The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-13)

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A25

SUNDAY Opinion

T

he good news: All hope is not lost for

the Republican Party to recover its

principles.

The bad news: Eighty-six percent

of hope is lost for the Republican Party to

recover its principles.

A week ago, the Republican National

Committee forced GOP lawmakers into a

time for choosing. Its resolution referring to

the violent insurrection at the Capitol on

Jan. 6, 2021, as “ordinary citizens engaged in

legitimate political discourse,” which re-

mains in force a week later, spells it out in

plain language: The GOP stands with the

insurrectionists of Jan. 6.

Elected Republicans have had, at this

writing, a full week to condemn, criticize or

distance themselves from this endorsement

of violence to overturn the results of a free

election. Where did they come down on this

existential question for democracy?

Again, the good news first: Seven Senate

Republicans, including Minority Leader

Mitch McConnell, directly criticized the

GOP’s insurrectionist platform.

The bad news: This means (unless I’ve

missed any others) 43 Senate Republicans

did not. The Republican Party legitimized

political violence, and 86 percent of Senate

Republicans let it stand. Among House

Republicans, the numbers were even

worse.

I’m a glass-is-one-seventh-full type of

guy, so let’s celebrate the seven Senate

Republicans who stood firmly against vio-

lence this past week, including the highest-

r anking elected Republican official in the

land. “Well, let me give you my view of what

happened Jan. 6,” McConnell said. “It was a

violent insurrection for the purpose of

trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of

power after a legitimately certified election

from one administration to the next. That’s

what it was.”

He further pointed out the foolishness of

Republicans siding with criminals over law

enforcement: “I am a pro-police, tough-on-

crime Republican, across the board.”

Yes, McConnell (Ky.) was a chief enabler of

Donald Trump. And yes, he might be

speaking out now to blunt the political

damage. But give McConnell credit: As he

did immediately after the insurrection, he

said the right thing this past week.

So did Republican Sens. Ben Sasse of

Nebraska (who said Jan. 6 was “shameful

mob violence to disrupt... the peaceful

transfer of power”); Lisa Murkowski of

Alaska (“We must not legitimize those

actions which resulted in loss of life and we

must learn from that horrible event.”); Mitt

Romney of Utah (“Nothing could be further

from the truth than to consider the attack on

the seat of democracy as legitimate political

discourse.”); Susan Collins of Maine (“ab-

surd,” she said of the RNC’s position); Rick

Scott of Florida (“what happened on Jan. 6

was wrong”); and John Cornyn of Texas

(“not an accurate description”).

And so did Mike Pence, Trump’s vice

president, when he said on Feb. 4 that

“President Trump is wrong” in claiming

Pence could have overturned Joe Biden’s

victory. “Frankly, there is almost no idea

more un-American than the notion that any

one person could choose the American

president.”

Give them all credit.

But this leaves the grim reality that most

Republican senators (and nearly all House

Republicans) looked at that RNC resolution

endorsing the bloody Jan. 6 insurrection

and left it unchallenged. Several — includ-

ing Kevin Cramer (N.D.), Roy Blunt (Mo.),

Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Lindsey

Graham (S.C.), John Thune (S.D.), Todd

Young (Ind.) and Bill Cassidy (La.) — offered

criticism of the RNC that tiptoed around the

insurrection. A few — Josh Hawley of

Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas (who

recanted his claim that the insurrectionists

were “terrorists”) appeared to defend the

RNC’s pro-insurrection position.

The rudderless House minority leader,

Kevin McCarthy, pretended the resolution

didn’t say what it said. (Rep. Adam Kinzing-

er, who with Rep. Liz Cheney was censured

by the RNC for serving on the House Jan. 6

committee, accurately called McCarthy “a

feckless, weak, tired man.”) And Rep. Elise

Stefanik (N.Y.), the No. 3 House Republican,

came to the RNC’s defense, saying it “has

every right to take any action.”

Each time Trump, or in this case the

Trump-occupied RNC, hits some new low, it

sets off a round of speculation: Maybe this

will be the time Republicans of conscience

finally recoil. Yet it never happens.

Now, a new opportunity: Polls hint that

Trump’s grip has loosened, that people are

more inclined to identify as Republicans

than as Trump voters. From what I’m told,

most Senate Republicans privately agree

with what McConnell and Pence have said.

Both men reportedly have received favor-

able feedback for their bravery — again,

privately. There’s no indication McConnell’s

leadership position is in jeopardy, despite

Trump’s regular “Old Crow” insults.

So where are the other 86 percent of

Senate Republicans? Will they stand with

their leader in saying a violent insurrection

is not “legitimate political discourse”? Or

will they once again cower? Trump claimed

this past week that McConnell “does not

r epresent the views of the vast majority of

[Republican] voters.” The cowardice of

M cConnell’s colleagues proves Trump

c orrect.

