It's OK to be apathetic about indifferent voters. Plus: Court packing. And, CNN in the middle?

Gary Abernathy

Many voters are indifferent. It’s OK to be apathetic about that.

In every election, millions of Americans are indifferent about voting. We should be mostly apathetic about trying to change that.

That’s my argument in my latest Washington Post piece:

But the true culprit behind low turnout isn’t a political effort to suppress the vote. It’s a more basic condition that knows no partisan, racial or socioeconomic boundary: apathy. Millions of people — affiliated and unaffiliated, of all races and backgrounds — don’t vote for many reasons, including because they simply don’t care. It matters not to them who holds office, or which ballot issues are approved or defeated. It is a choice perhaps not to be admired, but, in a free country, one to be tolerated…

…Whether suppression has occurred should not be gauged by the level of participation, but rather by whether eligible voters were denied a reasonable and equitable means to exercise their franchise when they wanted to. Total voters are mostly determined by the level of enthusiasm for the issues or candidates in any given election. We cannot, and should not, require people to care, nor devise too-clever legislation designed to overcome apathy when the privilege of determining the makeup of our government is not inspiration enough.

You can read the whole column at this link. Depending on how many Post articles you’ve already read this month for free, a subscription might be required.

Dems marching forward with court-packing agenda

The most ludicrous and outrageous idea in many years is the one coming from Democrats about adding members to the U.S. Supreme Court – i.e. “packing” the court.

The “need” for this, as far as the left is concerned, arises because the court has become too conservative, especially after former President Trump had the opportunity to appoint three members to the court. Some describe the ideological makeup of the court as 6-3 in conservatives’ favor, although Chief Justice John Roberts has hardly been a reliably conservative vote.

Now, as reported in USA Today, “Democrats will introduce a bill to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices, Rep. Mondaire Jones said Wednesday night.” The confirmation came after Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked a question during a Judiciary Committee hearing about an online report claiming such a move was happening.

"Our democracy is under assault, and the Supreme Court has dealt the sharpest blows," Jones wrote in a tweet. "To restore power to the people, we must #ExpandTheCourt."

Democracy is “under assault” apparently because a Republican president had the opportunity to appoint justices to the court, as prescribed by the Constitution. That’s a remarkable line of reasoning. Democrats obviously didn’t complain when liberals controlled the court for decades.

President Biden has announced a commission to “study” the court, including whether to expand it. Such a move would be one of the most blatantly partisan abuses of power in history.

CNN is in the middle? I’m still laughing.

Introducing a podcast interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, the New York Times set it up with the following in the print version: “…the American media diet has shifted from a wholesome balanced meal (think Walter Cronkite) to a sugar-laden hash of angry prime-time programming (think Fox News). CNN is somewhere in the middle.”

ARE YOU SERIOUS?

Describing CNN as “in the middle” is a blatant admission of the location on the political spectrum where anyone offering such a description resides. Describing CNN as “somewhere in the middle” is like referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “a calm voice of reason.”

There’s no doubt that Fox News operates from the right. To pretend that both CNN and MSNBC aren’t Fox’s polar opposites, operating firmly from the left, is to oblivously wear partisan blinders.

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