I think reading about Ruth and Antonin Scalia's friendship was the most wholesome political reading I've ever done. Hearing people divided in opinion, but not bitterly so, working together to figure out the best framework to construct American society from was inspirational. I hope the two halves of the political world can become friends in the way they were.
Rest in peace Ruth. I hope if there's an after you and Antonin are living it up.
Was so lovely after reading the article, that the point that stuck with me, aligned with your comment right at the top.
Maybe there's some sort of new "non-denominational creed" we could all sign up for.
~"
We may not agree but I will always listen to you.
I will always consider your opinion with respect and will endeavour to understand your reasoning.
My views are not set - my goal is to listen to arguments to come to an informed position, I can honestly take forward
"
As I typed that, I could hear the happy-clappy sounds of some mocking-utopia ringing in my ears - but goddamnit, it doesn't sound too hard for us to each put it into action.
I'm as guilty as the next person, but I'm going to try going forward.
This is a key aspect of the struggle of civilization and not utopian at all. If we hope to change anyone's mind and reach a level of social consensus on anything then it's imperative we make a safe space for everyone to think and have civil discourse. Knee jerk recriminations for essentially thinking is the recipe for entrenchment of positions and pushing people to the margins where they are more likely to mix with extremists. RBG and Scalia were a great example of how to disagree respectfully and not treat ideas as a personal threat but to engage with them with enthusiasm. I am with you in your quest to listen and give ideas their due and all people respect.
it's not just about listening to ideas. if it were that easy, we'd already be more socially cohesive. it's about subtler things like real empathy, where you can actually see and follow the chain of reason someone takes to get to a position, however outlandish you think that is at the outset. it's about holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time, constantly, about everything, rather than retreating into your warm and cozy ideological corner at every dissonance.
but it's also about not simply giving in to the outlandish because you want to create a safe space. that means calling someone out for what is usually some form of aggression without alienating or offending, putting real social capital on the line, and requiring self-restraint, courage, a bit of charisma, and more.
and then you have media organizations like npr itself, nytimes, and twitter actively trying to play both sides, instigating while also trying to claim the moral high ground, feeding divisiveness.
it's hard, and takes active, willful effort from (nearly) everyone.
If you really want to find a compelling starting point for the state of our current public political discourse, you may find it in the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Rush Limbaugh's first radio broadcast airs in 1988 which introduced "anger-tainment" as a very profitable political news model. As time passes, this new business model affected every news organization in one way or another, to various degrees, willingly or not.
i'm not sure the (repeal of the) fairness doctrine is a prime culprit, but i'm open to hearing a fuller perspective.
more to the point, i just heard a real example of the kind of empathy and compassion we need by nba hall-of-famer isaiah thomas on tnt's "the arena" airing right now, of all places.
it was in relation to LA county sheriff alex villanueva calling out lebron james to put up money for the recent shooting of two sheriff deputies in compton. this is a powder-keg issue here in LA right now. the knee-jerk reaction would have been to put down the sheriff for an unreasonable emotional outburst, but isaiah basically extended his hand and narrated how he understood where the sheriff was coming from, even if the demand was not exactly well thought out.
that's really hard to do in the moment, and my respect for isaiah just rose significantly because of it.
I'm not sure how old you are, but think about what you saw on that political / news show then imagine how Walter Cronkite would have reported those events. I haven't seen the show you're talking about, but I would imagine the difference would be stark.
Point being, what you saw sells ads better than if Walker Cronkite reported it because it's emotionally charged. All this really kicked into gear with Rush Limbaugh because he was allowed to sit there and just rant for 3 hours and get people riled up. When you consume any news, look for clues that they are trying to get you riled up. Look for emotional words like "obliterated," "destroyed," etc. particularly in the headline (which reporters don't control). News is a business and are bound by the same profit/loss laws as any other business.
"the arena" is a sports talk show that happened to be on in the background after watching the lakers game (in which lebron and his crew won). it's relatively unique in that it's anchored by a black woman (cari champion), but it's squarely a sports opinion show, and incidentally political, for instance, due to the intertwining issue of black folks being disproportionately targeted by police and the legal system.
it's not meant to be fact-rich/low-opinion news, and they make that obvious by not mimicking a news format, unlike many other "news"-like shows, which is entirely acceptable. there is room for a few opinion shows in the mix. but it's the opinion shows disguised as news shows that are insidiously problematic, and that's increasingly all of them.
we're entirely in agreement that the profit motive drives news and news-like organizations in a race to the bottom toward attention-grabbing infotainment rather than staid factual news.
it's almost as if we need to break off high-value, low-engagement news organizations into fully independent non-profits that are funded by a pool of income from the infotainment industry for the right to continue delivering low-value, high-engagement infotainment, rather than intermixing the two.
It just occurred to me that our political news discourse has gotten so bad, it was easy to assume "the arena" could be the name of a news / opinion show, but my mistake.
>it's almost as if we need to break off high-value, low-engagement news organizations into fully independent non-profits that are funded by a pool of income from the infotainment industry for the right to continue delivering low-value, high-engagement infotainment, rather than intermixing the two.
We absolutely do, and I think there is a demand for it, just not sure how it would ever get funded because the investors would always want the higher return the anger-tainment style would bring. I try to focus on individual / independent journalism when available. I'm just starting to (audio)read Woodward's new book, and it seems pretty fair so far. I thought his last book seemed fair also. The difference of the new book is quite stark compared to the media's take on it recently.
I remember early in his presidency, watching a Trump speech. A short while later I saw news coverage on that same speech and it was like they weren't even talking about the same event.
This makes so much sense, I mean Chris Cuomo, Maddow, Brian Williams, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, doesn't matter - they all use very emotional language to describe things.
I long for the good ole Walter Cronkite news casts. (I didn't mention fox commentators because that's beyond the beyond, they're way worse).
Is this because you disagree politically or because they’re “beyond the beyond, they’re way worse” or whatever thoughtless, meaningless comment Was typed?
Fox News was conceived as and currently is a propaganda network for the Republican Party. Roger Ailes, a Nixon advisor, saw how the media caused the public opinion to really sour during the Watergate scandal and impeachment and he had the foresight to counteract it. He was the first CEO for Fox News, which was funded by Rupert Murdoch, founder of SkyNews in Australia, another network with not the best reputation.
Can't echo this enough. It feels over the last decade that we really have lost this. You see so little actual discussion taking place any longer. Everything is rhetoric, it is tiring.
> It feels over the last decade that we really have lost this.
Polarization has been increasing in the US for longer than that. Many of these tendrils stretch all the way back to the founding days of the US, but I think the real uptick of this modern flavor is hate started with Newt Gingrich:
Ralph Reed: toxic as a kid at University of Georgia, still toxic today.
My judgement may not move the conversation any further. I'm too emotionally wound up. I could do without the personal experience of the community which spawned this artificial divide. But then again, it's all I have, so I might as well use the hard lessons as well as the good times.
Never been in the same room as the founder of the (so-called) Christian Coalition. I hope. Grew up in Athens Georgia around that time, it was considered a small town. It wasn't all bad, but it took thousands of miles and decades of years before I could enter a Christian Church without wanting to run away.
Not because he was bad - he wasn't. He was an honorable man. So honorable he got rid of earmarks, the allocation of funding to particular projects.
The result of this being that there is very little reason for people to cross the aisle. Previously, you had to keep working with the other party to keep the gravy train on schedule. Now?
For bonus points, ask if the cost of gridlock are higher or lower than the cost of the earmarks.
Disclaimer: this is my perception. Many will disagree and many will downvoted, but I want to put it out there in case it resonates with anyone and generates good, enlightening conversation. I hope people read and respond in the same spirit of good faith.
Perhaps Newt was a catalyst in Washington, but I think the broader cultural change was less related. Even as a lifelong liberal, I recall the 2000s as being a period of liberal snark toward conservatives, especially in the media and on the emerging Internet (I know some will argue that conservative policies are horrible so they deserved to be treated this way, but such arguments miss the point of civility: you debate bad ideas; you don’t attack people). It wasn’t the sort of ruthless display we see today, but it was relentless and it went on for more than a decade. Conservatives generally maintained decorum, but eventually the dam burst and the resentment cascaded over and Trump arrived on the scene to personify the middle finger that many on the right wanted to give to those they felt mistreated them for so long.
None of this is meant to impute blame or innocence on anyone, but to serve as a framework for understanding how we got here as that is prerequisite for getting black to a healthier state.
None of this is controversial or offtopic. Looks like the downvotes just proved your point. Folks don’t even respect a fellow liberal try to engage in a completely reasonable and civil way, forget any hope of them respecting a conservative.
The ironic part is that you allow a partial pass due to bad conservative policies, but during the time period to which you refer, the liberals were anti-gay marriage (DOMA anyone?) and ramming through “tough on crime” laws that they now decry as racist.
The clearest example of this that I have personally experienced was in a discussion a few days ago about the fires in Oregon. A state senator had his house burned down, and my suggestion that we shouldn't be celebrating this guy's misery brought a level of vicious attack I was completely unprepared for.
Like, I get it, it's ironic- he opposed a climate change and wildfire bill and his house burned down. What really scared me though was realizing I don't think the reaction would have been much different if he himself had burned to death in the fire.
Ouch. I have so many complicated thoughts trying to process the implications of that story, which I won’t try to sort out here. People are in denial about this, especially younger people with a fairly narrow view of both history and global politics, but what we are seeing is foreshadowing a civil war, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to see what might avert that outcome. There’s no question in my mind that we haven’t seen the worst of the riots and the violence yet. With the police forces being neutered all over the country, the inevitable response will be federal forces, and I think that is by design. Once that happens, we face a major escalation that will be very hard to unwind. We’ve learned now that these events are not rooted in any principle of justice (despite their clever PR that still appears to be fooling most) which means they can’t actually be avoided. They’re going to continue to capture any event they can to advance. I’m not even sure they realize what they are doing. Honestly, you can see the same ideological possession in so many of the comments in this thread.
Every time the police shoot a black man, unarmed and possibly in the back, there's a huge outpouring from the conservative media about why they deserved it and the police were right to murder them.
That, more than anything else, has contributed to the coarseness of the discourse. Well, that and the 4chanisation of everything. Maybe the right could rein in the "libtard" and "cuck" discourse a bit too? Oh, and the death threats that prominent women get.
That’s not the case at all. There is an attempt to explain why the shooting was justified, and it nearly always is justified, which is an important analysis. It’s not as though there is a pattern of unarmed killings.
> It’s not as though there is a pattern of unarmed killings.
There's at least one a month that makes international news? And several thousand demonstrators in the streets for hundreds of days that think they're not justified? And it turns out that the police lie about events unless there's footage, and sometimes even then?
One a month spread around different individuals in the country with over 700,000 cops and a total of over 50 million interactions a year, which includes dealing with all of the violent criminals who usually don’t want to go to go willingly and are often armed, then yes, one a month is incredibly low and indicates that this isn’t a pattern.
Even basic statistics knowledge should make this obvious.
It doesn’t matter that people are rioting. It turns out they routinely lie about events until there is footage too. Crowds riot about dumb/wrong things all the time. Sports games come to mind.
You just linked to an example where a wanted violent criminal was reported to police for violating a restraining order against a woman he previously allegedly raped, who then disregarded the cops orders, decided to fight with them and put them in a headlock, refused to comply again after being shot with tasers, refused to comply again when the gun was drawn, and instead reached for a deadly weapon while in lethal striking distance of an officer. I think you proved my point, not yours.
The underlying deeper point is that you are assuming you, or your point of view is good, and perfect, and his is bad. And because he made a mistake he should have his house burned down (and should die).
What you are missing is that you also make mistakes as a human being, and when you have terrible consequences of that happen, it might be nice if people on some opposite side of a political spectrum don’t laugh at you about it and say you deserved it, but stay quiet because they also know they are fallible and make mistakes.
I am truly shocked you are ok with someone dying because of some mistaken political point of view. This tbh has no place in a supposedly civil place like HN (or America? Or the world??)
Not only that, but there is no evidence that the fires had anything to do with climate change. You can not attribute individual events to climate change. There is also an argument that they were as bad as they are due to poor forest management.
I am a liberal as well and had a similar perception and that bothered me a bit. But, as fair as I want to be I couldn't help but notice the Republicans always favored the irrational, the fearmongering, and their discourse wasn't simply the other side of things but crooked perverted politics. Maybe the liberal snark was a reaction in the first place. And what we're witnessing now is the reaction to that reaction.
I'd wager you're getting voted down for "conservatives generally mainted decorum" in the decade after the Clinton impeachment, which included wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Fox News's rise to prominence, the Drudge Report setting the 24/7 alarmist tone that still domiantes online political content, McConnell growing into his now trademark do-nothing leadership, Ann Coulter moving from print to TV and showing everyone else that going weirder and crueler wins now. Hell, Orrin Hatch was literally censured _by Senate Republicans_ in the 2000s for how quickly he dropped his frenemy decorum with Democrats, especially Ted Kennedy.
The 2000s were absolutely not a decade of decorum, for conservatives or anyone in politics. The 2004 election was a massive turning point toward where we are today, and the 2008 election meltdown culminated the Republican party turning itself inside out in ways Gingrich really did directly catalyze a decade and a half prior.
We wound up with the Tea Party at the end of the 2000s and American political discourse went from an already slippery slope to a freefall.
As a New England liberal going back generations, for me it was very clear: conservatives were not simply wrong, but bafflingly, astoundingly, inconceivably wrong. The only logical explanation was that as individuals they were misguided: either evil, or dumb, or maybe just crazy.
I didn't understand this at the time, but everything I saw or read supported this worldview. Newspapers, magazines, schools, academics. Since I was left of them generally, I thought the world was too conservative. When conservatives complained about the mainstream media, it was always in context of mainstream journalists mocking them. For me, I saw it as conservatives mocking their extremists.
Fast forward to today, and I cannot imagine how frustrating it must have been to be a conservative then. That idea, that conservatives are bad, evil or crazy, was pervasive and all encompassing and smug.
Nowadays, for me, it's not about agreeing, but about listening. Hearing what people actually say rather than what a journalist says they say is quite enlightening.
“ Fast forward to today, and I cannot imagine how frustrating it must have been to be a conservative then. That idea, that conservatives are bad, evil or crazy, was pervasive and all encompassing and smug.”
I think this explains a big chunk of the Trump vote. Many voters saw in him someone who would not take the smug mockery without a fight.
It's also why there is such a disconnect with respect to the Russian collusion allegations. To those inclined to trust the mainstream media, it is a settled question: of course Trump colluded, and anyone who can't see that is crazy, evil or dumb.
Those who feel misrepresented by the mainstream media, don't see how that allegation isn't just more of the same egregious lying they have experienced first-hand for decades
Yes, the Russia collusion thing was particularly egregious. It turns out that it wasn’t just the media, but also trusted Federal bureaucrats who were willing to abuse their office for political gain.
The media completely discredited themselves by supporting a largely false narrative, and yet they never really came clean about it, and many who furthered that narrative are still working in the media.
I hope that one day the US can come to agree on the facts. But many situations seem to be like Scott Adams says: two people watch the same movie and see two different narratives.
Look at where it's got them - conspiracy theories about pedophile pizza parlours. I'm struggling to frame the events of the last two decades as "the story of how we realized that conservatives were reasonable people after all".
We tend to be biased towards those we identify with and against those we disagree with, and this will color how we receive and interpret facts themselves, nevermimd simple opinion
Ongoimg anti-racist riots for example: are they a long overdue correction to a deeply flawed and misguided nation that oppresses a large fraction of its own citizens? Or are they a symptom of post-modernist moral relativism run amok, whereby political leaders have abandoned their responsibility to maintain public safety and order? Or perhaps they are a minor local dust up, blown out of proportion by a greedy, cynical media? Perhaps some combination of those?
If one skews left, one will be inclined to dismiss the concerns of the right as unreasonable, perhaps even hypocritical. Do that habitually enough, and conservatives will come off as entirely out of touch; and so will you, to them.
I recommend really striving to understand the point of view of your political opponents, not by reading leftist think-pieces about what the right thinks for example, but reading reasonable presentations of conservative arguments. So, more National Review and less Breitbart, for example. Less focus on "qanon pedo-pizza" who are the black block anarchists of the right, and more on people who makes sense even if you ultimately disagree.
As a lefty, I feel those of us breaking for the Green Party are treated the exact same way. In a way our ideas aren't validated even in the party we called home, so we're leaving for greener pastures.
Your thesis is that conservatives "lost their cool" and elected someone clearly unfit for office in 2016 because... George W Bush got made fun of a lot until 2008?
I'm sorry, but I just don't think this is a helpful or accurate framework. Liberals spent 8 years snarking about conservatives because Bush was president, doing all his Bushy things. What about the following 8 years, when Obama was president? Can you specify at what point exactly you think conservatives lost their sense of decorum?
Specifically Newt around Vince Foster's death. You can trace the roots of a lot, a _lot_, of today's utter partisan obstructionism and foolishness — mainstreaming fringe conspiracy theories with the explicit and openly espoused purpose of wedging the other party regardless of its goals — to Gingrich making Vince Foster's death an unending headline news story.
I mean christ, Trump _still_ brings up Vince Foster.
I think this might collapse at the edge cases: If I'm a black man and the opinion is that I'm an animal, and the person with the opinion uses this reasoning to abuse me, then I may be ethically correct to not listen or keep myself in their presence.
