Looking Ahead at 2021 (not predictions)

 (Photo by Danil Aksenov on Unsplash)

“Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.”
Margaret Atwood 

I am an eternal optimist and feel confident that our future is bright. I envision that we will build a more equitable and just world over the next few decades, but the journey to get there will not be without hardship. However, the next few years are likely to get rockier, based on the current cultural, political and economic realities.  

There are five realities that exist and, based on how we navigate these or allow them to unfold, we will determine if the New Year turns out to deliver on the optimism we are feeling, with covid-19 vaccines rolling out and a new, more stable and predictable US President taking office, or if it ends up being no better, or even worse, than the previous year.

One: Vaccine Rollout and Anti-Vaxx Movement
Vaccinating 330 million Americans is going to be a Herculean task, not to mention vaccinating 7.8 billion people. Nothing on this logistical scale has been attempted since WWII. Adding to the complication is the fact that some vaccines will require two doses or need to be stored at temperatures that most storage and medical facilities are unable to accommodate, especially in poorer countries.  In America, we are already seeing major hiccups in the rollout with states not receiving the promised number of doses, healthcare workers turning on each other to cut in line and even one clinic accidentally giving patients antibodies instead of the vaccine. The Trump administration’s goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of December will fall woefully short with only 2.1 million doses being administered as of 29^th December.

Even if the Biden administration ensures a smoother rollout and everything goes according to plan, which it never does, it will take until the third quarter before 90% Americans are vaccinated, to enable herd immunity. This does not account for the growing anti-vaccine movement around the globe and here in the US. The latest Gallup poll found that only 58% of Americans say they trust and are willing to take the Covid-19 vaccine.

Since wealthy countries have hoarded the initial available vaccines, their populations will be vaccinated by end 2021. Other high-income countries like China, India, Brazil and Russia will take until mid-2022 to vaccinate their populations. As a result, low-income countries will not be able to procure vaccines until mid to late 2022, and will take till end 2023 if not early 2024 before they can able deliver mass vaccinations. And we are still months away from developing a vaccine for young adults and children, who have not been a part of the initial clinical trials.

It is easy to forget that there can be no return to normalcy until the majority of the world has been vaccinated, given our interconnectedness through trade and travel. We saw record-breaking Christmas travel in the US, showing that people are starting to let their guard down when we can least afford to. At the same time we are witnessing the worst global spike in cases and deaths since the virus was detected, and have also discovered a new mutation that is 70 % more transmissible than the previous strain. It was first found in the UK but has already shown up in South Africa, India, United States and thirty other countries. Based on these realities, before things get better, I fear the worst of the virus is yet to come in early 2021.

Two: Stock and Big Tech Unreality vs. Small Business Apocalypse

(Source: New York Times)

This one chart says it all. The red line indicates stocks, while the blue and green show GDP and job growth, respectively. While all three took an unprecedented hit at the start of the pandemic, stocks have now climbed back to historic highs, while GDP and jobs lag substantially behind their pre-pandemic levels.

Since the 1920s average Americans and politicians viewed the stock market as a proxy for the US economy, with its peaks suggesting brighter days and troughs indicating tougher times ahead. However, this pandemic has made it clear that Wall Street is now completely detached from Main Street. With access to cheap capital through bond markets, deep cash reserves and global reach, these larger corporations can withstand economic shocks and remain profitable in ways that small businesses simply cannot.

Consider that the five largest listed companies Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook have all seen double digit profit increases this year, and each will exit the crisis in a more market dominant position than prior to it. Contrast this with small businesses that have suffered disproportionately, with over 43% reporting significant to severe impact.

Recent data shows that 60% have closed permanently, which is a 23% increase in the number of closures since mid-July. One of the worst hit sectors has been the restaurant and service industry, accounting for 82% of the jobs lost since February. In California alone, due to the severe lock downs, the National Restaurant Association predicts that 43% of restaurants will permanently close. Given that small businesses account for 48% of private sector employees in the US, the economic devastation of this crisis will linger for years to come. 

Three: Uneven Economic Hardship & Social Instability
Some ten million Americans are unemployed, and over one million filed new state and federal unemployment claims in the last week of December. More than four million people left the workforce, between February and November, meaning that they are no longer actively seeking employment. According to economists this skews unemployment numbers, showing a drop when it is actually a reduction in labour force participation.

