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The new oped from Segal and Teachout — along with our ongoing reporting — shows why you shouldn’t believe Democrats who always insist they are powerless.
“Premature assertions of hopelessness are endemic to establishment Democratic politicians,” Segal and Teachout write. “This even passes for savvy: If nothing ever happens, because you convince yourself nothing can be done, then you’re never wrong.”



But Democratic naysayers like Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse are indeed wrong — Segal and Teachout write that they consulted with “a dozen experts who told us the insiders were too pessimistic, and circulated a memo with 19 different ideas” of what both the Senate and House could do to stall the nomination.
And yet, on Thursday the New York Times reported that “Democrats have opted against using parliamentary tactics to grind the Senate to a complete halt to try to delay a confirmation vote until after the election on November 3, as some progressive groups have demanded.”
To know that this is a preemptive and unnecessary surrender, just ask yourself: If Republicans were in the minority, what would McConnell do?

Whitehouse added: “We also know that if we’re going to take back the Senate in a race in which decency and normalcy versus Trump’s behavior is very much an issue, and Trump is desperate to try to make Democrats look as badly behaved and dangerous and odd and extreme as possible, we want to be very careful about playing into that narrative.”

Janko Suvar wrote:

As of the Casey ruling, before viability the state policy may not pose a substantial obstacle to a woman’s obtaining an abortion, but the state can regulate in the interest of the life of the fetus. Casey also stated that after viability the state can regulate with an exception for health of the mother,” Barrett said. Barrett predicted that it was, as of 2013, “very unlikely” that the Supreme Court would “overturn Roe, or Roe as curbed by Casey.”

“The fundamental element, that the woman has a right to choose abortion, will probably stand,” Barrett continued. “The controversy right now is about funding. It’s a question of whether abortions will be publicly or privately funded.”

Erős Pista wrote:Segal and Teachout write that they consulted with “a dozen experts who told us the insiders were too pessimistic, and circulated a memo with 19 different ideas” of what both the Senate and House could do to stall the nomination.

Atlantic wrote:Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution? I’m not so sure. If you think we’re going back to the America that used to be—with a single cohesive mainstream culture; with an agile, trusted central government; with a few mainstream media voices that police a coherent national conversation; with an interconnected, respected leadership class; with a set of dominant moral values based on mainline Protestantism or some other single ethic—then you’re not being realistic. I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things. We’re too beaten up for that. The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.

The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s? Personal trust can exist informally between two friends who rely on each other, but social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter. Social trust is built within the nitty-gritty work of organizational life: going to meetings, driving people places, planning events, sitting with the ailing, rejoicing with the joyous, showing up for the unfortunate. Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.

The period between the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 and the election of November 2020 represents the latest in a series of great transitional moments in American history. Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.

For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust. But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped. It ripples across society as multiplying moments of beauty in a storm.