Or, say, I'm a disabled person and someone tells me they think social services should be cut so people like me can die off for the good of humanity. It may be actively emotionally harmful for marginalized people to be listening to toxic opinions that they are worth nothing.
(EDIT: To be clear I think listening to opinions I disagree with in good faith is a good thing that we need more of in society. However, I also believe marginalized voices are, by sake of being marginalized, are forced to engage in a significantly higher volume of significantly more emotionally taxing opinions, and therefore may need to protect themselves, and that isn't wrong.)
It's easy to come up with these kinds of excuses for not tolerating the opinions of people you disagree with. If you disagree with me about abortion, you are either trying to murder babies (and hence I shouldn't have to be civil to you) or you're trying to control women's bodies (and hence I shouldn't have to be civil with you). If you disagree with me about health care reform, that's a life and death issue and hence I shouldn't have to be civil with you. If we disagree about a military intervention, that's a life and death issue and I shouldn't have to be civil with you.
Justice Ginsburg and Justice Scalia disagreed on just about all of these issues and got along fine. I don't think that's because they didn't care about their respective principles and about the issues that were at stake. I think it's because, as a point of fact, we have to live in a society with each other regardless of our differences. And most of those differences are genuinely rooted in good or at least understandable intentions in the first place.
There's a factor not considered here: to what extent were Scalia & Ginsberg able to get along because of other material conditions?
As supreme court justices we can assume that they had a basic foundation of psychological and material security - a position of prestige, a job for life, healthcare and so on.
I believe it is a lot easier to summon the "higher thoughts" necessary to be civil when ones personal position is more secure, so to achieve a more civil society it may help to work to make more insecure people secure.
I think this is an easy handwave to ignore that some people get more disagreement than others about whether or not they deserve civil rights, life, etc. While you espouse a need to listen, you’re not really listening at all here or even trying to understand what is being said.
It's not a handwave and it's not even remotely easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't have taken centuries of bloodshed for humanity to develop the basic concept of peacefully tolerating disagreements over fundamental values.
> It's not a handwave and it's not even remotely easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't have taken centuries of bloodshed for humanity to develop the basic concept of peacefully tolerating disagreements over fundamental values.
As a general principle, sure.
BUT.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect anyone to peacefully[0] tolerate fundamental values that fundamentally challenge their right to exist.
We may admire genuine saintliness, but expecting it (and taking people to task when they don't measure up) is a bridge too far.
You may have the right to say that you think I and my extended family should be exterminated, but I damn well have the right to — at the very least — get in your face about it.
After all, the solution to bad speech is more speech, right?
[0] Note that one can be non-violent without being peaceful.
I don’t think you need to be friends with people who explicitly and literally advocate for genocide. If you are just making that point to introduce that particular nuance for the sake of completeness, I think I can agree with everything you said.
My reservation is that most of the time this kind of argument is made, it’s because someone wants to take the most extreme cases and use them to construct some dubiously over-generalized argument. For instance, over a hundred years ago the Supreme Court themselves did this, notoriously stating “but certainly there isn’t the freedom of speech to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater!” and then using that to construct an argument to justify throwing someone into prison for distributing pamphlets about resisting the draft.
In the here and now, there is a far bigger problem with people taking normal political disagreements and catastrophizing them into excuses to break friendships and disown family members than there is with people literally advocating for genocide.
> My reservation is that most of the time this kind of argument is made, it’s because someone wants to take the most extreme cases and use them to construct some dubiously over-generalized argument.
This is literally the opposite of the original claim which is to try and understand where people are coming from and to listen to them as if they’re reasonable actors. You are doing the exact shit you’re accusing others of- assuming bad faith in their intentions and arguing against the bad faith intentions in a discussion about how to take good faith intent in arguments.
If you are not trying to do that then why even bring it up as a concern you have? Why ask if I read the first paragraph and not assume in good faith I read the whole post and respond to relevant portions I have a response to, just like any other reasonable human being?
> If you are not trying to do that then why even bring it up as a concern you have?
Because webmaven's comment was slightly ambiguous. While I don't think he meant to imply the specific connotations that I have concerns with, this is a public forum where it's possible that the audience could certainly infer those connotations, which makes it relevant to address them. Especially because it's a central part to the issues that we're discussing.
I tried to be conscientious about this and went out of my way to strongly imply that I didn't think webmaven meant to imply these connotations. Note, for instance, how I transition from using the second-person pronoun in the first paragraph ("If you are just making that point...to introduce nuance...", "I think I can agree with everything you said") to the passive voice and third person in the second paragraph ("most of the time this kind of argument is made", "someone wants to take the most extreme edge cases"). Maybe I should have been more clear about it, but that's what I was going for.
> Why ask if I read the first paragraph and not assume in good faith I read the whole post and respond to relevant portions I have a response to, just like any other reasonable human being?
You have contributed nothing to the discussion other than to make personal accusations that I am "not really listening at all here" or "doing the exact shit you’re accusing others of". In that light, I am assuming good faith by assuming that you're sinking to that level not because you're a troll or a jerk, but because you're genuinely misunderstanding me. That's why I asked if you read the first paragraph--because I thought that if you understood what I was trying to convey with it and read the rest of my comment with it in context, that would clear up your misunderstanding. Apparently that wasn't enough. I hope this comment is.
I really don't think that's objectively true. The "relative peace" is quite relative after all, depending a lot on where you live, and at best it's less than a century old (75 years since the end of WWII). I think there have been many other societies that have passed an occasional century or so in relative peace throughout history. It's just that the wars are more prominent in the history books than the boring peaceful years between them.
I'm not saying we haven't achieved anything... wide-spread recognition of basic human rights, near abolishment of slavery, valuing democracy and self-determination have all been taking to new heights over the last few generations. But at the moment all this is looking pretty fragile.
And personally, RBG's death today left me feeling more than ever that we're on a knife's edge, and that we could fall right back into those millennia-old patterns that are only occasionally interrupted by a century or so of "relative peace". Or worse.
Classical liberalism/the open society/the Enlightenment all came about centuries before WWII. There were wars (WWII included) fought against people who explicitly rejected these principles, but coming up with those principles in the first place was the part I was referring to.
If someone is expressing a good-faith opinion then you shouldn't write them off just because you disagree. Of course, "good faith" is a subjective judgement.
Over time I've come to realize that usually there's a legitimate reason why someone believes what they do. Often they are either optimizing for different things, or view the matter differently.
If listening to someone's opinion is actively causing emotional harm, then sure, don't listen to them. But I worry very much about the rise in offense-taking. Perhaps it's an illusion but I've felt it's become incredibly difficult to talk to people with different [political, etc] opinions than my own: not because of me, but because of their attitude towards dissent.
> If listening to someone's opinion is actively causing emotional harm, then sure, don't listen to them.
I think that might be the most important time to listen to them. If merely hearing an opinion threatens your model, that’s probably a warning sign indicating that your own ideas are fragile and unsustainable, and they need to be exposed to ideas that challenge them. Engage with painful ideas, break your own models down and reformulate them into something more robust. I think the unwillingness to do this is what leads to the problems you mention.
I’m reminded of “The Coddling of the American Mind”
> If merely hearing an opinion threatens your model, that’s probably a warning sign indicating that your own ideas are fragile and unsustainable, and they need to be exposed to ideas that challenge them.
This doesn't strike me as a universal truth. It's good as a general principle to test your ideas against ones that challenge them and make sure they're as robust as possible -- but if that "challenging idea" is "your group has no right to exist," then it's not reasonable to argue "if merely hearing that you have no right to exist threatens your model, that's a warning sign that your own ideas are fragile and unsustainable," is it?
So, my own philosophy is 100% listen to them, I don’t believe in closing off my mind due to fear of “emotional harm” etc.
My point was more like, if person X really does feel that way, then sure they can retract themselves from discussion. But they should do so knowing it’s their own failing/weakness and not blame it on the other person being “toxic”.
I agree it has become difficult to talk to people with different political opinions than my own. I just think the statement suggested was logically too strong, and entirely non applicable in very important failure modes. There are often legitimate reasons why someone believes what they do, but sometimes the belief is "I think there should be no consequences to murdering someone like you, because you're not worth the social resources you take with your disability", which was a belief expressed to me, and I need to protect myself emotionally from people who genuinely believe I should be dead.
I have no idea what your point it, but you may want to add one more example. Let's say I am a Trump supporter and the opinion is that I am a scum and should die before the election, then it may be ethically correct not keep myself in their presence.
I mean, honestly, yes, if someone wishes your death I don't know if it is healthy to expose yourself continually to their opinions that you should die. That's emotional abuse.
> If I'm a black man and the opinion is that I'm an animal
That’s not the opinion though. That’s exactly what the parent is referring to. You need to listen, understand, and empathize before assuming that people who don’t agree with you must be racist.
But with the internet much more of what you do is visible and more people know about it. What you said could be attacked with "white silence is violence"
I had a much longer response typed - but deleted it when it stopped even making sense to me.
"white silence is violence"
googles
Still no idea how that could be applied to my post - but I am most definitely white, and after a bit of introspection, can't think of anything I've constructively done to address racism outside of late-night internet posts.
So whilst I'd like to think I was "non-racist" - I do now feel a bit shitty that I entertain the cognitive-dissonance of being "anti-racist" and "not having ever done anything that was anti-racist"
Then if I cookie-cutter myself out to everybody else - I now see how racism flourishes, whilst the majority tut-tuts.
The idea is that ineffectual discourse without actual efforts towards reform is a method of signalling that one wants change while benefiting from the status quo of oppression.
Discussion is great, but the discussion is supposed to result in change, not a vortex of words which have no connection to reality.
When people advocate for lofty civility above all else when the status quo is violent, aggressive, demeaning and unjust, it shows that the priority is not justice; it is the maintenance of the current order.
Is this position accurate? I don't know. There's obviously countervailing concerns regarding having a chilling effect on the market of ideas, but like all tough questions, it's likely a difficult situation with no clear cut answer and two virtues being traded-off against each other. This seems to be borne out by the fairly dramatic spectrum of positions adopted on the issue across the globe.
No, the statement is nonsensical abusive rhetoric. Silence is literally not violence. It substitutes an argument that stands on its merits with a rather shameful and racist manipulation technique that is unfortunately quite effective, as evidenced by your apparent guilt. You obviously did nothing wrong. When racism flourishes is when we allow phrases like that to enter the discourse.
Did he do nothing wrong? If I see a child being beaten in the street, look at it and say "that's horrible" and continue with my day, have I done nothing wrong? I certainly didn't beat the child, but my inaction allowed the abuse to continue.
So question comes down to, did I have the moral obligation to act?
Personally I lean towards yes, but can at least understand where the people who say no might be coming from.
While I agree that silence is violence at its face is literally false, that's the general principal it's meant to invoke, that injustice can only be stopped when bystanders cease to tolerate it. The victim cannot stop it, and the perpetrator won't. Thus those who tut tut and move on with their day become complicit in allowing it to continue.
That is what the commenter is feeling vaguely guilty about, and it's a healthy thing to feel. I know I have guilt in my past where I have failed to help someone when I had the opportunity, and that guilt that comes from recognition of that has driven me to be less of a bystander later in life.
What you’re talking about has nothing to do with what I said and is an extremely important distinction. Serious allegations should not be made casually with artistic license to bend the truth. If you witness a beating and do not intervene, then no, you did not commit an act of violence.
You could debate what the morally correct thing is or isn’t if you want, but you can’t debate that you committed an act of violence.
This seems like a debate over semantics to me. Silence doesn't mean violence, but silence can enable violence or be worse than violence if the consequence of staying silent are worse than those of violence:
http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/edmund-burkeon-in-action....
This — suspension of judgement long enough to engage in genuine introspection, followed by a return to the conversation with humility — is something we so rarely see, and each need to engage in more.
But genuinely do appreciate your reply - makes that little voice in my head feel "less alone"
What was interesting/depressing was my "how about a creed" post was getting a few up-votes, then the moment I replied below saying maybe I was a "crap anti-rascist", my OP started to get down-votes.
Text hadn't changed, but by putting some context around it, it was read differently.
In my OP I very deliberately stuck to abstracts that I'd hoped "nobody could disagree with".
And nobody seemed to - until I put more words beneath it.
You're right though - engaging with your own posts is perceived as negative. People read the platitude and hit 'like' - the more you put beneath it, the greater the opportunity for something to annoy somebody (and scroll up to try to kill the thread)
I'm sorry I wasn't clear in my reply which was short and poorly written considering how it has a very powerful phrase. I'm not implying your post was racist but was responding to the quote you provided:
We may not agree but I will always listen to you. I will always consider your opinion with respect and will endeavor to understand your reasoning. My views are not set - my goal is to listen to arguments to come to an informed position, I can honestly take forward
I was trying to explain that because the internet has increased the visibility of ones opinions to a global scale, and a recent increase in the use of both public shaming as well as punitive financial measures (fired from job, boycott) it could be dangerous to opine about anything.
> I entertain the cognitive-dissonance of being "anti-racist" and "not having ever done anything that was anti-racist"
The systems and histories in place we battle with are much bigger, and much older, than we are. Unless your explicit goal is to set out to change the world (which frankly is a shitty goal and usually leads to some kind of genocide), literally the best advice is "think globally, act locally", as "outdated" as that saying I suppose now is.
Except that it is especially true when what you want is positive social change. Think about the implications of someone who first implements your initial original post ("just stop and think for a sec"), and then also implements your second ("is there anything I can do here?"). That's enough. Literally that, when applied on a large scale, would change the world, in a way far more positive than riots and social justice movements.
See, humans are really terrible creatures. We have a bad habit of overcorrecting and, you know, killing millions of people in the name of an ideal. We've done it what, dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of times.
It's the difference between water carving a river, and a nuke carving a crater. The first one takes longer but is alot less destructive.
Imagine what a planet full of people all changing the world would look like. Absolute, unabashed chaos. We all love to think we are the hero of our own story, but we aren't, and most of the time, shouldn't be.
We should do what we can do, what fate and hard work have placed in front of us.
"Change the world" as a cause in and of itself has killed far too many people to be considered a valid goal. We all believe our vision for the world is the right or best one, except it seems we're actually pretty bad at forcing the world to look like us.
You were berating yourself for believing in anti-racism, while not actually physically doing anything about it. My point was this: These are not contradictory things, and don't let emotional blackmailers convince you otherwise. You do what is in front of you to do, and only that. If there's not actually anything in front of you to do, that's it. Is there or isn't there? That's 100% up to you. I can't say there is or there isn't. But it is important to question even the statement that there is something to do because otherwise you get caught in a Kafka trap of never actually living in a just world (tilting at smaller and smaller windmills until you're swinging at air).
> speech can definitely lead to violence - and speech can also counteract it
I don't disagree with you on that. We can say "A can lead to B" and "A can counteract B".
I'm lost at the leap to "A is B" and "NOT(A) by COLOR = B".
I could speak or not speak, and even do so out of negligence or spite. My choices may have effects and consequences, but violence does not mean "anything with effects and consequences".
It feels too much like the missing piece is "this is what we say the word means now, QED". It's all too convenient that a conversation can be shut down by calling it violence. Implicating people is divisive. By it's own logic, redefining violence to include speech is itself a form of violent speech because it causes conflict.
"Maybe there's some sort of new "non-denominational creed" we could all sign up for"
That's me! I'm in that creed.
People associating their identity with their politics is when trouble starts. That's when it becomes really threatening for them to even consider alternate perspectives, because if they change their mind, they will change who they are and who they can be friends with.
It's possible to separate the two, whereby an idea on how society should be organized is just that: an idea, to be considered, adopted, discussed, and abandoned as new information becomes available.
One really poisonous idea I see circulating is "either you are for <some thing> or you are a <bad person>" Either you support riots or you are a fascistEither you punch Nazis or you are one Related, just as terrible, "Time for discussion is over. If you're on the fence at this point, you are <bad person>" These kinds of memes increase polarization, and stop discussion. A person who says something like that can no longer have a calm exchange of ideas with their grandma
I think you hit it right on the head. What I'm wondering now is: What leads to this association of politics and identity? Is it a product of our culture, upbringing, is it human nature? Is it that modern life has so little avenue for people individuating? Maybe it is filling a void.
One thing that strikes me as key to this polarization is how pervasive are some generalizations we make today and how the individual is lost when we make them. I've seen racists make the comment "Black people are ...." (won't repeat that here) but then I see activist say "Black people are (ex. disadvantaged.)" Are there no quite privileged black people? (millionaires, billionaires, etc) Don't lower class people face a pretty similar set of challenges no matter their skin tone? When you look at it, both arguments are generalizing equally as aggressive. My question then is: are all generalizations wrong or only some?
I think this process of grouping people has ome currents of thought tend to generalize two aspects to it, people who group other people when making statements and people who in some search of uniqueness, group themselves into it? As a non-American, coming from a very heterogeneous country I find it hard to follow how many people will self-identify so readily with a group and in the process lose some of their individuality. Maybe I speak from "privilege" as someone who due to upbringing and origin, felt a quite distinct individual, so I cannot say for sure. I just think this currents of thought harm more by dividing into groups and with many individuals satisfying their need of identity there.
