Assuming that we get onto some kind of good timeline in the future I think justice KBJ's volumes of concurrences and dissents will be studied as the important work of a justice with a fervent commitment to democracy and the constitution, a commitment that ACB and the NYT leadership lack
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 5:34 PM
The SC(R)OTUS Sinister Six sent Amy ‘Blank Sheet of Paper’ Cunning-Bunny out to complain about that very rude Black lady, and the NYTimes had a nice clean hanky for her — “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Makes Herself Heard, Prompting a Rebuke” [gift link]:
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote just five majority opinions in the Supreme Court term that ended last month, the fewest of any member of the court. But her voice resonated nonetheless, in an unusually large number of concurring and dissenting opinions, more than 20 in all.
Several of them warned that the court was taking lawless shortcuts, placing a judicial thumb on the scale in favor of President Trump and putting American democracy in peril. She called the majority’s opinion in the blockbuster case involving birthright citizenship, issued on the final day of the term, “an existential threat to the rule of law.”
Justice Jackson, 54, is the court’s newest member, having just concluded her third term. Other justices have said it took them years to find their footing, but Justice Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, quickly emerged as a forceful critic of her conservative colleagues and, lately, their approach to the Trump agenda.
Her opinions, sometimes joined by no other justice, have been the subject of scornful criticism from the right and have raised questions about her relationships with her fellow justices, including the other two members of its liberal wing…
Her slashing critiques sometimes seemed to test her colleagues’ patience, culminating in an uncharacteristic rebuke from Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the case arising from Mr. Trump’s effort to ban birthright citizenship. In that case, the majority sharply limited the power of district court judges to block presidential orders, even if they are patently unconstitutional…
Justice Jackson added her own dissent, speaking only for herself. She said the majority imperiled the rule of law, creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.”
That prompted an extended response from Justice Barrett, the next most junior justice and the author of the majority opinion. It did not stint on condescension.
“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion signed by all five of the other Republican appointees…
Just months ago, Justice Barrett was the target of ugly criticism from the right for minor deviations from Mr. Trump’s legal agenda, with some of his allies calling her “a D.E.I. hire,” suggesting she had been chosen only for her gender. But the president’s supporters were delighted by her criticism of Justice Jackson, with some crowing that their earlier attacks on Justice Barrett had succeeded…
Professor Murray said she suspected that Justice Barrett’s remarks were part of a larger agenda intended to silence a critic. “It was incredibly dismissive,” she said. “And I just wonder if it wasn’t just about this case, but rather about these asides that Justice Jackson has been leavening into her dissents.”…
Justice Jackson has appeared comfortable expressing herself from the start.
She has been particularly active in filing concurring opinions — ones that agree with the majority’s bottom line but offer additional comments or different reasoning…
She has also been active in dissent. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did not write his first solo dissent in an argued case until 16 years into his tenure. Justice Jackson issued three such dissents in her first term.
Marin Levy, a law professor at Duke, said Justice Jackson had been doing two things in her dissents.
“The first category concerns standard disagreements on the merits,” Professor Levy said. “The second category feels quite different — I think here we see dissents in which Justice Jackson is trying to raise the alarm. Whether she is writing for the public or a future court, she is making a larger point about what she sees as not just the errors of the majority’s position but the dangers of it as well.”
Justice Jackson, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also been a harsh critic of the court’s use of truncated procedures in ruling on emergency applications.
“This fly-by-night approach to the work of the Supreme Court is not only misguided,” she wrote in April, when the court said that Venezuelan men the administration was seeking to deport to El Salvador had sued in the wrong court. “It is also dangerous.”…
Last year, in a dissent in a public corruption case, Justice Jackson seemed to allude to revelations by ProPublica and others that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. had failed to disclose luxury travel provided to them by billionaire benefactors, a strikingly critical swipe on a sensitive topic.
“Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions,” she wrote. “Greed makes governments — at every level — less responsive, less efficient and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.”
The reason the NYT is like "wow seems like the black justice is being a little EXTRA" and ACB is like "your opinions are trash, shut up" is because on some level they get this and their jealously is driving them mad
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 5:38 PM
The sharpest critic of the U.S. Supreme Court is its newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who hails from #Florida www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202… via @washingtonpost.com
— Craig Pittman (@craigtimes.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 2:24 PM
Many people are saying… The Washington Post, “One of the Supreme Court’s sharpest critics sits on it” [gift link]:
Dissenting — again — on the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, in its most high-profile case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not mince words.
She had for months plainly criticized the opinions of her conservative colleagues, trading the staid legalese typical of justices’ decisions for impassioned arguments against what she has described as their acquiescence to President Donald Trump. She returned to that theme again in the final case, ripping the court for limiting nationwide injunctions.
