What Swing Voters Should Know About the Economy, Immigration, and the Death of Liberty*
Before November 5, I’ll post the last of my closing arguments.
As a reminder, however (and though they may be indistinguishable at their intersection), please do not confuse Trump’s pure evil with his cognitive decline and mental illness.
With all the noise, I’m sure it’s difficult to convey what’s really at stake in this election to the small number of voters who will make the difference but have only begun to engage. Those select voters in battleground states are now inundated from every source with blasts of attack ads, sound bites, and carefully crafted (dis)information on issues the polling and focus groups suggest matter most to them. The economy and immigration, which I discuss below, are among those at that top of the crowded list.
Also at or near the top of the list, the extreme supermajority on Supreme Court removed from the Constitution women’s right to make their own reproductive healthcare decisions. That should be reason enough to vote for Vice President Harris. My argument below goes further, however, because that extreme supermajority signaled its intent to pull the plug on the remaining liberty interests it put on life support in Dobbs. The only way to reverse that inevitability is electing a president who will nominate reasonable jurists and keeping a majority in the senate who will confirm them. See The Supermajority on the Supreme Court is the Overarching Reason to Vote for President Biden in 2024 (by the author) (written, obviously, before President Biden withdrew as the Democratic nominee).
Economy
I wouldn’t try to dissuade swing voters from including the economy in their calculous. If they could cut through the dissonance, however, they would know that America’s economy, the envy of the world, “is bigger and better than ever,” according to The Economist; that tariffs are taxes United States citizens pay on imported goods which, if imposed as Trump radically proposes, “could wreck our economy” according to Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in Economics; that The Wall Street Journal, known for its conservative views, opined that Trump’s policies would reverse the downward inflationary trend and create significantly higher deficits than those under the Vice President’s detailed proposals; that the booming economy Trump claims he once created was actually Obama’s economy which Trump inherited then proceeded to destroy; and that Democratic administrations have been successfully cleaning up the disastrous supply side messes left by every Republican predecessor since the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Immigration
Nor would I try to disabuse swing voters from thinking that immigration remains a problem fraught with human rights issues, which it is throughout every administration. Again, if they could negotiate the confusing maze of information, they would recognize that the number of migrants crossing into the United States illegally reached the smallest number since August of 2020; that the Biden administration is on pace to match Trump’s deportation numbers; that undocumented immigrants have lower rates of crime than U.S. born citizens in virtually every category; that immigrants are essential to a thriving U.S. economy, help keep inflation in check, and pay one in every six tax dollars to federal, state, and local governments; and that Trump killed the most substantive and far-reaching bipartisan border bill in decades to prevent President Biden from having a “win” and to save his campaign from descending into irrelevancy. As Vice President Harris said about the bipartisan border bill during her debate with Trump:
“That bill would have put more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking in guns, drugs and human beings, but you know what happened to that bill? Donald Trump got on the phone, called up some folks in Congress and said, ‘Kill the bill.’
“You know why? Because he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Liberty
I would, however, attempt to direct swing voters’ focus to one of the most significant and lasting threats to the American experiment: the politicization of the United States Supreme Court and its demise as the guardrail against constitutional overreach by the states and the overtly political branches of federal government. With the Federalist Society’s hat trick creating an extreme supermajority on the court, the historically “bedrock principle” of stare decisis no longer holds significance on key concepts, such as “liberty.”
Stare decisis is the idea that “today’s Court should stand by yesterday’s decisions — ‘a foundation stone of the rule of law.’ Application of that doctrine, although ‘not an inexorable command,’ is the ‘preferred course because it promotes the evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles, fosters reliance on judicial decisions, and contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the legal process.’” (Citations omitted.)
As Fulton County, Georgia Judge McBurney ably explained in his recent decision finding portions of that state’s anti-choice law unconstitutional:
“Ultimately, the Constitution means only what the courts tell us, and the Supreme Courts of the States and the Nation have the controlling voices in that discussion. Unsurprisingly (one would think), this results in different meanings being prescribed to the same words, phrases, and provisions as different minds and sensibilities take their turn discerning that meaning. In other words, the meaning of the Constitution is no more fixed than is the composition of the majority in the highest court of the land — especially when formerly bedrock principles such as stare decisis — appear to be on the wane.”
Ruling in Sistersong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective v. Georgia, at 2, note 2. One week to the day after Judge McBurney issued his decision, the Georgia Supreme Court reinstated the six-week ban pending appeal.
In Dobbs, the supermajority on the Supreme Court began the process of eviscerating the constitutional doctrine that solidifies individual rights to make “certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and belief,” rights that have “been woven into the societal fabric” for the majority if not entirety of most Americans’ lives.
Before the high court terminated 50 years of reproductive autonomy from government interference by overturning Roe with Dobbs, Trump and his nominees to the Supreme Court gave us reason to disbelieve the sworn testimony the latter gave to the Senate and American people that Roe was settled law. In Dobbs, we see the demise of substantive due process, the constitutional doctrine that “affords protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child-rearing, and education.” With the supermajority on the court, “[t]hese matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, . . . central to liberty” are now suspect, and may no longer be “protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. . . . [T]he heart of liberty” no longer assures “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life.” Justice Antony Kennedy, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.
The supermajority on the Supreme Court now threatens significant additional rights of individual autonomy from government intrusion including rights to contraception (which Trump recently called into question), interracial marriage, sexual activity between consenting adults, same-sex marriage, and the right of parents to direct the custody, upbringing, education, care, and control of their children. If Justice Thomas had his way, the court would revisit and reverse every substantive due process/right to privacy case from Griswold v. Connecticut, decided in 1965, forward. (The Supreme Court in Griswold held that a married couple had the constitutional right to privacy in the use of contraception without interference by the state.)
Last month Justice Elena Kagan characterized the supermajority’s originalist approach to Dobbs and confirmed the anticipated demise of constitutionally recognized liberty and privacy interests, saying that women were not free to have abortions earlier in the country’s history. “That’s the entirety of the majority’s reasoning. Then you say the same thing for contraception. Then you say the same thing for interracial marriage. Then you say the same thing for gay marriage. . . . I don’t think you are overreading the bigger question.” Kagan Sees Threats to Everyday Rights Beyond Abortion
Leaving such decisions to the whims of 50 different states fosters uncertainty and inconsistency. As for abortion, red state extremists are meddling in the rights of their citizens to obtain reproductive healthcare in states that recognize women’s bodily autonomy and privacy. I have previously written about these matters. The Usual Suspects Are Trying To Suppress Abortion In States Where It’s Legal; Will SCOTUS Uphold Compulsory Pelvic Exams Of Interstate Travelers? When the Supreme Court yanks other rights out of the Constitution, you should expect the same red state extremists will meddle in their citizens’ efforts to obtain contraception, enter gay marriages, and marry persons of races different from their own in states where those rights continue to be recognized.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.
**Richard J Van Wagoner is my father. His list of honors, awards, and professional associations is extensive. He was Professor Emeritus (Painting and Drawing), Weber State University, having served three Appointments as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts there. He guest-lectured and instructed at many universities and juried numerous shows and exhibitions. He was invited to submit his work as part of many shows and exhibitions, and his work was exhibited in many traveling shows domestically and internationally. My daughter Angela Van Wagoner, a professional photographer, photographed more than 500 pieces of my father’s work. The photographs of my father’s art reproduced in https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner are hers.