Personally, I think the US in particular is prone to this kind of thinking because the winner-take-all system incentives a dualistic, all-in approach. Thoughtful reflection does not win elections: riling up the rank and file does, including demonizing the opponent. More parliamentary, proportional systems encourage cooperation and collaboration among opponents
As for generalizations, the English language has an unfortunate construction that allows speakers to be ambiguous about their intent when making a generalizing statement. For example, "Men are violent" is a misleadingly meaningless statement. Does it refer to some men? To all men? Is it referring to the fact that men tend to be more violent, statistically, as a group? That assertion is ambiguous, but the always-truthful qualification "some" sits uncomfortably close to the always-unfair and bigoted "all". Bigots of all stripes rely on this ambiguity.
I don't think generalizations are bad necessarily, but to honor the dignity and diversity of individuals, it's vital to avoid this ambiguity, and to always be explicit about the generalization that you're making, and then your statement can be evaluated for what it is, pro or con. E.g. Instead of a Men are violent say what is meant, clearly: Some men are violent. In general men are violent. Most men are violent. All men are violent. Now at least we have a statement that can be agreed with or disputed, instead of motte-and-baileyed
Good leadership involves the sort of thinking where you are prepared to listen to a diverse set of opinions and be prepared to change your mind - especially if there is data that tells you you are wrong.
The political discourse across the globe has taken a sharp turn away from this over the last 40 years in particular. There was a brief window between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 where many had hope this was going to be the new normal. I remember feeling that sliver of optimism as I entered adulthood. No more.
Vote for people who are called "flip-floppers", by their opponents. Change your own opinions when the data changes. Be the change you want to see.
I’m probably gonna do it. I’m not sure I could do the other thing... if the world burns, at least I burn in her camp. I’m ok with that. I’m excited you might be there too!
I think my problem with statements like this, is that while I can totally imagine the liberals I know taking this viewpoint, there are very few conservatives I know that do. The response will be something like:
“Why would I listen to these whiners? I already know what I want.”
That type of response may result more from lack of education than from political ideology. Where I live, there are a fair amount of educated liberals and conservatives. I run into liberals and conservatives alike who give a similar response to what you listed; I also run into liberals and conservatives alike who have wonderful conversations about politics without getting riled up. From my observations, there doesn't seem to be a correlation with political ideology.
I'm curious to know how frequently you have encountered one of your liberal friends debating with an educated conservative. Likewise, I'm curious to know how frequently you've encountered one of your conservative friends debating with an educated liberal. Over the past couple of years, I've run into a number of people who simply couldn't believe that an educated liberal/conservative existed, primarily because they grew up in an area where there weren't many people with differing political views. It's a dangerous trap to fall into, because it allows you to categorize the other political party based on only the rhetoric of elected officials and on the interpretation from media. I have yet to meet a conservative or progressive who matches the caricature of either portrayed by politicians or entertainers.
All the educated conservatives I’ve met have been pleasant people. It’s just that the far majority have not been educated (as opposed to liberals, which seem to be pretty much all educated, to the point where I feel education and liberalism might as well be the same thing :/).
I have no evidence for the following statement, but as someone who grew up just before social media was a thing (I became a legal adult about a decade before Facebook), I truly feel that the zero-sum thinking, while present before social media, really took on a new form because of it. It is much more vehement than before. You don't get the same kind of interaction on a forum or a bulletin board that you do on Twitter or FB or [modern social network].
When I was growing up, there was no Fox News channel nor any of the cable news channels (I remember when MSNBC was a brand new thing). News was something you watched for 1 hour in the evening.
24 hours news + trench digging/tribalism have done a horrible number on modern discourse.
Thing is, I think that that's because before, there WAS no discourse, not really. It was slower. Most of the conversation was had by those you watched on TV. Alot fewer people participated. The internet DID democratize that, with frankly predictable results.
Not saying we should have done differently but I do think we need to come to terms with what that means (e.g. realizing it's forcing us into zero-sum thinking and consciously choosing something else).
Don't forget that well before Fox News there was a AM radio, and Rush Limbaugh was national in the 80's. I definitely remember how his talking point impacted my high school's debate team's rhetoric.
For all the crap the non-Sorkin episodes get, that episode should be in the Hall of Fame for TV. Both the script and acting are of the highest caliber.
Having been poor once and now being not-poor, this mentality of life being a game comes from a position of security. When I was poor, it wasn't a game but a struggle and a significant source of stress. If I thought of it as a game, it seemed rigged.
Now that I feel secure, I can see where you're coming from when you call it a game though.
Lol. Why are you downvoted here? It’s like some people want to constantly paint the world like the end of a Disney movie where it turns out every character was really good deep down inside.
inspirational? it was her greatest weakness, there was not any other single judge working harder against her
I'm not going for the nazi reference, he wasn't that evil but Scalia was literally trying to drag the United States back to the 1950s if not even further, decision after decision he never found an expanding right he didn't want to slaughter
Although the justices being friends is inevitable, it is not desirable. The justices would be more representative of the people - and probably dispense better justice - if there was an uneasy compromise between them based on basic principles of precedent and law.
That isn't a very fun vision of life on the bench - and any system is imperfect - so I don't really advocate that. But the idea that these people are asserting their preferences over 300 million people and then getting all chummy in their spare time isn't a good thing. It is unavoidable though.
It's quite possible to be friends who have strong, contrasting opinions. I'd argue the oppose that it is a desirable state for highly powerful people making decisions for the whole country because you're less likely be blinded by mindless us-vs them and give the benefit of the doubt the arguments and beliefs contrary to yours.
The inability to disagree in a mature way is why we have such a mess of identity politics, name calling and all sorts of division in many counties IMO.
This is true, but it depends on the topic. If I have a very strong opinion about the ineffectiveness of the Laffer curve when setting tax policy, I can probably be pretty good friends with somebody who believes the opposite. But I think it probably is important that we don't remain friends with people who deny other people's essential humanity, or who support political policies that have no effect other than to hurt people, and so on. Just because an opinion can be described as political doesn't mean that it's automatically coequal with others, and we don't have an obligation of deference.
Davis is a brilliant man that understands something about humans that far too many people don’t. He came to that understanding by engaging and asking questions.
This strategy single handedly abolished more KKK members than anything else. Contrast to the extremists of today like BLM who are having the opposite effect and pushing more people to racism. We’re going backwards. Then again, it’s not like BLM is actually motivated by their clever branding, so this is unsurprising.
OP's claim is quite bold and they did not offer evidence. I would describe it as 'unsubstantiated'.
To correctly say it is untrue, you must show another strategy actually converted at least hundreds of KKK members (perhaps more, as it's possible people beyond just Daryl got results from this strategy).
You seem pretty confident, why do you think it would not work at macro scale? If you are saying that empathy doesn’t scale, that’s a pretty dark view that requires some evidence.
Are people born racist? Does education an outreach not work? I really don’t see why you’d be so certain.
I don't really care so much about the individual voter, I care about how far their voice reaches on the Internet, I care about the people they influence, I care about their children, I care about higher-level things.
What do you think is a more effective way to deradicalize white nationalists as measured on a societal level: engaging them on the merits of their arguments and having a good-faith debate, or deplatforming them?
I missed your response days ago, but happened to see it just now scrolling through my comment history.
It seems obvious to me that deplatforming them will further radicalize them. It fits perfectly into their narrative as I understand it.
Engaging them as (deeply flawed, very wrong) humans and having a good-faith debate seems to have worked shockingly well for Daryl. I suspect it could for others, too (though Daryl is obviously a rare breed).
building personal relationships with individuals in order to deradicalize them one by one is not a viable strategy at the macro level. It's efficacy is irrelevant to me.
How is it not viable? If every person who went to a BLM protest also made friends with one police officer, don't you think that might be extremely effective?
I'm not really begging the question, because I'm not trying to convince anyone that a general policy of individual empathetic outreach isn't effective at a macro scale. For one thing, it's self-evident, and I'm not really interested in "debating" anyone who would challenge that. For another thing, it's a tangent from the main point of the thread.
Republicans and moderates are not denying anyone’s humanity, nor do they support political policies that have no other effect than to hurt people. Nobody does. Arriving at that conclusion should tell you loud and clear that your model is incomplete and you don’t understand your opponent.
Republicans in 2020 are absolutely and inarguably doing those things.
Every vote for that party in our zeitgeist is motivated in no small part by active malignancy. It's the defining characteristic of their leader, unavoidable and undeniable, and as of the convention the party literally has no platform except to serve and support his whims. So there is absolutely a right and a wrong side to things right now.
Absolutely and inarguably? A vote for a Republican is a vote for "active malignancy"? How could anyone even approach a conversation with you about this? Isn't this the exact opposite of RBG and Scalia's friendship, which is the actual topic of this comment thread?
That's the whole point: I'm not interested in a "conversation" on the topic because there isn't one to be had.
Friendship is an even stronger signal of tacit endorsement and there are situations, positions where it's inappropriate, even morally unjustifiable, to deploy. Scalia would certainly qualify for me.
Are you talking about the party that spent decades motivating turnout by making their base hate gay people? They denied the humanity of gay people, fought to deny them basic human rights and all for what? Just to cynically win elections?
If you didn’t know this or chose to ignore it, your model is incomplete and you don’t understand one side.
You're not acting in good faith here, and it's both obvious and hilarious. You respond to someone summarizing decades of malignant propagandizing with, literally, a Whataboutism dredging up a single minor procedural issue, out of context, from like 23 years ago, and pretend that single disingenuous statement disarms the thing it's responding to. This is -- you are -- exactly what I'm talking about.
Republicans are absolutely working to roll back legal protections for the LGBT community and have been engaged in a decades-long fight to reduce women's access to health care.
They're also fully in support of the immigration policies that have led to things like the very well-documented child separation.
In what ways are those not denying someone's humanity?
I think you are wrong. The mutual respect that grows out of friendship makes it easier to consider the other side of an argumen more seriously. And if there is one thing that is needed now it is more common ground being sought - not less.
The idea that one ought not fraternize with those who disagree with one’s opinion is unproductive and leads to unnecessary division and ultimately a weaker system. Ultimately it is a brutish and uncivilized idea.
I wish your post wasn’t downvoted. Bad ideas require discussion to be understood. And they can’t be discussed if they are removed from discourse.
I upvoted (hopefully to preserve the OP) but don't think "It's a bad idea"
If anybody from ycombinator is reading - it seems insane what a post can be down-voted into grey and then the void, whilst it has active commentary beneath it.
"Posts" can have a status applied to them, but the far more important thing is the "thread" where different views collide.
I agree that it's a shame when unpopular but reasonable and well-stated posts attract a lot of downvotes. Even if you assume that most such positions will be wrong, some won't be, and if they all get downvoted to oblivion, it encourages group-think.
No, it’s a beautiful thing. The country would be far better off if we treated each other this way. In many other countries, this is the norm. Maybe you can learn something from your elders.
In what democratic country is this the case nowadays? I‘ve lived in a buch of places in Europe and have friends in many more. The divide might not be as pronounced as in the US but it‘s certainly there.
Using me as an anecdotal example, I have acquaintances and a few (loose) friends that are fiscally conservative. I have exactly zero (known) acquaintances or friends that are conservative/regressive with regards to social issues. After all I‘ve seen and experienced in my life I just cannot emphasize with someone that can justify denying women health care or discriminate against race or sexual orientation, for example.
I suppose you could start solving these entrenchments by having millions of desert islands in order to force small groups of people with diametrically opposed viewpoints to endure hardships on them.
On the internet there is no chance. Without seeing the actual person and talking with them for hours it wouldn‘t work. The problem with this method is that it‘s terribly inefficient.
What we need is a sort of enlightened six sense for empathy that makes large groups of people feel the state of mind of other large groups. But barring large scale psychedelic treatments I don‘t see that happening.
No, being friends with contrasting opinions can be a good thing. Once in a while the guard slips off and one can see in the other's yard. Whoever's story has more flaws is likely to suffer a slight change in perception if not a downright 180 turn.
Sure. And they hopefully do their best. But it sits in tension with friendship. That is why there are all sorts of principles against it for high-integrity systems.
Well, props for sticking with a truly unpopular opinion.
I’d like to change your mind one day though. My friendship with Scott was instructive here. He was a former HN mod. I looked to him as a mentor and a friend, though I’m not sure it went both ways. Regardless, we worked together on Lumen for years. When I was banned for a year from HN, he never once allowed our friendship (such as it was) to affect his duty to the site. The decision wasn’t his, and he wasn’t going to pull strings internally just because we occasionally wrote code together.
I get what you’re saying. And I agree that in the long term, it’s extremely important to set up incentive structures in the right way. But friendship — a word quite hard to define, if you think about it — is a part of the human experience.
The point here is that there are people with integrity. They do exist. And they can be friends regardless of other duties — sometimes unpleasant ones.
Now, my little story isn’t quite related. I wasn’t an adversarial peer, which is what you’re talking about. But your reasoning seems to be: if the incentive structure permits friendship, it compromises integrity. It’s a reasonable concern, especially over the course of decades. But the word “professional” reflects the fact that business comes before friendship.
It’s a fundamental truth that people will try to form friendships regardless of their occupation. Rather than change the incentive structure, as you propose, shouldn’t we recognize that truth?
The reason I related to your comment so much is, for a time, I felt exactly the same way: if business was any indication, it was a web of insider deals, “friendships”, and favors behind closed doors. I wanted nothing to do with that world. But two people with integrity can sidestep all of those concerns and simply... be friends. Even in the highest court of the land, which determines our fate.
(As a sidenote, you seem like an interesting person. If you happen to want a friend, or to debate hypothetical political structures, feel free to DM me on Twitter.)
>The point here is that there are people with integrity. They do exist. And they can be friends regardless of other duties — sometimes unpleasant ones.
Sure. There are fantastic individuals out there.
The key to fair systems is to structure the system in such a way that does not rely on the recruitment of extraordinary individuals who are filled to the brim with integrity.
The key is to create a system of checks and balances that disallows obvious unfairness by means of liability isolation and personal separation, etc.
I'm glad your friendship with whoever Scott is worked out despite whatever problems on HN, but all the example tells me is that Scott (and to a smaller degree, yourself) have some level of personal integrity; but facts and statistics generally say that systems that can be gamed, will be -- and that's without a motivating factor other than a personal win; include motivation like money and power and the scales tip much more radically against those with integrity.
For every 'Scott' there are 10 folks without any integrity that'd have gladly re-instantiated their friends' accounts that had been banned AS LONG AS it didn't mean hurting their own position.
That's exactly why 'fair' systems are generally built in such an isolated fashion so as to reduce inclusion of bias and personal feelings.
Exactly! Which is why this conversation is so interesting – and why it seemed they were unfairly downvoted. The question of "does friendship compromise integrity of systems over time?" is quite fascinating, and there are many examples across many countries that show "yes, yes it does." So it seemed entirely legitimate to say that perhaps a system should penalize friendships, somehow.
But, after watching Scalia, how can you not like him?
He was witty, charming, and a master orator. So when people hear "can't have a friendship with Scalia, even though you work with him," it's kind of like "can't breathe, even though you're human." It's a logical contradiction. And it's not even a well-defined problem: what is a "friendship," anyway?
> The question of "does friendship compromise integrity of systems over time?" is quite fascinating, and there are many examples across many countries that show "yes, yes it does."
I think this is probably true in legislative bodies and in government agencies - for the same reason: both promote deal making because there's something to be gained.
One of the reasons the SC Justices are seated for life is precisely to blunt that effect. They can be friends without needing to make deals because they really don't get anything out of a deal - and one hopes they fully appreciate the gravity of their position.
The Court is a sort of unique entity in that it doesn't need (I don't think) to be confrontational in order to be effective. It is the one place where one would think, true wisdom reigns. And by and large, that is what I see from SCOTUS' decisions.
It's a sign of an intelligent, mature mind to be able to contain contradictory ideas without losing your identity. Being friends with someone on the other side of the political aisle, in a group as small as the supreme court, I would think has the effect of improving the quality of their deliberations and little else.
How can I not like him? Real easily, turns out! Scalia wanted to deny basic human dignities to people I care about. Scalia perpetuated a system that grinds your everyday citizen into the dirt because it made his moneyed interests a speck wealthier. To hell with that, and worse words besides.
A competent rhetorician is only "hard to hate" when you don't look at what they do. Keeping one's eye on the ball is not that difficult when you have a set of principles.
You should watch that second youtube link. His whole point was that judges shouldn't be in a position to deny anyone anything. It's a policy preference, and should not be left to seven unelected judges.
If you disagree with that, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree. It was sort of incredible that Scalia basically straight-up says "You gave me the power to decide whether abortion is permitted nationwide? Really? Who thought this was a good idea?" (Not an actual quote; the talk is quite good.)
Apparently it wasn't always so, and Scalia explains the history too. The concept of the constitution as a "living document" was manufactured, along with the idea that morals mature over time. "Societies only mature, they never rot! /s"
What you're talking about is a matter of business. There are certainly some individuals that it would be quite difficult to be friends with in spite of what they've done. But if Scalia is one of them, well... Everyone has their preferences, I guess.
I am entirely already familiar with Scalia's approach to jurisprudence. I spent most of my youth thinking it was just such a great idea. I also grew up affluent, white, male, and cis; to no surprise, these are contributing factors. Having since grown up and built for myself some facility for basic human empathy I do disagree with that, because not everyone can pick up states and leave Alabama or whatever because their judiciary decides that they can stuff gay kids in conversion therapy or can relegate abortions to back alleys. It privileges me to have such a society because I can go wherever the hell I want because I have money.