“The majority’s ruling … is … profoundly dangerous, since it gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate,” Jackson wrote…
She wrote more dissents this term than any other justice. Overall, she penned 24 opinions, second only to the prolific Clarence Thomas. Jackson also far exceeded her colleagues in the number of words she spoke during oral arguments. She uttered more than 79,000; Sonia Sotomayor, her liberal colleague, came in a distant second, at 53,000.
In her third term, one legal expert said, she has carved out a space on the left similar to what Thomas has held on the right. Writing frequently, often dissenting, and sometimes willing to depart from her liberal colleagues…
Jackson frequently disagreed with the substance of the conservative majority’s rulings this term but most strikingly offering a sustained, blunt and unsparing critique of how the court went about its work.
Again and again, Jackson accused the conservative bloc of weighing cases in a rushed, reckless and partisan fashion that undermined the high court’s mission to be an arbiter of fair and impartial justice — delivering results for Trump.
She summed up the sentiment baldly in a dissent in a case clearing the way for Trump to strip temporary protections from migrants: “The Court has plainly botched this assessment today.”
Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor, said Jackson is not so much embracing a new role as she is growing more comfortable being the justice who showed up on day one, jumping into oral arguments during her first case and grilling attorneys. Her first opinion was a dissent.
“I think this term, we have seen her take a more forthright approach in the way her colleagues are facilitating the administration,” Murray said. “I don’t know that she goes so far as to say they are in the bag for the administration, but she does come close.”…
Her role is particularly notable because she is the court’s most junior justice. Jackson, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, is the first Black woman to serve on the high court.
“She’s found her footing maybe faster than other justices historically,” said Morgan Ratner, a lawyer who worked as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his tenure on the D.C. Circuit.
She also is responding to the limits of power that come with being on the court’s minority, said Michele Goodwin, a Georgetown University law professor. As a result, Goodwin said, Jackson is writing on two tracks, one legal and the other rhetorical.
“She realizes the balls and strikes on the court, and what she’s doing is writing … forward for a different day,” Goodwin said….
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is increasingly willing to condemn the actions of the conservative majority, even when that means breaking with her Liberal colleagues
By Ruth Marcus
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led…— Mia Farrow (@miafarrow.bsky.social) June 29, 2025 at 1:05 PM
The New Yorker, on “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Declaration of Independence”:
… New Justices tend to hang back; Jackson, now in her third term, spoke up from the start. In her first eight oral arguments, she spoke eleven thousand words, twice as many as the next most loquacious Justice, Sotomayor. That tendency has persisted—The Hill found that Jackson spoke seventy-five thousand words this term, fifty per cent more than Sotomayor—and it isn’t the only measure of Jackson’s assertiveness. As the Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak noted at the conclusion of Jackson’s first term on the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts “did not write his first solo dissent in an argued case until 16 years into his tenure. Justice Jackson issued three such dissents in her first term.” Jackson’s conduct this term—in her work on the Court and her comments outside it—is not different so much as it is more so: more alarmed at the direction the Court and the country are heading, and more willing than ever to go it alone in expressing that distress…
Jackson’s independence from her liberal colleagues was on display in April, when the majority ruled that a challenge to President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison had been brought in the wrong court. Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Kagan, Jackson, and, in part, by the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was unsparing. She described the Trump Administration’s effort to “hustle” the Venezuelans out of the country before they could obtain due process as “an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.” The Court’s seeming indulgence of that behavior, she added, was “indefensible.” Jackson went further, in her own dissent. She assailed the majority’s “fly-by-night approach” of deciding cases on an emergency basis, without full briefing or oral argument—and compared the opinion with Korematsu v. United States, the discredited 1944 ruling upholding the internment of Japanese Americans. “At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” Jackson wrote. “With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”
Speaking last month at a judicial conference, Jackson seized the opportunity to call out “the elephant in the room, which is the relentless attacks and disregard and disparagement that judges around the country, and perhaps many of you, are now facing on a daily basis.” …
Even the anodyne USA Today!
In a Supreme Court term that handed Trump and conservatives, big wins, Ketanji Brown Jackson – the newest justice – has emerged as fierce voice of dissent.
— USA TODAY (@usatoday.com) July 5, 2025 at 5:00 AM
1/ Whether or not Friday's SCOTUS ruling has the practical effect of denying birthright citizenship to children born on US soil, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used her dissent to issue a strong warning that this decision has altered our system of gov't—& sooner or later, may destroy it.
— Fiona "Fi" Webster 🌎🌍🌏 (@fiona-webster22.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 10:45 AM
2/ “Disaster looms,” Jackson wrote. If a court cannot command the executive to follow the law, then there exists “a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, …
3/ & where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law’s protection become subject to the Executive’s whims instead.”
“I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, …
4/ & from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends,” she wrote.
“Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, & our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”
I’m not sure why Justice Jackson’s “unusually large number of concurring and dissenting opinions” are said to have “prompted a rebuke,’ especially one “that did not stint on condescension.” Comey Barrett’s “rebuke” was a choice, an act of agency.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/u…— Larry Glickman (@larryglickman.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 6:43 AM
===
KBJ joined a Court whose six-person majority has made a number of dubious and dangerous opinions. Her opinions have underlined that threat. If she had joined the Court at a different time in its history, these warnings would not have been necessary. But at this moment of democratic crisis, they are.
— Larry Glickman (@larryglickman.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 6:54 AM
The claim that her opinions have tested “her colleagues’ patience” strikes me as a form of what I have called “elite victimization.” The Court’s majority has made a series of radically extremist decisions—taking away a Constitutional right, offering Trump seemingly unlimited immunity etc.
— Larry Glickman (@larryglickman.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 7:03 AM
Um. What about Earl Warren, who wrote what is arguably the most important opinion of the twentieth century less than a year after he joined the Court as Chief Justice?
— Larry Glickman (@larryglickman.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 7:10 AM
Earl Warren, recently appointed as Chief Justice, with no judicial experience beforehand, also got “the hang of things” pretty quickly when he shepherded through the unanimous Brown v. Board opinion.
— Larry Glickman (@larryglickman.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 8:22 AM
The right’s judicial hero, Antonin Scalia, would routinely insult other justices, especially Sandra Day O’Connor, and write totally unhinged opinions.
— Phil Klinkner (@pklinkne.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 12:45 PM
No, you see, when a woman stands up to her colleagues she’s “kinda being a bitch,” but whenever a man pulls the absolutely outrageous BS Clarence Thomas pulls its “constitutionalism.”
— Brendan Davey (@brendandavey.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 8:11 AM
Literally the most qualified.
— Ms. Architeuthis (@msarchiteuthis.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 11:29 AM
White women clutch their pearls. Justice Brown-Jackson proudly wears her cowrie shells. May she prevail…
— DBerl0909 (@dberl.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 12:34 PM
Still Grim in Texas and It’s Only Getting Worse
Baud
Glad she’s making the most of her opportunity.
Elizabelle
You go, Justice KBJ. History is going to be kind to you, and. You are not wrong.
bbleh
Well I think it’s just terrible that that nice Amy Coney-Barrett — who is a Christian, you know! — has got SO upset with that rude person she has to work with that she just had to say something! I mean, a nice person can only tolerate so much, and some people just need to learn to stay in their place!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
It didn’t seem clear to me from the post: why is it that the other liberal justices don’t go as far as Jackson?
Old School
I wondered why the focus on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s connection to Florida mattered. That seems to be Craig Pittman’s focus on social media.
Ruviana
@bbleh: To be scrupfair she’s a Catholic, very different for the evangelicals.
bbleh
@Ruviana: true but in my experience Evangelicals are happy to embrace Catholics when their political interests align, and they are ALWAYS happy to claim that they are motivated by “Christianity.”
zhena gogolia
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I can’t read anything from the MSM, but my guess is Black people see what’s happening so much more clearly than anyone else.
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: I was going to suggest world view based on lived experience, so yeah.
H.E.Wolf
We are most fortunate to have Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court at this moment in time.
Justice Thurgood Marshall would be proud.
satby
@Ruviana: To be strictly clear, Coney-Barrett is an adherent of a fringe right wing Catholic sect, not a mainstream Catholic. People of Praise is a part of the “evangelical” Charismatic Catholic movement, and has about 1,700 members, according to Wikipedia.
mappy!
If they play the victim card, she’s living rent free…
satby
I love her call back to RBG with her cowrie shell collar. That’s a direct rebuke to the completely unqualified hack that was rushed in to RGB’s seat after her death.
schrodingers_cat
Ketanji and Kamala are two of the many reasons why Biden became too old for many elected Ds and the white bro podcast complex.
stinger
“Excellent Links”, indeed, Anne Laurie — thank you!
What’s with the emphasis on the word counts of two female justices? It reinforces the belief that women talk talk talk. Poor Karen Coney Barrett — she used to be the youngest woman on the Court by 12 years; now she’s only the youngest by a year. And is clearly outclassed.
H.E.Wolf
I noticed this gem from the NYT excerpt:
“Just months ago, Justice Barrett was the target of ugly criticism from the right for minor deviations from Mr. Trump’s legal agenda, with some of his allies calling her ‘a D.E.I. hire,’ suggesting she had been chosen only for her gender.”
Interesting that the NYT fails to note that “DEI” (among its other heinous innuendos) is frequently used by right-wingers as a synonym for “Black”.
Grrrrr….
Baud
@H.E.Wolf:
Barrett isn’t black.
NeenerNeener
@bbleh:
What calls itself Christianity these days is a far cry from the teachings of Jesus.