Another worrying trend is the increasing number of people who have been out of work for more than six months. About one-third of the total unemployed are now long-term unemployed. That people are actively looking for work but still unable to find employment indicates a problem in the labour market’s ability to match skills with goods and service needs. Not a good sign.

This crisis has also disproportionately affected women and minorities. Women’s job losses account for 54% of overall net jobs lost. Of the 12.1 million women’s jobs lost, more than 2 in 5 have not yet returned, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Among Black men the unemployment rate is around 11.3 percent, which is 5 percent higher than the rate for white men. To put this in perspective, never during the Great Recession did overall unemployment rates surpass 10 percent.  

 In addition, the crisis has exacerbated the wealth gap that already existed between minorities and whites, with job losses concentrated among minorities and low wage earners, according to the Brookings Institute.  

This widespread economic hardship is represented in the fact that the number of Americans living in poverty has grown by more than 8 million since April this year. Nearly 1 in 4 households are now experiencing food insecurity. An analysis by Northwestern found that food insecurity has tripled in households with children; reaching an all-time high of 29.5%.

In addition, there is growing housing insecurity. Millions of homeowners are now struggling with mortgage payments. A Harvard study finds that more than 6 million homeowners entered mortgage forbearance this year due to loss of income, and nearly half (44%) of these households earn $25,000 or less per year.

Many of these issues represent deeper systemic problems that cannot be fixed by a vaccine or simple policy prescriptions. The reality is that we may be three to four years away from gaining back the jobs that have been lost during this pandemic. Economists are already warning us about a K–shaped recovery that worsens and exacerbates pre-existing economic and wealth disparities. 

Four: Growth of Trumpism & Our Deepening Divide
Far from being a decisive victory for Democrats, the 2020 election showed a resilience of Trumpism. Biden won the presidency with the same number of Electoral College votes as Trump did in 2016. Far from witnessing a Blue Wave, we instead saw Democrats lose ground in national, state and local legislatures.

Latino voters flocked to Trump in Florida, Texas and New Mexico. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that Trump improved his performance in every Texas County with a Latino population over 75 percent. Trump also measurably increased his support among Black voters, including over 18 percent of Black men, 34 percent of Asians and 28 percent of the gay, lesbian and transgender community. Even in New York, a solidly Blue state, Mr. Trump increased his vote share within immigrant rich districts in Queens and the Bronx.

If there is any doubt about the broad appeal of Trumpism among the working class and minority voters, we need look no further than Robeson County. It is the largest county in North Carolina and possibly the most diverse in the nation. Robeson is 42.3 percent Native American, 30.6 percent white, 23.6 percent black, and has a growing Hispanic population. It came as a shock when Trump won this formerly Democratic county in 2016, with 67 percent vote share, but in 2020 he increased it to a whopping 81 percent.

On a national level, rather than seeing a healing of divisions that came into sharper focus during the divisive 2016 election, the 2020 election map shows a more entrenched electorate with far fewer counties flipping from one party to the other. In the last election 237 counties changed allegiances from Obama to Trump, in this election only 77 counties flipped.

American’s divisions are not just political but also seep into bi-partisan institutions that require trust for our democracy to thrive. Only 10% of Republicans polled by Gallup say that they trust the media. This is a dramatic decline even from the 30% and 36% who did during eight years of the Obama and Bush administrations, respectively. According to Gallup we now have the largest gap recorded between the two parties since they started conducting this poll in the 1970’s.

As we head into 2021 we can expect these differences to become even more extreme at a time when the left does not believe that the New York Times is ‘woke’ enough, and the right is abandoning Fox News for not being far-right enough.

Five: Democratic Party Civil War
Any party that fields 27 candidates for their presidential primaries, which is the largest number in history, is both leaderless and visionless. Republicans only had 18 candidates during their disastrous 2016 primaries which ended with a hostile takeover of the party by Donald Trump. Imagine a company stating that they have 27 candidates vying for the CEO’s job during a leadership succession – would you invest in them?

Much like the Republican Party, the rifts we see in the Democratic Party have been growing for a number of years. Like the Tea Party who targeted and removed moderate Republicans, this rebel group, who call themselves Democratic Socialists, are intent on remaking the soul of the Democratic Party from the inside. Waleed Shahid, a Bernie Sanders campaign alumnus who now recruits progressive candidates for Congress, was asked if this far-left group was the equivalent of the House Freedom Caucus, his answer was unequivocal: “Yes, it is”.