Antonin Scalia's entire worldview was built because he knew he was a rear-guard for regressive thought and maybe, just maybe, a broken country with an impotent federal government could allow people like him to continue to kick the shit out of the weak a little longer. He was never going to get to punish women with an abortion ban (and today, would never get to fuck over trans people) nationally--so the natural outgrowth of this is to punish women and fuck of trans people where they can. All in the name of "letting people choose", so they can choose to vote on the basic humanity of others.
I reject the idea that one can "be friends" with the people who want to bring the long dark back. They will break civil society on the anvil of a supremacism that exists to benefit me, and I refuse it.
This is the most insane comment I've read in a long time, no offense to you personally. Being friends is orthogonal, and should be orthogonal to one's judgement and their duty as a judge.
The entire world would be a better place if they do not follow the argument presented here.
You're not going to like the rest of the American political and justice system. The entire process is based on purposefully creating opposing and disagreeable forces.
The whole thing was clearly created on a principle of opposing friendships between powerful forces.
The Supreme Court is not just another legislative branch.
But that being said, have you seen how many decisions are 5-4? Or 6-3, 7-2? It does not appear that whatever friendship that existed between Scalia and Ginsburg impacted their rulings and dissents on the matters before the Court.
It's completely possible—and I say preferable—to hold starkly contrasting political or legal views, but still like one another. We need more of that. It's how we stay one cohesive nation, instead of warring factions.
(Note that this is a somewhat unusual year, as several cases were pushed from the previous term to the next term due to COVID-19--and the cases not pushed were so selected because they had more urgency, which generally means more contentious).
Most cases tend to be unanimous or nearly so (0-1 dissenters), and only about ⅓ of cases are contentious (5-4/6-3/5-3). This has been decently stable over the past few decades.
That jibes with my impression of the decisions I’ve seen. You and a sibling comment are giving me these stats and I’m not sure if that’s to refute or support my point? 1/3 of decisions being split like that is quite a bit. 1/3 being unanimous is also significant.
I guess my point is that their friendship didn’t seem to have impaired either justice’s ability to do their job with faith to their respective judicial philosophies.
You made me look it up, and it turns out I was using it correctly. But it's funny, because I had originally written "jives", then second-guessed myself and changed it to "jibes."
I had never seen the "gybes" spelling before. Is it like tire/tyre? Looks Welsh to me!
"since 2000 a unanimous decision has been more likely than any other result — averaging 36 percent of all decisions. Even when the court did not reach a unanimous judgment, the justices often secured overwhelming majorities, with 7-to-2 or 8-to-1 judgments making up about 15 percent of decisions. The 5-to-4 decisions, by comparison, occurred in 19 percent of cases"
Having followed a lot of the recent SCOTUS cases, I can say that if you think the law is leaving less room for interpretation nowadays, you are sorely mistaken. Look up the "Armed Career Criminal Act"--it's an example of what seems like it ought to be a simple matter of interpretation (look! it defines "violent felon"!) into a headache (okay, the person has to have committed a crime whose state-level common-law interpretation in 1984 had to have required at least this much force, and I'm sure I'm still missing some details there).
>It's completely possible—and I say preferable—to hold starkly contrasting political or legal views, but still like one another. We need more of that.
Disagree.
The system is confrontational; it's shaped this way so as to reduce the chance of buddy-buddy underdealings and negotiation.
The system is confrontational so as to promote fairness and prevent bias.
Creating yet another environment by which the judges can exert control over the law by winning personal favors among each other must be avoided. That's exactly why things are set up such way within the US government, Supreme Court not-withstanding.
All that said : I have never considered the supreme court to be fair and unbiased. Compromising for the sake of cooperation, sure. Effective, definitely.
> It does not appear that whatever friendship that existed between Scalia and Ginsburg impacted their rulings and dissents on the matters before the Court.
You'd never really know. That's why it should probably be well avoided.
> It's completely possible—and I say preferable—to hold starkly contrasting political or legal views, but still like one another. We need more of that. It's how we stay one cohesive nation, instead of warring factions.
This works as long as both sides are acting in good faith, and everyone involved (i.e. everyone in a society) is on more or less equal footing. If either of those conditions don't exist, fixing them is more important than maintaining the civil discourse. That's true for many reasons, and one important reason is that in those situations, insisting on the equality of reasonable political positions with unreasonable ones is an effective defense of the status quo, which makes the problems harder to fix.
Neither of these conditions exist in the USA right now, for the record.
Possible, yes. Preferable, sure. Most likely outcome, no.
The Supreme Court isn't a coffee club. The justices being on their toes and constantly being challenged by opposing ideas will lead to better outcomes. Friendship is a process of synchronisation, it sits in opposition to the best outcome for the system.
And yes, I pay a lot of attention to Supreme Court decisions.
Friendship is the process of learning about and recognizing the value of a human being that usually leads to a greater comprehension of that persons life and views not a synchronizing of those views.
A true friendship is not necessarily based on mutually-beneficial backroom deals. A sound friendship would have each party seeking to uphold and maintain the integrity of one another. To do otherwise is to reveal that it is not friendship, but rather opportunism, cronyism, or convenience - none of which have the stability or moral foundation of true friendship.
I don't think this is true. In the past people have reached across the aisle to compromise and collaborate successfully.
If your position is right, doesn't that contradict the continued existence of the United States? What's "United" about the US if it breaks down into a bunch of hostile warring tribes?
Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, a replacement was nominated in March of 2016, and because Scalia's seat had become vacant during an election year, the Senate would not even consider a nomination from the president [0].
McConnell immediately clarified his position was "the Senate shouldn't consider a nomination in an election year if it's controlled by my party and the president isn't in my party" -- no kidding, this was his actual clarification.
That is, in fact, the actual practice. The constitution splits the appointment between the presidency and the senate. When the same party controls both, vacancies are filled immediately. Otherwise, the party controlling the senate can exercise its heckler’s veto: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/history-is-on-the-sid...
What happened with Garland had happened numerous times before:
> In short: There have been ten vacancies resulting in a presidential election-year or post-election nomination when the president and Senate were from opposite parties. In six of the ten cases, a nomination was made before Election Day. Only one of those, Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s nomination by Grover Cleveland in 1888, was confirmed before the election.
By contrast, if Trump doesn’t put up a nominee, it will be literally unprecedented.
What happened with Garland was new in that the Republicans refused to hold any hearing or vote on the matter. They did not violate any laws with their refusal, only norms. I don’t know why no nominations were made before Election Day in 4/10 cases; that may have been another lesser norm, or the vacancies may have been closer to the elections, or both.
In any case, the refusal was a further erosion of any semblance of working towards the good of the country with people of opposing ideologies. The same goes for the increased frequency of government shutdown threats and occurrences.
Really, if those practices had stood for so long on norms, they should have been codified into law already. But the Congress, regardless of party, doesn’t like to cede any power. It’s equally unlikely that if the Democrats take control they’ll do anything about it either. I’m vague on what it would entail—it’s been a while since I read up on it—but another hurdle might be that it would take an amendment rather than a law. Regulating what the Congress does is explicitly harder than making laws for the rest of us.
Congress can't meaningfully restrict its own actions by passing laws: any law passed can be repealed by a future Congress by the same procedure as long as there are majorities.
Which isn't to say that there's no point in purporting to do so: you may hope to require a politically costly public vote (avoidance of which was a significant feature of the Garland no-hearing: with nobody else "on the record," outrage focused solely on the politically-safe McConnell). How effective this is isn't really clear though: voters seem to usually want "their side" to take full, uncompromising advantage when they are on top, and increased polarization means that the fear of alienating independents/moderates isn't as much of an issue, because there aren't any of them left.
Rules and procedures such as the filibuster are weaker still, as they require only a majority of a single house, and no cooperation from the President. We've seen that borne out as the parties out of power became more likely to use the Senate's procedures to stall the party in power, and the fairly quick recent dismantling of those procedures in a bipartisan fashion.
Constitutional amendments can do all sorts of things and their high barriers to passage make them solidly entrenched, but it's very difficult to imagine any issue commanding the necessary supermajorities to pass an amendment on any subject in today's America.
As for Democrats or Republicans in power after the election curbing this kind of partisanship, I wouldn't bet on it. There may be some pushes to try to codify
The link does not support your claim (or its own). The Senate did not consider and reject Merrick Garland, it refused to consider any Supreme Court nominee by Obama.
Of course, I'm splitting hairs between "refused to consider" and "voted against". But it's similarly splitting hairs to say that the party of the president makes meaningful difference as well.
Frankly, there's no good faith interpretation of McConnell's stance here as anything other than (ab)using his power to shape the judiciary.
> But it's similarly splitting hairs to say that the party of the president makes meaningful difference as well.
Of course it does! The Constitution splits the nomination/confirmation process between two political branches. The process is supposed to be political!
You have really insightful legal comments here most of the time but anyone supporting Mitch's 100% hypocritical stance on this is laughable.
He will do whatever it takes to hold on to his minority power. He did it with Obama and has already hinted ~2 hours after RBG died he'll happily do a 180 on his previous position this time around when he has the chance.
In this situation in 2020, I agree, they would. In 2016? I don’t see the reasoning that they would have.
The reality of the situation is that in the US one party constantly pushes boundaries and test limits. The other party then adjusts to attempt to counteract that. Yet it’s sold as “both sides are just as bad as each other”
Democrats literally threatened to pack the Supreme Court so they could get expansive interpretations of the Constitution to push through the new deal. They are constantly attacking structural features of our government and institutions, whether it’s chipping away at federalism or creating fourth branches of government out of whole cloth.
> Democrats literally threatened to pack the Supreme Court so they could get expansive interpretations of the Constitution to push through the new deal. They are constantly attacking structural features of our government and institutions ...
Court expansion hasn't happened yet, but if it does:
1. Them's the rules; sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. (Or: Live by the rules, die by the rules.) (Or: Karma's a bitch, ain't it?)
2. What you call the "structural features of our government and institutions" are meant to serve the people, not vice versa. It's idolatry to put those features on a pedestal and declare them to be immutable. Presuming adequate protection of genuine minority rights, it's not illegitimate for a democratically-elected government to use lawful means to try to restructure existing institutions in pursuit of the majority's felt political needs.
This is complete nonsense. Your comments on this subject seem to be 100% ideological not based in reality unlike most of your other grounded legal arguments on other subjects.
I’m curious which parties you’re referring to. Conservatives are called that literally because they want to conserve something from the past.
In this case, the left is marching forward with all sorts of new policies—often ostensibly to deal with a societal problem, but causing more problems because the policy does not derive from first principles.
The power is split across branches, not political parties. And I think you're forgetting that Senators are elected in by the people.
I see a common irrational theme of "let's change the rules because they didn't work out in my favor this time". I don't understand the logic behind this.
Senators originally (prior to 1914) were not directly elected by their constituents... the founders set up the Senate to be the more "responsible" "Upper House"and were set to represent the interests of each state and appointed by each state's democratically elected Governor. The intention of senators having longer terms (6 years vs 2 years for House members) in addition to being appointed by each state's Governor and state legislature was so Senators would not be as directly affected by electoral politics and would be forced to actually work together. I think the 17th Amendment to the Constitution was in retrospect a pretty horrible decision that has not added much democratic value to our system.
Well look at how governors have been handling the pandemic. Most of them seem completely one sided in terms of their response, unwilling to compromise and stretching the limits of their power. There isn't a "let's see how it's working and adapt based on new information" mindset, it's a "my way or the highway" mindset. For example, I live in PA and our governor's orders were recently found to be unconstitutional[1].
If anything, governors should have less power, not more. Decisions should be made on a smaller scale, states are too big for a one-size-fits-all model. And I certainly wouldn't want governors hand picking our senators.
Unsurprising, given the judge who found the orders unconstitutional was a Trump appointee. The past three and a half years Republicans have spent packing the courts seriously hurts the credibility of the legislative branch.
As an aside, Breitbart is one of the least trustworthy sources, and citing it does not help your argument.
Details on why you don't like the judge and which media outlet I referenced (i honestly just googled the story and grabbed the first one I saw) digresses from my point. And fyi once you digress from the main topic and shift to sub-aspects (without actually addressing the main point), it usually means you're arguing in bad faith, or your cognitive dissonance is kicking in. It's a mechanism used by closed-minded and stubborn people...Food for thought.
I'm not digressing from your point, I'm directly rebutting it. You claimed that your governor is abusing his power, offering as a supporting argument a ruling that his orders are unconstitutional by an ostensibly neutral third party. I'm attacking your supporting argument by calling the neutrality of that third party into question.
My own opinion is that the orders are constitutional.
I can read. I was referring to "The process is supposed to be political!" And by political, the implication is partisan, because otherwise it would be true by definition, and thus an uninteresting claim not worthy of ending in an exclamation point.
Political doesn’t mean partisan. It means characterized by political considerations, rather than rules. Partisanship is one aspect of politics which the founders wanted to avoid. But they always contemplated that the Senate majority and Presidency might disagree for political reasons.
Sure — and if the Mitch McConnell's objection to Merrick Garland's nomination had been political, it would have been one thing. But it was nakedly partisan: he refused to consider any justice that Obama would nominate, with no real reasoning beyond "we want a Republican to have a chance to fill this vacancy".
> they always contemplated that the Senate majority and Presidency might disagree for political reasons.
They did. The danger to the country is actually when they agree.
What happened here is that the Senate refused to compromise, and simply put the government in a holding pattern until they could get a more "agreeable" executive in office. Is that the way separation of powers was intended to work? I think not.
The National Review became dishonest propaganda some time ago. They are going back 150 years to find a precedent and ignoring many more recent precedents.
Explain to me what’s “dishonest propaganda” about the National Review article?
1) Going back to the 1800s is routine in the legal world to understand what is accepted practice in our system. After all, the relevant rules haven’t changed since 1789. Aren’t examples from people who created this system particularly relevant to understanding how it’s supposed to work?
2) The SCOTUSblog article goes through the exact same examples as the National Review article for the 20th century. The only difference is that the National Review article looks at whether different parties control the Presidency/Senate. What is “propaganda” about that? The Senate and Presidency are political branches that are supposed to be at odds, potentially. Is there any reason to assert that this political rivalry shouldn’t extend to Supreme Court appointments? Is it “propaganda” to even posit the idea?
The article I posted also looked at what parties controlled the Senate and Presidency and quoted more recent precedents where the parties were split, and the president got to appoint.
Moreover, stopping a vote entirely? That's unprecedented. Had there been a vote on Garland, he almost certainly would have been appointed. Many of the moderate Republicans in the senate, facing elections, would not have been able to justify voting him down to their constituents.
For the National Review to leave those pieces out is dishonest. I'm also not just referring to that article. The National Review has been dishonest propaganda for a while, making dishonest arguments that manipulate the facts (usually by omission or careful selections as here, but occasionally outright lying) to justify the actions of what has become a fascist party.
The National Review has been nothing short of reactionary propaganda from its outset. They vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Movement in its era, including running unsigned editorials with such lovely sentiments as “In the Deep South the Negroes are, by comparison with the Whites, retarded”
Democrats were literally the party of segregation when Buckley wrote that (there would have been no New Deal coalition without the support of segregationists). He was vastly out of step with Republicans at the time, and he did a 180 by 1965, the year after LBJ flipped the Democratic Party on the civil rights act. It’s a shameful period of American history, but unless you’re going to stop voting Democrat over what some Democrats said in 1957...
I’m not a Democrat and we weren’t talking about voting anyway. And these are the kind of sentiments Buckley continued on with after 1965, so please spare me the “different times”’pleading:
> In a 1986 New York Times op-ed (3/18/86), Buckley urged that ‘everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”
How is it “cynical” to point out that where a split senate/presidency exists in an election year, the senate has historically used its confirmation authority to postpone filling the vacancy?
And the response is to demand something that actually would be unprecedented: packing the senate? Which only Democrats have done before, under circumstances where it was obviously to coerce the Supreme Court into deciding cases differently. Acting like Democrats hold the moral high ground here is utterly absurd.
If the Democrats don't hold the moral high ground, why is McConnell lying about his rationale? He didn't say "The majority can do what ever it wants, and that's moral", he made up rationales that change to as the facts do.
The idea that a Supreme Court opening should never be filled when the President and Senate are opposing parties is utterly absurd.
It's true that the Constitution wasn't written like Ethereum to preclude all attempts to undermine it with bullshittery like refusing to even put matters up to a vote. That doesn't mean it's at all moral to ignore it.
Also, was "Packing the Senate" a typo? FDR threatened but did not pack the Court.
"Packing the Senate" is a Republican tradition (not that the parties mean much consistently, going back centuries), which even a blatant partisan couldn't avoid admitting:
Yes, segregationists were Democrats during the New Deal, but so what? The parent described slaveholders as "the spiritual inspiration of modern Republicans," and we both know what they meant: the "Southern Strategy" Republicans used to flip the South toward them by consciously appealing to racism.
The point is that the parent takes an extremely tenuous connection between Republicans and slaveholders, while denying the much more overt connection between Democrats and slaveholders and segregationists.
