Beware the Bubbles
They feel cozy. But they also deafen.
We are now two days away from MAGA’s novus ordo seclorum, which will be launched indoors because it will be 22 degrees on Monday, a temperature that is apparently considered arctic in DC. Actually, it’s the same temperature as JFK’s 1961 inaugural, which went ahead outside despite a wind chill of 7 degrees.
Those of us from Wisconsin would like a word. But it does occur to us that if DJT has a problem with the cold, wait until he hears about what it’s like in Greenland, Canada, and other places he wants to annex.
Happy Saturday.
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Bubbles, bubbles, everywhere
By now, we all ought to know how dangerous bubbles can be. We live in a world shaped by alternative reality silos and we’ve seen how those echo chambers have deranged the right. (I even wrote a book about it.)
But bubbles don’t just happen. It turns out that lots of folks actually want them.
They want to hear what they want to hear. They want the hopium and the wish-casting. They want the safe space. They want all of their preconceptions stroked and priors fluffed. And there are more than enough outlets and voices willing to engage in this sort of fan service.
But as cozy as it might make us feel, the echo chamber is deadly because they also deafen. I talked about this in my live chat with Chris Cillizza yesterday— and highlighted three prime examples in the news this week:
The progressive congressional staffers who thought this was a good time to ask for a 32-hour workweek.
The report that Joe Biden’s pollsters may have created a bubble within a bubble about his grim numbers.
The extraordinarily widespread — and misleading — belief that the Equal Rights Amendment has suddenly been added to the Constitution.
Of course, all of this pales beside the torrents of bullshit flowing from the new Administration. But they are warning signs, because wish-casting and tone-deafness are not winning strategies.
Let’s start with the staffers, who evidently sat around someone’s efficiency apartment amid bags of uneaten kale chips the week before the Trumpian restoration and decided to write a letter asking for a 32-hour week. Of course, hilarity and outrage ensued the moment the letter saw the light of day. The notion that Democratic staffers would go part-time as the GOP took control, was met with universal derision. Faced with the blowback of reality, the young, entitled staffers have since backed down.
But as a mental exercise, try to imagine the groupthink and extraordinary bubble of the staffers who were so tone-deaf that they thought this was a good idea.
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Then there is the new reporting about the Biden bubble. We knew it was a problem (I wrote about it last summer), but it may have been worse than we thought. This week, the NYT reported that Senate leader Chuck Schumer met with Biden in mid-July to deliver a blunt message.
If there were a secret ballot among Democratic senators, Mr. Schumer would tell the president, no more than five would say he should continue running. Mr. Biden’s own pollsters assessed that he had about a 5 percent chance of prevailing against Donald J. Trump, Mr. Schumer would tell him — information that was apparently news to the president.
What? Seriously, what? How could the President of the United States not know what his own pollsters were finding? But that, unfortunately, is how bubbles work. In this case the consequences were fateful.
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I’ve saved this for last: You can tell if someone has fallen into a wish-fulfilling information bubble if they think that the Constitution was amended Friday by presidential fiat.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.
The story began with President Biden’s announcement that he was “affirming what I have long believed and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: The 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.”
Democratic politicians and activists rushed to declare victory. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand declared that Biden’s action “makes it clear that the ERA must now be considered the law of the land.”
That claim was echoed throughout friendly social media, and amplified by Laurence Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan in The Contrarian, which declared, “The Equal Rights Amendment at Long Last.”
Alas, to the contrary, Biden’s declaration does no such thing.
No matter how much folks want to make it true, presidents cannot simply declare the Constitution amended.
When it passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, Congress set a seven-year deadline for states to ratify it. The last state to approve the amendment, Virginia, did so in 2020, long after the deadline had passed. (Several states had also rescinded their approval.) Even at the time, its vote was seen as largely symbolic.
The National Archivist, who is responsible for enrolling new amendments, has repeatedly said that the ERA has not been lawfully ratified, citing a legal opinion drafted by Biden’s own Justice Department. "In 2020 and again in 2022, the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice affirmed that the ratification deadline established by Congress for the ERA is valid and enforceable."
Even as he declared his belief that the amendment had been ratified, Biden declined to order the government to finalize the process by officially publishing it. The NYT clarified what all of this means — and does not mean:
Under the Constitution, however, the president has no direct role in approving amendments and his statement has no legal force by itself. The archivist of the United States, a Biden appointee, has refused to formally publish the amendment on the grounds that it has not met the requirements to become part of the Constitution.
Despite the rush to declare the 28th Amendment ratified, Russell Berman writes in the Atlantic, “That’s Not How Constitutional Amendments Work.”
Biden’s proclamation, writes Berman, “will likely have no more significance than the farewell address he delivered on Wednesday. It is an affirmation of values, an aspirational statement for posterity, but not an actual decree.”1
No less a progressive legal luminary than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2020 that advocates of the ERA would need to start the process over because the deadline for ratification had passed.2
And here is AP’s fact-check:
Does Biden's action on the ERA change anything?
Not really. Biden's move is largely symbolic, and it's unclear if his statement will have any impact. Presidents don't have any role in the amendment process. And the leader of the National Archives has said that the amendment cannot be certified because it wasn’t ratified before a deadline set by Congress.
So, no matter how well-intentioned, the announcement Friday was misleading, raising hopes that are certain be dashed. Maybe it can be defended as a motivational tactic — a gambit to force attention to the issue.
But Ruth Bader Ginsburg had it right: If you want the Equal Rights Amendment, you need to start over and fight for it — not simply declare victory with a bogus declaration.
I would like to report a murder
Katie Miller is the wife of Trump’s homunculus Rasputin, Stephen Miller. This week, she took a shot at former Vice President Mike Pence who urged the Senate to reject RFK Jr.’s nomination.
Miller complained that Pence had once fired her, and declared that he was now politically irrelevant. Former Pence aide (and anti-Trump warrior) Olivia Troye wasn’t having it.
Exit take: chef’s kiss.
A word from our readers
Your Saturday dogs
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Via The Atlantic:
In 2021, a federal judge dismissed a case brought by two states seeking to have the ERA recognized; two years later, an appellate court affirmed the ruling. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a staunch supporter of the ERA, opposed the effort, saying in 2020 that advocates needed “to start over” because the deadline had elapsed. In 2021, the House passed a resolution to repeal the deadline, but it never cleared the Senate. And just last month, the archivist, Colleen Shogan, and the deputy archivist, William Bosanko, issued a statement saying that they could not legally publish the ERA, citing “established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.”
Via AP:
“There’s too much controversy about late comers,” Ginsburg said. “Plus, a number of states have withdrawn their ratification. So if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said we’ve changed our minds?”
Ginsburg has previously expressed the view that the amendment “fell three states short of ratification.”
Ginsburg has been a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment for decades. And her standard response to the question of how she would improve the Constitution is to point to the ERA.
Ginsburg said Monday she is often asked, “Haven’t you, through the vehicle of the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause” gotten to “the same place where you would be with the ERA?” She said her answer is “not quite.”
Re. Olivia Troye. YOU GO GIRL!!
And JFK went to his inaugural without a hat (and ended men’s hat-wearing evermore).