By Bob Leipold

When we hear news of major opinions from the US Supreme Court – overturning Roe [1]; gutting the Voting Rights Act [2]; undermining governmental regulation of guns [3]; granting presidents, including Trump, extraordinary immunity from criminal prosecution [4] – it is worth reminding ourselves how we got here.  Would things have been different if Merrick Garland had been on the court instead of Amy Coney Barrett?

At the time, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defended his inaction on the Garland nomination and the rushed confirmation of Barrett by claiming he was simply following Senate precedent.  However, in neither case was that true.  There was absolutely NO precedent for the Senate refusing to consider a nomination made as early as March in an election year, and there was absolutely NO precedent for the Senate holding confirmation hearings when a vacancy and nomination occurred as late as September of an election year. [5]

Lie:  “All we are doing is following the long-standing tradition of not fulfilling a nomination in the middle of a presidential year.”  – Mitch McConnell, March 20, 2016 [6]

In 2016, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to consider a nomination made by the Democratic president in March of an election year.  Pennsylvania’s own Senator Pat Toomey explained: “When power is divided during a presidential election year, the Senate’s general practice has been to leave open a Supreme Court vacancy so that the voters may speak and possibly resolve the disagreement created by the division.” [7]  He claimed that seven times in U.S. history (a) a Supreme Court vacancy arose in a presidential election year, (b) the president nominated someone before the election, and (c) the White House and the Senate were controlled by different parties, but only two nominees were confirmed.

In two of the seven cases (Quincy Adams, Buchanan), no nomination was made before the election, so they tell us nothing about the Senate’s “general practice”.  One recess appointment (Eisenhower) also tells us nothing because the Senate was not in session to consider a nomination made only 22 days before the election.  Already the seven precedents are down to four.

The Senate did not act on a nomination made by Millard Fillmore in August of an election year.  Had Obama not nominated Merrick Garland until August, this would have been relevant, but Obama’s nomination was made in March, a full five months earlier than Fillmore’s nomination.

John Tyler’s initial nominations for two vacancies were rejected by the Senate in January and June; additional nominations and renominations were also rejected in June.  This suggests a precedent for holding confirmation votes as late as June in an election year.  Then, despite Tyler being the lamest of lame ducks (he was not even a candidate in the 1844 election), his final nomination for one vacancy, made after the election, was confirmed by the same Senate that had repeatedly rejected his previous nominations.  This confirmation came even though the Whigs had lost control of the Senate to the Democrats and the Whig candidate for president had lost to the Democratic candidate James Polk in the recent election.  (Tyler’s nominations are considered to have occurred with a divided government because the Whigs, who controlled the Senate, had expelled Tyler from the party early in his presidency.)

In the final, most relevant case, Democrat Grover Cleveland nominated a new Chief Justice in April of an election year; the nominee was confirmed by the Republican Senate in July of that year.  This case most closely matches 2016 with respect to the timing of the nomination, the party of the president, and the party controlling the Senate.

To summarize, three of Toomey’s seven precedent-setting cases are completely irrelevant.  While the Senate did not consider one nomination made in August, they have held confirmation votes (one affirmative) as late as July.  While there is clearly precedent for considering and rejecting a nominee in an election year, there is absolutely no precedent for refusing to consider a nomination made as early as March.

Lie:  “This confirmation process falls squarely within history and precedent. …  History shows that when Supreme Court vacancies arise in presidential election years, the outcome hinges on whether the same party or different parties control the presidency and the Senate. …  The circumstances before us today have led to confirmation every single time except one nominee with financial scandals. … This process has been precedent-backed at every step.”  – Mitch McConnell, October 16, 2020 [8]

In 2020, the Republican-controlled Senate raced to fill a Supreme Court vacancy that arose less than two months before an election with a candidate nominated by a Republican president.  Note that this, too, was an election year, and the nomination came much closer to election day than it had in 2016.  Republicans said things were different this time because the presidency and the Senate were controlled by the same party.  As Toomey explained, “While there is a presidential election this year, the White House and the Senate are currently both controlled by the same party.  The Senate’s historical practice has been to fill Supreme Court vacancies in these circumstances.” [7]  No, it hasn’t, because these precise circumstances had never occurred before.

