the links between dark money and the U.S. court system.

His refrain: "That can't be good" is pretty memorable.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#16511 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 08:08

From David Leonhardt at NYT:

Quote

The battle for the Senate

If Joe Biden wins next month, there are two very different scenarios for his presidency.

In one, Republicans have held Senate control, and Biden will have limited ability to pass legislation. In the other, Democrats have retaken the Senate, and Biden can enact an ambitious agenda — fighting climate change, enacting universal pre-K, raising taxes on the rich and expanding both health insurance and voting rights.

Given the stakes, I want to give you a brief guide to the Senate elections. For each, I’ve included a link to a story, often from local media, that offers a portrait of the campaign.

The basics: Fourteen of this year’s Senate races look competitive (with 12 of those 14 seats currently held by Republicans). Democrats need to win at least five of the 14 to retake a Senate majority. They lead in six, polls show.

The Cook Political Report yesterday called Democrats the “clear favorite” to retake control. “Republicans are just in trouble everywhere,” one Republican pollster said. Still, it’s easy to imagine Republican comebacks in a few states.

Posted Image

The Democrats’ best two. Two sitting Republican senators — Cory Gardner, in Colorado, and Martha McSally, in Arizona — trail significantly in states where President Trump also trails. In both, Democrats recruited excellent challengers: John Hickenlooper, a two-term former Colorado governor; and Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut married to Gabby Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman shot during an assassination attempt.

The next tier
. Democrats’ leads in four other states are smaller. In Michigan, Gary Peters, the white Democratic incumbent, is struggling to hold off John James, a Black veteran and businessman.

In Iowa, Maine and North Carolina, Republican incumbents are behind, largely because of Trump’s unpopularity. The biggest name is Susan Collins, the fourth-term Maine senator who is worried enough that she has gone “aggressively negative,” as Slate reports, against her challenger, Sara Gideon.

In North Carolina, adultery revelations don’t appear to have reduced the lead of Cal Cunningham, the Democratic challenger. His opponent, Senator Thom Tillis, is recovering from a case of the coronavirus he evidently caught at the White House.

The longer shots. If two of those six races slip away, Democrats would need at least one win in a state where they do not lead now.

In South Carolina, Jaime Harrison, the Democrat, is slightly behind Lindsey Graham, the Republican Trump-critic-turned-ally. (The Times has a story on that race.) In Alaska and Kansas, the polling has been light enough — and close enough — that upsets seem possible. The same is true in Montana, where Steve Bullock, the Democratic governor, is running against Steve Daines, the incumbent and an enthusiastic Trump backer.

Georgia has the distinction of holding two Senate races this year: the Republican David Perdue’s re-election race against Jon Ossoff; and a special election, because Johnny Isakson retired early, with health problems.

In Texas and Alabama, Republicans have sizable leads. (And in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell’s lead is big enough that most analysts don’t consider the race competitive.)

The big picture. The most important factor is the national environment. If Biden wins the popular vote by at least six or seven percentage points, Democrats will be favored to retake the Senate, The Times’s Nate Cohn told me. Biden now leads by 10 points.

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#16512 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 08:34

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg said:

It’s quite an accomplishment for an incumbent president to be losing in head-to-head polling tests by 10.5 percentage points with just three weeks until the election. In fact, as CNN’s Harry Enten notes, Trump is in the worst shape an incumbent has been in at this point in the polling era. Trump could still win, but it’s increasingly unlikely.

When things go this bad, there are many reasons. The economy is awful. The pandemic is still raging. There’s a long history of scandals that take a toll, even if none was sufficient to entirely destroy Trump’s presidency by itself. Compared with those realities, communications strategy is unlikely to be a major factor. Then again, normally both sides are reasonably competent. I thought I’d look at just one tweet and think about how it reflects a larger failing of this campaign.

Here’s Trump, Tuesday morning, piggybacking on a comment about Dr. Anthony Fauci: “Actually, Tony’s pitching arm is far more accurate than his prognostications. ‘No problem, no masks.’ WHO no longer likes Lockdowns — just came out against. Trump was right. We saved 2,000,000 USA lives!!!”

First: Why is he attacking Dr. Fauci? You may recall that previous incumbents would have a message of the day, and that everything, including every word from the candidate, would be an attempt to drive home that message. I have no idea what Trump’s message might’ve been on Tuesday, but surely it wasn’t feuding with Fauci. More likely, there was supposed to be a positive message about his Supreme Court nominee and a negative one about his opponent, Joe Biden. Not this.

Second: Why is he attacking Dr. Fauci? Fauci remains wildly popular! Also, he’s not Trump’s opponent in an election that’s three weeks away.

Third: Why is he attacking Dr. Fauci? Trump polls terribly on the pandemic. It should be the last topic he wants to remind voters about.