It seems like people who vote R don’t expect to have to face repercussions for any of the evil they do, either in this life or a next one. If there is no “next life” then I don’t feel I’ve missed anything by not being an asshole in this life. If there is a “next life” I wouldn’t want to be Mango Mussolini, Kristi Noem, or Stephen Miller, to name just a few.
My ex-sister-in-law is an Evangelical expecting the Rapture any day now. That she voted for the guy who fits almost all of the requirements to be the Anti-Christ doesn’t seem to bother her at all.
Kayla Rudbek
@satby: so Pope Leo can excommunicate her as a damned heretic, then? Best news I’ve heard today.
Ksmiami
@H.E.Wolf: I’m hoping the court gets disbanded at this point. It’s useless and corrupt
lowtechcyclist
Thanks, AL, for putting together this tremendous collection of links. If we get through this moment, history will praise KBJ to the skies, while having little to say about Thomas or ACB that isn’t dismissive.
@H.E.Wolf:
Or woman, or any other person who isn’t a straight white Christian man. I’m sure that if a gay or trans person gets appointed to some high position, they’ll be a “DEI hire” the first time they do anything the MAGAts find objectionable, even if that person is white.
Steve LaBonne
Conservative snowflakes- there’s a novelty for you.
UncleEbeneezer
@schrodingers_cat: Ketanji is everything Progressives swear they want in a SCOTUS Justice. Another thing that Progressives demanded, Biden did and then everyone completely ignored when it was time for us to help him win reelection.
H.E.Wolf
@Baud:
Thank you! I had a total Reading Comprehension Fail. I’m glad you caught it for me.
NotoriousJRT
Melissa Murray thinks KBJ is writing to the future. I think she is writing to US.
ETA: Sorry. It was Michelle Goodwin who commented she is writing forward to another day. That may be when she is finally heard, but I still think she is speaking to the “fierce urgency of NOW.”
WTFGhost
@bbleh: Why, yes, I see that *perfectly* about Ms. Amy Coney Barrett… bless her big ol’ heart.
(Did I get the tone right on that? I’m not a southerner.)
H.E.Wolf
@Ksmiami:
The majority are atrociously corrupt.
However, I would not be willing to punish the 3 women of integrity and expertise, who more than earned their places on the Supreme Court, by disbanding the Court and throwing them out with the trash.
Granted, it’s moot (a Court pun) until the Democrats regain executive and legislative power.
Mai Naem mobile
I keep on hoping KBJ is around long enough to become Chief Justice.
Kayla Rudbek
@Mai Naem mobile: from your mouth to God’s ears! And hopefully we’ll have the Federal Circuit cleaned up as well.
WTFGhost
@Mai Naem mobile: Best if it happened when the six conservative justices were involved in a circle jerk while they imagined liberals crying real tears over the destruction of real liberties, so they all had heart attacks, and died instantly, with such crazy costumes and strange implements that one their aides decided it was just simpler to say “they all died doing a Satanic high mass,” (later being overheard to say “fuck it, they can’t write a letter of recommendation for me anyway!”), the instant a new Democratic President and Senate are sworn in.
Martin
@NeenerNeener: So, I think the project by the right is they see Israel as a roadmap for the US and want to recreate it. It stands as proof that the world is supportive of a religiously protective semi-democracy that maintains that state by moving people who aren’t in the protected groups into second class citizenship because that’s the only way to reconcile a democratic process with a protected class. That model is broadly supported by other nations, by the US, including the current and all recent previous presidents. Adopting that model for the US should be non-controversial from their viewpoint, because it would be hypocritical for Democratic Zionists to say ‘it’s okay for Israel but not for the US’.
I think this is why Republicans can hold Zionist and anti-semitic views at the same time, because they don’t care about Jews, they only care about Israel as a precedent and roadmap for what they want the US to be. It can eventually burn for all they care, but for now they need it to succeed so they can pattern off of it.
And if you look at domestic legislation I think you see similar motives. Programs that don’t discriminate need to be torn down because the first and second class citizen project requires a certain kind of discrimination, which you’re seeing USSC providing a hand with. Christian parents can opt their kids out of LGBTQ books, but I’m willing to bet that a Jewish parent couldn’t opt their kid out of book that denied the Holocaust, or a black parent out of a book that said that slaves were well-treated. Willing to bet that first class citizens (white Christians) will not be subject to denaturalization but second class citizens will, and of course that’s all discretionary on how loyal you are willing to be to the project. So it won’t be a law, just a vibe. It’s why they tolerate Trump – he’s willing to advance any project in exchange for adulation, which is a pretty cheap price to pay all things considered.
Ohio Mom
KBJ has superhuman strength to put up with her co-workers. I hope she gets the suport and succor she needs and deserves from her family and close friends.
@Mai Naem mobile: I’ve never dared hope she becomes Chief Justice, just that she outlasts the worst of her colleagues and eventually finds herself surrounded by Justices worthy of her incredible legal mind and ethics.
