Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calls right-wing politics “deadly” — and predicts that “MAGA Will Kill Many Americans,” by the thousands, driven by greed and willful ignorance.

Krugman goes one step further, arguing outright that this is not by accident:

“Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes,” he writes.

He argues that the right’s decades-long opposition to health care is driven by greed, especially from “wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.”

Krugman points to Tuesday’s decision by Trump’s FDA to allow blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, which critics warn will increase use among the young.

Why?

“Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men,” Krugman writes — a constituency the president has been losing during his second term in office.

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There’s also the recent decision, again by Trump’s FDA, to block the release of studies finding the COVID-19 and shingles vaccines safe, with side effects rare.

“Beyond this,” he continues, “right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic.”

Krugman also implicates greed in the anti-vaccine movement, saying that “quack medicine is big business.”

“Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated,” he writes.

Ideological willful ignorance plays a part as well — driven by the alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalism, the latter of which is “deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.”

To prove his point, Krugman points to the widely-reported resurgence of measles, that was seen as eliminated from the United States decades ago, thanks to vaccines. Now, many parents are choosing to forego vaccinating their children against this highly contagious and potentially deadly disease.

He adds to that the refusal of many red states to expand Medicaid, a program largely paid for by the federal government under the Affordable Care Act.

The data bear him out. Life expectancy in “Trump-leaning” states trails blue states significantly.

There’s “a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level,” Krugman writes. “Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.”

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Image via Reuters 

There has been a “deterioration of morale” at the U.S. Supreme Court, Yale Law School professor Justin Driver told Bloomberg News, as he predicted “there will be major fireworks” by the time the high court’s term comes to a close around the end of June.

Other legal scholars share that concern.

“It appears from the outside that there has been an erosion of comity and trust,” William & Mary Law School constitutional and administrative law Professor Jonathan Adler told Bloomberg. “This raises the concern that it could affect how the court operates and inhibit deliberation.”

The court already appears to be operating at an unusual level of enmity.

“Tensions are starting to boil over,” Bloomberg reports. “Back-and-forth sniping between Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Samuel Alito Monday night marked the latest sign of strain at a court that has become a prominent symbol of the polarization besetting the country.”

During last week’s landmark ruling all but gutting what remains of the six-decade-old Voting Rights Act, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the court’s conservative majority of taking political sides. Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, called her claims “insulting” and “utterly irresponsible.”

More high-profile — and possibly highly-contested — decisions are to be handed down over the next eight weeks, and with them, more contentious opinions.

Justices are set to rule on President Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, they are to hand down opinions on transgender girls in women’s sports, and on Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

On Monday, as the court cleared the way for Louisiana to eliminate a majority-minority district, Justice Jackson “accused the court of betraying its principles, including its past pronouncements that judges shouldn’t change the voting rules on the eve of an election.”

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“Just like that, those principles give way to power,” Jackson warned.

Jackson’s remarks “drew a fiery response” from Justice Alito, who said that her dissent “levels charges that cannot go unanswered.” Bloomberg reports that “Alito took particular umbrage at Jackson’s claim that the court was engaging in an unprincipled power play,” which he called “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.”

At the time, Justice Amy Coney Barrett in an appearance said that “collegiality is a decision you make,” as she shared that she and other justices spend time together at lunches and even dinners at each other’s homes.

“You have to make decisions to spend time with people, and particularly people with whom you might disagree, in order to forge those bonds,” Barrett said.

Pointing to what it calls the “Jackson Factor,” Bloomberg reports that Jackson, the nation’s newest justice, “has been at the center of much of the sparring,” and much of that seems to be with Justice Alito.

During an immigration argument, Jackson “offered up a hypothetical scenario in which an administration systematically restricted green card holders when they tried to re-enter the country.”

Alito called it a “conspiracy theory.”

READ MORE: How the ‘Cutthroat’ Gerrymandering ‘Arms Race’ Is Killing Democracy: Columnist

Image by Josh via Flickr and a Creative Commons License

Southern state Republicans’ quest to eliminate most of their majority-minority congressional districts in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s further destruction of the Voting Rights Act will effectively transform the House of Representatives and turn it into something akin to the Electoral College, writes The Atlantic‘s Marc Novicoff.

According to the Supreme Court’s 6–3 conservative majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, states can defend new aggressive gerrymandering maps by arguing their intent is partisan rather than racial.

Already, Louisiana and Alabama will be redrawing their maps, Florida already did, Tennessee might — and other red Southern states are expected to follow at some point.

“And so the gerrymandering wars, already awful, are poised to get even worse,” Novicoff writes. Democrats will respond, Republicans will respond to Democrats, and so on, but “voters will lose in the process.”

“The chamber could become something like the Electoral College,” says Novicoff. “Whoever wins a state gets all of its representatives, and the winners are there just to vote for or against the president.”

For 2028, redistricting could become far more extreme.

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“The removal of the VRA will make the arms race even more cutthroat,” Novicoff says. “Republicans could draw Democrats completely out of the delegations of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and take another district or two in Georgia.”

Blue state Democrats are likely to follow suit.

New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and Washington have nonpartisan redistricting commissions they would have to dismantle. Oregon and Maryland do not, making redistricting even easier.

It’s “mathematically conceivable” that California, which has more GOP voters than any other state, Novicoff says, could send no Republicans to Congress. Illinois, as well, could “theoretically engineer a blue-wash.”

Then, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio and Texas could follow, scrapping all their blue districts.

“Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, was willing to game it out,” tentatively predicting “206 safe Republican seats and 203 safe Democratic seats.”

That would leave the nation with just 26 competitive districts out of a total of 435, Donnini calculated.

Bottom line, Novicoff says, regardless of which party wins the redistricting wars, the loser will be American democracy.

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Image: Public Domain by Architect of the Capitol via Flickr