Eric The Blue

Life in these United States

"9-1-1, what's your emergency?"

"Well, my name is Kayla, and I'm a clerk at Kwik Stop Convenience on Marbury Road. It's getting sort of late, there's only three of us still working, and this weird guy from high school that I turned down for a date last week just walked in carrying an AR-15 with a high-capacity magazine and an ammo belt."

"Kayla! How do you know so much about firearms?"

"Well, I come from a loser family, and my dad and all my brothers and uncles talk about little else at our gatherings."

"But in that case, Kayla, you should understand that your customer is merely exercising his constitutional rights. Give us a call back if he shoots you in the face 7 times in 2 seconds. We'll dispatch the police, but, just so you know, they're not especially quick to confront a guy who has an AR. Thoughts and prayers!"

Recycling

In 2016, after a nut with an assault rifle killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, I tried to rebut some of the arguments advanced by the pro-gun crowd, here. Reading it over again now persuades me that the response to another mass killing is always just another round of recycled arguments and talking point recitals. For example, I noted back then that John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, wrote:

[W]e had an "assault weapons" ban for a number of years in the 1990s, and it did zero good. The homicide rate later dropped dramatically as firearms laws were liberalized.

This is the kind of claim that can be fact checked, and I set out the murder rate (murders per 100,000 population) over a 20-year period, with the middle years in which the assault weapons ban was in effect bolded.  Source is United States Crime Rates 1960-2019 compiled by the FBI. Here's what it looks like:

1990 (9.4)
1991 (9.8)
1992 (9.3)
1993 (9.5)
1994 (9.0)
1995 (8.2)
1996 (7.4)
1997 (6.8)
1998 (6.3)
1999 (5.7)
2000 (5.5)
2001 (5.6)
2002 (5.6)
2003 (5.7)
2004 (5.5)
2005 (5.6)
2006 (5.7)
2007 (5.6)
2008 (5.4)
2009 (5.0)

Contrary to what Hinderaker says, the rate did not drop dramatically after the ban expired. The dramatic drop occurred during the years the ban was in place. But who cares? Yesterday, in a post titled "What to Do About School Shootings?", Hinderaker wrote:

The "solutions" proposed by Democrats are laughable, obviously intended for political gain rather than practical benefit. Banning "assault rifles," while likely unconstitutional, would do zero good. In close quarters, handguns are better than rifles, even short-barreled rifles like AR-15s. In the worst school shooting rampage so far, at Virginia Tech, the murderer used handguns. And when the ill-fated ban on "assault weapons" expired in 2004, the homicide rate went down, not up.

So the last sentence just repeats a falsehood. Either he doesn't know what the data shows, and isn't curious about the truth, or he's a liar. His whole post is laughable, but I'm just going to note a few additional things about the above brief paragraph. Complaining that the Democrats' proposed solutions are "intended for political gain" is his way of admitting that they enjoy broad public support. In theory, the sense of the majority is supposed to prevail, but we have minority rule and the minority is in the pocket of the gun lobby. I'm not sure why he thinks an assault rifle ban is unconstitutional, since he acknowledges that one was in place in the 1990s. By the method of constitutional interpretation favored by conservatives, the North star is always the "original intent" of the authors, and the authors of the Second Amendment could hardly be referring to "arms" that hadn't yet been invented. The next sentence is just a flex showing that, as a real man, Hinderaker knows what weapons are best suited to what circumstances. (It's of a piece with the quotes around "assault rifles" and "assault weapons": he wants us to know that he knows that these are the inapt terms of effeminate wimps who are alarmed by mass murder.) It's true that the Virginia Tech shooter used handguns, but assault-style rifles, often with high-capacity magazines, were used in numerous installments of the ongoing series of slaughters—Orlando, Las Vegas, Newtown, Sutherland Springs, El Paso, many others including, now, Uvalde. That Hinderaker seems to think a handgun is a better choice for killing kids and teachers in their elementary school raises the question: under what circumstances might a private citizen need an assault rifle or, if you prefer, an "assault rifle"?