Even before the new administration takes office, Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez, the most outspoken member of the Squad, has called for the ouster of current Democratic leadership. In the past she threatened her moderate colleagues, saying she would put them on a list to oust them in primaries if they made attempts to reach or work across the aisle.

After a poor showing by Democrats in the 2020 election, despite facing an unpopular and polarising incumbent, the knives have come out and the battle lines drawn between the moderate and progressive wings. The divisions were best summed up by Rep. Spanberger (D-Va.) when she said: “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. … We lost good members because of that”. President elect Biden too was heard on tape asking civil rights activists to stay quiet about overhauling police, echoing what many in the party believe; “That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police”.

It is easy to forget that Progressive Democrats had written Biden off during the primaries, and were also not happy about his selection of Kamala Harris, who is viewed as being too establishment friendly. It is true that Progressives grudgingly coalesced around Biden in order to defeat Trump, but any group that is simply united by hatred for an enemy and not by a common vision is in danger of self-destructing when it comes time to govern. 

The bottom line is that at a time when the Democratic caucus is about as divided as it has ever been in its history, they also have a razor thin majority in Congress. They have 222 members with 218 being the bare minimum votes needed to pass legislation. With the smallest majority any party has had in two decades and given the deep internal divisions, it leaves them vulnerable to losing a handful of members. There is also a strong possibility that Republicans will regain control of the Senate after the runoff races in Georgia, They just need to win one of those races for the wily Mr. McConnell to remain as the Senate Majority Leader.

 

2020 Election: Biden Won and the Democratic Party Lost

“A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.”
-Winston Churchill

That President Trump was going to lose this election was a foregone conclusion in my mind because he lost his one and only advantage - a strong economy. The historically unprecedented job and wage growth, especially among women and minorities, was wrecked by a global pandemic. This coupled with Trump’s inept leadership and lack of national strategy to manage the spread of the virus doomed his re-election bid. In addition to a struggling economy, Trump had a historically low approval rating, with which no incumbent, other than Harry Truman, has ever won re-election.

Going into the election, the Democrat’s also had an unprecedented fundraising advantage at every level. Biden’s campaign raised $809 million; more than any candidate in history, and entered the last month of the race with a three to one advantage over Trump. In Senate races, Democrats raised $716 million, to Republicans' $435 million, giving them an advantage of more than $280 million.

In Maine, Sara Gideon raised $69 million compared to Senator Susan Collins's paltry $26 million. In South Carolina Jaime Harrison raised $57 million in a bid to unseat Senator Lindsey Graham, achieving the highest quarterly fund-raising total for any Senate candidate in U.S. history. In Kentucky too, Amy McGrath consistently outraised and outspent Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. History tells us that candidates who spend more in Senate races overwhelmingly win their races; Democrats were confident they would retake the Senate.

For four years the media and the left have painted Trump supporters as bigots. Liberal coastal elites in newsrooms across the country had convinced themselves that once the vast majority of the country saw Trump’s true colours, thanks to their efforts to unmask him, the majority of Americans, apart from a small and shrinking rural, uneducated white base, would come to their senses.

For this reason Democrats and the mainstream media assured us that we would witness a historic Blue wave that would result in Democrats winning the White House, retaking the Senate, growing their majority in the House, winning back Governorships, flipping state and local legislators. They were even confident of turning deep red states like Texas, blue, thanks to the growing number of Latino voters; even though Texas has been reliably Republican since 1980.

Along with an unprecedented campaign war chest, in 2020 Democrats also had a likeable candidate and America was facing an out of control pandemic, a struggling economy, historic unemployment and a President with a dismal approval rating – how did it go so wrong for Democrats, again?

The story on election night turned out far different from the confident narrative we heard going into the 2020 election and far from seeing a blue wave, the opposite transpired. 

Not only did Democrats fail to unseat Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham, but in Kentucky, Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell by 20 points, making it the worst loss in that race since 2002. Republican Senators Joni Ernst, Dan Sullivan, John Cornyn, Steve Daines and Thom Tillis are all still standing. In races where Democrats outspent their opponents, they won 13 and lost 9. In races where Republicans outspent them, they won 8 races and lost zero.

