To say I’m discouraged with this week of decisions from the illegitimate and corrupt Supreme Court would be an understatement.
So here we are…again pic.twitter.com/IaeH0evrKB
— Miss T (Recipe For Murder now available!) (@TaMarasKitchen) July 1, 2023
I don't know what to tell you guys. We have to expand the Court. If we don't expand the Court, no liberal policy will be allowed to exist for the rest of our lives. That's why Republicans stole the court, that's why rich people pay for justices.
Govern yourselves accordingly.— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) June 30, 2023
And fuck this guy:
"It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as
going beyond the proper role of the judiciary…"— Sam Levine (@srl) June 30, 2023
Open thread. I’m going to take the dogs out, put the ducks to bed and try and think more pleasant thoughts.
SpaceUnit
SCOTUS is effectively making the case for expanding the court all on their own. The ‘liberal media’ need not weigh in.
Maxim
Intercourse them orthogonally with oxidized farm implements.
Ksmiami
Stop allowing the Court to have this much power. Fuck them. They are just corrupt hacks in robes and Biden et Al can just disregard their shitty decisions. And yes it’ll set off a ConstiTuTional CrISes , but we are already in one.
Alison Rose
I agree, but I simply don’t see how this would ever actually happen.
Alison Rose
@Ksmiami:
Um.
brendancalling
I have nothing good or constructive to say.
At the very least, if/when we retake the House, Dems need to exercise severe oversight over the lower courts—where, IIRC, we can set their jurisdiction—and completely defund the SCOTUS. Turn off the lights, the water, the heat—let Leonard Leo pay for it since he owns them anyway.
Kayla Rudbek
There is no area of law that the slimy six cannot mess up even further than it’s already messed up. Of course, this is coming from someone who is still irritated about the decision allowing disparaging and/or scandalous material to be registered as a federal trademark, and don’t get me started on how messed up the eligibility of patentable material under 35 U.S.C. Section 101 is (basically, the section that says you can’t patent mere mental steps, processes of nature, perpetual motion machines, etc.). The one thing that the European Patent Office does correctly is that they don’t allow business methods to be patented.
And I’m in such a cranky mood because of work that I’m seriously considering applying for other jobs. My gut is telling me that my new supervisor is not a good match, although it would be easier to transfer work units in my current job, and I have a union that I should go bounce things off of before it gets bad. But part of me is fed up with my agency overall and I’m tired of feeling like this.
oldster
Corrupt partisan hacks really resent being called corrupt partisan hacks!
Eolirin
@Alison Rose: Step one requires that we have full control over Congress with at least 50 senators that aren’t Manchin/Sinema style assholes, and then step two is that the court does something even more egregious in their rulings, like rule that congress can’t in any way impose ethical requirements while also overturning something like Griswold, Obergefell, or Brown, or that information even more egregious than what’s already come out about Alito and Thomas comes out, such that the general public is demanding expansion.
They can of course just stop being so extreme any time they like and interrupt things between 1 and 2. But the flip side of that is they’d cause far less damage, and if we can hold the white house and senate long enough, Alito and Thomas will eventually leave the court, one way or another.
Spider-Dan
At a fundamental level, this is the expected outcome from the 2016 election. It didn’t happen immediately because it doesn’t happen immediately. We tried to warn people and they didn’t want to listen because they hated her too much.
Some of the loudest voices calling for expanding the Court today were the softest voices when it came to taking control of the Court in 2016. Elections have consequences, and I can see only 2 ways to fix this problem:
1) wait for conservative judges to die when Democrats control both the White House and the Senate (while hoping the opposite doesn’t happen)
2) turn the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for whichever party last held the White House + Congress (which would be the swift and unavoidable outcome of expanding the Court)
The first is a pretty terrible option, but the second is more likely to expedite a hot civil war.
The Oracle of Solace
Roberts, Alito, Thomas, et al. honestly don’t seem to understand why the more liberal Warren court was praised for granting rights implied by the Constitution, while they are condemned for taking away those rights. I would have thought they don’t care, either, but there’s a lot of petulant whining about dissent and criticism coming from them these days, so apparently they do. They should realize that the way to stop being criticized for eliminating people’s rights is to stop eliminating people’s rights.
Eolirin
@Spider-Dan: I don’t think it follows that a court expansion leads to a war of escalation over the size of the court. It certainly didn’t all the other times the number of justices were changed for political reasons.
SpaceUnit
@Eolirin:
If the Dodd decision doesn’t do it I don’t know what will.
Alison Rose
Damn, this commentary from Jonathan Capehart is great:
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Maxim:
Vigorously. Violently so. Speaking of disturbing, the fact that Catholic conservatives are redefining our laws to suit their worldviews is disturbing enough that we need to so something about.
Fast.