Since the answer to that question is Never, they should be outlawed, and the purchase of other firearms should be subject to, at the least, waiting periods, background checks, red-flag laws, and age restrictions—the Uvalde shooter purchased his assault rifles legally, together with 375 rounds of ammunition, three years before he would have qualified to buy a case of beer. 

Baptists wilding

This report of the independent commission investigating sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)—"Uff da," my mom would have said. If you have time and a strong stomach, the full report is here. In a box at the top of its title page there is printed the following—

WARNING: This report contains information and descriptions related to sexual assault. This may be triggering to readers who have had similar experiences. We encourage you to care for your safety and well-being. The content of this report is not appropriate for children.

—but I'm not sure this adequately prepares readers for what's coming. Maybe the best summary is by David French, in The Atlantic, here. One way of conveying the generalized corruption, without discussing the details of any particular case, might be to describe how the Report came to be. For years, pew-sitters, ordinary members of Baptist churches, had been making complaints about sexual predators in the pulpit, at church camps for young people, on church staffs, etc. Nothing ever came of their complaints, but over time victims and their families, who knew what had happened in their own lives, spoke up enough, including with each other, so that a kind of critical mass of suspicion built up. At the denomination's 2021 national convention, delegates voted overwhelmingly to commission an investigation by an independent group. The purpose was to settle the question about what might be going on—whether there was actual trouble or just a web of mostly false whisperings. It's on the initiative of these delegates, mostly laypeople, that the Report that landed yesterday exists in the first place. 

And it's brutal. If you're an English major, the Report reads a bit like an exaggeration of a Nathaniel Hawthorne tale concerning some Puritan who, sallying forth into the woods at night for corrupt purposes, discovers that no one is at home in bed like they're supposed to be. Nothing came of all the complaints because the people who should have done something did nothing. To be more precise, they investigated enough to become informed about what needed covering up: a long list of known or suspected abusers was compiled, but nothing happened to the people on the list. They just continued about their business. Frequently the person who might have delivered consequences was himself sexually compromised—not molesting campers, but boffing the secretary on the side, say. I know I'm a bad person because the details sometimes seem to me almost comically lurid. 

Inevitably I suppose there will be comparisons to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. I should be careful, since I'm not an expert, but I think the differences might place the Baptists in an even worse light. The Catholic Church is more hierarchical, so some bad apples high up, like John Nienstedt, can create a pervasive stench. (Though the question arises: how is it that the very worst people seem to be the ones who advance up the chart?) The SBC, which has around 14 million members in the U.S., is comparatively decentralized. It follows, I think, that all these complaints coming in from church members spread across the country were dealt with independently by a local big shot, and none ever did the right thing. It's not a case of corruption seeping downward from the top. The wide base was already thoroughly rotten. Terrible crimes were committed. Nobody called the cops. They made a list, did nothing with it. 

Reading the accounts of various news organizations, another thing that seems to me sort of comical is the manner in which the supposed liberal media tiptoe around an obvious point, which is that these losers have been quite loquacious about the alleged depravity of people who mark their ballots differently from them on Election Day. Again, not an expert, but I believe their Bibles have red-lettered instructions not to worry about a speck of sawdust in their neighbor's eye when there's a plank in their own. 

Dad gets mail

I opened it and, strange to say, prayers aren't all they want. The letter is signed by David Kubal, "President and CEO of Intercessors for America," and concludes:

Please, in the next 24 hours . . .

1. Complete the enclosed PRAYER NOTE TO JUSTICE THOMAS and encourage him with your special message.

2. Include your best gift—$100, $50, $25 or whatever is pressed upon your heart to give—to mobilize more intercessors like you to fuel a movement to turn this country back to God and His will.

I thought about returning the PRAYER NOTE with a "special message" borrowed from "Hannah and her Sisters": "If Jesus Christ were to come back to Earth today and see all that is being done in His name, He would never be able to stop throwing up." But I would have had to use my own stamp. 