ColoradoGuy
@Martin: It may go further than that. I’m old enough to remember the Southern phrase “n—– lover” applied to white people they didn’t approve of. Since the Ku Klux Klan has taken over the GOP, the old-school terminology will start to creep back. They hate everyone who isn’t like them … and have spent three decades cleansing their party of anyone who isn’t a fanatic.
NeenerNeener
So basically my ex-sis-in-law is a useful idiot.
Lauryn11
The conservative majority truly hate that Ketanji Brown Jackson, freshman on the Court is calling them out for being the radicals.
BarcaChicago
@schrodingers_cat:
@UncleEbeneezer:
THIS.
PsiFighter37
@Mai Naem mobile: Won’t happen.
I was in France in 2016, when I got word just as we were going to bed that Scalia had kicked the bucket. I was ecstatic because I thought for once in my life, I would see a Supreme Court that would finally, firmly, be on the side of right, and Roberts would be forced to moderate – because he would want to not be stuck in the minority of every opinion. So while it would not be a raging 5-4 liberal majority, a 6-3 that was incrementally liberal was a winner for at least a decade, if not longer.
Now – forget it. I’m nearly 40 and there will never be a liberal Supreme Court in my lifetime, even if Democrats manage to win whatever fair elections get held after this. If it looks like the GOP is going to be wiped out in early 2028, you can trust that Thomas and Alito will retire with haste, so that Emil Bove and whatever other Trumpist enforcer gets installed on the court (there is no way the Dems are winning the Senate next year).
Martin
@NeenerNeener: I wouldn’t say that. I would say Trump is the useful idiot under my theory.
I think your ex sis in law believes that white Christians deserve a protected homeland, that the US is that protected homeland (Mormons would fully agree with that) and votes in accordance with that belief. A lot of Democrats support Israel along exactly the same arguments and do we consider them to be useful idiots? I disagree with them but I think there are arguments to be made there, arguments in which the US is different from Israel, arguments in which a flawed Israeli project was the pragmatic solution to a real problem (I would argue it was a lazy short term solution, the consequences of which we are now facing).
I say that Trump is the useful idiot because we should oppose that viewpoint applying to the US – that any kind of discrimination is antithetical to democracy, and Trump, lacking any kind of moral compass, is simply unable to critique the idea. He knows who buys his tacky slop and rewards them accordingly. That’s the extent of his worldview. Odds are your ex sis in law has thought it through more than Trump has.
Another Scott
@PsiFighter37: OTOH, things don’t change until they do.
The GOP flipping Senate 12 seats in 1980 was a huge surprise.
Coattails make a lot of things possible.
Yeah, it’s likely to be tough, but I’m not willing to say it’s impossible. Especially not this early.
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Don’t you see there being a broad backlash to that kind of project? There’s already been massive protests this year, for example. The people that swung to Trump were mad about inflation and he’s not doing anything to address that
Martin
@UncleEbeneezer: I’m sorry, but that’s exactly how MAGA view Trump. Not signing up for that shit.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
How is that like anything MAGA is like?
I strongly disagreed with his I-P war policy, but I still planned to vote for him because I knew that everything that has passed since 1/20/25 was coming
artem1s
This is John “worst justice ever” Robert’s legacy. He has no control over his court. He cannot negotiate with his fellow justices or convince them to act with gravitas. Hell he can’t even get them to follow their own damn rules. He is not a role model or inspiration to anyone. He doesn’t believe his own arguments and opinions can stand the light of day. He’s a coward and a failure.
Gvg
@PsiFighter37: no I think Thomas and Alito are too self centered and selfish to do that, and wouldn’t accept obvious evidence it was going to happen.
just my opinion of them. I do think it will be hard to achieve unless we get the will to impeach them off the court for taking bribes like we should. That requires evidence that convinces the country it’s necessary which is more than that they did it, but also that corruption does in fact hurt everyone directly pretty soon. We are getting pretty close to some really bad results soon but aren’t quite there in their faces yet.
Citizen_X
Say what you can about the Founders–and there’s a lot you can say–but at least they realized that they owed “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
Not so much with our Amy.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
OMG, the uppity black lady must be restrained . Her statements and writings are things of beauty. I love reading smart authors.
