The long national nightmare of the past four years may not be over, but as the happy pandemonium that erupted this past weekend over the announcement of the Biden/Harris victory clearly demonstrated, a lot of us think there might be a light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t an oncoming train. (No offense to the president-elect and his well-documented love of the choo-choos.) As I was dining on my cuticles awaiting the election results last week, I also saw two different streaming productions that explained a little bit about how we got here.
In addition to Lorne and Deirdre, there’s Salar Ardebili‘s doofusy Clark (of whom Lorne says, “I don’t trust him to remember his own food allergies”) and Sarah Gise‘s social media whiz April, who takes one of KC’s on-air zingers and turns it into an Internet meme in minutes. Some of this reminds me of Bob Newhart’s famous “telephone” routine, “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” where honest Abe, about to make the Gettysburg Address, checks in with a flack, who dissuades him from shaving his beard and is exasperated that the president has typed out his speech. (“Abe, how many times have we told you? On the backs of envelopes!”)
I can’t imagine a better guide right now to the national roadmap of jurisprudence and human rights (which are far from the same thing) than Heidi Schreck and What the Constitution Means to Me.
In one of the more chilling segments, Schreck recounts the case of Jessica Lenahan Gonzales, a woman in Castle Rock, Colorado, who had filed an order of protection against her estranged husband and whose children were abducted and killed by him after the local police failed to enforce the order. She subsequently sued the police department and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2005. We hear the audio from the oral arguments where the justices debate the meaning of the word “shall.” Ultimately, Scalia’s majority opinion held that enforcing such orders wasn’t mandatory for the cops. As Schreck explains, this case has a ripple effect that calls into question all legal protections for vulnerable people—presumably, the people that police forces are supposed to care about in the first place.
