Evening Wrap

A fun thing about Democrats is that Democrats can’t have nice things. This has been true possibly forever (what is time), but especially since 2000, when poorly designed ballots placed a presidential election in the hands of a conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, which handed the presidency to the (Republican) guy who may not have actually won. This was par for the course for Democrats, who consistently win more votes than Republicans but have little to show for it. (Thank you, electoral college and partisan gerrymandering.)

To most of us, prisons and jails are a bit of a mystery. They’re tucked away in nondescript municipal buildings or in sprawling rural facilities, where public and media access is limited and strictly controlled. Most of the news that trickles out of the system is filtered through a state press shop, leaving it heavy on legal jargon but short on details. We know that the system is rampant with dysfunction, but we don’t really know what, if anything, is being done to fix it. In the United States, incarceration is simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible.

There are so many examples of Republican rhetoric manifesting into real-life consequences that I literally do not know where to begin. Remember when they spent decades trying to outlaw abortion without understanding abortion, only to be surprised by all of the negative impacts of outlawing abortion? Or when they baselessly attacked the integrity of American elections, only to be whisked to safety after their own voting base stormed the U.S. Capitol in the name of election integrity?

America’s health care system makes no sense. We are the richest country in the world, and also the only developed nation that does not provide universal health care to its citizens. We spend more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, but we’re also one of the unhealthiest nations on earth. Every problem we have is at odds with everything we do to address it. American health care: The bureaucratic equivalent of the shrug emoji.

For at least the next few days, we can’t discuss politics without discussing Georgia, where a Tuesday runoff election will officially (blessedly) end the 2022 midterms. The race is a rematch between incumbent U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and beleaguered Republican Herschel Walker, who must face off once again after neither cleared the 50% vote threshold needed to win outright in November.

I am referring, of course, to Georgia, where a runoff election on Tuesday amounts to a rematch between incumbent U.S. Sen Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and former football star/MMA expert/also-for-some-reason-a-Republican-candidate-for-Senate Herschel Walker. The race is no longer a must-win for Democrats, who clinched control of the Senate after last month’s midterms, but retaining the seat would increase their majority.

A curious thing happened during the winter of 2020, when we stayed at home, washed our hands and wore our masks: The flu essentially disappeared. There were just 1,316 cases between September 2020 and January 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a whopping 99% drop from the same time period a year earlier.

When you think of government or politics, you probably think about the people you vote for — your governor, or state legislator, or city council representative. But lawmakers are only the most visible (and loudest) part of the massive machine that is American government. The real work takes place behind the scenes, where thousands of employees keep the country running in a lot of ways you’ve probably never considered.

Packing the judiciary was a long-term strategy for Republicans, who spent years cultivating conservative judges who would be sympathetic to the sort of right-wing causes that aren’t popular among voters. The most obvious example is abortion, a legally established right that was overturned in June by a newly conservative Supreme Court. A majority of Americans would prefer that abortion remain legal, but they have no say in federal courtrooms, where unelected judges issue decrees based entirely on their own interpretation of an often-vague document written 240 years ago by a bunch of white slaveowners. (The justice system: So much justice!)

It’s hard to cover state government even when you’re focusing on a single state government, because state government is weird. And each one is uniquely weird. Did you know that Wisconsin’s legislative index has a section about cheese? Did you know that the North Carolina General Assembly has a Tomato Sandwich Day? (Did you know that people eat tomato sandwiches?) Nationwide, legislatures can’t even agree on a set number of chambers (thanks, Nebraska).

A manager at a Virginia Walmart opened fire in a break room late Tuesday night, murdering six people and injuring at least four others. Police said there was no apparent motive for the mass shooting, which came four days after another high-profile mass shooting at an LGBTQ club in Colorado, which occurred six days after the last high-profile mass shooting at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. That was a run-on sentence, which bothers me as a writer but bothers me far more as a citizen of a country where mass shootings occur so frequently that they’re impossible to summarize.

As we have discussed here many times, the end of Roe v. Wade led to a big legal mess in many states, as old or badly crafted abortion bans suddenly went into effect. The laws are creating all kinds of worry and confusion for reproductive healthcare providers. The Georgia Recorder reports this morning that the clinics that perform in vitro fertilization are worried that creating embryos in the lab may run afoul of the state’s abortion laws.