Mai Naem mobile
@PsiFighter37: i am not saying it’s likely but never say never. I think there’s a possibility for FL, Texas, Alaska and Iowa to flip in the Senate. The GOP can plan for their tax cuts and Medicaid cuts to be put into effect after the mediterms but that doesn’t mean healthcare companies are going to wait till the last minute to close down facilities. I think rural areas aka orange dbag country are going to be hurting in ways they haven’t even considered. I drive around a lot in central Phoenix and shopping center parking lots are definitely emptier. The ICE grabs have scared a lot of brown people. That money made there by those businesses is not going to be going to the cooler areas of northern Arizona(aka Orange dbag country) during the summer. I know a few people who live in northern Arizona. April-Sept is when they make the money to get them through the year.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@zhena gogolia:
@MagdaInBlack:
Makes sense
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think Democrats are too norms biased to produce a backlash that will matter. In my lifetime no president until right now was willing to upend the fundamental machinery of government. I disagreed with a lot of what Bush did, but he didn’t defy Congress or the courts. He didn’t threaten checks and balances. In an environment when the machinery is working, there are ways to push back and ways that are too far. But once you start dismantling the machinery of government, you can’t keep relying on that machinery to work for you as you push back. When that machinery is dismantled a void is created and someone needs to step into that space – either the administration or the opposition, and we’re not doing that. We’re holding to the old rules of the game, not adapting to the new ones. And it’s hard, but that’s what leadership is supposed to be there to do – to take the energy that is building in each of us – anger, fear, anxiety, etc. and channel it into a strategic direction. Trump is a lot better at that than Democrats, both in generating that energy by fearmongering and then pointing at places to channel it up to and including Jan 6, just as evidence of how far he’s willing to go.
Where is the equivalent effort on the left? Who are our leaders? Who is setting a strategy and encouraging us to pour our energy in a given direction. Mainly it’s been go wave your sign on the corner and vote to reelect us in 2026, and that is wholly insufficient as an outlet for the energy we have. That’s why even my friends who ran the Katie Porter campaign here aren’t sure they’re going to vote for her for Governor, because they have this energy and there is zero leadership. Katie is nowhere to be seen at a time we need that. Same for Harris.
Don’t misunderstand – I think the protests are good, I just think they are insufficient to the moment. That’s a lot for a grassroots effort to pull off, but it’s not enough. But the protests I think do more to galvanize the left than it does to fight the right. Trump doesn’t give a shit – he’d just as soon deport the lot of us and make the problem go away (to Bush’s credit, he wasn’t looking to divide the nation). At some point you have to push back in ways that hurt him, and we haven’t figured that out yet. The protests against Tesla dealerships, for example proved to be relatively effective with Musk. But so far nothing with Trump.
Eventually, that energy spills over and without direction you get the ghetto riots of the 1960s and events like that. And that doesn’t usually make things better. Democrats have all of this potential energy in the electorate, and are doing fuck all with it, and that’s a big part of why we’re mad at the party. I’m not counting on any disaffected Trump voter to get off their ass. They were too lazy or shortsighted to think their vote through, and that’s not going to change when it comes to opposing him.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
It can be argued it’s not the job of legislative leaders in the minority to act in the ways you’re wanting them to. I recall G&T mentioning this in a past thread and that the opposition that eventually toppled the Ukrainian government in 2014 did not come from legislative leaders, but the grassroots
JoeyJoeJoe
@Mai Naem mobile: and that doesn’t even include Maine and North Carolina. Also, there will be a special election in Ohio. A political atmosphere where Texas and Iowa etc could flip is one where Ohio could do so as well
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Because it’s an argument that because Biden did good things over here, he deserves a 2nd term, as if nobody else is capable of doing those same things. It’s too parasocial, too loyalty based. Democrats generally aren’t as loyal to personalities as MAGA is with Trump, but we’re pretty loyal to personalities – hoisting Pelosi and Obama and Biden and so on up and extending their virtues usually well beyond what is reasonable.
Biden came to believe that only he could beat Trump and a lot of people here seem to believe that as well, and it’s just complete bullshit. The electorate were making it really clear they weren’t enthusiastic about Biden which meant we were playing a game of lesser of two evils roulette (25% of the electorate were double haters – twice as many as Obama/McCain and 4x as many as Bush/Gore). Why subject yourself to that when there are other candidates we could pick instead?
The posters upthread are still looking for excuses and enemies and FFS, give it up already.
Professor Bigfoot
@Martin: We just have to convince white people that having Black people in positions of authority won’t unpenis them.
I’m sorry, I hear all these arguments and I keep coming back to one thing: former prosecutor, former US Senator, sitting US Vice President versus an adjudicated rapist and 34 count felon.
And I note that the felon was a white man. And that white man only won white people.
And all the other explanations thrown about simply do not rise to explaining this phenomenon beyond he was a white man and she wasn’t.
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): And that’s fine – it need not. But also understand, when those grassroots leaders succeed in their opposition role, they tend to get elected to replace the legislative leaders.
I think you are putting cause and effect in the wrong place. It’s not that legislative leaders shouldn’t play that role, it’s that when they don’t they get discarded in favor of new leadership. I would also argue that if you do get your country in that state, the existing legislators failed to prevent it and maybe they were inadequate to the job to start with.
p.a.
Supreme Court has been another bastion of bullshit collegiality between its liberals and its fascists. Change is good.