 

(Data: FEC, Edison Research for the National Election Pool. Graphic: Reuters)

The story in the House is no better. Democrats lost their 35 seat advantage, with a Republican gain of 10-15 seats, and are now left with the smallest House majority in more than two decades.

At the local level where Democrats expected to chip away at the three-fifths majority of the 98 local legislative chambers that Republicans controlled, not only did they fail to flip even one, but they lost New Hampshire. The same story was repeated in Governor’s races. Republicans not only successfully defended all seven seats but flipped a Democratic one; giving them a 27 to 23 state advantage as new terms begin.

Yes, Biden won the White House but this too happened after five nerve wracking days, with far too many races too close to call for many days after the election. His victory is less than resounding or convincing and this should concern us all. Consider that if just 44,000 more votes had gone Trump’s way in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin, we would have a tie.

The truth is that the election felt more like a red surge. The Democrats' claim that Trump’s surprise 2016 win was in large part due to Hillary Clinton being a flawed and polarising candidate herself does not hold true when we see that the President earned nearly 10 million more votes than in 2016, gaining six million more votes than Mrs. Clinton.

Latinos are the fastest growing group in the United States and this year for the first time in a presidential election, they numbered more than eligible African-American voters. Far from losing ground, the man who put immigrant children in cages actually increased his support winning a 32 percent share of Latino voters. 

Latino voters powered Trump to a convincing win in Florida. A state that Democrats had expected to win going into the election. In Miami-Dade, which is 70 percent Latino, Trump picked up 200,000 more votes and closed a 30 point gap to 9 points. While it is true that about a quarter of Miami-Dade residents are Cuban-born, this group has historically supported Republicans, so their support alone cannot explain the gains Trump made here.

In Texas, counties with Latino majorities favoured Trump, marking a massive swing from just four years ago when Democrats dominated all these counties. Zapata County in Texas, which is 95 percent Latino, and one Mrs. Clinton won by 33 points in 2016 - Trump flipped in 2020, winning it by 6 points. A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that Mr. Trump improved his performance in every Texas County with a Latino population over 75 percent.

Even in the neighboring state of New Mexico, which is nearly half Latino, Mr. Trump picked up many more votes from four years ago. Counties like San Juan in the Northwest and Otero County in the Southeast with heavy Latino populations all moved closer to Trump.

Mr. Trump also measurably increased his vote share among Black, gay and Asian Americans. It is pretty remarkable for a man who has been labelled a white supremacist to grow his support to 12 percent of Black people, including over 18 percent of Black men, not to mention 34 percent of Asians and 28 percent of the gay, lesbian and transgender community. Amazingly, the President’s LGBTQ vote share doubled from 2016.

If all these facts were not damning enough, in dozens of interviews with the New York Times, African-American voters who chose Biden say they voted for the Democratic Party with great trepidation and a longstanding concern of feeling underappreciated by the party they have stood by for decades. One voter summed up what many African-Americans are feeling about Democrats, saying that they have not “earned his vote — or his loyalty.” He added that “my vote is open for bid — what will you do for me and my kind now that the election is over?”

Even in California, one of the most liberal states in the country, while Biden trounced Trump as was expected, what came as a shock is that Democrats lost many down ballot races. Republicans are now expected to win back at least four of seven seats they lost in 2018. The last time Republicans managed to defeat an incumbent Democrat in California was in 1994. In this election they have already done it three times with a few races still too close to call.

Californian voters also handily rejected progressive ballot measures around raising business taxes, instituting rent controls, protecting gig workers and reinstating affirmative action. They also helped the GOP regain their status as the second largest party in the state after falling behind “no party preference” registration in 2018. With the 2020 election results, Republicans in California can claim their best year in more than a decade.

The 2020 election map also shows a more entrenched and divided electorate compared to 2016, with fewer counties flipping from one party to the other. In the last election 237 counties changed allegiances from Obama to Trump, in this election only 77 counties flipped, with Biden winning 59 of them.

The bottom line is that the election results show that Mr. Trump’s appeal is more resonant and broader than most people understood. Not only did he manage to grow his base, but he actually found new voters. This reality contradicts the Democrat’s claim about Trump’s 2016 win was a fluke and that the 2020 result would be a total rebuke of this President and his policies – Trump has expanded his appeal by bringing in new and non-white voters.