There is this notion that the parties "flipped" sometime in the mid 1960s that's simply false. Republicans were from the inception the party of religious wackadoodles and capitalists. Democrats, at least since right before the civil war, were the party opposed to big business, banks, etc. The segregationists weren't just Democrats. They were New Dealers. They were New Dealers because the south was agrarian and at odds with big business (over tariffs) and banks (over monetary policy and debt). When Wallace broke off in 1968 to run on a segregationist ticket, he touted his pro-labor background. And as a result of that coalition, the New Deal and related programs were inextricably tied up with segregation: excluding most Black people from social security, creating redlining through the FHA, etc. See: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/rothstein-segregation-color-o... ("Walker’s second point overlooks that the New Deal did not merely concede to private bigotry but pursued independent racial policies that did much to create a segregated landscape that persists today.")
The South didn't really flip until Clinton. (Reagan won it, but he won everything.) Carter decisively won a bunch of southern counties that were 95% white. And ultimately it did so not because of the "southern strategy" but because southern states industrialized, and Republican ideas of low regulation and low taxes were great for attracting jobs and industries from northern states.
There are a number of highly concerning posts you've made attempting to normalize a flagrant attack on the rule of law across this thread, but this post in particular is extremely difficult to reconcile with the principle of charity.
What "charitable" reading is there of the statement that "slaveholders are the spiritual inspiration for modern Republicans?" I'm simply pointing out that slaveholders and segregationists are the actual ancestors of modern Democrats. Not just because they share a name, but for concrete economic connections that endure to this day. Southern agrarian interests were opposed to the high tariffs Republicans imposed to protect northern industry (because they were exporters of unfinished commodities), and centralized banking (because they debtors). White labor unions excluded Black workers, who were competition.
Sophistry is overlooking by handwaving about the "Southern Strategy."
No. Sophistry is ignoring 50 years of post-Nixon/Goldwater era Republican political strategy.
It's tremendously difficult to believe someone could live in the states and not have any idea this was going on.
Even former RNC chair Melhman was fairly straight to the point on the issue in 2005: "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization." Nothing has changed since then.
Any Democrat who accepts a lecture about the "moral high ground" on the subject of the Supreme Court is the Republicans' useful idiot.
The Roberts Court disenfranchised millions of Democratic voters by gutting the Civil Rights Act. The fight over the Supreme Court's composition is a fight over pure electoral power.
Why would they need to pack the court? They already have a political majority, do they not? No need to break a norm when it confers no additional benefits (as the breaking of the previous norms did).
> the party controlling the senate can exercise its heckler’s veto
I'm trying to think of a plausible vehicle for arguing that if the Senate refuses to vote on a nomination within a reasonable time, then that refusal (i) constitutes a waiver of the right to withhold consent and therefore (ii) is deemed consent.
Biden's speech was just saying that the nomination shouldn't happen during an election. I don't think he ever said it couldn't happen during a lame duck session of the Senate.
Let’s be clear. A lame duck is one that has been shot, is still in flight, but is headed down. In politics, it refers to after a sitting representative loses an election (or term limit ends) but before before the term ends.
Obama was not a lame duck when Scalia died. McConnell et al redefined the term to suit their needs. As they will no doubt redefine it now.
He was just saying that the nomination should not happen during an election year and then he expands that he won't consider conservative nominees from the conservative i.e. different party president. It's just 4 minute video of several speech fragments, does not take long to watch and be informed.
I don't know that in the current political climate, the democrats would extend the same courtesy if it happened under their control of the Senate and White House.
Lately I see a lot of people saying things like “this particular example of real behavior is bad and conflicts with my values so should be electorally punished, but my mental model of the other side tells me that they would probably do the same thing if they hypothetically got the opportunity, and so I’m not going to uphold my values.”
I’m surprised that most people in america didn’t see this coming. It’s been clear that “winning” has been the strategy for the republicans and they’ve been doing it consistently for decades now.
They’ve shown up at elections, they’ve shown up for local elections, they’ve worked for every single advantage in power they could get. I mean these are the chaps who suffered a massive electoral defeat to Obama the first time and found their mettle by saying “one term president” like a mantra. They converted that into a fight for every micro meter.
Eventually anyone m would also realize that “winning” (at all costs) is the strategy that works and adopt it. The best strategies get adopted by market players.
The media environment for the past many decades now ensures that bipartisanship won’t work either.
Maybe it’s an incorrect cultural reading on my part,
I don’t disagree with your characterisation, but I do disagree with the idea that it is republicans alone. Unfortunately this has been the way both parties have operated for a long time. The democrats have also done their fair share of abuse of power just in the last 4 years.
The use by Obama of the FBI to investigate his political opponent during a presidential campaign, on a basis of an improbable opposition research report is unprecedented and to say the least, controversial. Imagine the outrage if any republican president had done that.
Not saying this is only the last 4 years. I agree, at least 30 years. But no, it is not the action of a single party.
Was there any indication this was Obama directing the FBI to behave this way, or that this was an established pattern of behavior? There’s a very important difference between a mistake or an error in judgement vs an established pattern of behavior and engagement of illicit behavior by the president himself (as with Trump offering a pardon to Assange to deny ties to Russia in the DNC hack after failing to have Ukraine fallaciously smear Biden).
Sure, but the argument that the Senate shouldn't approve or even consider a Supreme Court nomination in election years because voters should have a voice was made by Mitch McConnell, at a time when not approving a presidential nominee suited him.
I don't think anybody can argue in good faith that it is equally incumbent upon the Democrats to act in a manner consistent with principles argued for and precedents set by Mitch McConnell.
I don’t think anyone could argue that the democrats are acting in good faith pushing for delay now while having pushed for expedition in 2016. Both parties want to shape the supreme court.
I am more annoyed by the fact that the supreme court has become a political arena. Making laws should be the responsibility of the elected legislator. A court, any court, should merely arbitrate on the conformity of legal disputes to these laws. If they acted that way, no one would really care who gets nominated to the supreme court. It is because the supreme court has taken the habit of ruling on matters that should be left to the legislator and effectively to make new laws that it has become a bitter fight for nominations.
I see the same power grab happening in Europe and am equally worried about it. No power should be given without accountability.
Yes, that's true. But it's important to note that Republicans deviated from this process 4 years ago and will now just resume business as usual while being a lot closer to the actual election than in 2016.
> If they acted that way, no one would really care who gets nominated to the supreme court.
How could this be done? Political issues are in front of the court every day and minute. This makes it immensely political. How could then those mere arbitrators be non-political?
It was always political. It will always be.
> It is because the supreme court has taken the habit of ruling on matters that should be left to the legislator and effectively to make new laws that it has become a bitter fight for nominations.
Uhm. You know this is also something that has been going on forever, especially in every "common law" system.
And in the majority of those cases the SC does only instruct the lower court on that specific case, refraining from creating new law as much as possible.
France is a "civil law" country. Courts there cannot "make new laws", they can only invalidate them. (And as far as I know this applies in general to all civil law countries.)
> France is a "civil law" country. Courts there cannot "make new laws", they can only invalidate them. (And as far as I know this applies in general to all civil law countries.)
The German Supreme Court has, on two occasions, declared new constitutional rights: the right to informational self-determination (when deliberating a census process law) and the right to integrity of data processing systems (when outlaying voting computers). I don't know if that counts though since technically they argued that other constitutional rights implied these rights (but weren't mentioned explicitly because the German Basic Law was drafted in 1949).
Well, clearly both parties seem to have expectations that the court will rule on controversial matters like abortion. The fact that it also declines to examine many other cases doesn’t really change that.
Sure, and controversial laws were submitted for constitutional review everywhere around the world (where there are constitutional courts). And picking judges was always a political thing. Just as picking the top prosecutor. And so on.
What's so surprising about that? It's not so much a "rule" as a statement of political fact. Now that Supreme Court has become a de facto legislative body, no nominee has a chance of getting through when the presidency and Senate are not controlled by the same party.
The reality is that if we had a Democratic President and Senate, nobody on the left would be arguing that we have to hold off until the election. Chuck Schumer would no doubt be insisting that the Senate "do [its] job", as he did in 2016. [1]
It's hard to fault McConnell for doing precisely what he was elected to do -- confirm conservative judges and justices.
If you think McConnell has a monopoly on hypocrisy I have a bridge to sell you as well. McConnell took both sides of the argument (delay when convenient, expedite when convenient), the democrats opposed him on both occasions. If this was a moral discussion, then both parties are equally guilty of hypocrisy.
Now if you think that political appointments are a moral matter rather than a balance of power within the constitution matter, it's not a bridge that I have to sell you, it's a planet.
I think the problem is that you cannot use one strategy one time, and another the next. If he’d elected to delay like before, nobody would have complained. If he’d not sabotaged the last nomination, nobody would have complained now either.
His point was that the WH and Senate shouldn't contemplate a SCOTUS nominee in an election year if they are controlled by opposite parties. Not hypocritical as that's not the case this time.
That's the way he's reframing the point now. There was no mention from 2016 that I can find where he mentioned anything about opposite parties: his argument was entirely "it's too close to the election and the next president should be the one who gets to appoint the next Justice."
That's what was given to him in 2016 by the Senate which holds the power of giving or not giving a vote to the WH nominee according to the constitution:
2. If dems wanted their adversaries to respect unwritten norms, maybe they should have refrained from baselessly accusing the nominees of gang rape (Justice Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas).
3. A SC Judge vote needs BOTH WH and Senate. That was not the case in 2016 regardless of who said what. That is the case this time. It's the President's prerogative to nominate, and the Senate's prerogative to confirm.
4. This time, it would also most likely be a contested election. So not having a full supreme count will be a disaster.
Btw, I am NOT a fan of McConnell. But this case is very different.
I know it doesn't mean much, but I filled out a plea to both my Republican senators and Mitch McConnell's contact forms to respect the McConnell / Merrick Garland precedent in 2016. Obviously they've explicitly said they wouldn't, but it doesn't hurt to try.
McConnell has already publicly stated that he's bringing a nominee to the senate floor. You didn't think he'd have consistency and integrity even with his own precedent did you?
The precedent set was that the Senate can overrule the president. That precedent will be followed.
I don't think anyone misunderstands the situation - McConnell is going to do whatever is most expedient to get a Supreme Court composition that he likes. Any specific justification is mostly cosmetic - Senate has the power, and the controller of the Senate uses the power.
That was not the precedent. The precedent was to “allow the country to decide.” Drop the pretext. His side won. Screw the other side. Just have some integrity and own it.
That does not form a legal precedent. What you refer to was a political move and not a legal action. The Constitution governs this, not how people previously voted or blocked votes.
I believe the first time a SC nominee was blocked was Roger Taney in 1835. This is politics and happens, as a general principle, regularly by both parties.
No, and No. This is how the Senate works. What people are crying about right now is a standard of proceduralism that is completely made up and has never, ever been what either party believed in. Do you want to win? Good, welcome to democracy.
It's not. Mcconnell in 2016 declared it improper to vote on a nominee in an election year and now he says it can be done less than 6 weeks before an election. Yes it is within his authority and breaks no laws but the US Senate has traditions of decorum and fairness that he is trading for a short term win to the detriment of the country. We can't send him to jail but we can certainly be upset.
In 2016 the senate and the White House were held by different parties. Since SCOTUS nominations come from the executive, and are seated with advice and consent of the Senate, what McConnell did is not only normal it’s perfectly in line with a century of precedent. The idea that it was out of line, or against some nonexistent norm, is a narrative invented to make people feel better and discredit the court in the eyes of the public.
Prior to this Senate session, SC nominees could be filibustered. And every nomination prior to Brett Kavanaugh had bipartisan votes. The Senate is as responsible as the President for keeping the SC staffed with competent jurists. The role is meant to be apolitical. The first salvo was the nomination of Robert Bork by Reagan. He was a terrible choice but was replaced by Kennedy who was confirmed 97-0. Even Clarence Thomas got 11 Dems to vote for him. Mcconnell refused to even hold hearings for Garland or take a committee vote. That's an abdication of his duty.
Since the Senate was held by a different party, senators could have voted against Obama's candidate, couldn't they? But they didn't; rather, Garland wasn't ever brought to the Senate for a confirmation vote.
Because McConnell didn't care a bit about the people expressing the next Justice, he was more simply scared as fuck of losing that vote despite theoretically having a majority.
Since this is HN I will paraphrase Bryan Cantrill: "Do not fall into the trap of trying to anthropomorphize McConnell. You need to think of him the way you think of a lawnmower".
McConnell was given the power to do that by the rest of the Senators who put him in that position.
The narrative that Garland would have been confirmed if only he’d gotten a vote assumes that McConnell didn’t have the support of his caucus in what he did. That’s an incorrect assumption. They could have removed him and done what they wanted to do if there was some groundswell of support for Garland in the Republican Party. There wasn’t, they supported McConnell, and Garland wasn’t brought to a vote. That’s just how politics works.
It was a new rule, concocted at a moments notice, and discarded the moment it outlived its usefulness. That latter moment was today. It was the definition of abuse.
I was responding to the request, "Please tell me the last time a democrat-controlled senate confirmed a Supreme Court justice for a republican president in an election year."
If you're trying to be thorough, though, you should probably mention that Reagan's first selection for that seat was controversial because of his involvement in the the post-Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre," as well as the general suspicion that he would try to reverse Roe v. Wade and other civil rights-related rulings of preceding decades. Reagan's second selection withdrew his name from consideration before even being nominated, so I'm not sure why he's even relevant here.
I get that you're trying to make a political point, but there's simply no evidence that Democrats would have behaved like McConnell's GOP (perhaps more aptly described as the post-Gingrich GOP) did in 2016.
Democrats blocked Bork for an article he wrote 25 years before, which raised the libertarian argument of whether Congress should be able to regulate racial discrimination by private parties. It is to this day a challenging topic for even liberal libertarians, because those laws rest on a sweeping interpretation of the interstate commerce clause. But Democrats used that article to defame Bork as a segregationist. The second nominee withdraw his nomination after it came out he used marijuana, after what happened to Bork. So yes, Democrats were not in a position to play that cars a third time against a wildly popular sitting President.
There is ample evidence that Democrats would have behaved like McConnell did. For example, their threats to pack the Supreme Court in 2019. (After their threats to pack the Supreme Court under FDR gutted large parts of the constitution.) The fact is that Democrats don’t perceive conservatives as legitimate players in the political process. That’s why they continually raise alarm about conservative Supreme Court nominees, even though in 40 years of a conservative majority on the court, not a single major liberal precedent has been overturned.
The Democrats didn’t block Bork for writing an article.
Democratic “threats” made in 2019, post-Merrick Garland, have zero bearing on their hypothetical behavior in 2016, pre-Merrick Garland and the shattering of norms that his (non)hearings represented.
I’m not a Democrat, but, from the outside looking in, it doesn’t seem like they have a real problem with right-leaning politicians or judges. I can understand why they might not view those who seem to be pursuing a return to the pre-Civil Rights era as wholly legitimate, but they’ve adopted plenty of relatively conservative positions over the years (just look at the record of their current presidential candidate!). The American Left has only recently begun to show its face again, for example, after decades of absence, and the Democratic Party has long seemed to harbor more resentment toward that group than moderate conservatives.
I’m also not a demographer, but I don’t think many would consider a potential 6-3 conservative majority on the SC to be at all representative of the US population. To me, that seems like the real legitimacy crisis here, not whether Democrats think of conservatives as legitimate political actors (spoiler alert: I think it’s safe to say they view conservatives about as favorably as conservatives view them).
You’re mixing up legal versus political conservatism, which are two very different things. I agree Biden is very moderate politically. But no Democratic Justice is meaningfully conservative legally (though Kagan displays a streak of it). In close decisions, the conservative justices routinely break ranks. (Roberts in the ACA case, Kennedy in Obergefell, Gorsuch in Bostock, Scalia in many 4th amendment cases, and in the video game first amendment case.) The Democratic appointees always vote as a block.
You’re wrong to say that Republicans hate democrats as much as democrats hate republicans. There is pretty much no liberal opinion you could say that would get you personally attacked at a federalist society meeting. There are a wide range of mainstream conservative views you’d best not say in a similar context among liberals.
> The Democratic appointees always vote as a block
I think this behavior could very possibly be caused by there being more conservative justices. If there were 6 liberal justices and 3 conservative ones you'd probably see the 3 vote as a block and the 6 break rank.
The supreme court is going to mostly issue opinions that are close to it's median member. And the more liberal or conservative justices on the supreme court the more liberal or conservative that viewpoint will be. And thus the more likely the more moderate members will be to break rank.
Constrain the operational gamut of law enforcement (aka “defund the police”).
Abortion is a medical health issue and a woman’s right to choose.
I dunno, there’s plenty that will get be undue attention at a Federalist meeting, and some things I could say that would put my life on the line (remembering home invasions, fire bombings and an assassination of a surgeon involved in abortions).
I've only voted straight democratic ticket for my entire life. And I feel more comfortable sharing my views with trump supporters than my liberal friends.
Just last night I had to walk away from a conversation because the other party got so heated just because I suggested it's very likely the new supreme court won't overturn roe v wade.
The GOP have been trying to overturn Roe vs Wade since at least the Reagan era, if not from the day the decision was made.
What was your reasoning for your side of the argument? Were you arguing based on the GOP history of not successfully overturning RvW, or were you challenging the other side's assumptions about GOP wanting to overturn RvW? Were you playing the ball or the player?
Which is basically two fold. Roe vs wade is very popular. Last pre research poll I found said even among Republicans less people wanted to overturn it than not overturn it. 49 to 48.