Eolirin
@SpaceUnit: We haven’t had condition one since Dodd, and the first order of business post getting that would be passing a law re-establishing abortion rights nationally, not expanding the court over it.
They’d have to knock that down too.
I don’t think the general public will be okay with a majority capable of passing legislative fixes immediately going to expanding the court before at least trying legislative fixes. I do think we can get ethics requirements through, and I think if they balk at that we have more ammunition too.
But this is all contingent on us having a functional, democratically controlled, congress
We can’t lose Montana or Ohio. Gallego has to win in Arizona. (Not picking up those very close races in WI and NC really hurt) Those are not going to be easy. We need to win back the house. I think that’s going to be less of an issue.
SpaceUnit
@Eolirin:
Agree. 2024 elections will be the most critical of our lifetimes.
Eolirin
@SpaceUnit: Just until the next one. ><
We’re never going to win definitively with this electorate. So maybe in 20 years when GenZ and Millennials are the dominant political force and the Boomer and older generations are mostly dead.
Geminid
@Alison Rose: Yes, in effect Mystal is saying that no liberal policy will be allowed for the rest of our lives.
It’s bullshit, but that’s Mystal’s specialty.
SpaceUnit
@Eolirin:
Ha. Yeah.
Maxim
Dobbs, not Dodd. But yes, we need to control all three houses and then come at things legislatively first.
piratedan
@The Oracle of Solace: but but but… we REALLY don’t like it when minorities are happy and thriving, life is a zero sum game and if they’re happy that means WE’RE unhappy…. why don’t YOU understand that?
Eolirin
@Geminid: Hey, maybe they’re right, but it kind of implies that we’re all dead in less than 20 years.
Jackie
@SpaceUnit: EVERY ELECTION YEAR WILL BE THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION YEAR UNTIL…
piratedan
@Eolirin: well, I think that expansion might be much more welcome than you do…. we already have the court returning abortion to the states, which a majority oppose, now we see loan forgiveness being denied… essentially for being a Democratic policy and now this additional travesty, which has no standing, no harm, other than imaginary for someone who isn’t even working in that field.
Their clothes are off already imho.
Eolirin
@piratedan: Fucking hell, no. They’re not interested in being happy. They’re interested in being superior. What you need to do to yourself in order to sustain that, especially against evidence that you’re not makes you unhappy. Because at the end of the day the only way to really demonstrate superiority is to hurt people, and that’s fundamentally corrosive to the soul.
Carlo Graziani
Robert’s defensiveness points to vulnerability. It is time for consistent messaging from Congressional Democrats at least, to make the pressure unbearable:
“Our settled law was stable right up to the point where Republican extremists succeeded in radically changing the personnel on the Supreme Court. At which point, very suddenly, a cavalcade of settled law got overturned to the advantage of constituencies that elected those same extremists. It is now perfectly apparent that as far as the U.S. Supreme Court is concerned, law follows personnel, not legal principle. Consequently, it is vital for the safety of our democracy that the personnel of this court be changed, or augmented, so as to limit the special-interest-favoring damage inflicted—and to be inflicted—by the Court’s current personnel.”
Roberts would shit himself if that message became embedded in the national discourse. He’d bitch incessantly, but he’d also fret about being remembered as the second coming of Justice Taney. And, weathervane that he is, it might force some moderation on him when it matters.
Eolirin
@piratedan: I think people just want these things fixed, and I think the only effective way to get to political consensus that they get fixed by expanding the court is by making it clear that they can’t be fixed by legislating. If we have the votes for one we have the votes for the other.
mvr
The decisions have been better than we could have expected from this bunch, so I’m not disappointed. But I am thoroughly pissed.
I think that in general having a tradition of letting the courts and the Supreme Court decide things has distinct virtues in reducing what might otherwise come to violent conflict. But those advantages have to be weighed against the costs of letting a not elected body ignore the clear text of statutes and precedent to implement their favored policies against the what those texts would seem to say and what it is pretty obvious most people would prefer. (Let alone the fact that they have shit views about what to go in for.)
For the last year or two that has made me think that pointing out the illegitimacy of each of these decisions is the way to go. Just undermine their authority until something happens. It is too bad really.
But what else can we do?
prostratedragon
@Ksmiami: I think they’re daring him to open that door for them.
Chetan Murthy
@Eolirin: you make a strong case that we will not fix these problems. Let me explain: if what it takes to fix these problems is to both have a significant period of time in which Congress legislates and the court misbehaves, and then another significant period of time in which Congress expands the court, and the president appoints new justices, Then that period of time is long enough that inA country with an electorate as finally balanced as ours, You’re never going to get such a period of time of unbroken Democratic control of the trifecta
ETA: for instance, the democrats legislate and the court behaves itself until the Republicans take control again and then the court proceeds to rip things apart. By the time the dems get power again if they ever do, The electorate will have forgotten at the dems will have to start from scratch again. Please understand, I’m not saying you’re wrong: I think you’re correct and we’re fucked.