DANA MILBANK

The GOP glass

is one-seventh

full, and that’s

being optimistic

BY BILL SAPORITO

W

here I grew up, sports

gambling was furtive but

everywhere. My high

school was in Newark’s

North Ward, then a fading Italian

American neighborhood. Boys who

had certain, um, connections, would

run betting slips for college and pro

football games. The yellow slips

would arrive on Thursday and get

collected on Friday, with payouts

made promptly on Monday.

You could bet $2, or more if you had

it, on as many as four games and with

odds up to 5 to 1. I think of my high

school betting as an education in

probability.

Mine was a Catholic school run by

the Christian Brothers, an Irish order

whose servants did not intervene in

our casual delinquency. (The only sin,

I suppose, would have been betting

against Notre Dame.) Likewise, my

father, a police detective, never wa-

gered on anything but understood

what people wanted — he once apolo-

getically arrested his own barber, who

doubled as a bookie, during a gam-

bling raid. There were no hard feel-

ings between the two, and normal

tonsorial service resumed when the

man got out of the pen. Yeah, it was

Jersey.

It was also Jersey that unleashed

legal sports betting on the nation in

2018, when the Supreme Court struck

down a 1992 law that banned sports

betting in most states.

We, the people, wanted a piece of

the action, and we got it. And the

betting ahead of this Sunday’s Super

Bowl is the biggest action of all. A

record 31.5 million Americans are

expected to bet on the big game this

year.

Americans bet some $50 billion

last year, double the amount in 2020.

In New York state, punters bet an

astonishing $1.6 billion on their mo-

bile devices in the first 23 days from

Jan. 8 of this year, when mobile bet-

ting became legal. That number

pushed the Empire State ahead of the

Garden State in sports wagering. You

can now bet on the outcomes of pro-

fessional and college games in

30 states and D.C., with more on the

way as governments compete for the

tax revenue attached to gambling.

Betting has also unleashed a

b illion-dollar wave of advertising to

attract more customers, turning the

networks into hapless shills. Game

broadcasts now routinely feature bet-

ting information, and you can’t watch

any National Football Leaegue game

without seeing a Manning family

member hustling for C aesars. Fox has

basically merged its NFL coverage

with FOX Bet.

The ads also support an array of

betting-focused programming. In

New York City, you can now watch

“The Betting Exchange” on the

MSG network, “The Bettor Half Hour”

and “Odds With Ends” presented by

DraftKings Sportsbook on MSG+ and

“Place Your Bets” on SNY, all local

sports channels. There’s NBABet on

NBA TV. And VSiN.com, a national

betting channel. Think of it as CNBC,

only for gamblers.

The explosive growth of sports

gambling is yet another piece of our

collective cognitive dissonance: We’re

a nation that is now banning books

while it is making book. We’re expand-

ing legal marijuana to states where

people are still in jail for selling mari-

juana. Texas is limiting women’s re-

productive freedom while promoting

its regulation-free business environ-

ment to out-of-state CEOs. The advent

of crypto is about escaping Wall Street

and the big banks and maximizing

our financial freedom; so is taking the

Cincinnati Bengals and points.

America has always had a conflict-

ed relationship with its vices. Long

before Powerball, the Continental

Congress ran a lottery to finance the

Revolutionary War. We’ve banned

gambling, booze and drugs at various

times in our history, with unsatisfying

results. The proposed solutions —

Prohibition, the never-ending, never-

winnable war on drugs, and the long-

held argument that state-sponsored

gambling is a form of regressive taxa-

tion — rarely find public favor.

For decades, the NFL eschewed any

connection to sports betting, know-

ing full well that in schools, on factory

floors, in Fortune 500 headquarters

and in every gin mill with a telephone

booth, people (including players)

were betting on games. The league

fought hard against New Jersey when

the state legislature passed a sports-

betting bill. But the NFL has never let

hypocrisy stand in its way, whether

that’s in addressing head injuries,

“loyalty” to cities it abandons at the

drop of a new stadium in, say, Las

Vegas or the opportunity to stick its

snout in another trough of money.

Now, the NFL’s bet against betting

is off: The league has deals with seven

betting shops that could generate

more than $1 billion in income. As

usual, betting will peak this Super

Bowl week, when an estimated

$7.61 billion will go up for grabs — a 78

percent increase over 2021.

Legalization hasn’t made betting

any more appealing to me. I’m in a

comically low-stakes football pool

with some journalist friends. I might

buy a $10 spot in the Super Bowl pool

at my local pub, just to have a rooting

interest. The long-term return on

stocks is a far more rational invest-

ment than trying to guess which way a

football will bounce.

But watching Cincinnati return a

punt to the house to cover would be

way more exciting.

Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc.

magazine.

Place your bets, America.

It’s Super Sunday.

WAYNE PARRY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Bettors make wagers at the sportsbook inside the Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City on Feb. 10.

time, the conservative majority stepped

in to put on hold the lower court’s order

that the state draw a new map, in time

for the midterm elections, including a

second majority-Black district.