If the Republican justices fall along these same lines it won't get overturned.
Which brings us to our next argument Which is basically the supreme court is very reluctant to overturn major constitutional court cases that have stood for almost half a century.
So will the supreme court throw out 50 years of precedence to overturn an issue that 70-80% of the population and 50% of Republicans disagree with overturning?
I’d say any of those things at CPAC much less Fed Soc. Last Fed Soc meeting I was at before COVID, we had a vigorous debate over Bostock. The room was split 50/50. Likewise, there are enough libertarians to get a good amount of support for constraining the operational gamut of police or eliminating qualified immunity. More than a third of Republicans support making abortions always or mostly legal, and among Fed Soc, which leans a tidge libertarian, it’s probably half. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t address any of the nuances of those issues at an ABA meeting, much less in a partisan liberal organization.
Sure, that’s right wing radio. I’m talking about fairly ordinary people at ordinary people. You see this even within the Democratic Party itself, which has come to demand strict ideological purity. Everyone just pretends that 50% of Black people don’t oppose same-sex marriage, and that the 30% of the party that’s pro-life doesn’t exist.
You must have some very interesting "ordinary" friends. You're also trying to compare the federalist society, a high-brow legal organization composed of highly educated lawyers, with ordinary, likely much less educated people. Try going to a Trump rally and holding up a black lives matter sign. I'm sure you'll have plenty of intellectually stimulating conversation.
That's called compromise, and it is how a government should function, but Republicans have lost all ability to do that and so we have stalemate after stalemate, no covid stimulus, no attempt to compromise on anything. Democrats are fine with compromise, to a point, but the republicans have to meet in the middle, not take their ball and go home like they always fucking do.
Impeaching the president for an alleged offense committed while in office is not "trying to delegitimize the election," unless you're prepared to say Republicans were "trying to delegitimize the election" of Bill Clinton. Conversely, it is absolutely without question that there are Republican officials, like the president himself, trying very, very hard to delegitimize the 2020 election before it happens. And I would dearly like to see more Republicans, who used to be so damn concerned about preserving the rule of law, upset about that.
You are right, and shouldn’t be downvoted for pointing out a simple truth.
People are upset because the media played it up as such a miscarriage of justice, but the truth is the senate wouldn’t have confirmed him and so they didn’t vote for a hearing.
The Democrats of course can and obviously will do the same the next time they have opposition in the senate - and would have done the same, I’d bet, if the situation was flipped then.
I actually think many don’t understand this as it was really propagandized on Twitter, etc as some massive deal, but having the hearing wouldn’t have changed anything.
> but the truth is the senate wouldn’t have confirmed him and so they didn’t vote for a hearing.
This is not necessarily true. McConnell does this to protect his fellow senators from having to decide between party and state, potentially hurting their re-election chances if they side with the party. Majority leaders regularly stop things going to vote not because they wouldn't pass, but rather because it can create strife and bad feelings within the party.
I'm not sure this is really as relevant a question as whether an opposition senate has ever blocked a Supreme Court nominee in an election year. I don't have the answer to that, but it appears the last time a Democratic president made a Supreme Court appointment while Republicans held the Senate was in 1895, whereas the last time the reverse happened was 1987. So while we may not be able to say "the Democrats clearly wouldn't have done the same thing McConnell did" with surety, I don't think we can say that they clearly would have, either.
Yes, i know. Neither was 1895. That was kind of my point. Let me try to frame this a hopefully better way.
People keep trying to argue that McConnell isn't being a hypocrite, he's just following precedent. But for that to be true, we need to (a) find a time before 2016 when the Senate prevented a Supreme Court nominee from even getting a vote on the Senate floor in an election year, and (b) the Senate needs to specifically cite the upcoming election as a reason. So far, no one seems to be able to point to that supposedly precedent-setting case. And that's before we throw in McConnell's new claim as of yesterday that such a precedent only applies when the Senate majority and the President are from two different parties, a condition which, it's worth noting, was never mentioned by him or any of his supporters in 2016.
In strictly legal terms, McConnell gets to do what he wants. But the claim that he was following some previously established norm by denying Garland a vote in 2016 but not denying a new nominee a vote in 2020 is simply a lie.
It absolutely was mentioned by many people in 2016 (including McConnell himself, if you read his statements and realize he wasn’t spelling it out word for word because the majority aspect was blindingly obvious, and if I recall he may have even clarified that part too).
I read about it extensively at the time from many on the right, and the left - that was the entire grounds for it happening. That McConnel himself may not have explicitly called out the Senate majority in his prominent press interviews was because it was totally obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with politics why, and therefore why beyond saying “it’s an electron year” would he need to keep clarifying? He just wasn’t assuming the insane amount of bad faith everyone would give him, incl. people like yourself.
So no, you don’t have some subtle understanding that no one else besides you and “your side” is getting at all.
Again, let me reiterate, because it seems you’re really trying to find something here: it was discussed on the right extensively, explicitly mentioning the Senate majority factor at the time, in 2016, and was generally well understood on the right. In fact the rights news writers were sort of flabbergasted and writing about how it’s being propagandized to look super bad when in fact it was not. I can’t even believe you’re trying to argue that wasn’t the case - talk about a straw-man.
Avoiding the vote altogether as opposed to having it and rejecting it was indeed unique, but not hypocritical. Simply put, he had the power to do that as the majority in the Senate. You can be upset about it, but I suspect you’re really just upset because your side lost or you have some gut revulsion towards McConnel, not because it was some grand betrayal - because it didn’t change a single thing in terms of outcomes, not even in terms of slippery slopes. The Democrats are totally free to do the same the next time this situation comes up, and they will and are expected to, and that too wouldn’t change a thing, and I’m sure some idiot Republicans will whine about it as well...that’s politics.
Not really, just an inference from there being some 150 years of election.
If there was an instance where the other party did this the GOP would be slapping them around the ears with it. So since they’re not doing that, I assume there’s no instance they can use.
I'm curious: does anybody seriously think that if the positions were reversed that the Democrats would honor this?
Let's say that Biden wins, then Trump runs against him again in 2024. Somebody dies or retires right before the election, do you think the democrats would seriously wait and risk allowing the nomination to be done by Trump?
None of these people are in any way signaling their actual virtues. It's all just slogans. Also: the Democrats didn't grant this to the Republicans over Scalia. The Republicans were in power in the Senate at the time and used this power to their advantage.
Yeah, this is all terrible: this is the world you get when our politics seem to be regulated by twitter. If you want this to change, get rid of cable news talk shows, and get rid of twitter. Until then, this is what you're going to have.
The reason why this is not transferable to the Democrats, is because they haven't previously refused to hold confirmation hearings for an appointee solely on the basis that there'd be an election later that year.
If you're asking whether Democrats would have placed themselves in a similar position in 2016 if the roles were reversed, then the answer is no. I'd expect them to consider the nominee, and quite likely vote against - but they wouldn't stonewall until election.
But Democrats did try to nominate Garland in 2016, so now can they protest if Republicans put up a nominee now? Republican position may be inconsistent between 2020 and 2016, but if Reps now take position taken by Dems in 2016, how can Dems be critical if it?.
Has any elected democrat threatened to pack the supreme court, except as a response to McConnell reversing his position now that his party is in control?
You can't compare the senate majority leader with a random anonymous twitter account.
"We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court, We have to take this challenge head on, and everything is on the table to do that." is...not.
Even still, your argument doesn't follow. Reacting to someone doing a thing you disapprove of isn't the same as instigating the thing. Your argument is that since Democrats disapprove of what Republicans did, and are considering taking action to undo and action they disapprove of, that they would have also done the act. That is very strange reasoning.
Nobody should be talking about court packing. Sitting on nominations to gain tactical advantage might be a sneaky. But it’s something that’s been done forever. Expanding the Supreme Court for political purposes would be unprecedented and breaking a huge taboo. It is not at all a proportional response.
Refusing to vote on a nominee is also unprecedented. You've yet to acknowledge that in every other case the Senate voted. This time they refused to even put it to a vote. (And some senators considered continuing it through the entire clinton presidency, were she elected, I might add)
That's also a huge taboo, and for good reason. It prevents voters from making politically informed decisions because their representatives don't have actions on which to judge.
Indeed, but to find one in an election year you have to jump back to 1881, where Hayes proposed a Justice after the election had already happened. The confirmation lapsed. President Grant proposed the same justice and he was confirmed. Worth noting, Hayes also had a justice confirmed as a lame duck (William Burnham Woods).
[Edit: I missed lame-duck Millard Filmore in 1852 the first time around also]
Prior to that you had John Tyler in 1844, who had two vacancies in the court open up in his election year. He made 9 proposals of 5 different people, one (John C. Spencer) was rejected and then later re-proposed and withdrawn, one (Reuben Walworth) was proposed 3 times, withdrawn once and postponed or lapsed twice. One was confirmed. Another was proposed twice. So this whole thing was a complete circus, but even still congress did their duty and confirmed one of Tyler's picks.
Prior to that there was John Quincey Adams who, also as a lame-duck, proposed a nominee who was tabled. In 1828.
So the precedent, insofar as there is one, is that when an election has already happened, the other party can table it. Except that more often than not, that doesn't happen. In fact, it's really only happened twice, in 1828, and 1852, and then not in 1880 despite similar circumstances. And then 2016.
And again those cases were different: Adams had already lost the election, when he made the nomination. Fillmore is maybe the closest, even though it happened later in the year the election hadn't happened yet, but Fillmore also failed to be re-nominated, so in a sense he'd lost the election in the primary.
[To be extra clear, in most of the cases where a nomination expired, the same president had a nominee confirmed later (Eisenhower, Harding, Cleveland), so it wasn't a flat out refusal to entertain candidates.
If your claim is supported by that article you linked down below, it seems like a big stretch to refer to Democrats as a unified whole ("believe Democrats ... after they") when you're referring to three people, two of whom were engaged in ultimately failed campaigns for the presidency.
It might be more constructive to speak with precision about a claim of such import.
And here's the example comment that highlights the varying moral compass that seems to exist in defining what one perceives as "thrown under the bus" vs "holding accountable". What are your political leanings, if you don't mind me asking?
My leanings are complicated. I’d boil it down to a mix of pragmatism and pro-rights. I’m pro choice, pro 2nd amendment, pro gay marriage, mostly for a small government, etc. I usually lean republican nowdays due to the democratic side of the aisle being more likely to actually take rights away.
I don’t think what we know he did deserved the punishment, especially the picture where he was pretend groping. Nobody would have batted an eye at it at the time.
Absolutely not. Why would Trump eliminate one of the biggest draws to electing him? If he pushes someone through before November, he absolutely loses the senate (assuming you believe the polls). No way those purple states with senators up for election are going to carry Republicans who went from "we don't vote for the USSC during final term years" to "RUSH THROUGH THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY NOMINEE!" in 4 years.
The move is to have everything set and ready to go during the lame duck and push hard then if you lose or wait until Jan if you win. Removes the election math from the process.
This is probably the most toxicity I've ever seen in an HN story's comments. Thanks for everything you do... I imagine you've got your work cut out for you tonight.
TIL. I use underscores for italics (as my normal applications work that way), and have just been accepting that my emphasis looks like _emphasis_, instead of emphasis. Thank you.
Also, if it isn't consistent, that's because we only see a portion of what gets posted here, often rather randomly. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
With Supreme Court supremacy Republicans don’t have to get re-elected by voters anymore, they just have to dispute the results, lose, and appeal up to the nearest friendly court.
You can have your cake and eat it too by waiting, though.
The looming court seat was a very effective driver of votes for Trump in the previous election, at least that's the conventional wisdom. So have a go at seeing if that will work again. You can also spin it as being respectful, serious, and considered by waiting.
Even if you end up losing the Presidency, and even the Senate, you're still in power for enough time afterward to make an appointment.
The only things I could think of working against that would be: the idea that you just make the appointment immediately and tout it as another success to your base, or perhaps a fear that since it's Ginsburg's seat that's vacant, having it open is actually a more mobilizing force for Democrats. There's also, I suppose, the possibility that you make the move right away on the theory that this upcoming election is likely to be contested and could reach the Supreme Court.
OP is saying that there's no risk, because you can wait until after the election, but before the new term begins (i.e. before January, 3). Trump could still nominate then, and the current Senate could confirm.
But this is also exactly why this gambit doesn't really work - because the voters know that whatever happens at the polls, the end result is the same. They could hold voters hostage to the Supreme Court nomination back in 2016 because there was a split between the president and the Senate that blocked either side from getting what they really wanted until the next term.
Trump and the GOP plan to steal the electrion via the Supreme Court, just like GW Bush did in 2000, except this time they will need SCOTUS a lot more because it won't be as easy for them to justify nulling a landslide for Biden - but they will do it anyway because they have no shame, and if they have power, and they have SCOTUS to do their dirty work, then so be it.
I definitely would expect Trump to calculate whether it is more in his interests to do it before or after election day.
I don't think it's possible to remove the election math, though. Whatever he does, it could influence voter turnout for both sides.
There's also the possibility that something about the election will be disputed and go to the Supreme Court (as happened with vote counting with Bush v. Gore in 2000). So Trump might decide he wants his appointee to already be serving before election day if he thinks that would be more in his favor.
Yep. It's pretty much needed as if the election is contested and needs to be decided by the Supreme Court, not having a justice will be a disaster. Also presidency ends on January 20th - you can't go without a justice for 4 months.
Because this time, most likely there will be a contested election. And because this time it's different because both the WH and Senate are held by the same party unlike 2016. SC judge needs both Senate and WH and that was not the case in 2016.
Interesting point. Trump and McConnell's interests aren't actually aligned, here. McConnell is up for reelection, ahead in the polls, and wants an inoffsensive conservative justice. Trump's behind, is more interested in his reelection than in getting a conservative justice on the court. He can't drag his feet too long or it will look like he's stalling, and he'd have to nominate a judicial version of Judy Shelton so he's playing to his base, but it's someone the Senate wouldn't approve. Or if they have someone they already vetted with skeletons in the closet that just haven't come out yet.
This logic might apply during less polarized times.
American politics right now is full-on us-versus-them, and who has the biggest numbers. McConnell is in Kentucky and ahead in the polls, and he’s smart enough not to full-on troll the left with a flat-out fascist.
The left will respond as if he did anyway, but they’ll have a lot less success in convincing conservatives it’s a bad move if the judge is not beyond what most conservatives will support. That line has shifted far to the right (or, to the far right) over the past 30 years.
I guess I’m saying that opinions on an “inoffensive conservative justice” is a bimodal distribution, and McConnell’s right hump is higher.
Getting a conservative justice on the court is a massive draw for Trump's reelection. That's why he released a list of candidates before both elections.
He can still nominate after the election even if he loses it - his term doesn't end immediately. It's not really like the other two times - not like 2018 because there was no vacancy on the court then, and not like 2016 because the president and the Senate were deadlocked then.
I don't get this theory. There are a lot of people out there who want to see a conservative justice elected, but prefer Biden over Trump in the White House? Or a lot of conservative voters who are apathetic about the presidency and might not vote, but would be convinced to come to the polls if a Supreme Court spot was at stake?
I mean I can believe both of those sets of people exist, but hardly that they're numerous enough to dictate the election strategy.
It's not so much that they prefer Biden over Trump. But they dislike Trump. I know people who cannot stand his antics on Twitter or the way he disrespects women or his blatant infidelity to his wives. However they strongly believe in conservative and Christian values and will hold their nose while the vote for him to try to ensure the supreme court votes their way on issues such as abortion. Trump knows this and uses it as a carrot to encourage these people to vote for him.
Yes, there are lots of people who will tell you how much they dislike Trump, then vote for him. I'm saying that those people still exist even if the Supreme Court spot isn't at stake: a Republican White House still gives them a better chance of legislation upholding conservative values in the future.
Why? Trump is never going to appoint a justice who will legitimately advance any cause of liberty. He’s going to appoint someone who will protect his power and the power of the Republican Party. Trump making more appointments is exactly the same as him getting another 4 years, except it will last decades.
I'm not a right libertarian, so I can't really argue with you. But you have to understand that your perspective on Trump is not necessarily shared by them, regardless of how objective it may be.
Gorsuch is the most libertarian-leaning Justice we’ve had in decades. Others on the short list, such as Barrett or Kethledge, also have significant records of originalism with respect to the scope of the administrative state.
I don’t think libertarians realize where we are in 2020. Lots of culture war stuff from the last few decades where libertarians sided with liberals (abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage) has now flipped and then battleground is keeping the government from forcing people to participate in those things: Catholics being forced to perform elective abortions, nuns being forced to pay for contraception, people being forced to participate in same-sex weddings as bakers (and presumably caterers, etc.)
Nearly all EU countries recognize such conscience rights. Eliminating them would put the U.S. squarely outside the mainstream on this issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objection_to_abo... ("Conscientious objection is granted in 22 member states of the European Union plus the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland.").
The context of this is laws that would require providers to provide certain services, under which such a contract would be deemed illegally opting out (as set forth in the court case linked above). That’s the whole point of this effort.
Is there a law in the US that forces a doctor to perform an abortion or a nurse to participate? Aside from one that says that your employer can ask you to fulfill the terms of your contract or lose your job? It seems that the vast majority of laws limiting physician freedom are being proposed or passed to prevent them from performing abortions, counseling patients about abortion, or discuss guns in the household.
