For decades, pundits and experts insisted that partisan polarization was the problem in American life. “Authoritarianism, oligarchy, and racism were symptoms rather than causes,” argues associate professor of public policy Jake Grumbach in “How Normie Pundits Paved the Way for the Supreme Court Voting Rights Disaster” at Slate.

“We built serious institutions around this diagnosis,” he explains — pointing to Duke University’s Polarization Lab, Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative, the political organization No Labels, and others.

The conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court snatched up that hypothesis, tweaked it, and turned it into Wednesday’s Louisiana v. Callais decision that severely further eroded the Voting Rights Act.

How?

Grumbach argues that the Supreme Court claimed that congressional districts that are polarized along political party lines cannot also be seen as being polarized along racial lines. Grumbach also argues that “for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation.”

“To ‘control for partisanship’ when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels,” Grumbach says.

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“The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party,” Grumbach explains. “To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.”

While polarization-obsessed liberals “did not directly cause the Callais ruling,” they “laid an intellectual foundation.”

“When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive,” he says. “We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion.”

And by doing so, they “handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.”

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There’s no question the U.S. Senate is “truly in play” right now — it’s conceivable that Democrats could take the majority. But there’s one reason why a simple 51-seat majority will not be enough to accomplish the big tasks, such as convicting President Donald Trump should he be impeached, or blocking Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, argues Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark.

One senator could blow up the Democratic agenda: Last argues U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) is the reason a simple majority won’t be enough — and explains why losing the Senate entirely would be “bad.”

“Democrats are likely to come close to flipping the Senate, so if they fall short the narrative will be that Trump ‘held’ and did better than expected,” he posits.

If Democrats remain in the minority, “impeachment becomes an even more politically-fraught exercise.”

And lastly, if Republicans control the Senate next year, Last says there is a greater than 90 percent chance that Trump will have the opportunity to replace the two oldest Supreme Court justices: conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. That would create “a Trump-picked majority on the Supreme Court for a generation.”

Last says that Democrats have a “2-in-5 chance” of flipping Alaska, Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Maine. (He also notes that he’s “spitballing” on the numbers.)

If everything went the Democrats’ way, including holding on to Georgia and all currently-held seats, they would have a 53-seat majority, pulling off what would be a “political earthquake.”

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Last says Democrats “probably need to get at least 52 seats” — because 51 leaves them at Fetterman’s mercy.

Fetterman, according to Last, “routinely criticizes the Democratic party itself.”

Fetterman’s public appearances over recent months — often on Fox News — have led some to wonder if he is preparing to switch parties. His comments — and votes — at times appear to align more with the Republicans than with Democrats.

Democratic strategist and pundit James Carville last month suggested that if Fetterman wants to run for re-election as a Democrat in 2028, “he has no chance in a Democratic primary.”

Last posits that 53 seats are possible, but absolutely not likely. “Hitting 51 seats is, by comparison, much more achievable. Even winning Maine, North Carolina, Michigan, Alaska, and Ohio would be a long row to hoe, and even if Dems got it done, they only end up with 51 seats.”

What happens if Democrats win a 51-seat majority?

“Republicans will make a full-court press” to get Fetterman to join them. “Why wouldn’t Fetterman switch? He is a ballroom-endorsing, Netanyahu-maximalist who has a good relationship with Trump and has been gradually expanding his grievances as not merely being with progressives, or Israel-skeptics, but with the main body of Democratic voters and elected Democrats in Congress, too.”

Last calls a 51-seat Democratic majority a “perfect storm” for Republicans, who “can give him anything—not just the promise of a shot at holding onto his seat in 2028 by clearing the field for him, but friendly spaces on Fox and a warm, post-Senate embrace that finds room for him in their ecosystem.”

Of course, Last warns, he was wrong about Fetterman in 2021 and 2022.

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President Donald Trump and the GOP have an affordability crisis on their hands, and they are dealing with it — not by solving it, as a “normal” political party would do — but by “denying reality,” argues Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman.

After all, Trump promised to make prices drop on “day one.” He vowed to cut energy costs in half. That has not happened.

“He has instead presided over rising inflation — the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure is running almost a percentage point higher than it was when he took office — and his Iran debacle has caused a spike in gasoline and diesel prices,” Krugman writes.

Krugman points to several prominent Republicans who over the past few days have taken to the nation’s airwaves to claim that gas prices are falling.

CNN put the falsehoods in focus:

U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) on Thursday claimed “gas prices continue to come down.” CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale noted that “average gas prices in the US as a whole and in his home state of South Carolina had actually gone up over the last day, week, month and year, according to AAA data.”

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House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Dale found, “falsely claimed Thursday that gas prices are much lower now than they were ‘two years ago,’ when, he claimed, they were ‘$6.’ Thursday’s AAA national average, $4.30 per gallon, was actually higher, not lower, than the average two years prior, when it was $3.66 per gallon.”

One day earlier, CNN notes, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “falsely suggested” the average gas price in California was $8 per gallon right before the Iran war started. “The state average at the time was actually $4.64 per gallon, according to AAA.”

Krugman calls it “striking” that Republicans are “lying” by trying to create an “alternate reality” about a fact that most Americans can see on a daily basis, on “giant signs all around America,” namely, at the gas station.

So why do they, apparently, think these lies will work?

Krugman argues Republicans are pretending that President Donald Trump’s second term in office started during President Joe Biden’s term in office, “after the inflation surge of 2021-2022,” and not after what he calls the “immaculate disinflation” that followed.

Calling that effort “games with the timeline,” Krugman notes that it will not work: “That ship has already sailed (and sunk).”

So who is it for?

An “audience of one”: President Donald Trump, who, “swaddled in his Mar-a-Lago bubble,” doesn’t know that prices at the pump and inflation are up.

“Trump says that we have no inflation,” Krugman notes. “He recently insisted that inflation was 5 percent at the end of Biden’s term and took credit for falling inflation before he took office. So Republicans determined to say whatever he wants to hear — which means everyone still in the party — feel obliged to praise his inflation record, the facts be damned.”

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