When you google "David Kubal," you get to some of his articles at a site called The Christian Post. He appears to have been particularly peppy in the Fall of 2017, when within a few weeks' time he authored "Harvey Weinstine: A Prophetic Glimpse of Hollywood," "Hurricane Irma: Is God Trying to Tell Us Something," and "Should Christians Give Up on President Trump?"  Who knows, Doofus, maybe you should ask Hurricane Irma. Here's Johnny Cash.

 

 

Roger Angell, 1920-2022

As indicated here, I have for the past several Aprils felt an added gram of dread when Opening Day came and went without comment by Roger Angell, the editor and baseball writer at The New Yorker who turned 101 on his most recent birthday. I should have saved it all for 2022 as he died yesterday. New York Times obit here. His colleague David Remnick's "Postscript," in The New Yorker, draws upon Angell's breezy but weighty—it's alchemy—essay on advancing decrepitude, "This Old Man," which I remember made me laugh out loud while I read it one day in a Target Starbucks. It can be funny when it's not you—yet. Before his wits deserted him, my dad liked to say that old age was not for the faint of heart.

I subscribe to The Gray Lady and The New Yorker so preemptive apologies if some of these links take you to a paywall. Fyi, as recently as a few months ago you could get the Times for $3 a week and, for $12, a tote bag and 12 issues of The New Yorker. 

The Times obit mentions the "inventive imagery" with which Angell enlivened his baseball writing, and provides a few good samples, though not my own favorite: he said, of the effect made by an untouchable pitcher quietly accruing a string of strikeouts, grounders, and weak pops, that "the click of another passing inning is like someone closing a door in the next room." His wrap up of the 1975 baseball season, the one in which Carlton Fisk famously motioned from the batter's box for his big fly to stay fair, included what one might think of as an Answer to Critics:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift. 

 

Twins out west

I've loved Twins games on weekday nights on the west coast for around 55 years now. It's at least 54, because I know I was listening, transistor radio under the pillow, on Wednesday night, May 8, 1968, when the A's Catfish Hunter pitched a perfect game against the Twins in Oakland. The box score for that game is here. Back then, the standard starting time for night games was 8:00, and I see that the game was played in 2:28, so it would have been about half past midnight in the central time zone when Rich Reese, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, fanned for the last out. Reese worked the count full, 3-2, then fouled five consecutive pitches before whiffing on the eleventh pitch of the at-bat. You don't fall asleep five minutes after that, and I wonder whether next day I was noticeably groggy in Miss Sime's fourth grade class at Highland Elementary. 

Last night's game against the A's started at 8:40 local time. My kids didn't go to bed till the seventh inning. You know you're old when you think every change seems calculated to remove the charm from life. At least I was able to cut the grass between supper and the start of the game. Also, the Twins won, which is rare: in the last ten years, their record in road games against the A's is 6-23. They've done better everywhere else, including at Yankee Stadium. It can't be the rabid fans urging on the home team. The A's have been a bad draw forever. The attendance last night was 3138. Hunter's perfect game was witnessed by 6298. A lot of the same in the intervening 54 years. Games in their stadium have a weird feel, even on TV. Not enough people to make the low hum of a baseball crowd, and there is so much foul territory that the few who are there, invariably bundled up against the cold, could as well be watching on TV themselves. 

My older daughter is reading for school A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I read again myself in order to talk about it with her. Hot take: Shakespeare's comedies are skillful and amusing but they leave no imprint, and I can't fault an 8th-grader's cold response to fairies in the woods squeezing magic juice on the eyelids of the wrong sleeping lover, etc. Were I in charge of the curriculum and determined to make 8th graders read a Shakespeare play, it'd be Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Macbeth, brutal but brief. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that the plot of "The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby," the play put on by the ridiculous rustics in A Midsummer Night's Dream, resembles closely that of Romeo and Juliet, which was also written in the mid-1590s. It's amusing to think of Shakespeare not taking himself that seriously, and imagining his tragedy played as a farce. 