Citizen Alan
@PsiFighter37: if the people who mocked, literally mocked, the idea that they are that the composition of the Supreme Court should play a role in how they voted had the tiniest shred of decency, they would have already killed themselves out of shame. But they don’t, which is why they spent the summer of 2024 screaming about Genocide Joe.
Ramalama
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): not sure. I mean Keagan’s a lesbian. Which was widely known when she was teaching at Harvard law…though that doesn’t guarantee anything. Found out recently that a woman who’s a lesbian (white, married to a lady, with kids, who’s subcontracted me to do a ton of work turns out to be a Trump supporter. Or she was. Ugh.
TurnItOffAndOnAgain
@Martin:
I, for the life of me, can’t see the equivalence between celebrating the first black woman supreme court justice telling it like it is to Trump’s sewage slide of lies.
And in fact, I think drawing equivalences where they don’t exist (both sides!) is part of why we are where we are.
BellyCat
(Have not read the thread)
Could not be more excited about KBJ and the fire she is bringing!
EarthWindFire
NYT and WAPO wrote a lot of words to say uppity, smart AF black woman hurt her “betters’” feelings. Keep it up, KBJ, keep it up.
@Professor Bigfoot: All of this. They’re going to have to get what they voted for good and hard before any of them change and it will never change a lot of them. Fortunately, we don’t need that many.
Martin
@Professor Bigfoot: So, other explanations do rise to that, but you’re fairly committed to seeing things your way. I will again point out to be very careful with what conclusions you force people to make with your arguments, because by your reasoning the DNC should have a policy of only nominating white men for president (because according to you, only white men can win and it wouldn’t make sense to nominate a candidate that can’t win) which would mean the Democrats had a white men only policy, but the GOP do not? You think that’s helpful to marshaling democratic enthusiasm?
But your argument falls apart in NY-14 where both AOC and Trump increased vote share. An increasing number of voters split their ticket with those candidates, and you’re arguing that they were too racist and sexist to vote for Harris, but not so racist and sexist to vote for AOC – also a woman of color?
I think the explanation is in a lot of ways much more straightforward and less self-destructive to the party. I think that voters want economic change. Not the cost of eggs necessarily, but the shape of the economy. You can have rising GDP and low unemployment under a feudal system by employing everyone in the kings enterprises and having all of the benefits accrue to the king. In terms of the top line economic measures it wouldn’t look much different from what we have now, but everyone would hate it. And I think people are angry that it’s much harder to be meaningfully self-employed (as opposed to gig work), to operate your own retail store because of Amazon, small service businesses increasingly hard because tech companies are making that digital with infinite scale, AI is taking entry level white collar jobs away, investors are demanding arbitrary layoffs even in extremely successful businesses because they want more stock buybacks, blue collar unemployment is exceptionally low bu they are also overworked and understaffed and again, investors have a hand in that. Increasingly the economy feels fraudulent, scams left and right. Working conditions feel shitty. Customer experiences are getting worse.
So, voters want that to change. Did Biden and Harris offer any change? No. They were stalwarts in campaigning on maintaining the status quo with some tweaks around the edges. Did Trump offer any change – yes. A lot. It was all lies and shouldn’t have been believed, but he was at least promising change, which is more than what Democrats have been doing. And if you are desperate for change and one party is offering nothing and a lunatic is over there offering to flip over the table, who knows, maybe flipping over the table will help, because we know staying the course won’t help. And in that scenario Trumps perversions work to his benefit because people want someone who won’t hew to the status quo, and his perversion serve as proof that he won’t.
And you roll into the NYC primary where you have the tried and true moderate white man who again promises to stay the course, and the proud muslim socialist who is willing to try new things and not only does the proud muslim socialist win by a sizable margin, that youth vote that everyone keeps saying are too lazy and apathetic to vote – in the 2021 primary, the largest voting group was 60-64 year olds, and in 2025 it was 20-34 year olds by a MUCH higher amount. NYC is by no means representative of the country, but your sweeping generalization should apply to them as well – and it doesn’t. It didn’t in NY-14 either. What we saw was that an aspirational candidate willing to try new economic ideas (Zohran campained purely on economic policies) will generate excitement not just in NYC but nationally. Everyone followed that race.
My thesis has always been that Harris was doing that in the first half of her campaign and built up a pretty good lead in polling. Then in Sept/Oct (I was away on a family emergency for a few weeks and missed the details of that inflection) she pivoted away from more economic populism, stumping with guys like Shawn Fein, and toward more of an anti-Trump agenda stumping with Liz Cheney, with reporting indicating that around that timeframe the campaign was seeking large dollar donations and the cost was to dial back the economic populism stuff. She stopped mentioning living wage and paid family leave in her speeches. Even David Fucking Brooks thought that Harris should have leaned into more of the economic populism and progressive economic policy ideas late in the campaign and he’s the fucking pope of centrist bullshit – and that’s what his takeaway was. He thought backing off of that is why Harris started losing her lead. It started in late Sept and then she had The View interview on Oct 8 where she was asked if she would change any of Biden’s policies and she said no. And that’s when things really appear to have started to fall off. She campaigned with Marc Cuban who said in October “the progressive and liberal principles that have always been the principles of the Democratic Party are gone. It’s Kamala Harris’s party now.” Tacking to the status-quo, to the safe center, alongside a billionaire isn’t what voters wanted. They want shit to change.