TriassicSands
@Geminid:
This isn’t about this thread, but the earlier one in which i made a reference to a “huge mistake” Biden had made. You responded, in part, that it is “easy to criticize.”
You misunderstood the intent of my comment. Saying he had made a “huge mistake” wasn’t really directed at him, it was a way to emphasize just how bad the Supreme Court is. My point was that when he said they “misinterpreted” the Constitution (a reasonable comment for him to make for public consumption), the meaning of what I wrote next was that they couldn’t really “misinterpret” the Constitution, because they aren’t even bothering to interpret the Constitution in the first place, since they have an agenda and know beforehand what the desired outcome is. I guess I thought (wrongly, apparently) that by calling an innocent comment a “huge” mistake, people would understand from what I said next that the comment was criticism of the SCOTUS Six and not Biden. At this point, I look at the Constitution as a mere prop for the Six to manipulate to create cover for what they’re going to do no matter what the Constitution says. I’ll try harder.
Geminid
@TriassicSands: I understand now where you were coming from. I just responded to what you said in the first psrt of your comment, not to what you meant by the second part. Basically, I thought Biden’s response was a good one in that context and not a mistake, much less a huge one.
But I did press you awful hard about this. That is a mistake I make too often with people here, and one that I need to avoid.
TriassicSands
@Alison Rose:
It seems obvious to me that the Six have an agenda and are working tirelessly to accomplish a long list of goals, in a way I’ve never seen before from a US Supreme Court (i.e., before the post Trump Roberts Court).
One of the ways this seems obvious, at least to me, is they are taking cases they don’t really need to take and making decisions that rather than being incremental, something that has often characterized SCOTUS’s in the past, go all the way and even decide issues that aren’t necessarily, in a strict sense, before the Court.
They can’t do just anything they want and create cases out of whole cloth, but there does seem to be collusion going on in which Wing Nuts are creating cases out in the country for the specific purpose of getting them to the Supreme Court.
The flip side of that was seen in Moore v. Harper, where Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito, aware they didn’t have the votes, didn’t want to rule on the case at all. The other six, perhaps realizing how critical the issue before them was, decided to dispense with it now. I would, however, expect to see the issue of the Independent State Legislatures before the Court again, especially if Trump can win next year and manage to somehow get a 7-2 majority. I’m not saying THAT will happen, but giving the go ahead to ISLs would allow Red States to simply fix presidential elections. And what wingnut wouldn’t love that?
Eolirin
@Chetan Murthy: If we come out of 2024 with a Senate majority, we only need to make progress in NC and WI, and cement progress in Georgia to pretty much have a lock on the Senate for the foreseeable future. Especially if DC becomes a state. We eventually flip Maine, as soon as Collins retires, and lose Montana and possibly Ohio, though it will depend on whether demographic shifts reverse themselves there. We won’t need them if we have the second WI seat, can hold Georgia, and can pickup stuff in NC. We’re close on NC. Georgia is gonna be tough to hold for a bit, but if Atlanta keeps growing it’ll get easier.
The house may be a lock until 2030, especially with the map rulings we’ve gotten out of the Supreme Court and with NY and WI possibly having more favorable maps, and if we manage to get voting rights legislation through that sustain a court challenge, possibly longer than that.
But also this doesn’t necessarily take multiple cycles. An abortion rights law, for instance, would be immediately challenged by red states, so would a voting rights bill. It could not be pushed off for multiple years. Letting it go into effect at all would be too big a loss. If they chose to moderate, to save their personal power, they won’t do so without consequence.
TriassicSands
@Geminid:
I never forget and hold grudges. Beware.
OK, no I don’t. I’ve been commenting here for many years (not always as TriassicSands) and early on I decided to not get into arguments. It’s a waste of time and never accomplishes anything. I wasn’t offended at all by what you wrote and given the way you interpreted it, your comment made sense. But, I’d prefer to be understood, even if I haven’t always made myself clear initially, which is why I brought this up
ETA: Plus, I don’t come to B-J and do nothing else. Sometimes I don’t comment at all; mostly I do other things at the same time, which can cause typos that don’t get fixed or comments that might not be clear enough.
Eolirin
@Eolirin: Also, we’re not finely divided. We’re substantially Democratic, just distributed unevenly enough that our system, which is designed to enable minority rule, is still doing so.
The demographic shifts that are happening in this country are going to overwhelm that in another decade or two, if we don’t devolve into a Jim Crow like anti democratic system at the national level. The Biden investments in infrastructure and manufacturing pretty much guarantee that places like the Midwestern states aren’t going to decay into unassailable red states where the politics are driven by rural poverty, urban collapse and youth flight. Even just another cycle or two of investment, especially in dealing with education debt and housing affordability, with more climate mitigation work, will cement this. They really need to break things fast or they’re going to get run over
The GenZ break for dems in 2022 is a sign of things to come. They’ve lost the youth vote by an insane amount, and they’re not doing anything to get it back. This will have growing consequence.