Toomey claimed that seven of eight nominees had been confirmed under these circumstances.  However, all but two of those confirmed candidates were nominated by the end of March and all were nominated and confirmed by the end of July.  There is no historical precedent that addresses a vacancy and nomination occurring as late as September, less than two months before an election, especially an election in which early voting had already started in some states. [9]

With no historical precedents to justify the Senate’s actions in either 2016 or 2020, we are left with the most obvious explanation – a hypocritical, craven, political power-grab.  McConnell, Toomey, and the Republican party should stop pretending there was a high-minded, principled justification for their actions.
 
McConnell could not, of course, have done this by himself.  The support of Republican senators including Toomey is a stark reminder of the importance of maintaining a Democratic majority in the Senate.  Remember this history when the next big Supreme Court decision is announced and when it’s time to vote in November.

REFERENCES

[1]  "Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades" NPR All Things Considered, Nina Totenberg and Sarah McCammon, June 24, 2022.  Article

[2]  "Brnovich: A Significant Blow to Our Freedom to Vote" League of Women Voters blog, Sep. 2, 2021.  Article

[3]  "Supreme Court revisits the scope of the right to bear arms in the wake of latest mass shooting" CNN. Ariane de Vogue, Updated November 7, 2023.  Article

[4]  "US Supreme Court rules Trump has broad immunity from prosecution" Reuters. John Kruzel and Andrew Chung, July 1, 2024.  Article

[5]  To ensure there would be no accusation of cherry-picking from liberal sources, I have taken much of this information from a National Review article, supplemented with additional reading and research.  "History Is on the Side of Republicans Filling a Supreme Court Vacancy in 2020" National Review. Dan McLaughlin, August 7, 2020.  Perhaps the discovery that an article purporting to defend McConnell's decisions on the grounds of precedent contained evidence to the contrary should have come as a surprise, but somehow it didn't.  Article

[6]  "McConnell, White House spar over Supreme Court nomination hearings" Fox News, Updated March 20, 2016.  Article

[7]  "Toomey Statement on Supreme Court Vacancy" VoteSmart. Pat Toomey, Sept. 22, 2020.  Statement

[8]  "Proud to Support Judge Barrett’s Confirmation and Proud of this Precedent-Backed Process" Web site of Mitch McConnell, Republican Leader, The Newsroom, Oct. 16, 2020.  Press Release

[9]  "Election 2020: When early voting and mail voting for president begins in every state" USA TODAY. Joey Garrison, Sep. 26, 2020.  Article

By Bob Leipold

We all know that conservative talking points on guns are based on ideology, not evidence, but it is worth examining a few of the most egregious claims.

Lie:  More guns make us safer.

In the past 20 years, the number of guns in the US [1] and the rate of gun deaths [2] have both increased by about 50%.  Yet gun-rights advocates continue to argue that more guns will make us safer. [3]  If more guns make us safer, how can it be that this substantial increase in the number of guns coincides with an increase in gun deaths rather than a decrease?  There are already more guns than people in the US. [2]  When will we reach that magical number of guns that starts making us safer?

Lie:  We need “good guys with guns” to stop active shooters.

It is an article of faith among gun-rights advocates that, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” [4]  But how often does that actually happen?  In their analysis of 433 active shooting attacks, Larry Buchanan and Lauren Leatherby of the New York Times showed that only 12 of those incidents (2.8%) ended when a citizen shot the attacker. [5]  In contrast, bystanders subdued the attacker without using a gun in 42 cases (9.7%).  And in an underappreciated problem with the “good guy with a gun” hypothesis, in one of those 12 cases, the armed citizen who shot and killed an attacker was shot and killed by police when they mistook him for the attacker.  Based on these outcomes, it’s three times as likely a citizen “good guy with a gun” who stops an active shooter will be killed by police (1/12 = 8.3%) than it is that a citizen “good guy with a gun” will stop an active shooter in the first place!

That raises a broader question of how we distinguish a good guy with a gun from a bad guy with a gun.  Intentions are obviously critical, but those aren’t measurable.  For starters, maybe we could look for prior arrests or other contacts with law enforcement.  However, according to the US Secret Service, more than one-third of mass shooters from 2016-2020 had no prior arrests at the time they committed their mass shootings, and almost one-quarter had no known prior contact with law enforcement at all. [6]  So when you hear the argument that we can’t regulate guns in ways that inconvenience “law-abiding citizens”, remember these mass shooters were part of that group – until they weren’t.

Lie:  Gun violence is the price we pay for freedom and personal safety.