Whose rights matter? In this case, the

conservative majority airily privileged

the convenience of state legislators over

the ability of Black voters to secure fair

representation — all while pretending it

was simply following the rules rather

than putting a heavy thumb on the scale

for one side.

“Pretending” might overstate mat-

ters, since the majority did not explain

its action. That was left to a concurrence

from Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. Joined

by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Ka-

vanaugh insisted that blocking the low-

er-court order was a simple matter of

maintaining regular judicial process,

letting the case be decided after full

briefing and argument. He invoked what

he described as a “bedrock tenet of

election law” — that courts shouldn’t

“swoop in and re-do a State’s election

laws in the period close to an election.”

Except that Alabama’s primary isn’t

until late May. Absentee voting will start

on March 30 — but that leaves plenty of

time for the legislature to redraw a few

districts. It took just five days to produce

the new map. “Late judicial tinkering

with election laws can lead to disruption

and to unanticipated and unfair conse-

quences for candidates, political parties,

and voters, among others,” Kavanaugh

lamented.

What’s missing here is any expression

— any hint — of concern for the counter-

W

hose rights matter? As the

Supreme Court grapples

with when to intervene in an

ongoing case and when to

hold back, it slings around a lot of

impartial-sounding legal jargon: “likeli-

hood of success on the merits,” “balance

of equities,” “irreparable harm.” But the

fundamental question boils down to the

justices’ conflicting visions of whose

rights they deem worthy of protection —

and whose they are willing to see violat-

ed.

Time after time, in case after case,

from capital punishment to voting, from

pandemic restrictions to abortion, the

conservative justices’ priorities manifest

themselves. They leap to act on behalf of

state officials who might be inconven-

ienced by having to wait for a full ruling;

they are similarly solicitous of religious

individuals who claim that their consti-

tutional protections are being infringed.

Meanwhile, inmates facing execution,

women seeking abortions, minority vot-

ers challenging voting restrictions —

their arguments for urgent intervention

are routinely discounted and rejected.

This judicial double standard was

once again on flagrant display Monday

as the court, splitting 5 to 4, intervened

in an Alabama redistricting case. Afri-

can Americans, who account for 27 per-

cent of Alabama residents, constitute a

majority in just one of its seven congres-

sional districts. A lower-court panel

found that the redrawn districts violate

the Voting Rights Act.

The justices agreed to review that

ruling — fair enough. But in the mean-

vailing rights of Black voters. Inconve-

nience to state officials who have to

scramble to redraw maps or candidates

who aren’t sure about the contours of

their districts? Huge. Infringement on

the ability of Black residents to have

their political voices fully heard? Not so

much.

Alabama has an ugly history of voting

discrimination. Black candidates have

rarely succeeded in winning election,

especially to statewide and federal of-

fice. This case involves a challenge under

the Voting Rights Act, which is supposed

to protect the rights of minority voters.

So you might think those rights would be

given some consideration — especially

since the court intervening to grant a

stay is supposed to be an “extraordinary”

action.

It would be bad enough if the court’s

skewed approach to dispensing justice

were limited to voting rights cases. It’s

not.

Whose rights matter? Not the rights of

women seeking abortions in Texas. The

court has stood by for five months,

allowing the flagrantly unconstitutional

Texas law prohibiting abortion after six

weeks to remain in effect. What interests

of Texas would be grievously harmed if

the law were put on hold while the case is

litigated — and how could they possibly

outweigh the rights of women in the

state to determine whether to continue

their pregnancies? Talk about irrepara-

ble harm.

Whose rights matter? Not the rights of

those facing imminent execution. The

conservative majority (this time with

Justice Amy Coney Barrett disagreeing)

intervened last month to allow the ex-

ecution of an Alabama man, Matthew

Reeves. Two lower courts had said the

execution violated federal disabilities

law because the man lacked the cogni-

tive ability to fill out a form choosing his

preferred method of execution.

The question wasn’t whether the state

could go ahead and kill him — just

whether it would have to wait a few

weeks to do so by a newly approved

method called nitrogen hypoxia rather

than by lethal injection. (Reeves con-

cluded, once someone was able to ex-

plain the form to him, that lethal injec-

tion would be more painful.) A few

weeks’ delay hardly seems like asking

too much.

Whose rights matter? Oh yes, the

rights of religious individuals who claim

they are being discriminated against —

for example, by pandemic restrictions.

In those cases, the conservative justices

are only too happy to hasten to their

defense. Consider the conservative ma-

jority’s indulgence of some New York

synagogues and churches that chal-

lenged pandemic restrictions on in-per-

son services in 2020. As Chief Justice

John G. Roberts Jr. pointed out in dis-

sent, the attendance limits about which

they complained had already been lifted.

When it comes to this Supreme Court,

some rights are more equal than others.

Some state officials deserve deference

and accommodation; others are subject

to judicial second-guessing. This is two-

tier justice, as sloppily reasoned as it is

unfairly dispensed.

RUTH MARCUS

Alabama’s redistricting case shows

— again — whose rights matter to the Supreme Court