Sister Golden Bear
@Alison Rose: I want to stay and fight, but the “what’s next” question has got me seriously thinking about whether it’s time to leave the country. Thankfully the worst and the anti-trans legislation is losing in the courts — for now. But they’ll be appealed and the Sleazy Six have made it clear they don’t give a fuck about the law and facts. What happens when they uphold the law retroactively changing the gender to what we were assigned at birth on all legal ID of the trans folks like me who jumped through all the not inconsiderable hoops to get our gender legally changed. What happens when they decide to void trans people’s passport for “lying” about our gender.
Yes that sounds hysterical, but we were called hysterical when we warned years ago about all the shit going down now.
Chetan Murthy
@Eolirin: I sure hope you’re right. Obviously I think there’s nothing else to be done about it.
Eolirin
@Chetan Murthy: To be fair, this analysis is relying on a bunch of conditionals; we can’t lose the presidency this cycle or in 2028. If we lose the senate, we’re in a much more difficult situation, etc. I think our prospects 10, 15 years out look a lot better than where we are today. But we still need a bridge to then that doesn’t fuck everything up.
Alison Rose
@Sister Golden Bear: It honestly doesn’t sound hysterical at all. We know a lot of them definitely want to do it, and they will if they find the opportunity. TBH if I were able to, I’d ask my mom to move with me to Canada or the UK or whatever country sucks the least on human rights. I’m so fucking tired of the MAJORITY of the population being held hostage to these motherfuckers
It’s especially frustrating in one way being in California, because if we were our own country, it’d be pretty fucking sweet. But even though our government isn’t psychotic, we’re under the thumb of one that is.
Chetan Murthy
@Eolirin: Can’t lose the *House* either. And I’m reminded that American voters are fickle AF, e.g. “thermostatic voters” in the 2021 gubernatorials. I’d say that you’re assuming (or hoping) that everything goes our way. Whereas, as Murc (of Murc’s Law) puts it, “it’s a lead-pipe cinch that the GrOPers will take the trifecta at some point in the next N cycles” (b/c of Duverger’s Law).
Again, I agree with your diagnosis of the difficulty of expanding SCOTUS (or disciplining it in any way). So, hey, it’s all a crap shoot. Again, I agree with you.
different-church-lady
We have to remember that the SCOTUS is a trailing indicator. This cake got baked seven years ago. It can get un-baked, but we’re going to have to suffer through the damn thing.
different-church-lady
@Jackie: …forever.
different-church-lady
@Spider-Dan: It really fuckin’ annoys me how they’re screaming for Biden to fix the mistake they made.
Eolirin
@Chetan Murthy: If we hold the Senate we almost certainly take the House, given the conditions we’re facing.
And the GOP can absolutely collapse; we’ve seen it happen in places like California and NY. It can do that more or less nationally. Because of the anti-democratic nature of the Senate, they’ll probably be able to fuck stuff up even as a permanent minority, but even historically, the Democrats held the House unbroken between FDR and, gosh, was it Clinton? Or nearly so?
If we shore up Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, we have a pretty firm lock on the EC too.
N can be a really large number.
mrmoshpotato
@oldster:
Same way the orange shitstain resented being called Putin’s puppet to his fat, orange, fascist face.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Sister Golden Bear:
Didn’t the SCOTUS rule favorably for some case involving trans rights in the last few years? With Gorsuch (sp) being a decisive vote for the majority opinion? Maybe I’m misremembering?
NotMax
“Tell me about the olden days again, Pop. What happened next?”
“And then, when the court declared the entire Constitution unconstitutional…”
//
TriassicSands
@Eolirin:
2024 is brutal for Senate Democrats. They have to defend 23 seats against the Republicans’ 10. It’s important to be realistic, even if the picture looks bleak. We’ve got to win every possible seat, even if the result is a Republican majority. I kind of expect WVA to go to the GOP. Arizona is a problem if a Democrat and Sinema split the vote. We could be better off not opposing Sinema if we were assured she would continue to caucus with the Democrats. On the other hand, if we’re going to lose the Senate, it doesn’t matter if Sinema caucuses with the Democrats, and replacing her with Gallego ought to be an improvement. I hope she doesn’t run.
The most important thing in 2024 is for Democrats to retain the presidency. A presidential veto, which we don’t see that much, will be critical if Republicans hold the House and regain the Senate. There is no way the fascists will get veto-proof majorities, which means Biden (or any other Democrat) can prevent a national ban on abortion, horrendous anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and so on. I would expect the filibuster to go, if it makes a measurable difference to the fascists.