Even in the absence of a specific law, medical providers can always be sued. Part of the push to redefine elective abortion from a right rooted in bodily autonomy to being “routine healthcare” is to open providers to lawsuits for refusing to provide them: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/390968-abortion-refus...
Ah, now you’re reminding me of a case in Ireland where they let the Hindu, not Catholic, patient die because they did not believe in abortion. That is not a scenario I want in my life. Doctors choosing your morals for you and calling it their conscience?
I guess it’s the libertarian thing. Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.
Except it’s not just about emergency care. (In that case I’d argue it’s a critical public safety issue.) Advocacy groups are targeting the practice generally, because providers opting out can mean that people have to travel further to get an elective abortion, sterilization, contraception, etc. You don’t have to be all that libertarian to believe that in non-emergency situations, doctors should be able to tell people to go somewhere else to get a procedure the doctor doesn’t wish to perform.
And, of course, since the doctor is also an active participant in killing the fetus, it’s not the “doctor imposing morals in the patient.”
There’s more to it. They often know at 8 weeks that an ectopic pregnancy is there. It won’t be for another 30 weeks that it becomes a problem. So, not really an emergency room situation but something where you might be in the room with your Ob/Gyn. If that person thinks abortion is murder they shouldn’t let you know that other doctors will happily murder your fetus to save you. If you die it’s god’s will. If the baby dies in 30 weeks, that’s also god’s will. You’re saying that the doctor should be held harmless withholding that information?
> Catholics being forced to perform elective abortions, nuns being forced to pay for contraception, people being forced to participate in same-sex weddings as bakers
so the solution is to ban abortions, contraceptives, and same-sex marriage altogether?
In almost 50 years of a conservative Supreme Court majority, what major liberal precedent has been overturned? Basically none. Heck, Roe itself was a 7-2 decision with two Nixon appointees in the majority. Roberts won’t vote to overturn Roe, neither will Gorsuch, and probably neither will Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh, a Kennedy disciple, won’t undo Obergefell, probably neither will Gorsuch. History shows that conservative justice at best hold the line on social issues, or continue to move forward.
Look at the political debates likely to come up over the next 10 years and tell me where libertarians are aligned with liberals. Apart from the things I mentioned above, cases that will come up may include the constitutionality of a wealth tax, changes to equal protection to allow discrimination in favor of particular groups, firearms confiscation, etc. (I’m not saying all of these will happen, I’m pointing out what the next legal battlegrounds will be.)
> conservative justice at best hold the line on social issues, or continue to move forward.
The difference is that—unlike racial justice, women's rights, and gay rights—in this case abortion was a mistake and so the step forward would be to reverse it. If you go back far enough, society has successfully reversed actions that were at the time considered forward progress.
Dude you are really going to town on this posting. Kudos for fighting the good fight, I'm trying to balance out the downvotes but I'm clearly outnumbered lol. I always feel dirty AF after these flamewars so I don't know how you can do it.
Also, I think most of the "right libertarians" are already Trump votes out of sheer disgust and exasperation. Libertarians (of any stripe) are probably the least likely to get hot and bothered by Trump's antics.
There are a lot of evangelical Christians who reluctantly voted for Trump because he'd pack the court (and they like Pence). With one more conservative justice, they might decide the court is adequately packed.
Trump wants to skate from state (NY) let alone federal charges after the election if he loses. The Democrats should use this leverage for all it’s worth. If he’s going to act like a mob boss let’s turn him like one.
The irony of your scare-mongering is that Roe was a 7-2 case where two Nixon appointees voted in the majority. It was reaffirmed in Casey where another Republican voted in the majority. Obergefell was written by a Republican. So was Bostock.
I don't think there's irony there. The republican platform explicitly wants to overturn Roe. Russo was months ago. If the new justice is right of Roberts, it would get overturned.
The evangelicals are part of their coalition. They have to at least pretend to try to overturn it or the evangelicals won't show up.
Each party is a coalition of interests whether it's a particular minority, class, etc. They have to at least pander to every part of their coalition, otherwise they don't show up to vote. If nothing gets done, they can simply flail their arms, yell, scream and blame the other party. The important thing is making it look like they are trying.
Each party also has a coalition of large donors who expect a lot more for their money than mere pandering and aren't fooled by the tactics used for the previously mentioned coalitions. Parties without donors die, so this is a existential requirement.
This is essentially why voters never get what they want and donors always do.
A 5-4 conservative majority Supreme Court keeps striking down abortion restrictions, much less rolling anything back. A 6-3 wouldn’t flip it, though you might get some more enforcement of the viability limit. Only Alito and Thomas would actually vote to flip it if it came to that.
I'm not sure what your point is. One doesn't need to overturn Roe outright to overturn Roe in practice for many americans. If there are no abortion providers in your state, and your state bans telemedicine medication abortion, you can't get an abortion. That roe still protects Californians isn't relevant to you in mississippi or georgia or nebraska.
And that really, truly, only takes a 6-3 majority. If Barrett replaced Ginsburg in July, the ruling would have gone the other way. And consternation states well continue to violate the law in an effort to get it changed.
> I'm not sure what your point is. One doesn't need to overturn Roe outright to overturn Roe in practice for many americans. If there are no abortion providers in your state, and your state bans telemedicine medication abortion, you can't get an abortion. That roe still protects Californians isn't relevant to you in mississippi or georgia or nebraska.
Restrictions that eliminated every provider in a state likely would violate Roe itself, as would things like heartbeat laws. Yes, one imagines a 6-3 court would uphold more restrictions than today. But things like mandatory counseling, waiting periods, parental consent periods, 12 week limits, etc., exist in more conservative European countries like Germany, Italy, etc. Even insofar as Roe recognizes a right to bodily autonomy that precludes banning abortion entirely, why shouldn’t the most conservative states in the most religious developed country in the world be able to decide that they’re going to do the minimum required to protect that right, as opposed to something behind that one right.
Not that I want to get in the way of a reasonably articulated airing of the other side of this issue, which I appreciate you offering, but:
One reason is that the most conservative states in the country are still mostly polarized between rural and urban districts, with urban districts housing large majorities of people who want access to reproductive health services, but are denied that by a coalition of mostly rural conservatives to whom the welfare of urban denizens are an externality.
That is to say, the state legislatures aren't really speaking for Jackson or Birmingham or Little Rock (you can look up the demographics if you want). Even in Mississippi, the most conservative state in the county, the spread between Espy and Hyde-Smith in 2018 was just 7 points.
If (say) Kansas City could somehow secede from Kansas, leaving two states --- Rural and Urban Kansas --- I think the principled argument here would be stronger.
In addition to what tptacek says, I have a few other concerns about this line of reasoning. First, with regard to access, there are a number of states that have only a handful of abortion providers as is (the Dakotas collectively have 3 abortion providers). If you are forced to travel 3-4 hours (or more!) for a medical procedure once, sure perhaps that's unavoidable. But to have to do it two or perhaps 3 times makes the service de facto inaccessible to many.
If clinics were common and accessible, having counseling and waiting periods might be more palatable. The problems arise when that counseling is structure to guilt women into not having abortions, or when the waiting periods make it de facto impossible for people to access a medical procedure. I take a very pragmatic view of the law in this regard. That is, someone should not have to lose their job to get an abortion. I recognize that there are other medical procedures where the same thing could happen (and I argue that we should have stronger protections for those cases too!), but it's more egregious when the law is constructed to take advantage of our lack of social safety to make it more difficult to access rights. There's a strong parallel with voter ID laws here.
Also, I don't believe there are prohibitions on counseling, waiting periods, parental consent periods at the federal level in the US. Mississippi has laws requiring all of those, as well as ultrasound, and necessary requirements about the facility. So I don't see how that's relevant. States certainly can, and do, already put into practice those limitations. Russo went further.
Secondly, I personally take issue with religious justification for laws. Even indirectly, especially since we live in a country that claims to provide religious freedom I recognize that this isn't really legally tenable, but when there's a clear religious justification for a law, in my opinion, we should apply stricter scrutiny to that law.
Third, and this perhaps combines some elements of the first two, as well as tptacek's comments: there's a tyranny of the majority (or perhaps plurality) situation that arises. Restrictions on how someone can exercise a legally protected right are dangerous, and should only, be done with very compelling reasons. Most abortion restrictions aren't very compelling.
I also don't see that adding additional legal restrictions is "the minimum to protect that right". Meddling with a right to make it more difficult to exercise isn't doing the minimum, it's something else entirely. Instituting a new law cannot be the minimum. To give an example, the 15th amendment did the minimum in regards to giving black people the right to vote in the US. States that instituted poll taxes and literacy tests were not doing the minimum, they were abridging the right. At a state level, "the minimum" might have been to do nothing to prevent voter intimidation which also happened some. So to return to the modern example, "doing the minimum" might be, like, not instituting buffer zone laws.
You don't have to agree with it but his point was that the WH and Senate shouldn't contemplate a SCOTUS nominee in an election year if they are controlled by opposite parties. Not hypocritical as that's not the case this time.
Also what happens if the election is contested and needs to be decided by the Supreme Court? Can't have a Supreme Court without a justice till January 20th.
> Also what happens if the election is contested and needs to be decided by the Supreme Court? Can't have a Supreme Court without a justice till January 20th.
Strangely enough that same Supreme Court spent most of 2016 without a justice with no issue.
Also, in what world the Supreme Court deciding on the validity of an election with a deciding member having been appointed to it just before that same election by one of the participants does not consist of a massive conflict of interest?
> History supports Republicans filling the seat. Doing so would not be in any way inconsistent with Senate Republicans’ holding open the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The reason is simple, and was explained by Mitch McConnell at the time. Historically, throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a presidential election year, even in a lame-duck session after the election, even after defeat. Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a presidential election year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic.
The linked article actually goes on to describe every situation where there was an election year Supreme Court vacancy. Please read.
It's not "common" because election-year Supreme Court vacancies where different parties control the Senate and Presidency are "not common." Republicans filibustered the nominee when LBJ sought to appoint Warren's replacement, leading to Warren not retiring. Then before that, Eisenhower, a Republican, got an election year nomination through by nominating a Democrat.
Then you're back in the 1800s. But we routinely look back to the 1800s to establish what is accepted practice in our government.
> It's not "common" because election-year Supreme Court vacancies where different parties control the Senate and Presidency are "not common."
The number of qualifications needed in order to establish this "precedent" should tip you off that it's manufactured expressly to gain a political advantage.
The "qualifications" come from the appointment and confirmation process itself. The Constitution splits the job of filling Supreme Court vacancies between the two political branches of government. The fact that the process can become political where different parties control those two branches in an election year is utterly unsurprising.
> The fact that the process can become political where different parties control those two branches in an election year is utterly unsurprising.
Correct, no one is actually surprised that Mitch McConnell abandoned the flimsy justification for his power grab the instant it outlived its use to him.
How is doing something exactly as it’s spelled out in the Constitution a “power grab”?
Alternatively, McConnell could have called the vote and the Republican majority in the Senate could have just voted it down.
Pre-nuclear option (an actual example of a power grab) even a minority of Senators could stop a nominee from getting through. The Republicans had a majority.
> Alternatively, McConnell could have called the vote and the Republican majority in the Senate could have just voted it down.
It can't be assumed that there wouldn't be Republican defections on a Garland confirmation. This is exactly the reason the majority leader refused to allow a vote. Even now, a number of Republican Senators have already "defected" and declared they won't vote on a nominee before the 2021 inauguration.
Yes. In fact, the usual presumption is the opposite. The closer in time to the adoption of the constitution we can trace some pattern (or in the case of a law to enactment of the law) that is more persuasive. If the generation that wrote the constitution engaged in this political gamesmanship (and they did) that strongly suggests they understood such conduct was permissible within the framework they created.
> The closer in time to the adoption of the constitution we can trace some pattern (or in the case of a law to enactment of the law) that is more persuasive.
This sounds a lot like "originalism", which is controversial at best.
You, I and everyone else knows that this was a pretext, not a precedent. You can dress it up however you like, but the fact is that McConnell was going to do whatever he wanted no matter what.
The "conservative" National Review went back to every Supreme Court appointment in history and made charts showing exactly what happened to answer your question. The New York Times, with its "moral clarity" performed no such analysis and presented no such charts.
Why put ‘conservative’ in quotes? If you Google the name of the magazine their own meta description says conservative as the second word, so they consider themselves a partisan source.
In English quotes can be ambiguous, in this case they mean it is a direct quote from the parent comment (for emphasis, basically), not that it's under suspicion.
It's amazing how if someone shared NYTimes, WaPo, VOX, VICE etc, then everyone's cool. But if someone shares a slightly right leaning source, people start asking for "non-conservative" source.
Honestly you won't get a clear picture from reading a single source, or even multiple sources that lean a particular way. You have to read multiple sources from both political leanings.
Think of it as a trial. Liberal leaning media is the prosecutor and conservative media is the defendant. Depending on the topic, these roles are reversed.
As much as I respected and admired RBG, even she would’ve known it’s at best a wish and nothing else.
If things weren’t so polarized, they absolutely should spare no time in replacing the seat, as is their duty. But we know it’ll be yet another cynical and dishonest process as it was last time.
> Mr. McConnell and his allies say the two situations are different. Where one party controls the Senate and the other the presidency, as in 2016, they say, vacancies should not be filled in a presidential election year. Where the same party controls both the Senate and presidency, they argue, confirmations may proceed.
It's a terrible argument. If the senate is not controlled by the same party as the president and they dislike the president's choice for supreme court, they can vote not to confirm him/her. It also encourages the president to choose a nominee who can appeal to both parties. McConnell refused to allow Garland to even have hearings in the Senate let alone a vote because he feared that some of his republican colleagues may have been persuaded. If there are two controlling parties in two parts of the government then the solution is compromise. This is a philosophy totally abhorrent to McConnell whose views can only be supported by an authoritarian minority.
Wait it takes two to compromise, and a Supreme Court pick is really important . What did the Democrats offer McConnell in exchange for Garland hearings?
He already has, in a talk at the Federalist Society last year, where he said that if given the chance to replace a SCOTUS justice in 2020 he would not hesitate.
EDIT: And again, just over an hour ago, McConnell promised that he would have a vote on a new justice within a week of receiving the nomination.
Meanwhile, Murkowski of Alaska announced she would not support confirmation hearings until after the election.
And in other related news, Senate Democrats have promised to add seats to the Supreme Court if they win the Presidency and Senate in November and McConnell goes ahead with his plans...
Well, it's not like this flip-flop would be in the top 10 of his list of shameless actions... From his point of view, the majority of the country already hates him anyway, and sure, it's a few weeks of bad press from the predictable wing, but in the end he'll (hopefully for him) have pushed his cause (making the conservative grip more concrete) forward.
The progressives will rage on Twitter, but on the day he goes back on what he said in 2016, Mitch is going to have a pleasant dinner with company that will agree with him, and he's going to fall asleep just fine, because he's convinced (or twisted the truth to convince himself) he's doing the right thing, and those who disagree with him are the ones who are un-American...
I think he's probably making calls and planning meetings for tomorrow with the R's on the wall about nominating a SCOTUS judge this soon, as we discuss here on HN. I have no doubt he's had this planned for years and is ready to execute his plan.
I'm somewhat curious how much deference and respect the administration will grant her. Basically how many days before they start pitching their nominee.
Edit: Fwiw, the RBG movie about her is on Hulu now.
It isn't about respect. The upcoming election may be disputed in court and the Administration wants to have as many judges on its side as possible. Even if there is no election related court challenge, there are many investigations of the current administration ongoing and it would be helpful to have more conservative justices for insurance.
The upcoming election will only be disputed by one side, because the other side will have such a clear majority that a dispute is practically impossible.
Both sides have lists for judges not just for the supreme court but all federal courts. Its easier to keep a up to date list then to try to figure out a list when there is a vacancy. They will also often reveal the list or parts of it to get other people's opinions.
You know they dont respect her at all and they'll replace her as soon as feasible. This is a political win they can't ignore and people being offended won't change that in the least
You are completely right, I don't know why people are downvoting you.I predict they'll have someone nominated and approved and sitting on the seat within a month. All legistlation will be dropped until this matter is complete. No stimulus checks, no help for businesses, everything else just dropped to Ring2 and getting a new SCOTUS judge is in Ring 0
> All legistlation will be dropped until this matter is complete. No stimulus checks, no help for businesses, everything else just dropped to Ring2 and getting a new SCOTUS judge is in Ring 0
All that stuff is held up in congress - they need the senate judiciary committee and the senate to approve a judge. That's it.
People are downvoting because they're unhappy with the situation but my stating it gives them a target. But on the other hand, I'm not super worried about internet points.
There's a possibility of a block of republicans who are anti trump (romney, collins, murkowski at least) might try to spike it, but McConnell has already said Trump's nominee will get a vote. I guess we'll see if they can cooperate enough to push it through.
Grassley, Murkowski, Collins, and Graham have said they oppose a vote, but that might be lip service and there's a difference between "opposing a vote" and not voting. And pence gets a tie breaker if its a tie.
"romney, collins, murkowski" ... appreciate the hint. Researching that now. My humble apologies for HN blindly downvoting you. Is asked because I don't have a hard preconceived notion, and wanted replies like yours.
Honest curiosity and debate is tricky business here.
People read intention and emotion into statements of fact or opinion based on their own mental situation, and there are a lot of people who are unhappy about this right now and downvoting something you don't want to happen is a way to 'vent'.