Meanwhile we know from the feedback by the AOC/Trump splitters that they supported both candidates because they both thought they stood for economic change. They were maybe uncertain as to whether moving left or right would improve their situation, but they sure as shit knew that standing still wouldn’t.
I’m not certain that my analysis is correct, but it’s at least actionable. I for one am not wiling to throw women and people of color out of the party – that’s fucking suicide. Like, literally the most insane idea you guys keep putting forward. But nobody is even willing to consider that Democrats go-to economic ideas are unpopular, and that Democrats have really dropped the ball on the issue of the shape of the economy – how much agency people have in the economy, and how wealth is distributed.
So why did NYC democrats rally behind Mamdani over Cuomo, or even Brad Lander who seems like a perfectly reasonable uncontroversial white man?
Martin
@TurnItOffAndOnAgain: I never suggested that. I compared continuing to pine for the Biden-that-could-have-been to MAGA. KBJ has nothing to do with it. Yeah, Biden nominated her. Good for him – it was an excellent choice – probably the best on the court in my lifetime. He did a load of great stuff. But that’s not what politics is usually about, and it’s not relevant as to who was the best candidate for 2024.
I didn’t use KBJ as a bridge to why Biden was wronged – the PUMA brigade did that.
TurnItOffAndOnAgain
You didn’t exactly make it clear that it wasn’t about KBJ.
And I still fail to see the equivalence.
Martin
@TurnItOffAndOnAgain: The equivalence is that they think Biden is owed something. That he was wronged by the left. That he was entitled to this. That’s cult of personality shit and they can’t let it go and it’s fundamentally no different in nature than what MAGA does with Trump.
Joe nominated KBJ, which the left wanted (I can’t tell is this is an attack on KBJ for being too far left – I can never tell with that crowd) and the left, like Judas, stabbed him in the back. Fuck that. Biden’s job was to run a campaign to win, and he wasn’t doing it. Everything he did before was immaterial. His job was to win, the campaign was floundering, there wasn’t money coming in, there weren’t volunteers, field offices hadn’t opened, and he wasn’t prepared for the debate. What he did for us last week didn’t matter, we need a winning candidate and he wasn’t there, and we replaced him. End of story. His legacy isn’t our problem. He’s got a closet of accolades, that should be sufficient. He’s not owed shit. Nor is Obama or Clinton or any of the others. Candidates are like a raft for crossing over, not for holding onto. Don’t carry them on your back when they are no longer useful.
Harrison Wesley
So Coney Island Parrot is the designated hatchet person for the Right?
Darkrose
Well, gosh–that’s mighty white of you.
Seriously, why do you keep lecturing the black and brown folks here when we say “white people would rather vote for a convicted felon than for the smart black woman”?
TurnItOffAndOnAgain
@Martin:
Well one, I didn’t read it as a question of featly, like you did. I read it as saying it was foolhardy to not back Biden because it was a bad strategic idea.
Two, even if I saw it the way you did, I still would not be able to fathom how your comparison was anything but a false equivalence.
Jackie
@BellyCat:
YES! The six maga justices don’t know what to do with her! ♥️
Martin
Because no shit? I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’ve never said you’re wrong. But so fucking what? What are we supposed to do with that information – become a white nationalist party as well?
Either you fight the bigotry or you give into it. I think we should fight it. And as such, overcome it. So why didn’t we? You’re never going to get an electorate that isn’t biased about something. You just have to overcome it.
But Trumps white vote share wasn’t substantially different from 2016 to 2020. He gained 2 points with white men and lost 2 points with white women (this was the only demographic group he lost ground with, btw). He gained 9 points with black men and 5 with black women. He gained 11 points with hispanic men and 13 points with hispanic women. None of that neatly align with the racism/sexism theory, and certainly not among whites. Why then did some black women who voted for Biden abandon Harris for Trump? Was it they were racist against Harris or favored the felon?
None of this disproves that there’s a fucking lot of whites that would rather vote for a white male felon than a black woman. I don’t dispute that one bit. But these simplistic explanations are leading people astray, and setting them the party up to repeat the same mistakes by thinking a white male candidate running the same campaign and policies would have won. I think Biden would have gotten massacred.
Msb
You go, girl!
So the cool white gang are “impatient” with criticism. Too bad. They’ll need to get used to more than impatience.