I expect the Democrats will lose the Senate. Our best hope will probably be if Republicans continue to nominate idiots, lunatics, and idiotic lunatics. That could save some seats. If Republicans were smart, they’d avoid a repeat of 2022, but they’re more radical than intelligent. If the Dems do lose the Senate, that will be very bad for addressing the balance in the courts. As always, the weak spot for Democrats is the electorate.
It’s more difficult to tell what will happen in the House. If Biden wins and wins by a wide popular vote margin, Dems could come out with a nice majority, which, along with the presidency would help protect vulnerable Americans. Sadly, I have zero confidence in voters.
I firmly believe that now each succeeding election is more important than the last and mid-term elections are just as important as presidential years.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@TriassicSands:
Gen Z voters came out big for Dems in the 2022 midterms to make a real difference in many races. Dobbs isn’t going away anytime soon. The Wisconsin Supreme Court Dem victory is a recent example of this
Eolirin
@TriassicSands: Montana is the definitive seat in 2024; in a universe in which Montana gets held we almost certainly maintain control of the Senate. Most of those 23 seats are pretty safe. Montana, Ohio, and Arizona and the ones we need to be most concerned with. We’re almost certainly losing West Virginia. Even assuming Manchin decides to run again, Jim Justice would need to lose the nomination for there to be a chance. The other states potentially in play should be easier to hold than those. I have some faith Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and PA will do the right thing with popular incumbents and a Presidential year. If we lose those we almost certainly have lost the Presidency too.
Unfortunately the only two pick up opportunities we have are Florida and Texas. So we need a sweep of those 3; not getting Wisconsin and North Carolina in the midterms and damn we were close, has removed any margin we may have had. I think Sherrod Brown has decent odds, I’m not sure about Tester, and Arizona will depend heavily on who’s actually running; if it’s someone like Kari Lake, Sinema spilts the R vote more than the D vote. And no, we’re not better off not running Gallego; Sinema’s polling is awful, she loses to someone like Lake and comes in third in a Lake, Gallego, Sinema match up.
TriassicSands
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yes, but we don’t just need most GenZ voters to support Democrats, we need most GenZ people to vote AND vote for Democrats. The difference in those two options could be millions of votes. I’m pretty sure that in 2022, as always, the lowest turnout rate was among the youngest voters. That has got to change. Sadly, for better or worse, an 80+ year-old candidate is not the best vehicle to bring about that change.
I have a GenZ neighbor who is a Democrat and hates Biden and says he won’t vote for him. Of course, he won’t vote for the Republican, but he would either not vote or vote for a third party candidate. I plan to work on him. I think by November 5, 2024, I can convince him to vote like his future depends on it — because it will. And however bad he thinks Biden is, the alternative should be unthinkable. Fortunately, it’s possible to whine in 2023 and shut up and wake up 2024.
NotMax
@TriassicSands
Message for him: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the intelligent.
Eolirin
@TriassicSands: In 2022, GenZ, between turnout and voting break down, completely negated the 65+ vote (though unfortunately not evenly, or we would have won in NC. Youth turnout was lower there). Some of that is demographic falloff, but they don’t all need to turn out, just enough. Every cycle from this point forward will mean GenZ is a larger share of the electorate. Millennials are also more liberal than the older generations, so between the two groups there’s a pretty strong lean Dem. But it’s going to take a few more cycles before this becomes completely dominant.
Aussie Sheila
@Carlo Graziani:
Agree. Normie Dems aren’t ready for radical revision of the USSC domination of the realm of the politically possible. But they are ready imo, for a campaign to rob it of its general esteem and deference. That should be the way forward. A Court that usurps the proper role of the legislature isn’t a Court in the ordinary sense, it’s a super legislature, and it’s inconsistent with democratic self government.
The US Constitution is what it is, and deference towards it appears to be a necessary part of national unity, but what it means and its implications are political matters, and the sooner the US left grasps this, the better.
Sister Golden Bear
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yes they did. Two decisions back in 2020 — when RBG and Breyer were still on the court.
Feels like a lifetime ago now, but it was the first time the SCOTUS upheld trans people’s rights.
But that was then, this is now. And the extreme Calvinball involved in today’s decision makes clear the Sleazy Six went out of their way to rollback LGBTQ+ rights.
Yutsano
I don’t understand what’s controversial about 13 circuits needing 13 judges. The Supreme Court is overburdened with the circuit work, so we should just alleviate the burden. It’s not expansion for expansion’s sake. It’s making sure circuit work isn’t being neglected.
Eolirin
@Yutsano: It’s much easier to make that argument when you already have control of the court than when you don’t.
TriassicSands
I’m not going to make bets and win money on anything like that, but the states are different enough and with the 23 to 10 ratio, I’m afraid your statement is overly optimistic. If I were to re-write it, I might say “…in a universe in which Montana gets held, Democrats might even maintain control of the Senate.” And, of course, one key difference is that in Montana Tester has been able to win against the odds, so doing it again wouldn’t be anywhere as difficult as some of the other races. Again, I hope you’re right, but I wouldn’t take your side of the bet.