Some international comparisons are telling. When Shinzo Abe was assassinated in Japan in 2022, the fact that a gun was used was just as shocking as the fact that a former Prime Minister had been killed.  Japan, with a population more than one-third the size of the US population, had ONE gun-related death in 2021 and only 14 gun-related deaths since 2017 at the time of the Abe assassination. [7]  Similarly, when a gunman killed three and critically wounded four in Copenhagen in July 2022, it was the worst incident of gun violence in Denmark since February 2015 when two people were killed and five police officers wounded. [8]  In contrast, the US has averaged more than one mass shooting per day every year since 2019, and so far in 2024 over 10,000 people have died by gun-related murders, homicides, and accidents, with likely an even larger number of gun-related suicides. [9]

It is noteworthy that gun deaths have fallen in both the UK and Australia since they took strict gun control measures following mass shootings in their countries. [10]  But the US, with a firearms death rate more than ten-fold higher than the rates in any of the four countries mentioned here, [11] has not been moved to take any significant action to reduce the firearms death rate.

Lie:  We need guns to protect ourselves and our families.

Firearms have surpassed motor vehicle traffic as the leading cause of death of US children ages 1-17 every year since 2020. [12]  The trend is disturbing, too, as the percentage of deaths attributable to firearms has roughly doubled in the last 20 years.  Motor vehicle traffic deaths, on the other hand, have fallen substantially over that same period.  And this is a distinctly American problem.  A recent international comparison concluded, “In no other similarly large or wealthy country are firearm deaths in the top 4 causes of mortality let alone the number 1 cause of death among children and teens.”[13]  So why do we spend more time and energy “protecting” kids from Tik Tok and library books than we do protecting them from gun violence?

Lie:  State gun laws are ineffective at reducing gun violence.

There is a strong correlation between firearm deaths and state gun laws.  The rates of firearm deaths in states with the strongest gun laws are less than half the rates in states with the weakest gun laws. [14]  And focusing on each state’s laws probably underestimates the efficacy of gun-control laws, as there is evidence that weak laws in neighboring states tends to increase a state’s own firearm deaths. [15]

Going beyond the effects of a state’s general gun regulation environment, a 2023 RAND Corporation review identified three laws whose effects were supported with their highest evidence rating. [16]
   (1) Child-access prevention laws reduce firearm self-injuries (including suicides), firearm homicides or assault injuries, and unintentional firearm injuries and deaths among youth. 
   (2) Stand-your-ground laws increase firearm homicides. 
   (3) “Shall-issue” concealed carry laws increase total and firearm homicides. 
All of these findings are consistent with the proposition that stronger gun laws can reduce the number of firearm deaths.

A 2015 study in the American Journal of Public Health examined the effects on firearm suicide rates of three types of state law – a permit required to purchase a handgun, registration of handguns, and a license required to own a handgun.  For each of these three laws, states without the law had on average 57-120% higher rates of firearms suicides and 11-18% higher percentages of suicides by firearm than did states with these laws. [17]

In research on firearms, it is difficult to directly measure the prevalence of guns, so researchers often have to resort to proxy measures – something that can be measured more directly that correlates well with gun ownership.  In a less-direct but arguably more-disturbing connection between firearm suicides and the availability of guns, a 2004 study comparing about two dozen proxy measures concluded that, “The best currently available indicator [of household gun prevalence] to use in cross-sectional gun violence research is the percentage of suicides committed with guns.” [18]

Lie:  Gun deaths are primarily an urban problem.

In Pennsylvania, gun death rates are generally higher in more-rural counties (with the exception of Philadelphia), driven largely by suicides.  In fact, gun-related suicide rates in two of the most-rural counties approach the gun-related homicide rate in Philadelphia (>20 per 100,000). [19]

Nationally, the top ten counties for firearm homicide rates in the US over the period 2018-2021 included five rural counties and only three large metro counties; the top twenty counties for firearm homicide rates included twelve rural counties and only five large metro counties. [20]

REFERENCES

[1]  Estimated gun stock from “How Many Guns Are Circulating in the U.S.?” Jennifer Mascia, The Trace Mar 6, 2023, based on data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.  Article

[2]  Death rates from CDC Wonder (Injury Mechanism & All Other Leading Causes = Firearm).

[3]  See, for example, “Guns make Americans safer” Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, Updated Sep 13, 2022; “[A]llowing law-abiding citizens to more easily access firearms does help reduce violent crime.” from the NRA Institute for Legislative Action; or pretty much any book by John Lott, Jr.