As a reward for subjecting myself to A Midsummer Night's Dream, last night in bed after the ballgame I started reading Unknown Man No. 89, almost the only Elmore Leonard crime novel that had somehow escaped my attention. The main character is a Detroit process server who, according to the following Chapter 1 description, is a good fit for his occupation:

He decided he liked process serving because he was his own boss. He could work two hours a day or twenty-four; and because he liked it, he usually put in at least twelve. He didn't mind being in the car most of the day. He liked to drive around and listen to music or, about a hundred days a year, a Detroit Tigers baseball game. It didn't matter what place they were in. 

Someone called Leonard "the Dickens of Detroit" but—assuming there’s autobiography in this chacterization—to me he's just my doppelgänger. By the way, though it doesn't matter, the Twins are in first.

Mesmerized by Rich Strike

 

I'm not ordinarily a fan of "the sport of kings" but I've watched this video, which keeps an arrow on Rich Strike through the second half of the Kentucky Derby, maybe forty times now. Just mesmerizing. And you keep noticing new things. At first, I was obsessed with the ground made up: if a movie showed an 80-to-1 underdog coming on like this to win, I'd say, probably with everyone else, "Hollywood!"

And then there's the call. I think the guy was maybe looking through binoculars? He never mentions Rich Strike till he's screamed out that Epicenter and Zandon, "these two," are "coming to the wire!" He plainly thought only one of them could win, last time he'd checked no other horse was within range, but then with around 100 yards to go Rich Strike suddenly invaded his binoculared field of vision. That's a theory, anyway. I give him credit for immediately recognizing that it was the longest shot in the race who had come out of nowhere, seemingly, though the video shows that he came from somewhere—far back, before weaving through most of the field in the last quarter mile to win. 

When the video starts, Rich Strike is in 17th place in the 20-horse field. When the leading horse comes out of the last turn, there's just less than a quarter mile to go, and Rich Strike appears to have moved up to 13th place. When the lead horse Epicenter has one furlong to go, Rich Strike has moved up to sixth. He passes them all in the last 200 yards. 

Is it weird that this horse race reminds me of nothing so much as the 800 meter final in the 1972 Olympics? But Dave Wottle wasn't 80-to-1.

 

 

No big deal

Regarding Alito's draft and the response of Republican politicians who hold federal office—senators and US representatives—the metaphor of the dog who caught up to the car seems apt. For example, Sen. Ron Johnson, the MAGA Republican seeking re-election in Wisconsin this fall, said earlier this week that, while overturning Roe might be "messy," it wouldn't be "that big a change." From an article at madison.com:

Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said he doesn't expect abortion to be an issue in his campaign and said if Roe v. Wade is overturned "it's not going to be that big a change" in Wisconsin despite a law on the books that would ban abortion in almost every instance. 

"It might be a little messy for some people, but abortion is not going away," he told the Wall Street Journal, adding that people would be able to still drive to Illinois for an abortion if Roe is overturned. . . 

Johnson has supported federal abortion bans in the past and praised the leaked draft Roe opinion but said the matter is best handled by each state. Still, Johnson's spokesperson, Alexa Henning, would not say whether Johnson still supports a federal ban.

Pity poor Alexa. I can well understand that she's at a loss about what to say, considering that her boss has taken the "position" that overturning Roe is great, but not that big a deal (though admittedly "messy"), since his constituents will be able to drive to Illinois for an abortion, thank goodness. Before, he was for a federal abortion ban; now, just drive to Illinois, no problem! Dog, meet car.

I wonder who Johnson thinks this message will appeal to.

Meanwhile, back home in the states, where Johnson thinks abortion policy should be set, Republican legislatures are busy drafting laws that would extinguish his talking points. A legislator in Missouri, which is a trigger law state, recently introduced a bill that would make it illegal to leave Missouri in order to have an abortion. A right to travel has long been regarded as inviolable, but the Missouri bill isn't by a long shot the most extreme. I think that honor goes to Louisiana, where the legislature is poised to pass a law that includes these provisions:

I've read it over a few times and feel sure there's only one way to understand this. Louisiana will ban abortion. If a federal law is passed purporting to nullify its state law, Louisiana will ignore the federal law. If a state judge rules that the federal law must be obeyed, Louisiana will get rid of that judge. It appears the bill is unlikely to become law only because the governor, a pro-life Democrat, has described it as "problematic." But it's just by blind luck that the governor of Louisiana isn't a complete lunatic. 

