#hyperpartisan

A hyperpartisan Supreme Court is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Back in the 50s, voting patterns from Democrats and Republicans on the court were almost indistinguishable. That has drastically changed. Democrat-appointed judges now vote liberal almost 90 percent of the time, with Republican-appointed judges voting liberal not even 15 percent of the time.

Why is this such a big deal? Because the Supreme Court no longer has even the appearance of an impartial mechanism that interprets existing law. Interest groups pour money into producing judicial candidates that will bolster their cause. Both sides look at Supreme Court seat openings as a battle in a war, trying to get the Court on their side so they can implement whatever laws they want. This is all especially true of conservatives today, but don’t think liberals are innocent.

It’s pretty obvious at this point that people in Trump’s inner circle colluded with foreign adversaries.

We already know enough to call it collusion: Donald Trump Jr. attempted to coordinate a meeting where he would receive political dirt on Hillary Clinton. That such a meeting is collusion should be obvious to anyone, but what makes it glaringly obvious is that those in Trump’s inner circle aren’t even trying to defend it. They’ve moved on to the defense that, since collusion isn’t a crime, it’s not a big deal.

It helps to step back and look at just how far America has descended.

Donald Trump is not the beginning of this downward trend. We have been experiencing it for the past 50 years, ever since political parties were weakened in the process of choosing candidates for general elections. Strong political parties, despite the public’s disdain for them, are one of the main reasons our democracy still stands today. People fall prey to demagoguery, and while democracy needs to be a process where the people choose their elected officials, there also needs to be a balance between pure democracy and a democracy where there are gatekeepers that safeguard the country from extremists.

Problem is we don’t really have strong political parties anymore. The Republicans have completely lost it, embracing pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and shedding any last semblance of rigorous intellectual thought. Democrats have seen a movement on the left taking form, with activist organizations pushing back against what they see as centrist orthodoxy.

So what comes next? Who knows. America may never see a dictator or an autocratic regime take over, but we’re already seeing democracy fragment. Long-standing norms are being shredded as chaos dictates politics. Hyperpartisanship has created a system where primaries are producing more and more extreme candidates, and where gridlock is the norm in Washington. Support for democracy is fading in America, with more and more people signaling that they’re okay with non-democratic means of ruling.

Peter Orszag, Bloomberg - Our political system is so plagued by polarization, it’s difficult to move any legislation forward. In the late 1960s, significant overlap existed in votes cast by the most conservative Democrats in Congress and those cast by the most liberal Republicans. (See accompanying chart: Polarization in Congress.) By the late 1980s, the common ground had diminished. Today, it has virtually disappeared.

What’s causing this? Many people have said the problem is that Congressional districts have been redrawn to be as partisan as they can be, to keep politicians from each party in office as long as possible. (Optimizing the district lines in this manner is a harder problem than it may initially seem, as research by two Harvard economists has shown.) Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, for one, has blamed “the gerrymandering of political districts,” which made each one permanently Republican or Democratic, for “erasing the political middle.”

So, presumably, we could solve the problem by simply changing the rules on how congressional districts are drawn. A closer look at Congress, however, shows that redistricting isn’t a major cause of our polarization at all.

Compare, for example, historical trends in the House and the Senate. Senate districts are states, so they aren’t continually redrawn as congressional districts are. And yet the polarization patterns in the House and Senate have broadly tracked each other. (See accompanying chart: History of Congress.) Polarization between the two parties was relatively high in both houses for the first three decades of the 20th century. It dipped in the House and Senate alike from the mid- 1930s until the late 1970s, and then began climbing to record highs today.