I just got around to reading that Paul Waldman column in the Washington Post that David Harsanyi criticized here the other day. It’s even worse than David wrote.
Waldman is arguing that Republicans are using the Supreme Court to achieve policy aims they can’t get through the normal legislative process. He writes:
Republicans know that it would be politically impossible to enact many of their ideas at the national level; you might have noticed that when they controlled the White House and Congress in 2017 and 2018, they did not try to pass legislation that would outlaw abortion, repeal state-level gun regulation or disband the Environmental Protection Agency.
But they can have the Supreme Court do it.
Well, no, we can’t. The Supreme Court is not going to outlaw abortion — as Waldman concedes parenthetically a few sentences later. It’s not going to disband the Environmental Protection Agency, either. Also, the Republicans did try to outlaw some abortions in 2017–18. The measure failed only because of a filibuster. They also tried to liberalize state gun laws.
That’s a lot of error to pack into two sentences.