1. He wouldn't have gone against the consensus on masks, once it emerged.

2. He wouldn't have gotten in pointless stupid endless fights with the governors or his own health agencies.

3. He wouldn't have modeled the stupidest behavior possible during a pandemic and almost certainly wouldn't have gotten himself infected.

4. He wouldn't have touted dubious treatments and then gone with regeneron when his own health was at stake.

<I'm running out of people who I think can be honest about this. <jls> and <Everett> are still standing. Can't think of anyone else.>

Yeah, you got me. Secretly I think Trump did a great job.

<He was dealt a bad hand in some ways>

<You think? Great economy, spectacular job numbers, terrorism hasn't been an issue, Arab countries playing nice with Israel.>

I don't give him a scintilla of credit for the first three, and don't care about the fourth.

<As for Covid, he did ban the flights from China>

That particular myth has been exploded, hasn't it? The pseudo-ban did no good anyway.

<, got 30,000 (unneeded) ventilators to NYC>

"unneeded"

<and has facilitated a record smashing vaccine development.>

Yeah, no incumbent but Trump would have cared about getting a vaccine done. What does this facilitation consist of, anyway?

< That vaccine is what'll take care of all this anyway, maybe for Biden, who'll take credit for it. >

But if she's confirmed, I think ACB is going to matter less than many liberals fear and many conservatives hope. To see why, let's examine the current Court lineup through the lens of a case decided last term, <Bostock v. Clayton County>.

There are three solid liberals: Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan

Three conservatives: Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh. I left out <solid> because I suspect Kavanaugh is going to start drifting left, and I think that's a good chance Barrett will too. But I'm not asking anyone to trust me on that. Let's assume there will be four conservatives.

That leaves Chief Justice Roberts and Gorsuch, who are centrist or conservative depending on your priors.

In <Bostock>, the Court held that discrimination against gays and transgender people fell within the definition of "sex discrimination," which is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

No one who voted for or against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 thought it prohibited discrimination against homosexuals or cross-dressers, which are the closest terms to gay and transgender in use 56 years ago. In particular, the notion that there might be a category of persons called "transgender" that were entitled to the special solicitude of the law, as opposed to a small group of depraved and mentally ill men who enjoyed wearing dresses, was not even on anyone's mental horizon.

The conservative, "originalist" holding for <Bostock>, then, would have been that gays and transgenders were outside the coverage of the Civil Rights Act, because the legislators at the time had not intended to protect them. If Congress wanted to place gays and transgenders within the scope of the Act, of course, it was free to do so by amending the Act, but the Court wouldn't do it on its own.

But that's not what happened. The Court voted 6-3 that gays and transgenders <were> within the coverage of the Civil Rights Act. Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion and the Chief Justice joined it, along with the four liberals (Ginsburg was still alive). Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voted no. (Kavanaugh nevertheless offered gushy congratulations to the gays and transgenders he'd just voted against -- I've never seen such a thing. That, along with his record of hiring large numbers of female and non-white clerks (he far outdoes the Notorious You-Know-Who in the latter category) and the general *sinister* hydraulic pressure on Supreme Court justices, see Roberts below, is what makes me think Kavanaugh is going to start drifting left.)

Gorsuch's opinion was sophisticated and well-reasoned, but its lodestar was not "what did people mean by sex discrimination in 1964?" but "what do people mean by sex discrimination more recently/now?". With that framing, the answer was foreordained. I'm not saying his approach is right or wrong (the truth is, originalist readings of the Civil Rights Act have not been too common in prior Supreme Court cases); I'm saying it's not conservative. I think his opinion didn't come as a surprise to people who have followed his career closely; I'm not one of those people.

Roberts has been drifting left, measurably and consistently, for a decade or so. I can track down a graph illustrating this (really!) if anyone doubts it. He is on record for caring a great deal about the "institutional legitimacy" of the Supreme Court. Those words strike the cold chill of death into the heart of any judicial conservative, for what they mean in practice is trying to gain the favor of the small number of law professors, legal journalists, and interest groups that pay really close attention to what the Court does. Since all of them skew overwhelmingly left, anyone concerned about "institutional legitimacy" is going to tugged that way himself, herself, or itself.