Then we get to the text. “Actually, Tony’s pitching arm...” I follow the news about as closely as anyone and I’m also a huge baseball fan, but it took me a while when I saw this one to remember that Fauci threw out the first pitch at a Nationals game at the beginning of the season and that the effort was a flop. I then also remembered that Fauci’s wild pitch was more endearing than embarrassing. So as an insult, this doesn’t really work. Not to mention that it also reminded me that no one wanted Trump to throw out the first pitch and that he made a pathetic effort to invite himself to do it and that he then pretended to cancel.

Next: “far more accurate than his prognostications. ‘No problem, no masks.’” This one presumably refers to Fauci’s comments early in the pandemic in which he suggested that masks wouldn’t be helpful in preventing the spread of the virus. That turned out to be wrong — but once the evidence was in, Fauci began consistently hammering the message on best practices, including masks. Once again, this also reminded me of Trump’s (far more numerous) inconsistencies on the matter.

After that we get a non sequitur: “WHO no longer likes Lockdowns - just came out against.” I think Trump is here taking something out of context — or, more probably, repeating something he heard from someone who got it wrong in the first place.

He ends with “Trump was right. We saved 2,000,000 USA lives!!!”

Two things about that. Trump is now forgetting that his claim to have saved two million lives had to do with … lockdowns! Granted, Trump never shut anything down — governors did, and more importantly individual citizens stopped doing a lot of things they considered dangerous. But he did push guidelines early on that encouraged shutdowns, and at the time he said it was necessary because otherwise two million (or so) lives would be lost; he used to compare that strategy favorably to what Sweden was doing.

Perhaps more to the point, though, that figure is nonsense. As it is, with 215,000 deaths, the U.S. is about ninth in the world in per-capita fatalities. Another two million would give the U.S. about seven times as many deaths as Peru, the current worst case; there’s no reason to believe that without Trump’s “successes” we’d be off the scale by world standards.

Overall? Even if the target made sense, Trump’s tweet is full of obscurities (which make it hard for anyone who isn’t fully engaged in his ongoing monologue to understand) and obvious inaccuracies (which make it easy for the media or for Democrats to criticize). It may be entertaining for Trump’s strongest supporters, but no candidate can win an election with only their strongest supporters.

It also gave Biden a layup. The Democratic nominee responded, “Here's something that will be very different if I'm president: I'll actually listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice and expertise, not attack him for telling the truth.”

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#16513 User is offline   Zelandakh 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 14:30

View Posty66, on 2020-October-13, 11:03, said:

Senator Whitehouse is giving an amazing presentation on the links between dark money and the U.S. court system.

His refrain: "That can't be good" is pretty memorable.

For those that missed it, watch it here. It is well worth the 29 minutes of your time.
(-: Zel :-)
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#16514 User is offline   PassedOut 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 15:34

View PostZelandakh, on 2020-October-14, 14:30, said:

For those that missed it, watch it here. It is well worth the 29 minutes of your time.

Yes, my sister told me yesterday that this is a must-see and it is. I agree with your recommendation whole-heartedly. Thanks for posting the link.

Here is Chris Coons: Video
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#16515 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 19:56

View PostZelandakh, on 2020-October-14, 14:30, said:

For those that missed it, watch it here. It is well worth the 29 minutes of your time.


Yes, we definitely need some more beautiful minds like Senator Whitehouse. Thankfully he didn't ask judge Barrett about farting while she was in high school.
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#16516 User is offline   Zelandakh 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 20:10

If the best defence to the points raised by SW is pure whataboutism, people had best take the matter very seriously.
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#16517 User is online   pilowsky 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 20:49

Recently, an American friend directed me to the best US psephological site I have seen https://projects.fiv...ction-forecast/ (538.com)
Nate Silver's site has a 'Snake' which is the equivalent of Australia's electoral pendulum showing which states are needed for a Presidential candidate to win enough electoral college delegates to win the 270 required to become President.

Setting aside all the Gerrymandering and other criminal behaviour, inspection of this snake immediately shows that the 'United States is STILL fighting the Civil war every two to four years. (Or the war of Northern aggression as they called it in N. Carolina when I visited in 1987).
The 'red' states are almost all antebellum and the 'blue' ones Northern. Even the bottom half of California was confederate.

You probably knew this but it was a bit of a surprise to me.

Interestingly, when the armed forces have their war games the always divide into red and blue teams - even on Star wars!

As I may have mentioned earlier, The main source of military labour in the USA is from the South. From here, they are deployed overseas where they gain experience fighting with people in Asia and Africa.
Then they come back to the USA and leave the armed forces. Where do they go? Into the police force.
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#16518 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 21:00

Adam Liptak at NYT said:

‘Severability’ Could Save Health Law, Graham Says and Barrett Seems to Agree

WASHINGTON — Republicans have been working for a decade to destroy the Affordable Care Act. Judge Amy Coney Barrett has criticized Supreme Court decisions that failed to do so. And it looks like she will be on the court next month for arguments in a third major challenge to the law pressed by Republican state officials and the Trump administration.

