“The American people,” US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in 2016, “should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” McConnell took that position in response to President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the late Antonin Scalia.

While he subsequently offered other justifications, revolving around whether or not the same party controls both the Senate and the White House (“[s]ince the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year”), the top political selling point of argument was clear:

With a presidential election less than a year away, better to await the voters’ decision on who should appoint a new member of the Supreme Court.

Now, with the death of  Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, McConnell’s political tune shifts its main melody to those other excuses. The new chorus: “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”

The Democrats have changed their tune too. They were all for a vote to confirm Merrick Garland in 2016. They’re dead set against a vote to confirm whomever President Donald Trump nominates in 2020.

Democratic arguments against a swift replacement for Ginsburg are pretty weak as well.

First, they say Ginsburg expressed a “final wish” that her replacement wait until after the election. That’s a strange one. In what universe do dying (or retiring) Supreme Court justices get to dictate the terms of their replacement?

Second, they raise the usual hue and cry: A Republican-appointed court might overturn Roe v. Wade. That claim ignores some inconvenient facts.

Such as that Roe v. Wade was written by a Republican-appointed justice. And that all five Republican-appointed justices on the Court at that time voted for it. And that half of the four Democrat-appointed justices voted against it. And that subsequent Republican-majority Courts have preserved it. Republican politicians talk a great anti-Roe game, but at the judicial level Republicans created Roe and Republicans have perpetuated Roe.

The first Supreme Court justice, John Jay, was nominated by President George Washington on September 24, 1789. He was confirmed by the US Senate two days later. Twelve years after that, the Senate dragged its feet for a whole week before confirming Chief Justice John Marshall.

These days, far more is both knowable and known about prospective Supreme Court nominees well in advance of their nominations. Yet the process has mutated from “advise and consent” to “multi-month political campaign.”

There’s no taking politics out of the matter, but the whole thing could be better handled with a White House policy of nominating replacements within seven days of a death or retirement, and a Senate rule requiring an up-or-down confirmation vote within seven days of nomination. Let the voters judge what was done, not who might do what.

Instead, the legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is yet another bear-on-a-unicycle ring added to an already far too crazy 2020 political circus.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Supreme Court: Playing for Time vs. Advise and Consent,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 09/21/20
• “Supreme Court: Playing for Time vs. Advise and Consent,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 09/22/20
• “Supreme Court: Playing for time vs. advise and consent,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 09/22/20
• “Supreme Court nominations: playing for time vs. advise and consent,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star [web and print editions], 09/24/20

A brigade of pearl-clutching, virtue-signaling, cancel-culture keyboard warriors wants you to know that Cuties (Mignonnes — it’s actually a French film) is a bad, bad movie that no one should watch and that Netflix should immediately remove from its lineup.

According to US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) Cuties may be, and according to US Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) it actually is, child porn. It sexualizes young girls and, per Gabbard, will “whet the appetite of pedophiles & help fuel the child sex trafficking trade.”

In reality, Cuties is the moving story of an 11-year-old girl attempting to grow up too fast, at the most intractably confusing age, and across the lines dividing two conflicting cultures. There’s nothing remotely pornographic about it, and the “sexualization” part of the story line isn’t even close to approvingly wrought.

Amy (played by Fathia Youssouf), her mother, and her brother are Senegalese immigrants to France.

Culture Number One: As a young Muslim girl, she’s already being groomed by the family matriarch (a great-aunt) for the day when she’ll find herself swaddled head to toe in white and presented to a man as his property. Her father, not physically present in the film, is expected to arrive shortly from Senegal, bringing with him a second bride (to Amy’s, and her mother’s, distress).

Culture Number Two: As a young student in the secular French school system, Amy perceives the currency of “maturity” with her peers as encompassing how little clothing and how much makeup one can wear, and especially how suggestively one can pose. She discovers, finds herself intrigued by, and through sheer force of will makes herself part of, a dance troupe of other 11-year-olds who call themselves (surprise) “The Cuties.”

Naturally, family and cultural conflict ensue, as does adolescent acting out of various kinds.