[4]  "NRA on Newtown: 'The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun' – video" The Guardian. (Source: Reuters Fri 21 Dec 2012 14.01 EST)  Article

[5]  “Who Stops a ‘Bad Guy With a Gun’?” Larry Buchanan and Lauren Leatherby, June 22, 2022, New York Times.  Article

[6]  US Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (2023) "Mass Attacks in Public Spaces: 2016-2020"  Report

[7]  “Assassination Shocks a Nearly Gun-Free Japan” Daisuke Wakabayashi, Ben Dooley, and Hikari Hida, July 8, 2022, New York Times.  Article

[8]  “Danish police say the deadly mall shooting was apparently a random attack” NPR, July 4, 2022.  Article

[9]  Gun Violence Archive, figures as of August 29, 2024

[10]  “Other Countries Had Mass Shootings. Then They Changed Their Gun Laws.” Max Fisher, May 25, 2022, New York Times.  Article

[11]  Data from GunPolicy.org.  Detailed analysis available upon request.

[12]  Death rates from CDC Wonder (Injury Mechanism & All Other Leading Causes = Firearm or Motor Vehicle Traffic).

[13]  McGough et al. (2023) "Child and Teen Firearm Mortality in the U.S. and Peer Countries" KFF.  

[14]  Death rates from CDC Wonder (Injury Mechanism & All Other Leading Causes = Firearm).  Strength of state laws is the average of ranks from four report cards – Giffords Law Center, Everytown, Guns & Ammo, and AZ Defenders.  Detailed analysis available upon request. 

[15]  Liu et al. (2022) "Association of State-Level Firearm-Related Deaths With Firearm Laws in Neighboring States" JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(11):e2240750. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.40750

[16]  RAND Corporation (2023) “What Science Tells Us About the Effects of Gun Policies” (Jan 10, 2023 update)

[17]   Anestis et al. (2015) “The Association Between State Laws Regulating Handgun Ownership and Statewide Suicide Rates” Am J Public Health.  105(10): 2059–2067.  Article

[18]  Kleck, Gary (2004) “Measures of Gun Ownership Levels for Macro-Level Crime and Violence Research” Journal Of Research In Crime And Delinquency.  41(1): 3-36.  Abstract

[19]  Death rates from CDC Wonder (Injury Intent = Suicide or Homicide, Injury Mechanism & All Other Leading Causes = Firearm).  Counties are ranked by population-weighted population density calculated from municipality-level data, with lower densities corresponding to more rural and higher densities corresponding to more urban.  Detailed analysis available upon request.

[20]  Death rates from CDC Wonder (Injury Intent = Homicide, Injury Mechanism & All Other Leading Causes = Firearm).  Counties with the designations “Micropolitan (Nonmetro)” and “NonCore (Nonmetro)” were considered to be rural and designations “Large Central Metro” and “Large Fringe Metro” were considered to be urban.  Detailed analysis available upon request.

By Bob Leipold

​Voters seem wistful for the “Trump economy”, but that wistfulness is based on unfounded claims and unreasonable comparisons.  The pre-pandemic Trump economy largely maintained, but did not dramatically improve upon, the performance of the economy Trump inherited from Obama.  As for comparisons to the current economy, claims that Biden is responsible for the recent inflation surge and that Trump would have prevented it are unsupportable.  Let’s look at each of those comparisons in turn.

After spending the first couple years of his presidency cleaning up the economic mess left by the Bush administration, Obama presided over a steadily improving, if unspectacular economy.  To give Trump every advantage, we’ll look at only the first three years of his presidency.  Those first three years were all pre-covid, so Trump is not penalized for the economic effects of the pandemic, even though his bungled response likely made the economic consequences worse.  (But that’s a subject for another post.)

Let’s start with GDP growth.  In December 2017, Trump opined that, “The economy now has hit 3%. Nobody thought it would be anywhere close.  I think it could go to 4, 5, and maybe even 6%, ultimately.” [1]  In fact, GDP growth during Trump’s first three years in office averaged well below 3% per year, only slightly higher than the annual GDP growth rate during Obama’s second term in office (2.7% vs. 2.5%). [2]  These numbers also call into question the claim that the Trump tax cuts would be “rocket fuel for our economy”. [3]

How about job creation?  Trump claimed he would be the “greatest jobs producer that God ever created” [4], yet during his first three years in office, only 6.4 million new jobs were created, 1.6 million fewer than the 8.0 million new jobs created during the last three years of the Obama administration.  And the jobs creation advantage under Obama was durable.  Job creation averaged 223,000/month for the last six years of the Obama administration compared to an average of 177,000/month during Trump’s first three years. [5]  If that record makes Trump the greatest jobs producer God ever created, what are we to call Obama?