All of this, Democrats have said, puts the law in grave peril.

But some Senate Republicans had a surprising response on Wednesday: They pointed to a doctrine of statutory interpretation called severability. Because of it, they suggested, their allies’ own case against the health care law was a toothless exercise that was likely to fail.

It was an admission that the focus by Democrats on attacking Republicans — and Judge Barrett — for threatening the future of Affordable Care Act in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has hit home.

Just minutes after the start of the second and final day of questions for Judge Barrett at her confirmation hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, invited her to describe the severability doctrine. She knew why he was asking, and she was ready to play ball.

“What it means,” she said, “is if you have a statute — and the Affordable Care Act is obviously a very long statute — if there is one provision within the statute that is unconstitutional, the question is whether that one section can simply be rendered null and excised from the statute.”

That is the key issue in next month’s case. After Congress zeroed out the penalty originally imposed by the legislation for not obtaining insurance under the so-called individual mandate, Republican state officials argued that the mandate was now unconstitutional. They added, more significantly, that this meant the entire law must fall.

In legal terms, they argued that the mandate was not severable from the balance of the law. In the Supreme Court, the Trump administration filed a brief saying precisely that: “The individual mandate is not severable from the rest of the act.”

Severability is the legal equivalent of a game of Jenga: If you pull out one plank, will the entire tower topple?

Judge Barrett did not say how she would vote in the pending case, but her summary suggested that she was skeptical of the maximalist arguments made by the administration.

“The presumption is always in favor of severability,” she said.

Mr. Graham summarized what he had heard. “The main thing is the doctrine of severability has a presumption to save the statute if possible,” he said. That was, he said, a conservative approach that allows Congress rather than the courts make the key policy decisions.

“I want every conservative in the nation to listen to what she just said,” Mr. Graham said. “That is the law, folks.”

The senator, if not the nominee, seemed to say that the health care law was not in real danger next month and that Judge Barrett’s presence would not alter the calculus.

Legal experts were reluctant to draw broad conclusions from the exchange.

“Reading the tea leaves here is hard,” said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan who filed a supporting brief in the new Supreme Court case along with scholars across the ideological spectrum. The brief argued that “the question here is not debatable: The mandate is severable from the rest of the A.C.A.”

“To my eyes,” Professor Bagley said, “the most telling part of Barrett’s response is her aside that ‘the Affordable Care Act is obviously a very long statute.’ Her response suggests — very weakly — that she may see something anomalous about unraveling all of Congress’s handiwork just because a toothless mandate is constitutionally defective.”

Judge Barrett also made more general statements about the health care law on Wednesday. “I am not hostile to the A.C.A. at all,” she said. But that was in some tension with what she had said over the years about earlier Supreme Court challenges before she became a judge.

In a 2017 law review article, Judge Barrett was critical of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s 2012 opinion sustaining the mandate. “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” she wrote.

In an interview after the Supreme Court rejected a second challenge to the law in 2015, this one concerning tax subsidies to help poor and middle-class people buy health insurance, she said, “I think the dissent has the better of the legal argument.”

“That’s not to say the result isn’t preferable,” Judge Barrett said at the time. “It’s clearly a good result that these millions of Americans won’t lose their tax subsidies.”

While Judge Barrett’s comments about severability were arguably at odds with the legal positions taken by Republicans in the pending case, they were consistent with recent Supreme Court opinions.

In June, the court ruled that a provision of the law creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional. But Chief Justice Roberts said the rest of the law could stand. “We think it clear that Congress would prefer that we use a scalpel rather than a bulldozer in curing the constitutional defect we identify today,” he wrote.

About a week later, in a case on a federal law regulating robocalls, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh made a similar point. “Constitutional litigation is not a game of gotcha against Congress, where litigants can ride a discrete constitutional flaw in a statute to take down the whole, otherwise constitutional statute,” he wrote.

There is an element of “gotcha,” some legal scholars say, in the sequence of arguments in the latest challenge to the health care law. The arguments start with Chief Justice Roberts’s 2012 opinion upholding the individual mandate as authorized by Congress’s power to levy taxes.

That power disappeared, the argument goes, when Congress, after repeatedly failing to repeal the entire law, reduced the penalty associated with the individual mandate to zero.

That may or may not be so, but the answer to the question is by itself inconsequential. The larger issue is whether the mandate is severable from the rest of the statute.

Judge Barrett, answering a softball question from Mr. Graham, indicated that she was skeptical about that second step.

“If you can preserve a statute, you try to, to the extent possible?” he asked.

Judge Barrett responded, “That is true.”

