I am going to express some unfashionable opinions. Not JK Rowling level, but I suppose near enough. Bear with me...
The US is built on its somewhat silly constitution. If you think it is the 'greatest nation on earth', you are pre-committed to having to live with those rules.
However disappointing it might be for American liberals that one of the greatest of their own should be replaced by a woman they might consider a bigoted nut job, that is just the way America works.
As an unbeliever I can observe that until it is possible to run for the highest office without paying lip service to the supernatural, the fundamental issues will remain.
I guess with time these things iron themselves out. As an outsider I cannot see why the current POTUS, appalling as he may be, is not entitled to try to to force through his pick before the election.
Even if he fails, it will probably happen anyway as he is lame ducking around maliciously. His party and his viewpoint seem a bit doomed medium term anyway.
Perhaps the bigger worry is the way the judiciary is being more permanently sucked into the culture war.
There have been concerns about this in the UK in the past few years, perhaps in the other direction towards a more expert, metropolitan tendency, but judges are surely academics rather than politicians per se, and there will always be polarities that ought to be respected.
As for Breonna Taylor, I'm coming at this one from a position of greater ignorance. I studied the US Constitution at Cambridge not their contemporary, occasionally unhinged law enforcement system.
Yet some time before Lewis Hamilton started sporting that shirt, I swotted up on the circumstances, and this did seem to me to be one of those incidents where the people giving das orderz and the people issuing the warrants were possibly more to blame than the trigger happy cops at the sharp end this system.
1 comment:
"Perhaps the bigger worry is the way the judiciary is being more permanently sucked into the culture war. "
You only have to revisit two decisions The Scott decision pretty much doomed the US to a Civil War and Separate but Equal is the reason we are still fighting that war. It has always been political. The Senate, weighted heavily toward the low population states, has been a problem from the start. It is only getting worse as the US becomes more urban .
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