Tag: The Verge

It involves Bigfoot erotica and a Virginia congressional race. Perhaps we should back up first. It started with this tweet from Leslie Cockburn, a Democrat running for Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District. It includes a screengrab of her Republican opponent Denver Riggleman’s Instagram page, where he apparently posted what one could only call Bigfoot erotica. This is not what we need on Capitol Hill. Vox did an explainer. What should matter, in this case, is policy. From Lux Alptraum in the Verge: “By making a candidate’s sexual interests a part of the campaign rhetoric, we’re sending the message that the kind of smut you’re into is as important as your policy platform. It discourages talented people from even considering running for office because they don’t want their careers tanked by an accidental glimpse into their erotic psyche. Worst of all, it distracts from meaningful discussions of candidates’ actual merits and qualifications — in the specific case of Riggleman, it turns the conversation away from his truly monstrous affinity for normalizing white supremacy, a trend that is growing more widely acceptable in American political discourse by the day.” (h/t: Will Lager)

McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation. Writing in the wake of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and the turmoil of the 2000 election, the political scientist Keith Whittington noted the speed with which commentators had rushed to declare the country on the brink of a constitutional crisis—even though, as he pointed out, “the republic appears to have survived these events relatively unscathed.” Whittington instead proposed thinking about constitutional crises as “circumstances in which the constitutional order itself is failing.” In his view, such a crisis could take two forms. Whittington, Levinson and Balkin all agree that the notion of a constitutional crisis implies some acute episode—a clear tipping point that tests the legal and constitutional order. What exactly is the crisis here? Another problem with thinking about America’s current woes as a constitutional crisis involves the question of what comes next. Still another problem with the term is that the duration of the crisis is not clear. There’s a better term for what is taking place in America at this moment: “constitutional rot.” Constitutional rot is what happens, the constitutional scholar John Finn argues, when faith in the key commitments of the Constitution gradually erode, even when the legal structures remain in place. It’s also what happens when all this takes place and the public either doesn’t realize—or doesn’t care. Balkin used the same phrase immediately after the firing of James Comey to describe what he saw as “a degradation of constitutional norms that may operate over long periods of time.” Comey’s firing was startling, he argued, but not a constitutional crisis in and of itself. The question is whether we can collectively bring that infection under control before we face an acute crisis.