Rather than try to spin the results as a victory, the Democratic Party should view them as a warning sign that their message is not connecting with many working class voters; white and non-white.

In addition to figuring out how they will tangibly deliver on promises to Black voters, which will not be easy, they should be extremely alarmed by the fact that so many Latino voters chose Trump. This is the fastest growing demographic in the country and if the Democratic Party were to lose their support, it would cost them elections for years to come.

 

Justice Ginsburg, Our Democracy and Doing the Right Thing

Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ride an elephant in India.

(Image: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)

 

"Sometimes it helps to be a little deaf."
-Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I was deeply saddened to hear of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, but have become more concerned with the effect it will have on our ailing democracy. The political battle to fill her seat will provide fuel to an out-of-control partisan fire, forty-five days before what is already one of the most divisive and contentious elections in our history.

Even before RBG’s body was laid to rest, the battle lines were drawn along the predictable partisan lines. Mitch McConnell sounded the Republican battle cry by releasing a statement the same evening intimating that he would ensure Mr. Trump’s nominee received a floor vote on the Senate. Conservative media followed suit with a chorus of approval and a stark warning for their elected leaders that they must proceed “because the Democrats intend to crush us if they can, and if the GOP wimps out, our voters will melt down.”

Liberal media too came prepared for battle. A Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist opined that “if Republicans do give Ginsburg’s seat to some Federalist Society fanatic, Democrats must, if they win back the presidency and the Senate, abolish the filibuster and expand the court, adding two seats to account for both Garland and Ginsburg.” The paper’s editorial board followed with an attempt to rile the liberal base saying “Senate Republicans, who represent a minority of the nation, and a president elected by a minority of the nation, are now in a position to solidify their control of the third branch of government.”

I too felt the anger and moral outrage being expressed by my liberal tribe, and dismay at Mr. McConnell’s hypocrisy. In 2016, he refused to even hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee, saying that it was too close to an election. Now even closer to an election, he is marching forward only because his party has the advantage.

We live in an age where we feel pressure to constantly react on social media, before our brains have time to process, reflect and thoughtfully consider information. We know that our brains function best when we take the time to consider complex issues, rather than react in the moment. Studies show that the more time we spend on social media the more it leads to Groupthink, described by Irving L. Janis’s in his 1970’s book as the “deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures.”

This time I decided not to react. I turned off social media, read what the constitution mandated, looked for historical precedents and spent time reviewing arguments from both sides.

Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution empowers the president to nominate any individual he or she chooses. The nominee must then face hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which votes to send the nomination to the full Senate for confirmation. We can argue about nominating someone so close to an election, but there is nothing in the constitution that prohibits this.

In 1968 President Lyndon Johnson found himself in a similar predicament when he nominated a Supreme Court justice after stating that that he would not seek a second-term. His announcement all but guaranteed that Richard Nixon would win the upcoming election, since the Democrat’s best hope to beat him, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated.

Despite Mr. Johnson’s lame duck status the Republican minority leader Everett Dirksen went against his party and supported the nominee, because he respected his legal brilliance and said it was the right thing to do. Even Nixon who had made appointing law and order justice’s a campaign promise did not oppose it, saying he “would not interfere with the Senate’s right to decide on the nomination.” In the end majority Southern Democrats joined by minority Republicans managed to filibuster the nomination which led Johnson to withdraw his nominee.

In 1992, Joe Biden, then Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, forcefully argued that if President Bush put forward a Supreme Court nominee during an election year, his committee would "seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over". Much like Mr. McConnell explained how the situation in 2016 was different, Mr. Biden too had an explanation for his changed stance after being accused of similar hypocrisy.

Biden had also argued in 2016 that the Republican senate’s reluctance to fill the vacancy could “lead to a genuine constitutional crisis, born out of the dysfunction of Washington…”. This outcome is more likely now with a contentious election that might end up in the courts, especially since we have an incumbent President who refuses to say if he will accept the election result. With eight justices it is possible the court will become deadlocked, which means the decision would default to a lower court ruling.

