Weekly Roundup: Constitutional Originalism and Biblical Literalism
Dan briefs us on the dueling presidential town halls before he and Brad explain the tenets of Constitutional Originalism, a legal philosophy Amy Coney Barrett claims to hold. They compare it to a separate, but related issue--biblical literalism. In both cases, conservative actors claim to hold the "original" meaning of the text in order to combat social and cultural progress. But, as Dan and Brad explain, a century of philosophy and hermeneutics has shown both to be untenable. From there they discuss the voter suppression efforts the GOP has waged in TX, CA, and GA. They wrap up by analyzing the shocking comments from pastor John MacArturthur, who claimed recently that God made Earth a disposable planet for humans to use and then discard. For Brad, this signals a creeping turn to authoritarianism and scorched-earth (literally in this case) politics.
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My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and here with my co-host today, I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Brad, it's good to see you here in California, where I think it's a lot hotter than it is today in Massachusetts.
One of those times when the temperature difference is probably pretty striking.
We have a heat wave, we're worried about more fires, so it's going to be in the 90s today, and I think you're probably getting close to freezing.
Does that sound right?
Yeah, I think tonight actually is supposed to be our first night where we get down to freezing.
There you go.
There you go.
I'm all about it.
So we're both in the teeth of the semester.
I know everyone out there is tired.
I know a lot of you are on online school, online helping kids with their school.
Everybody's working.
Online life.
Online life.
And those of us who are lucky to have jobs and be making our way in the economy this way, we are lucky.
But I also know that it's tough and everyone's struggling in various ways.
So I've got a bunch of things I want to talk about today, Dan.
And Principally, the ongoing Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings and this idea of originalism.
But before we get there, two town halls last night, two competing town halls.
I think a lot of eye-rolling from the American public of just like, what is going on here?
Just want to open this up and say, what did you, you know, what did you take away from this?
Strange, honestly, debacle of we don't have a second debate, we have a town hall from Biden because Trump says he's not going to debate, and then Trump decides he wants his own town hall because he's a toddler, and so that's what we get.
So, thoughts on that?
Yeah, so, I mean, you hit it, right?
So Trump diagnoses positive for COVID, right?
And all of that.
And so the commission on debate says we're going to do it virtually.
Trump, who already, right, it was already going to be a town hall style debate.
And this does not suit Trump.
We've seen this before.
It was on display last night.
We'll get to that in a minute.
But so he says, I'm not going to do it virtually.
Interestingly, I think, I think we mentioned this last time.
Part of the reason he gives is they can cut you off at any time.
In other words, a moderator can actually moderate.
So he bails on it.
Huge tactical mistake for him.
He's behind in all the polls and like one of the only potential game-changing things left are the debates.
I think everybody on his team kind of realized that.
Biden turns around and says, I'll do a town hall, you know, just discussion and lines that up.
And so then Trump, of course, demands one.
NBC gets lots of flack for giving it to him, basically says you're rewarding Trump, not just for giving it to him, but for lining it up at the same time and creating a competing event and all that sort of stuff.
Trump spins it like he requests it and then says that NBC, you know, asked him to do it, he's going to do it, it's not going to be fair, all this other kind of stuff, sort of setting it up so that when he performs poorly he can, you know, get out of it.
Anyway, so you had these two events, I'll admit I didn't Watch it all wire to wire.
You can't watch both at the same time anyway, so it's a lot of jumping around and watching clips.
But it's exactly what you would expect.
It was sort of interesting that, and I don't know if this was NBC trying to push back on the whole critique of doing this and so forth and, you know, extra airtime for Trump.
But Savannah Guthrie, who was moderating it, like just grills Trump for the first 15 minutes or so, doesn't let him get away with like lots of evasions and different kinds of things like that.
He gets very combative with her as he does when he's pressed on things.
And, you know, this sort of is throughout.
So the long and short of it is that overall he did what he does.
He was combative with her.
Lots of vacuous statements about, you know, how next year will be the greatest ever and different things like that because he doesn't really have a plan.
He's been asked lots of times how a second term is going to look and he just says, it'll be great.
You had some controversial things, like what was obviously kind of a pro-Trump person who was situated right behind him, like nodding a lot and things like that.
They've since identified who this person was and things like that.
But on the other side, you have Biden, who's, you know, sort of calm and collected.
And a couple of interesting things, he still won't really address that issue of so-called court packing.
But he also said that his vote for the crime bill in 94 was, in retrospect, a mistake.
I don't know that that's the first time he's said that, but that hasn't been the dominant line.
I found that refreshing.
You have the media, I think, who doesn't know what to do.
They complain about Trump being bombastic and, like, moderators not moderating, but then when they do moderate, they say that they're going easier on Biden than Trump.
They say that it's not substantive enough, but then they critique Biden for being too long-winded and too policy-focused.
The long and short of it is, you hit it on the head.
I don't know, and I admit I'm not good at sort of putting myself into the headspace of undecided voters.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how somebody can be undecided at this point.
Um, but I don't know that this is going to change anything.
I think it certainly didn't help Trump.
I don't know that it hurt him, but I didn't think the first debate was going to hurt him like it did.
And if it didn't help him, then it's, it's a win for Biden.
Biden at this point is, is very much playing to maintain a lead that he has.
He's clearly kind of remaining, you know, kind of keeping his head down and letting Trump be Trump, letting Trump sort of Self-destruct as he probably did last night when he at one point referred to Guthrie as being cute meaning like with her questions Which isn't gonna play well with the very people he's supposed to be swinging so anyway I think a lot of a lot of noise and a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing as as somebody a lot more literary than me once said.
But worth noting, and then next week is the last scheduled presidential debate now that millions of people have already voted.
So yeah, so we'll see where it goes.
I mean, that's one thing to point out is something like 4 million Americans have already voted.
And so it's not when an election comes.
It's for me.
For many of us, the election's here and the vote's been cast.
That's one thing to say.
Go ahead, yeah.
Well, I was just going to say one other thing.
Actually, two things.
One that I should have brought up.
Biden also sort of took a page from some of the Trump book and said that he'll address the court packing issue by the time of the election, knowing full well that millions of people have already cast their votes.
And so forth.
He's trying to keep that from being a headline.
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