I don’t know that I’d call Ohio safe. I immediately think of Russ Feingold in WI losing to one of the worst Senators imaginable, Ron Johnston. Twice. And Ohio, has gone pretty wingnut crazy recently. My oh my, electing J.D. Vance. Yikes. I really like Sherrod Brown, but…Ohio. Of course, in every race it depends on who gets the nominations.
Montana. They elected “Body Slam” Gianforte. One of the reasons i’m so down on voters is because they can elect someone like Tester and then someone like Gianforte. That makes zero sense and it shows that voters are utterly irrational and often are so ill-informed and uninformed that their votes are ridiculous. Let’s see, this year I’ll vote for Gandhi and in two years I’ll vote for Hitler. Yeah, OK.
It should be a pretty safe bet that Sinema won’t be in the Senate in 2025. She’s kinda the No Labels candidate in AZ. (Although, I’d be happy to label her.) The best scenario for Dems is if she polls so badly that she simply doesn’t run. But one never knows with flakes. Is it impossible that she would run, knowing she would lose, but hoping she would cause Gallego to lose as well? (In other words, is she at all like Trump.) I just don’t trust her at all, so I wouldn’t try to predict what she’ll do. As far as how the votes split in a three way race that always depends on who the three candidates are. After the non-stop Kari-Clown-Show, will Republicans be dumb enough to nominate her? Who knows?
My hope is for a Democratic president and a Dem majority in the House. If Dems somehow held the Senate i would be amazed and ecstatic. But these are really weird times.
TriassicSands
Nothing. Except it’s 2023 and there is no chance it will be portrayed as a simple move to match justices with circuits. In truth, it’s not. For obvious and understandable reasons, we want to overcome the illegitimate VI. And, if it is such a good idea (which it is), why weren’t Democrats pushing for it when Donald Trump was president. Of course, the answer there is obvious.
And, Yutsano, you know what the media will do with it.
If you wanted to remove the controversy, there would be an easy way to do it — let Biden nominate two justices of his choice and then nominate two justices recommended by Republicans. No problem. Except the Republicans would maintain a majority and I don’t know any Democrats who think Biden should do that. Democratic voters might be calling for the House to impeach Joe. I’m sure the GOP would oblige.
dirge
Don’t know why nobody seems to know this, but the constitution does not say that justices hold office for life. It says they hold office during good behavior.
Congress can and should set standards, then take out the trash. Pretty sure that’s going to be politically easier than expanding the court (which is also a good idea).
TriassicSands
You betcha.
But, today, even that would cause endless screaming and the media wouldn’t help.
The way to do it without or with less controversy is to require that the Court be expanded at a future time when no one now knows who will be president or who will control either the Senate or the Court. (That’s a little more difficult because of the ages of three of the WingNuts.)
TriassicSands
@dirge:
That is effectively for life or until they’re bad. Other offices have specific ages and term specifications; not the SCOTUS. Since the Constitution is silent on both of those, there is no limit. Reps and senators can serve forever if they can keep getting elected. See Diane Feinstein, Chuck Grassley, and everyone’s civil rights icon Strom Thurmond.
One has to be 35 to be president, but there isn’t anything stopping Trump II from nominating his son Barron to the high court. (I doubt even the GOP would OK that, but they’re really crazy, so, who knows?)
Eolirin
@TriassicSands: Of those 23 states, only 8 of them are even remotely conceivable for Republicans to flip; of those 8 only Arizona, Ohio, and Montana are genuine tossups. West Virginia is almost certainly a loss. If we have a very bad night, we might lose more than those 4, but we’d almost certainly have to lose the Presidency, since it means we lost in Michigan, Wisconsin and/or Pennsylvania.
Of the 3 genuine tossups, Montana is the ugliest looking, though we don’t yet have enough information on Arizona to fully assess it. It’s extremely unlikely we can win in Montana and not win in Ohio. Though, I suppose if the Ohio candidate is reasonable or the Montana candidate is a crazy nutjob, maybe that’s flipped.
State voting patterns aren’t entirely independent variables. They correlate with each other to some degree, even if there’s a wide gap between outcomes.
TriassicSands
Gotta go. G’night everyone.
TriassicSands
@Eolirin:
I almost got outta here.
I agree with you about most races. The crux is how few seats will flip control. We’ll see.
Quick Question: Is Eolirin a nym or your given name. If it’s a nym, I don’t care, but if it’s your given name I wonder how you pronounce it. It looks really pretty and like it should sound very nice, too.
Eolirin
@TriassicSands: Nym; Ee-oh-lear-in
TriassicSands
@Eolirin:
That is what I thought. I really like the sound of that.