Democrats also need to accept responsibility for the hyper-partisan nomination processes that we now routinely witness. In 2013, when Democrats controlled the White House and Senate, Harry Reid the Senate majority leader used the ‘nuclear option’ to change a long-standing rule that required 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, to a simple majority. He did this for all executive appointments and judicial nominations, excluding the Supreme Court. The move was considered short-sighted and criticized by scholars, pundits, current and former politicians on both sides. Republican Senator John Thune begged Mr. Reid not to proceed and warned him “What goes around comes around.” In 2016, Republicans back in control of the Senate returned the favour by invoking the nuclear option to appoint Justice Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Interestingly, I came across a 2016 New York Times interview with Justice Ginsburg, where she unequivocally states that it is the President’s duty to fill a vacancy and the Senate’s job to take up the vote. She adds “there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.”

There are many things to admire about Justice Ginsburg but her fearlessness and independent-mindedness are what I most admired. Even though she was a liberal icon, she was never afraid to break from the tribe and stand against the majority view.

She publicly defended Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, saying they were both " very decent and very smart individuals".  She was staunchly against a growing chorus in the Democratic Party that wants to pack the courts. She reiterated this position last year saying that "If anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that – one side saying, 'When we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.” Never shy to express an opinion, she did not agree with Colin Kaepernick’s racial justice protest, saying in 2016 that kneeling for the national anthem was “dumb and disrespectful.”

At a time when a Pew Research survey finds that only 45 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of Republicans say they share any “values and goals” with members of the other party, we need to remind ourselves of her close friendship with Antonin Scalia. Two people who could not have been further apart on the ideological spectrum. As a tribute, Justice Scalia’s son shared a string of tweets showing how deeply his father cared for ‘Ruth’. The late justice once challenged by someone about the fact that his friendship with Ruth had not resulted in any support from her on the bench, responded by saying, “some things in life are more important than votes".

I believe Justice Ginsburg would want us all to remember that we are not warring enemy factions but an opinionated and cantankerous democracy. When a family of four cannot agree on pizza toppings, why do we expect 330 million people to agree on far more contentious issues?

The point is that we need to respect and celebrate not just diversity of skin colour but also of our wildly differing viewpoints. Like every family, we do not have to agree on everything but we do need to find ways to compromise and live together under the same roof. If we continue to blindly default to preset partisan positions, and think of ourselves as us and them, we will only serve to weaken our union and allow adversaries like Russia to exploit these divisions.

At a time when the future of our union is in danger and the credibility of our democratic institutions continues to be imperiled by increasing political polarisation, I believe we the people need to break this cycle of tit for tat partisan escalation.

There is no evidence that Republican-appointed justices destroy the ‘liberal way of life’. In fact, the opposite is true. The data and evidence shows that Democrat appointed justices remain solidly liberal while Republican appointed justices shift leftwards over time. Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, both Reagan appointees moved solidly leftwards, as did John Paul Stevens, who was appointed as a moderate. David Souter, a George H. W. Bush appointee, considered to be solid conservative, became a reliably liberal voice on governmental powers, social justice and equal protection issues. Even Antonin Scalia’s views liberalized from his extremely conservative positions of the late 1990s. More recently, Chief Justice John Roberts has routinely sided with the liberal wing on high profile cases, much to the dismay of Conservatives.

Also, polls show that the Supreme Court remains one of the most trusted institutions, even after Trump’s two appointments, with nearly 70 percent of respondents in an Annenberg Civics Knowledge Survey saying they trust the court to “operate in the best interests of the American people”. Contrast this with Congress’s approval rating, which stands at 18 percent.

Democratic Senator Christopher Murphy said in 2016 that “The president fulfilled his constitutional obligation today, now the Senate must fulfill ours ... If Senate Republicans refuse to consider the president’s nominee, they will be willingly violating the spirit of that sworn oath”. Republicans had zero justification to block President Obama’s nominee. It was nothing more than an unprincipled and calculated political maneuver. But the same holds true now and two wrongs don’t make a right. For this reason, my conscience will not permit me to block hearings and a vote on President Trump’s nominee because unlike Mr. McConnell and his Republican colleagues, I am no hypocrite.

Doing the right thing is never meant to be easy, convenient, or done only when a desired outcome is guaranteed. Following Justice Ginsburg’s advice I am going to be a little deaf to the din of my liberal tribe baying for revenge and break the cycle of partisan vengeance.

I believe it is the right thing to do for the future of our democracy. Some things are more important than political victories.