A month ago, I couldn't have imagined anything crazier than Texas allowing private citizens to receive a $10,000 bounty for squealing on someone who performed or abetted an abortion. 

Rockin' the short-sleeved button-down with cargo shorts

Liberals talk of “codifying Roe” but we should aim higher: mandatory abortion unless the expectant mother can prove her clump of cells lacks the potential to become a teenager with opinions about dad’s “style sense.” Why is this so bad? Probably wouldn't even be impressed by the sight of Fred Couples sauntering down the fairway in a bright and busy sweater vest.

 

Team of rivals

A common thread in the memoirs, or tell-alls, of Trump administration officials concerns how they wrestled with the question of whether to resign and finally, having ground their molars to the gum line and converted their wardrobe into a closet of rent garments, decided that as one of the few sane persons in sight they had a duty to persevere—only then could they prevent something calamitous from occurring. The latest contributor is Mark Esper, whose book was published last week. From The New York Times:

President Donald J. Trump in 2020 asked Mark T. Esper, his defense secretary, about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to "destroy the drug labs" and wipe out the cartels, maintaining that the United States' involvement in a strike against its southern neighbor could be kept secret, Mr. Esper recounts in his upcoming memoir. . . .

Mr. Esper, the last Senate-confirmed defense secretary under Mr. Trump, also had concerns about speculation that the president might misuse the military around Election Day by, for instance, having soldiers seize ballot boxes. He warned subordinates to be on the alert for unusual calls from the White House in the lead-up to the election. . . .

Pressed on his view of Mr. Trump, Mr. Esper—who strained throughout the book to be fair to the man who fired him while also calling out his increasingly erratic behavior after his first impeachment trial ended in February 2020—said carefully but bluntly, "He is an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in a position of public service" . . . .

Mr. Esper describes an administration completely taken over by concerns about Mr. Trump's re-election campaign, with every decision tethered to that objective. He writes that he could have resigned, and weighed the idea several times, but that he believed the president was surrounded by so many yes-men and people whispering dangerous ideas to him that a loyalist would have been put in Mr. Esper's place. The real act of service, he decided, was staying in his post to ensure that such things did not come to pass.

These great statesmen all get chatty when they're trying to sell books! Maybe the real act of service would have been to raise an alarm before the election in which the president was trying to secure for himself four more years of dangerous whisperings from his team of assorted kooks and crackpots. The Times continues:

Mr. Esper singles out officials whom he considered erratic or dangerous influences on Mr. Trump, with the policy adviser Stephen Miller near the top of the list. He recounts that Mr. Miller proposed sending 250,000 troops to the southern border, claiming that a large caravan of migrants was en route. "The U.S. armed forces don't have 250,000 troops to send to the border for such nonsense," Mr. Esper writes that he responded. 

In October 2019, after members of the national security team assembled in the Situation Room to watch a feed of the raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Mr. Miller proposed securing Mr. al-Baghdadi's head, dipping it in pig's blood and parading it around to warn other terrorists, Mr. Esper writes. That would be a "war crime," Mr. Esper shot back.

Mr. Miller flatly denied the episode and called Mr. Esper "a moron."

It seems that the context required Mr. Miller to call Mr. Esper "a liar," not "a moron," but perhaps when you are yourself a liar and a moron you reach reflexively for the one you're more sensitive about. 

Finally how funny is Falstaff?

That Falstaff is "Shakespeare's greatest comic character" seems such an accepted opinion as almost to have achieved the status of a cliche. I recently read again the two parts of King Henry IV and, though he makes you laugh, isn't there something pretty uncomfortable about the "jokes"? I mean that the humor is so subversive as to make a shadow over the fun.

