1. Democrats still unlikely to win both houses of Congress and hold it for more than 2 years. Assuming RBG and Stephen Breyer retire immediately upon election of President Biden, that's still only 4 liberal judges. Next oldest judge is Clarence Thomas, but unless the coronavirus takes him out or he gets hit by a bus, he's not going anywhere anytime soon. President Biden is not gonna stuff extra judges into the Supreme court.

2. Campaign finance reform is dead in the water until they overturn the Supreme Court case that ruled money is speech. See above.

3. Eh, good luck with that. That's probably another area where President Biden won't want to spend his political capital, and the FCC is going to be pretty toothless. Besides, putative fairness is easy to game, you'll get plenty of reporting of the "Republicans say earth is flat, Democrats disagree" variety.

4. Good luck with that also. Even if you could make Facebook and Youtube vet their content, and even if they could do it technically and logistically, the right wing crazies will migrate to their own sites, as they have been doing over the last few years. These guys are opportunists chasing eyeballs, and as long as the eyeballs are there, somebody's gonna monetize them. Attempts to regulate mainstream media platforms will, at least in the short run, fuel their sense of persecution and increase distrust of institutions.

It actually takes a few weeks to eliminate the right from the Supreme Court: pass a law raising the number of justices to (say) 21 then appoint folk who want to crush corporate power. Destroying the right as a power on the Federal judiciary won't take too much longer, just apply the same steps. The rest just flows from there. Besides, we need more judges in most circuits anyway; corporations file way too many suits against other corporations, and until that ability is pruned back through real tort reform we simply need more staff to deal with it.

Btw, we now know why Trump seems eager to sign the Senate disaster relief bill. McConnell and his boys snuck in a $170 billion dollar tax cut for real estate developers on (I hear) page 208. Something to remove in a later bill, obviously. Though it looks like the House may actually come to town to vote because of a Republican; if that happens there may be some trimming from the Senate's Republican wish list. I can see Pelosi actually just removing that provision to enrich Trump and his ilk then daring the Senate not to pass it. Heck of a hill to have to die on for McConnell and his very endangered swing state buddies.

I think that the political blowback from trying to pack the Supreme Court would be devastating for the Democrats. They would run the risk of losing support from the moderate side of the party while motivating the Republicans’ supporters.

What political blowback? No one would be bothered but the creatures of the right. If the hypothetical moderates gave a damn then the GOP would have been blown out of the water after the last Supreme Court fiasco. Not a peep. The Democrats can do whatever they want without any fear of the so called moderates.

Oh, and Trump has apparently been forced against his will to pretend to use his power to order suppliers to make emergency supplies; so he told someone to make ventilators. Supposedly. Months too late and without a word about the rest of the critically short supplies. Gosh, thanks.

Oh, and I got one of Trump's campaign mailers from the CDC. Glad to know he felt free to make off with public health money to try to steal another term so he can steal everything else that isn't nailed down (and more importantly, stay out of prison).

Plus, looking at the quote they excerpted, it really really looks like he actually was saying Coronavirus was a hoax. The part that was cut just provided more context.

Incredibly, many moderates actually care about the stability of institutions. If the Democrats start monkeying around with the number of justices on the Supreme Court, there's nothing to stop Republicans doing the same next time they're in charge. And they will be sooner or later. And then it's banana republic, here we come. The blowback will be enormous, and there is no way President Biden, Advertised Safe Bland Moderate would risk it. He might be persuaded to put term limits on the length of service of Supreme Court justices as experts have advised this as a way to defuse the deathmatch partisanship of appointments, but I find this unlikely too. Structural reforms aren't his thing.

In other news, the federal government is sending more medical aid to swing states than blue states. Florida's getting 3 times their requested supplies. Massachusetts, Maine and Colorado are getting dribbles. They sent broken ventilators to California. Red staters and swing staters will genuinely have a different experience of the crisis. Can you say "client state"?

The ad would have been just as effective if they had left the part in where he said the hoax was Democratic hype while the case ticker kept climbing. I say they edit the extra what 5 seconds in, and then rerun the ad. Malicious compliance.

I think there are people, whos first priority is, that the boat is not rocked too much, and they are mostly with the democrats now. Anatagonizing them would be risky.

Now i suppose there are ways to eat your cake and have it too. Like you add 5 positions to the court and fill 2 with really leftwing judges and then propose a constitutional amendment, that requires a fillibuster or other form of supermajority for future appointments to the supreme court and future changes of the number of justices.

Not that i think Biden would go for something like that.

Naah, add 20 and the Republicans can't answer tit for tat. There would already be too many. it's why the fights over district court judges aren't as bitter; too little bang for the buck. Besides, they'd never win national power again in our lifetimes if this program was followed; the minority party of flyover country losers and psychopathic greedheads can't win elections without crimes and cheating, and they wouldn't be able to do that any more. Hell, Trump just admitted it out loud. No, they'd have to give up being completely evil to get back into power; and if they did that they wouldn't be the GOP any more and it wouldn't much matter.