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#16519 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 21:41

Nate Cohn, wrapping up his analysis of Wednesday's poll results at NYT said:

Another bad day for the president, and for the likelihood of a Republican Senate majority in 2021.

https://www.nytimes....in-the-sun-belt

Looks like they are on a roll. Fingers crossed.
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#16520 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-October-14, 22:10

Sydney Ember and Lisa Lerer at NYT said:

The line was familiar. The follow up was not.

Senator Kamala Harris came ready to press her case against Judge Amy Coney Barrett on the second day of this week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, asking if she had been aware of President Trump’s promise to nominate judges who would repeal former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

The question concluded with one of Ms. Harris’s characteristic refrains, one she memorably leveled against Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh two years ago: “I’d appreciate a yes-or-no answer, please.”

Like Justice Kavanaugh, Judge Barrett seemed briefly perplexed by Ms. Harris. “I want to be very, very careful,” Judge Barrett said. “I’m under oath.”

But unlike then, Ms. Harris let Judge Barrett’s tentative answer slide, hinting at what could become her new professional reality as a No. 2 to the most powerful man in politics.

Before joining the Democratic ticket as Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate, Ms. Harris was known as a politician with a withering prosecutorial style and a skill for crafting viral clips. She built her national brand on high-stakes moments — judiciary hearings, the Democratic primary debate stage — that she molded to her advantage, her years as a district attorney on display as she grilled adversaries.

Now she is trying to balance her penchant for forceful exchanges with her duties as the vice-presidential nominee. After all, being vice president means checking your ego at the Oval Office door.

From her opening remarks to her questioning on Wednesday, she cut a more restrained profile, using her platform at the confirmation hearings to amplify Mr. Biden’s message while studiously avoiding any maneuvers that could jeopardize his lead in the polls. Even her decision to monitor the proceedings from her Senate office rather than in person because of the dangers posed by the coronavirus reinforced Mr. Biden’s case that his administration would be a more responsible steward of public health than Mr. Trump’s.

...

With Republicans holding a firm majority in the Senate, Democrats recognize they will almost certainly not be able to prevent Judge Barrett’s confirmation to the court, and many cautioned against criticizing her directly. Instead, Democratic activists, officials and the campaign are urging members of the party to filter their arguments through the lens of the election and to focus on issues that play well among swing voters.

For Ms. Harris, there is little political benefit in harsh personal attacks on Judge Barrett. The committee questioning is unlikely to change the outcome of a confirmation hearing, but a misstep could damage the Democratic presidential ticket’s chances with more moderate voters. And the kind of liberal voter who is following a Twitter play-by-play of the confirmation hearings — and who would have seen a critical exchange — is already energized to support Mr. Biden.

The consolation prize for losing the court for a generation, some Democrats privately argue, could be winning control of the Senate — and the White House.

Along with Ms. Harris, many Democratic senators focused their questions on the possibility that Judge Barrett would vote with the conservative majority on the court to overturn the health care law, a message similar to the one that helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018.

The discussion of health care emerged as such a strong theme that even Republicans couldn’t help noticing.

“At times, I have been confused and I thought we were on the Health Committee instead of the Judiciary Committee, because it has been such a central talking point for every Democrat,” said Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas. “I get that’s their election message.”

Ms. Harris and Democrats saw a similar opportunity to mobilize suburban women on abortion rights, given Ms. Barrett’s well-documented personal opposition to abortion and criticism of Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. Most Americans say that abortions should be legal with some restrictions.

While some Republicans praised Ms. Barrett’s opposition to abortion rights, they consciously chose not to make the issue a central focus of their questioning — unlike their Democratic opponents.

For the Biden campaign, Ms. Harris’s disciplined performance came as a relief. A former rival who landed some of the toughest attacks on Mr. Biden from the debate stage during the primary, Ms. Harris spent much of her vice-presidential vetting process persuading those closest to the former vice president that she would be focused on his campaign, rather than on her future ambitions. Some Biden allies still view her with lingering mistrust.

Ms. Harris’s approach during the confirmation hearings follows a similarly deliberate performance during vice-presidential debate last week, aimed at keeping the pressure on the Republican ticket rather than reshaping the race.

Though she sharply challenged Vice President Mike Pence on the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus — calling it “the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country” — the debate had none of the fireworks or television-ready lines that have punctuated some of her past encounters.

Still, there have been flashes of Ms. Harris’s combativeness.

“I imagine you were surrounded by a team of folks that helped prepare you for this nomination hearing,” Ms. Harris said icily on Tuesday when Judge Barrett equivocated on whether she knew of Mr. Trump’s promise to appoint judges who would overturn the health care law. “Did they inform you of the president’s statements and that this might be a question that was presented to you during the course of this hearing?”

But mostly, she proved herself a loyal soldier, just as she had convinced the Biden campaign she would be.

Smart. I like this new look for the Dems.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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