Source? Literature? Game? The sound your cat makes when s/he is angry/annoyed/happy/hungry/ or speaking in tongues?
Chris T.
So: SCOTUS first nuked the idea of standing. Anyone can sue anyone for any reason. And now they’ve nuked the idea of real cases with real people, via Creative 303. So what’s to stop us (or anyone, really) from just flooding SCOTUS with fake cases?
Mai Naem mobileI
I am interested in seeing what ProPublica comes up with next. If they keep on with this drip drip, there’s going to be pressure building to at least do something about ethics and limits on gifts etc. I am kind of hoping that they either do a piece on Kavanaugh first and then a bigger piece on Roberts or just a piece on Roberts. You know that people will be emboldened to leak to ProPublica because what do you have to lose at this point? If the stories are a few years old the leakers may have moved on in their careers. Lots of temporary summer jobs at resorts – sometimes its college students who aren’t going to go into the hospitality industry and are just looking for a summer job to make some $$$.
Mai Naem mobileI
Did Alito and Thomas ever turn in their disclosure forms this year? They had asked for extensions but I thought the extensions were fairly short. I haven’t heard anything since. I am wondering if Scalia and Thomas would have the balls to go off on another billionaire paid for vacation this summer. They’re both certainly arrogant enough to think they can do it with no consequences.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@TriassicSands:
Barron would be disqualified, under article one no one with a title of nobility can hold any office.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
If only someone had warned them.
raven
I hung with a lawyer who has argued before the supreme court and he said that there have been less noticed decisions that are as, or more, damaging than the three we are discussing.
Tony Jay
All this (gestures in the direction of the Sanhedrin Six) was always going to happen though, wasn’t it?
The Right have lost the Presidency, lost the Senate, lost the ability to do anything in the House other than shit on the desks. All they have is their manufactured majority on the SC so of course they’re going to leverage that to cause as much trouble as they can while they still can.
Yes, this is terrible, it embarrasses your country and will cause real pain to a lot of innocent people, but that’s what the Right does. Move forward, stay united, outvote them and remove them and make it possible for future Democratic administrations to fix these problems permenantly.
The sun always rises, yeah?
ETA – Fucksake, a few years ago you had a GOP Congress and Trump in the White House. This ain’t that.
The Thin Black Duke
@Tony Jay: POC have always known the battle never ends. White folks are starting to figure it out.
Baud
@Tony Jay:
👍
Tony Jay
@The Thin Black Duke:
They’ve had that privilege.
lowtechcyclist
@Eolirin:
We keep definitively winning the electorate as a whole. We won the popular vote in 2016 by 2.9 million votes, and that was the smallest margin by which we won the popular vote in the last four Presidential elections.
So the problem isn’t the electorate, the problem is the rules that disadvantage our majority.
Job 1 is obviously to win next November. We need to win the Presidential election, re-take the House, hold Montana and Ohio in the Senate, and we need a win for Gallego in Arizona as well.
After that, we need to convince Senators like Angus King and Mark Warner to go along with filibuster carve-outs for voting rights (including limitations on gerrymandering), abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and statehood for D.C. (and Puerto Rico if they want it).
That’s likely to be the hard part. Gotta lean on those guys. They hid behind Manchinema in the last Congress, and in this one the GOP-controlled House gets them off the hook. But in the next one, with any luck, they’ll have nowhere to hide.
MomSense
@Eolirin:
Pretty much this.
Here’s a cheery thought. We lost the White House in 2016 by about 70,000 votes while winning the popular vote by 3,000,000 and change. We won the White House by about 45,000 and the e popular vote by 8,000,000.
I think the sooner we all face how incredibly fucking difficult it will be to win in 2024 the better. We have to start now. Right fucking now. I have some thoughts on what we can start doing now since we don’t have a campaign up and running yet.
Ksmiami
@prostratedragon: ok. This Court is a disgrace- either they go, their jurisdiction is reduced, or endless suffering results for innocent Americans. That’s it.
MomSense
@lowtechcyclist:
I have talked face to fucking face with Angus many times. He is the smartest person in every room he is in no matter which room and who is in it with him. Don’t believe me? He will tell you.
Don’t count on him.
Baud
I’ve been told voters care about pot issues.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@MomSense:
The economy is currently doing just fine. Dobbs is still a thing and recently propelled a Dem Wisconsin Supreme court candidate to win by over 11 points. The 2022 midterms helped shore up states that are critical for Dems to win in 2024
MomSense
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I would feel a lot better about things if I didn’t see so many Millennials posting all kinds of Marianne Williamson nonsense. If she had any sense of shame she would never show her face in public after the way she abused gay men during the AIDS crisis.
Also too if I never see another Millennial posting about how capitalism caused their chronic illness and somehow communism would be better for their health it will be too soon.