Fortunately there’s a happy ending, which I’ll refrain from spoiling with detail but give you this simple gloss on: Amy ultimately decides it’s better to just roll with being eleven years old, both sets of cultural expectations be damned.

Cuties isn’t a comfortable movie. It’s not supposed to be a comfortable movie. Nor is it supposed to be titillating or obscene, and it isn’t those things either.

Is it a great film? That’s for you to decide, and I hope you’ll do so yourself after watching it instead of letting Ted Cruz or Tulsi Gabbard decide for you sight unseen.

In fact, I’m grateful to Cruz, Gabbard, and their “I saw Sarah Good with the Devil!” hangers-on for inspiring ME to watch it. If there’s any redeeming aspect to cancel culture (of either political wing), it’s that convenient and self-serving public outrage serves as a  reasonably reliable predictor of what might be worthwhile.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “I Watched Cuties so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 09/15/20
• “I Watched Cuties so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 09/15/20
• “I watched ‘Cuties’ so you wouldn’t have to (but you should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Dillon, Montana Tribune [web and print editions], 09/16/20
• “I watched ‘Cuties’ so you don’t have to (but you should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Claremont, New Hampshire Eagle Times, 09/16/20
• “I Watched ‘Cuties’ So You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 09/17/20
• “I Watched ‘Cuties’ so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anderson Valley, California Advertiser, 09/18/20
• “I Watched Cuties so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 09/19/20

“Most voters in six 2020 swing states,” an early September CNBC/Change Research poll finds, “do not consider either President Donald Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden mentally fit to be president.”

In Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 51% consider Trump mentally unfit for the office, while 52% feel the same way about Biden. Biden holds steady at 52% nationally, while Trump’s unfitness number ramps up to 55%.

Frankly, I find those numbers surprisingly low. No, not because both Trump and Biden are clearly narcissistic sociopaths. Nor because the two of them frequently and publicly behave and speak in ways consistent with dementia or brain damage.

Yes, those things are disturbing, but they’re not anomalous. Most if not all politicians are sociopaths, and at least one (Ronald Reagan) suffered from dementia while still in office and remains well-remembered by many.

The problem is the idea that any human being is even remotely “mentally fit” to the office of President of the United States as that office exists today.

George Washington presided over a federal government weaker than any of the 14 then-existing state governments, boasting a population smaller than that of Los Angeles alone today, lacking foreign territories or possessions, and for the most part eschewing foreign policy entanglements.

Donald Trump presides over a too-strong federal government and a sprawling global empire. He rules a population of more than 300 million at home — nearly 3 million of them employed by that government itself — and complicates the lives of billions around the planet with military interventions, economic sanctions, election meddling, etc.

Washington’s writ ran as far as he could plausibly (and personally) lead an army on horse.

Trump, like other recent presidents, can order a drone strike halfway around the world on a whim, and is never more than seconds away from a briefcase containing the codes for consuming the planet in nuclear fire.

Who can be trusted with that kind of power? Whose IQ and moral fiber are up to mastering it, using it wisely, resisting corrupt temptations, and exercising monumental self-restraint? No one, that’s who.

Even if the US Constitution’s original restraints on presidential power still held, and they haven’t for more than a century, the duties of the office are just too inherently complex for a single manager to do well, and  too lucrative and empowering to avoid attracting corrupt megalomaniacs like Trump and Biden and their hangers-on.

As a Libertarian who considers my party’s presidential nominee, Jo Jorgensen, a trustworthy human being who’s likely competent to any doable task, I’d like to believe that if elected she would (with the help of a hostile Congress) rein in the office, shrink its power to back within constitutional limits, and begin dismantling the post-World War Two imperial project.

But even a Libertarian president would merely be a stopgap solution to the problems the presidency itself represents. Until we rethink  not just who we allow power over us, but how much power we allow them, we’re increasingly exposing ourselves to both social and physical extinction.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “No One is ‘Mentally Fit’ to be President,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 09/14/20
• “No One is “Mentally Fit” to be President,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 09/14/20
• “No one is ‘mentally fit’ to be president,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 09/15/20
• “No One is ‘Mentally Fit’ to be President,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 09/16/20
• “No One is ‘Mentally Fit’ to be President,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 09/18/20