Now that we see Trump admitting it would be an unexpectedly good outcome if only 100,000 Americans die from his epidemic handling it'll be interesting to see if dying to own the patriots stays in fashion. In and so much as Fox is terrified that they are directly legally liable if anyone stupid enough to trust them gets the disease and dies of it, it might not. We'll see.

In other news Trump has announced that he's going to give the entire half trillion dollar slush fund the Democrats were foolish enough to give him to his buddies without any oversight or restrictions. No wonder the market ticked up.

And a note related to my thread in GC: Cuomo went up 54 points owing to this epidemic in the polls. Trump went up three or four despite his daily briefing reality show and willing national media accomplices; having done so he's still no better than he's done before. And he's trailing Biden by 2-9 points among voters nationwide. He'd better help steal that half trillion buck slush fund fast.

They could take a bunch out again. Sacking justices for political reasons is a classic illiberal democracy move. It'll be a box on the banana republic bingo card.

As for Trump, he'll cycle through the entire aspiring demagogue crisis exploitation playbook before his roulette wheel ends on "you're screwed". Blame the Chinese. Blame the Democrats. Blame something irrelevant Obama may or may not have done. Deny statistics. Blame the state and local level. Blame science itself. Pose heroically. Conveniently have government agencies fail to collect statistics. Blame blue states for infecting red ones. Blame medical workers. Have Fox News report nothing but grimly inspiring stories of heroism from the front lines. Pose heroically again. Blame immigrants, or possibly gays. Funnel aid into red states. Force their governors to sing his praises on national television to guarantee continuation of said aid.

It should wear thinner as time goes on, but I don't expect him to acknowledge reality for more than a couple of days before reverting to egotistical flailing. He'll be back to hate tweeting within 48 hours.

And here we have a case of different government levels with different plans, that both make sense, leading to the worst possible outcome.

The federal government wants to be strict on closing non essential public places. The state* government of Vienna believes, that it is neccessary to be able to get out a bit for many people, who live in cramped city apartments, while they still should take precautions like keeping distance from other people. For that reason, in Vienna parks that are owned by the federal government are closed, while parks that are owned by the state are open. Which means you can still go to some parks, but they are fuller, because park goers concentrate there.

Personally i am sofar happy to stay indoors, safe for a weekly trip to buy groceries. But then i am alone in my apartment so i don't have the problem of stepping onto each others toes and my apartment is AFAIK a bit above the averge size for one person apartments.

* or city, Vienna is both a state and a city

Just because...there's a company with a line of simple, low cost ventilators. The US government paid to develop it. But they're not making any and Trump refuses to tell them to. So we can expect the contractually specified 10,000 units in mid-2022 while they continue to sell their higher priced model to whomever wants it for whatever the market will bear. Oh, and it turns out that Trump has used the Eisenhower era law to force companies to produce for the government thousands of time so far...he just refuses to do it when it will cost his buddies in the medical supplies line anything.

And it's going to be interesting to see what will happen with that aircraft carrier which has over 100 detected cases on board. They're asking for orders/help, but we have no Secretary of the Navy to give them any. The last one was fired for refusing an illegal order of Trumps, and so far as I've heard no one has even been named as a replacement. So just who is supposed to make that call now? Trump can, sure, but really?

This didn't take long. Cops are now using social distancing legislation to harass protesters and pro-democracy businesses.

On the 31st of every month, people lay flowers at the entrance of a subway station where a brutal police beating took place back in August. In the last few months, the crowds have dwindled and the cops pre-emptively camp at the subway station to remove any flowers as soon as they appear and arrest people en masse. Last night they put people in batches of 5 to search and then arrested them for gathering in groups of more than 4.

As restaurants have been required to place tables 1.5m away from each other and serve parties no larger than 4, cops are aggressively "inspecting" pro-democracy restaurants and taking down the ID numbers of all the customers.

The captain of the Theodore Roosevelt, a US navy aircraft carrier, had to do an end run around the White House to shame them into saving his crew from an outbreak of the coronavirus. Needless to say the worthless yes-man Trump's got running the Navy sacked him for it. But at least he got his crew taken care of.

It might be interesting to see if when competent and patriotic civilians are running the Navy again his case gets revisited. Until then I suppose there's plenty of papers that need pushing on land somewhere.

Trumpists are still insisting it's all a hoax. Among the rumours circulating online, there's no footage from inside US hospitals because they're not packed, they're hiding the fact that blue state hospitals have been shuttered and emptied just to make Trump look bad. Nobody knows any real coronavirus victims. Nobody has interviewed any coronavirus survivors. The media is using fake footage from other countries. The hospital tents are all for show. If people are dying it's because the hospitals are deliberately not treating them, again just to make Trump look bad. I swear if these people have a friend or relative drop dead they will conclude it was a fluke. And they'll claim that everyone else's grieving relatives are paid actors.