Yes, we can win but only if we work because we are definitely the underdogs in the next election. There are many reasons why we are not in a good position heading into 2024. We have to face them and deal with them.
hueyplong
Stuff we see on the internet doesn’t necessarily constitute anything representative of the actual electorate. I’d be surprised if Marianne Williamson mattered in 2024. Yes, Jill Stein hurt in 2016, but the electorate has that example before it and, after 4 years of Trump in power and another 4 of his legacy and continued threats, there ought to be fewer people who still think as the Sarandons of 2016 did.
There is a decent chance that people learn and change their voting behavior even if they don’t admit out loud that their prior action led to disaster.
This Supreme Court is a turnout machine for Democrats and a serious reminder of the foolishness of third party dabbling in the context of a Trump/DeSantis threat. I’m fairly optimistic about 2024 and much of that is based on how upset our side (rightly) is.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yeah, not bad. All week long I’ve been hearing on Bloomberg “Friday’s the big day, Friday’s the big day, Friday’s the big day” and then they were disappointed over the lack of bad news. Of course if this great news occurred during a Gop administration they’d be shooting off fireworks into the Hudson.
Gin & Tonic
@Mai Naem mobileI: I doubt Scalia will be going on any vacation this summer.
The Thin Black Duke
@MomSense: What keeps me optimistic is seeing that young people are getting much more engaged politically. For example, they know that old farts like us aren’t going to get the worse of it when the dystopian impact of climate change finally reaches white suburbanites in Riverdale. It helps knowing they got skin in the game.
MomSense
@hueyplong:
SCOTUS is only a turnout machine for Democrats until it’s not. There is a point at which it causes despair and that is really bad for turnout.
trnc
I don’t know how they can do anything more egregious than literally ignoring black letter law (“waive or modify”), blithely punt stare decisis (Roe) or allow discrimination to be codified. People who aren’t convinced about any recent rulings probably won’t care much more about any others.
A lot of discussions focus on these particular rulings and not the fact that the court majority is ruling based strictly on their own personal whims.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Fuck you Roberts, if there is a second civil war, your court’s attempt to play Calvin Ball with the law will be part of the cause.
lowtechcyclist
@trnc:
Dead thread, I know, but lately I see more and more discussion of the latter, that they’re basically making up the law as they go along, like the ‘major questions doctrine’ which is their invention, or that they’ve pretty much thrown stare decisis out the window, and that the reasoning of their opinions is weak and just window dressing for ruling however they want.
JML
The hilarity of John Roberts BS never stops. Whiny McTool is upset that the dissents are questioning if his theocratic majority is going beyond proper judicial limits? FFS almost every opinion from Thomas, Scalia, and Alito for years used that call out when trying to strike down business regulations, affirmative action, privacy protections, etc. Fucking hypocrite.
Bill Arnold
@oldster:
I hope most people here would have the nerve, if they encountered a member of the Partisan GOP Six, to call them a partisan hack to their face, loudly, so that everyone within 50-100 yards can hear them (if not deaf).
Eolirin
@TriassicSands: Totally made it up. I’ve been able to use it for over 20 years without ever running into a situation where someone else has taken it.
brantl
@Eolirin: You need 60, unless we change the cloture rules.
brantl
@Geminid: The 6 person SCROTUS is now redefining English, to come up with whatever decisions they want to, if you think what he says isn’t a clear and present potential danger, you are fooling yourself.
Eolirin
@brantl: We have, on the record, 48 votes for doing so for voting rights, and I’m fairly sure Fetterman would be a yes. Gallego would be 50, if we keep Tester and Brown. We probably have about the same math on abortion rights.
Once there’s a carve out, it’s much easier to get another one. I think the filibuster dies pretty quickly.
Geminid
@brantl: Mystak did not say “potential.” He said this like it was a certainty.
He said that court expansion was the only way to avert this result. Did you notice that the commenter I responded to simultaneously accepted his premise and despaired of averting it?
This is another variation on the bogus argument that Democrats are foolish to think that winning elections is enough, even though the only way we’ll even have a chance of effecting court reform is to win elections, and a lot of them.
So as far as I’m concerned, I was not fooling myself. I was just not letting a “public intellectual” who’s never done a fucking thing except talk fool me. And I was trying to keep him from fooling another commenter.
grubert
still waiting for someone to point out where the Constitution gives the Court the power to overturn any laws at all.
What’s that? They gave themselves that power? An unconstitutional power that we all just accept because?
grubert
There are other alternatives.. congress can rotate judges out of the Scotus to lesser courts.. congress can restrict review for certain topics..
Packing isn’t the only option
Bill Arnold
@grubert:
SCOTUS grabbed that power in the early 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison
It’s now tradition, over 200 years old.
Cacti
Biden has neither the stones to support SCOTUS expansion, nor to openly defy them.
But we’re reaching a point where one or the other is going to have to happen.