I’ll bet the stock market will show the superiority of the Trump economy.  The stock market certainly had a good year in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year of Trump’s presidency – up 22% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 29% for the S&P 500, and 35% for the NASDAQ.  To find a better year, we’d have to go way, way back – to 2013, during Obama’s second term.  Returns for that year were 26% for the DJIA, 30% for the S&P 500, and 38% for the NASDAQ.  When comparing the first three years of the Trump administration to Obama’s second term, average annual returns were higher under Trump, but only slightly – 13% vs. 11% for the DJIA, 13% vs. 12% for the S&P 500, and 19% vs. 16% for the NASDAQ. [6]  If that is the stuff of economic miracles, it is a minor miracle indeed.

I’ve got it – international trade!  After all, Trump asserted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” [7], which makes it hard to understand why the annual trade deficit with China over the first three years of the Trump presidency was more than 5% higher than it was during the last three years of the Obama administration. [8]  (The difference is even bigger if we compare to all eight years of the Obama presidency.)  Furthermore, studies by Federal Reserve and academic economists concluded that US consumers and businesses, not China, bore almost the full cost of Trump’s tariffs. [9]  When Trump continued to insist that China was paying the cost of the tariffs [10], he either didn’t understand how tariffs work or he did understand and lied to obscure the economic impact of tariffs.  And it wasn’t just China.  The average annual US trade deficit was 14% higher in the first three years of the Trump administration than it was during the eight years of the Obama administration. [11]

This time for sure – the unemployment rate!  In the years before Trump took office, the unemployment rate under Obama declined steadily from a high of 10% to 4.7% when Trump took office.  It continued to fall to a low of 3.5% before covid, although the rate of decline was slower than it had been under Obama. [12]  But then again, who knows if you can believe the numbers? [13]  Trump said they were fake before he was elected, trumpeted the numbers (when they were good) when he was president, and decided they were fake again when the unemployment rate fell to 3.4% under Biden.

Now let’s turn to the current economy.  By any objective measure, it is in good shape.  Stock market indices have reached record highs, even after adjusting for inflation [14]; the unemployment rate has been below 4% for the past two years [12]; inflation-adjusted earnings are higher than they were under Trump (ignoring the pandemic spike) [15]; and it appears the economy will avoid slipping into a recession.  The biggest problem of the past few years has been inflation, but Trump and Republicans trying to pin the blame on Biden have two problems.  First, if inflation was caused by Biden, why was it such a widespread problem?  The Pew Research Center reported that 37 of 44 advanced economies saw at least a doubling of their average annual inflation rate from the first quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2022. [16]  Second, if Republicans believe they’d have done a better job of controlling inflation than Biden did, how do they explain that the UK, which had been led by conservatives since 2010, had higher inflation rates than we did in the US? [17]
 
Claims that there was inflation under Biden but not under Trump are self-evidently true, but meaningless.  Circumstances were not the same during the two administrations.  The only meaningful claim Trump could make is that he’d have dealt with inflationary pressures better than Biden did, but as described above, there is nothing in the record to suggest that Trump is an economic miracle worker.  The best that can be said is that he didn’t profoundly screw up the solid, steadily improving economy he inherited from the Obama administration.

REFERENCES

[1]  Trump forecast of GDP growth

[2]  GDP growth figures from Federal Reserve Economic Data; analysis by the author​ 

[3]  Trump claim that tax cuts will boost the economy

[4]  Trump claim regarding job creation

[5]  Job creation statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; analysis by the author​

[6]  Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, NASDAQ; analysis by the author​

[7]  Trump claim on trade wars

[8]  Trade deficit with China figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis; analysis by the author​

[9]  Studies by Federal Reserve and academic economists showing consumers pay the cost of tariffs

[10]  Trump claim that China pays the cost of tariffs

[11]  US trade deficit figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis; analysis by the author​

[12]  Unemployment figures from Federal Reserve Economic Data; analysis by the author​

[13]  Trump questions official unemployment statistics

[14]  Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, NASDAQ

[15]  Median usual weekly real earnings from Federal Reserve Economic Data

[16]  Pew Research Center report on widespread inflation

[17]  US inflation figures from Federal Reserve Economic Data; UK inflation figures from UK Office for National Statistics; analysis by the author