These plays famously alternate scenes of the "high" and "low"—the king at court, Falstaff & fellow revelers at a tavern in Eastcheap; the king receiving war counsel from his top advisors, working stiffs on the road complaining about the lack of chamber pots at a cheap roadside inn; etc. It's Prince Hal, heir to the throne, who moves in both worlds. The dramatic interest created in the early scenes concerns the question of whether or not Hal will reform himself, slough off his low friends, preeminently Falstaff, and prove himself worthy of the throne. This he does, and it seems the proof of his reformation offered by the play is the valor he displays in battle against the rebels angry at his father for having deposed the prior king, Richard II. In what feels like the climactic scene in the story of his rise, Hal slays Hotspur, the hot-tempered and fanatical leader of the insurrection. It is (to me) an amusing artificiality that the outcome of this "battle" is signaled by a confrontation between two principals when of course there are actually opposing forces of nameless soldiers trying to kill one another. But you can't really represent that on a stage, and anyway Shakespeare's purpose is to highlight Hal's transformation. The play doesn't appear to treat this story with any irony. The question was whether Hal could pull himself up and do what's needed. He does it. His accomplishment is demonstrated on the stage. It's meant to be satisfying.

But then there is Falstaff. As a subject of the king, one with connections, he also serves—specifically, in "the king's press," that is, conscription. His approach is to press "good householders," "yeomen's sons," "contracted bachelors"—in other words, men of means with obvious reasons for wanting to avoid military service, with the result that they pay Falstaff for an exemption. In this way, he bankrolls his dissipation, and the "soldiers" he ends up with are a ragtag collection of impoverished misfits. When his ways then cross with Hal's, the following exchange occurs:

PRINCE: But tell me, Jack, whose fellows are these who come after?

FALSTAFF: Mine, Hal, mine.

PRINCE: I did never see such pitiful rascals.

FALSTAFF: Tut, tut! good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder. They'll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

Is "funny" the word for this? "What difference does it make, bad soldiers will fill a mass grave as well as good ones—war is butchery." The argument perhaps isn't sincere, inasmuch as it's advanced to cover corruption, but that doesn't make it a less devastating comment on the events of the "high" plot wherein Prince Hal proves his mettle in glorious combat. This is why I say he's "subversive." A bit later, Falstaff gets a little too close to the fighting and expresses fear for his life. Hal, by now gallant Hal, provides high-minded encouragement: "Why, thou owest God a death." He then exits and Falstaff soliloquizes:

'Tis not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air—a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism. 

By the logic of the "high" plot, such a "catechism" needs repudiation, but I don't know when this happens. It just stands as a commentary—take it or leave it—on the elevated affairs suggested by the title, The History of Henry IV. 

Mismatch

The infant mortality rate in different states, which I mentioned here, is generally represented as the number of deaths of persons under age one year per 1000 live births.

There are 13 states that have passed "trigger laws," meaning that a Supreme Court decision scrapping Roe automatically activates an abortion ban in the state. That's how eager they are to outlaw abortion, and the reason they give is that it kills a baby. They sometimes use the word "holocaust." Perhaps, then, it makes sense to see how these states are doing on infant mortality. Here they are, with their infant mortality rank indicated. Source is the CDC.

Wyoming	16
Idaho	20
Texas	22
Utah	24
North Dakota	25
Missouri	27
Oklahoma	33
Tennessee	37
Kentucky	38
South Dakota	45
Arkansas	47
Louisiana	49
Mississippi	50

Not a single one in the top quintile. Eight in the bottom half, and four of those in the bottom quintile. Now that the half-century long project of getting Roe overturned is about to succeed, maybe they can get to work on keeping more of their babies alive long enough to celebrate a birthday. 

One other observation about the news of the day. Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving current justice. He was appointed by President Geo H W Bush a couple years after the 1988 election. There have been eight more presidential elections since then. That makes a total of nine over the span of time all current justices were appointed. A Democrat won five out of the nine, and more Americans voted for the Democrat in seven out of the nine. Yet six of the nine justices were appointed by Republicans. It's five of them who are going to toss Roe. Of those five, three were appointed by a president who took office after being outpolled by around three million. "Elections matter," we're told. OK, but when did people vote for what they're getting?