Justice Roberts Tops Federal Leaders in Americans’ Approval

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Chief Justice John Roberts earns the highest job approval rating of 11 U.S. leaders rated in a Dec. 1-16 Gallup poll with 60% approving of how he is handling his role.

Only two other leaders on the list are reviewed positively by majorities of Americans — Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell (53%) and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci (52%). …

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell receives the worst ratings of the 11 measured, with 63% disapproving and 34% approving. CONTINUED

Lydia Saad, Gallup

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Americans have mixed feelings when looking back on 2021 but are hopeful about 2022

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As the new year approaches, America overall has mixed feelings when it looks back on 2021. For 42% of Americans, 2021 was a year filled mostly with happiness. But for 40% of Americans, 2021 was filled mostly with sadness. …

Though views of 2021 are mixed, most Americans feel hopeful when looking ahead to 2022. CONTINUED

Fred Backus, CBS News

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Biden’s struggles shouldn’t eclipse GOP’s year of dangerous falsehoods

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America’s running political conversation defaults to the sitting president. Today, Joe Biden’s legislative struggles, pandemic management and weak approval rating drown out most everything else.

But in 2021, the performance of his partisan adversaries mattered at least as much to the nation’s future. And in Washington and state capitals alike, Republicans have compiled a record of dishonesty and aggression that threatens American democracy itself.

The January 6 insurrection, incited by then-President Donald Trump to overturn his election defeat, offered them a different path. Deadly violence that endangered their own lives gave Republican lawmakers the strongest possible justification for separating themselves from Trump’s disfiguring pathologies.

For a moment, they did. Shaken congressional leaders condemned him and returned to the vandalized capital to affirm Biden’s victory.

The moment passed. CONTINUED

John Harwood, CNN

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First They Fought About Masks. Then Over the Soul of the City.

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… From lockdowns to masks to vaccines to school curriculums, the conflicts in America keep growing and morphing, even without Donald Trump, the leader who thrived on encouraging them, in the White House. But the fights are not simply about masks or schools or vaccines. They are, in many ways, all connected as part of a deeper rupture — one that is now about the most fundamental questions a society can ask itself: What does it mean to be an American? Who is in charge? And whose version of the country will prevail?

Social scientists who study conflict say the only way to understand it — and to begin to get out of it — is to look at the powerful currents of human emotions that are the real drivers. They include the fear of not belonging, the sting of humiliation, a sense of threat — real or perceived — and the strong pull of group behavior.

Some of these feelings were already coursing through American society, triggered by rapid cultural, technological, demographic and economic change. Then came the pandemic, plunging Americans into uncertainty and loneliness, an emotion that scientists have found causes people to see danger where there is none.

Add to all of that leaders who stoke the conflict, and disagreements over the simplest things can become almost sectarian. CONTINUED

Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times

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The Republican Axis Reversing the Rights Revolution

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The great divergence is rapidly expanding—and President Joe Biden’s window to reverse it is narrowing.

Since the 1960s, Congress and federal courts have acted mostly to strengthen the floor of basic civil rights available to citizens in all 50 states, a pattern visible on issues from the dismantling of Jim Crow racial segregation to the right to abortion to the authorization of same-sex marriage. But now, offensives by red-state governments and GOP-appointed federal judges are poised to retrench those common standards across an array of issues. The result through the 2020s could be a dramatic erosion of common national rights and a widening gulf—a “great divergence”—between the liberties of Americans in blue states and those in red states.

This process is evident in the restrictive laws approved over the past year in many Republican-controlled states making it more difficult to vote and increasing opportunities for GOP partisans to influence the administration and counting of votes. It’s apparent as well in the moves by multiple red states to bar transgender young people from participating in school sports or receiving medical treatment for the transition process. The same impulse is powering the rapidly spreading red-state movement to constrain how students are taught about the nation’s racial history. Perhaps most explosively, five GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices recently signaled their willingness to overturn the national right to abortion established in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. That would immediately trigger laws on the books in most red states banning or severely restricting the procedure. CONTINUED

Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

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Despite Their Accomplishments, Democrats Close 2021 Demoralized

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President Biden and congressional Democrats could look back at this year with pride and accomplishment, given their passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $1 trillion infrastructure package. But instead, the first session of the 117th Congress is now in the history books, and Democrats head into the holiday season deeply demoralized, badly damaged politically, and with real reason to fear that Biden could become the fifth consecutive president to lose both Senate and House majorities on his watch. …

Not to beat on a dead horse but while so many Democrats are pointing fingers and cursing Manchin, or trashing him to sympathetic reporters, their time might be better spent trying to learn something from this debacle of a year.

Quite simply, if you want to do big things, you have to win elections big. The ambition of a party’s legislative and policy agenda should be commensurate with the magnitude of their victory. CONTINUED

Charlie Cook

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