But I think Trump will nominate someone and they'll be approved by Senate, perhaps making Trump the most impactful president in terms of the judiciary in recent history.
Three supreme Court judges, roughly a quurter of all federal judges(194) of which 50 something are appeals court judges,and a hundred something district judges (that's not that many). They're fairly young for judges as well.
It's dark times for democrats as a conservative judiciary is going to be around for a while now.
If Trump wins another term and they republicans hold the Senate conservative judges being appointed will continue for another 4 years.
> even she would’ve known it’s at best a wish and nothing else.
It's specifically her dying wish. IMO she's giving Senators who still support democracy something they can say to the press when they decline to vote to fill her seat.
Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
Why would they wait for the things you think are more important that don't have anything to do with it?
Republicans have a majority of the Senate judiciary committee and the Senate. They have it if they want it without involving stimulus or anything to do with Congress.
For those so certain that the Republican Senate is going to ram though someone, there are a few moderates left, and they've already decided thing can wait until after the election:
"So far the following GOP Senators have pledged that they will not consider a Supreme Court appointment until after the next inauguration.
Huge caveat: of those 3, only Murkowski actually made her statement after RBG passed. Collins made her statement hypothetically earlier in the campaign, and Grassley made his hypothetical statement back in 2018 during that election cycle.
So far, Murkowski is the only confirmed GOP defector, and 4 total defectors are needed to prevent nomination hearings before the election.
It's just how these things work. A few senators are allowed to defect and make a hoopla, but nobody wants to be the final defector that changes the actual outcome, because his or her political career would be over.
McCain famously did it during his last vote, because he knew he was going to die shortly thereafter.
There's a bit of difference between what you're outlining and "coordinated" as the GP mentions. One seems far less nefarious and just in line with the realities of certain democracies and re-election.
She’s going to furrow her brow and try to explain why flip flopping and selling her vote in exchange for McConnell not killing her post-senate career (she’s down by ~12 points to her democratic challenger) is fine because McConnell had already learned his lesson.
Most of these statements were made in 2018. A lot has changed since then, and these statements where made when Samuel Alito's retirement was being floated. RBG is a totally different ball game.
Yeah I wouldn't bet too long on that. McConnell knows how to twist arms, they will crack to pressure and get a solid conservative in there before the election. Of that I'm sure.
I’d say he could also wait until after. Last time, the vacancy motivated Republican more than Democratic turnout — and if Republicans don’t win the Senate again, there’s still time after the election to do the appointment.
There are almost a dozen GOP Senate seats up at risk. A vote before the election gives them a solid victory to campaign on to their base, which might be enough to keep those seats in the GOP in November.
Waiting until after the election does nothing to improve their electoral prospects, so for McConnell there's no point in waiting.
The sensible side of me would deem this blind optimism but… Maybe, just maybe, senators respecting Justice Ginsburg’s last wish will be the first step on a long road towards healing our toxic political polarization.
He ideally should be able to, as long as the correct procedures are followed. Republicans, however, set the precedent by not allowing Obama to appoint one in his last year in office. My money, however, is on them ramming someone through anyways.
But that was a republican senate that had the power to confirm or not. Now you have a republican president and senate so if they want to ram somebody through they can do that.
The next logical step is that the Democrats will flatly refuse to confirm any future Republican nominee for SCOTUS, regardless of what year of the President's term it is.
Partisan politics is tiring. The US is steadily becoming more and more mediocre while the rest of the industrialized world improves, because we are focused more on winning petty battles than improving our nation.
In this case, it's about the preservation of our democracy (Trump has already indicated he will contest the election), so I don't think "petty" is the appropriate term.
There's no democracy to preserve. The Supreme Court is inherently anti-democratic. As is the electoral college, the Senate, etc.
The US Constitution is explicitly anti-democratic, and it always has been, as the founders intended. I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm just saying that's what it is.
The anti-majority aspect should be obvious at this point: the President lost the popular vote (and indeed got the votes of only 26% of eligible voters), and the majority of the Senate represents a minority of voters.
The continual part is also essential. The less frequent the votes and/or elections, the less the public is able to express their wishes (and hold representatives accountable). Lifetime terms on the Supreme Court are the worst aspect of this. A member of the Supreme Court may be nominated by a President who lost the popular vote, confirmed by the Senate controlled by a minority of voters and whose members are only up for election once in 6 years. The Supreme Court justice then may hold power for decades, even as the "political winds" shift underneath the Court.
It's also important to note how difficult it is to change the laws, especially the Constitution itself. The Constitution was amended relatively frequently in the past, but now it's almost unthinkable. Separation of powers, checks and balances, mean that a determined minority can prevent pretty much anything from happening. They can completely thwart the majority from acting or changing the existing laws (which unfortunately have no expiration date).
Well democracy is ruling by the demos - think three wolves and a sheep voting what to have for dinner. The moment you say that mutton is off the menu you are limiting the power of the demos to rule. So it is anti democratic.
You are talking about direct democracy, which is but one kind of democracy. Representative democracy is still democracy.
Remember that Plato defined democracy in opposition to monarchy and aristocracy. Universal suffrage, freedom to form parties and to manifest against the government are (part of) what defines modern democracies. Even Switzerland only resorts to referendums in relatively rare cases.
> Well democracy is ruling by the demos - think three wolves and a sheep voting what to have for dinner. The moment you say that mutton is off the menu you are limiting the power of the demos to rule. So it is anti democratic.
Limited ≠ Anti
Representative democracy is also limited compared to direct democracy, for example.
I don't think anyone disputing that they can do it, the point is that it's hypocritical. And the Republican Senate didn't "not confirm" Obama's pick, they refused to consider him at all, arguably a dereliction of their duty under Article 2 of the US Constitution.
That's literally not what the word precedent means. We're not talking about historical counterfactuals, we're talking about the specific defenses and reasoning that's given for a specific decision. When the Supreme Court makes a decision on the basis of precedent, they're saying that the way a previous case was decided should dictate how this case is decided. Likewise, McConnell's claimed "reasoning" in 2016 was that a supposedly controversial president should not be able to elect a new Supreme Court justice in an election year. If that precedent stands, Trump should not be able to in 2020.
Mitch McConnell has been consistent on this since 2016, and he just made the following statement today regarding RBG's death:
> The Senate and the nation mourn the sudden passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the conclusion of her extraordinary American life.
> Justice Ginsburg overcame one personal challenge and professional barrier after another. She climbed from a modest Brooklyn upbringing to a seat on our nation’s highest court and into the pages of American history. Justice Ginsburg was thoroughly dedicated to the legal profession and to her 27 years of service on the Supreme Court. Her intelligence and determination earned her respect and admiration throughout the legal world, and indeed throughout the entire nation, which now grieves alongside her family, friends, and colleagues.
> In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.
> By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise.
> President Trump's nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.
It's happening whether we like it or not, and there's no "precedent" we can appeal to in order to stop it.
> It's happening whether we like it or not, and there's no "precedent" we can appeal to in order to stop it.
Again, you're responding to some point I haven't made. I'm not claiming there's any way to stop it, I'm claiming McConnell is a man without honor or even decency and that the United States is headed into the toilet.
I don't know why this is confusing to you. Absolutely no one says he can't.
To quote a great comment:
> McConnell had serious doubts that Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, would _fail_ to get a majority in the senate, so he forbade the nomination to come to a vote. So it’s a little different than you pose: you a pretending that Obama’s nomination came to a vote and lost (which would be entirely legitimate). The majority leader prevented that from even happening.
1/3 to 2/3 of the Senate is lame ducks. They are only in power because the utter devastation of the Trump era won't hit their ballot until 2020 or 2022. The "blue wave" of 2018 didn't wash over the Senate, only by mere luck of the random distribution of election years across Republican Senators.
To be fair, he’s right. The constitution says the senate gets to approve the judiciary, and the senate is comprised of state-weighted representatives. If the majority of states don’t want a judge, they won’t be appointed. This is basic constitutional law.
It’s the constitution, particularly the election process of the senate that’s wrong: There’s no reason every state, regardless of their population, should have equal say in who gets to decide the judiciary (among other things).
They can do it. But the very same Senate Majority leader set the precedent to not confirm appointments in an election year.
If McConnell violates this precedent that he set, I would strongly advocate for Democrats (whenever they have the Senate) to remove the legislative filibuster and increase the size of the SCOTUS to 17.
I would not be entirely surprised. There was a time when Democrats seemed to be intimidated by threats over nuclear options and such. Now that they know the truth, maybe they won't heed such warnings and decide that they need to win at any cost, just like their opposition.
That's really just the "end of the Supreme Court" argument. If you pack the Supreme Court once, it'll happen every time a new party has the senate and the white house.
Especially since you yourself suggest packing it to give an immediate "Democrat" majority, when it's incredibly likely, even without a new nomination, the Supreme Court remains republican for at least 8 years.
Personally I think this is what democrats (and people like you) are hoping for. It'd give an excuse to pack the court day one and maybe not immediately lose all public support.
That depends on how the court is packed, and how it functions after. It's possible that court packing could be seen as a success, even if each side alternates at packing, just because having many justices can minimize some of the court's current limitations.
To put it another way, the size of the House, Senate, and Presidency are determined by the constitution. The Judiciary is the only branch where it's size can be increased without a constitutional amendment, which could favor populism, regardless of who is in power, if it's expanded significantly.
Being as small as it is could speak to how the government has a tendency to concentrate/centralize power, even if it's relatively easy to spread that power out.
You are incorrect on one thing. The size of the House is not determined by constitution. The only things it guarantees are that there’s a census and that each state gets at least one.
I upvoted and agree with the GP comment, but some might be mad that he didn't go one more step back and explain that the Republicans had already decided to block nearly all of Obama's appointees for purely political reasons. So Reid was just responding to a prior escalation.
I think the simple distinction is that McConnel upset decades of detente and will reap enormous rewards and pay no price. Compare this to Joe Biden helping confirm Clarence Thomas because he believed it was the Senate's duty to give nominees a fair hearing and that the favor would be returned. That is over now and we're in a game of beggar thy neighbor. The salt in the wound is that Trump is only president due to antiquated rules that are set in law despite being a truly pointless tradition.
However when the democrats win the election (president and senate) this fall then democrats will be able to add 3 more members to the Supreme court in order to counteract the Republicans heavily slanting the SCOTUS with Roe v Wade advocates.
>before and after it was clear that he put bounties on American soldiers.
There is no proof Russia actually put bounties on soliders.
>Calling Americans soldiers losers and suckers.
No proof he did this except for McCain. Wouldn't be treason if it were true.
>Pardoning war criminals.
If this is the same case I know about then he was acquitted of war crimes. I doubt it would be treason though.
>Telling voters to commit election fraud by voting twice.
Maybe but I think he was trying to call out the risk on mail in voting. Most of media was not talking about the risks like people double voting. After his statement they talked about it. I think that was his point.
>And, last but not least, killing more than 200k Americans even though he knew perfectly of coronavirus risks.
Not treason and Trump is not really responsible for all deaths. Trump does not have the authority to do what people want him to do. That is on the states. If Trump locked down the states which would have been unconstitutional he would have been called an authoritarian.
> He ideally should be able to, as long as the correct procedures are followed.
Part of that procedure is having your party in charge of the Senate at the time of said nomination. Obama did nominate someone, he simply could not get him confirmed. That's on Obama (and Democrats more generally).
Trump will also nominate someone, and because his party has a majority in the Senate, that nominee will likely be confirmed whether Trump wins the upcoming election or not.
I am 100% certain that if Obama had a Democratic Senate majority when he nominated Merrick Garland, his nominee also would have been confirmed. (As a registered Democrat myself, I would have demanded it.)
There is no other precedent here: you accomplish in office what you can (procedurally) accomplish. Trump lucked out here; Obama didn't.
Where does this end? What keeps this principle from extending to a President's entire term, as opposed to just the last year? If Democrats ever retake the Senate, why should they ever hold hearings for a single Republican judicial appointment, let alone confirm one? Should judicial appointments just sit vacant until president and Senate are from the same party?
I think it's a perversion of the "advice and consent" language from the Constitution for the Senate to simply stonewall a nomination process until they get the President they want.
You're right. Unfortunately this is a natural result of having so many different veto points in this process and in the US governmental system in general.
I was just thinking today about why Canada's Supreme Court isn't remotely politicized in the same way as the US. Part of it may be that we're just not as partisan, but I think the main thing is that with our parliamentary system, if the party in power has a majority—which they do the majority of the time—they can basically pass what laws they want. Of course, they generally refrain from doing deeply unpopular things since they'll pay for it at the next election, although even that does happen: eg. the Mulroney (conservative!) government implementing a 7% goods and services tax. Probably played a large part of them being out of power for a decade+ immediately following, but was great for the country fiscally from there forward.
Anyway, since the government can largely do what they want, there's much less need or reason to essentially try to enact 'legislation from the bench'. I couldn't even tell you the political leanings of our SC justices.
There are still plenty of downsides to this system of course (lack of proportional representation comes to mind), but it does appear to be more functional in a lot of ways than the US. And probably not by accident—the Canadian system was developed almost a hundred years after the US, and had it and other more recent governments as models; it was also soon after the US Civil War, which played a part in Canada adopting a strong federal system with less provincial power, relatively speaking.
Of course, it's easy to say all that. Much harder to actually enact significant reform!
As Republican Senator Richard Burr said in 2016, after Scalia died, "...And if Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court."
At first I read your comment as “What keeps this principle from extending to a President’s entire team” and I recalled that Trump’s cabinet appointments were notoriously slow to get through the Senate, held up even by a Democratic minority.
McConnel had serious doubts that Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, would _fail_ to get a majority in the senate, so he forbade the nomination to come to a vote. So it’s a little different than you pose: you a pretending that Obama’s nomination came to a vote and lost (which would be entirely legitimate). The majority leader prevented that from even happening.
That is not what happened at all, he didn't hold a vote because he didn't want to and used an excuse that "Presidents shouldn't be able to nominate a SCOTUS judge in their last year". Now he's changing it to "majority party situation" and that is not what he said when he refused to hold any confirmations. He is a sneaky snakey weasel and has been for decades.
> [if] Obama had a Democratic Senate majority when he nominated Merrick Garland…
With a Democratic majority, Garland would have been confirmed. It's exactly because no Democratic majority in the Senate existed that Garland wasn't even voted on (and actually didn't even get a hearing).
Sure, but the fundamental issue isn't McConnell, it's that Obama seriously weakened Democratic control of both the House and Senate during his time as President. As a result, his party lost a Supreme Court pick.
No, the fundamental issue is that McConnell was the first and only Senate Leader to ever prevent a vote on a SCOTUS nominee, so there were no confirmation hearings at all.
> There have been 37 unsuccessful nominations to the Supreme Court of the United States. Of these, 11 nominees were rejected in Senate roll-call votes, 11 were withdrawn by the president, and 15 lapsed at the end of a session of Congress.
Note: 15 nominations were not voted on by the Senate, including Merrick Garland.
McConnell prevented senators from voting on a candidate they would have approved. This is hijacking representatives' voice because you're afraid to hear it.
McConnell is pretty transparent about his hypocritical political bullshit:
> "Oh, we’d fill it,” McConnell told supporters in Kentucky on Tuesday when asked what he would do if a Supreme Court justice died in 2020 while President Trump was still in office
Seeing trump as a cause and not a symptom or as the leading disaster for American democracy is a very common distraction.
McConnell is the heart of all of it. He is nothing but an appetite for power. He’ll do anything. No morals whatsoever (and I say that neutrally, as a fact and not a moral judgement.)
It's beautiful to see someone like McConnell, who understands political power and is able to use it fully and legally w/o overstepping. If Democrats had someone his equal then they would be pleased too.
Please remember that luck (chance) is an important and sometimes decisive component in conflict. Today it seems the Republicans are lucky; who knows what the future will bring.
> It's beautiful to see someone like McConnell, who understands political power and is able to use it fully and legally w/o overstepping. If Democrats had someone his equal then they would be pleased too.
Regardless of which side you're on - I don't think that's a worthwhile basis for political discourse and shouldn't be the modus operandi for what basically determines the development of a country.
Then again, you're right of course - the fact that McConnell and other don't actually overstep in legal terms just shows that the rule set isn't suitable for the current political climate in a time which is shaped by disregard of norms and mutual respect.
That's a fantastical interpretation. Reid pulled the nuclear option to stop Republicans from refusing to do their job (approve judges). McConnell would have pulled the nuclear option himself as soon as he got the majority, regardless of what Reid did.
McConnell is just doing what his constituents want. Otherwise, they wouldn't have voted for him repeatedly since 1984.
EDIT: One might argue that Mr. McConnell correctly anticipated the desires of the USA electorate because in November of 2016 they expressed a wish for more conservative judges in federal courts. If the voting public was outraged by McConnell's actions, one might expect they'd vote accordingly.
> It’s not like Mitch can singlehandedly control the whole senate.
He's Senate Majority Leader. That's literally exactly what he does.
Besides, he's whipped his party so hard they basically never break rank. Even Mitt "I'm not like the others" Romney votes with him nearly 100% of the time.
If you don't vote the party line then you get shown the door during your next election. They turn off the money spigot and nominations stop coming and they help your opponents (same party) get the R nomination. None of the current R senators have the backbone to go against that. Oh they say they will but when the day comes to vote, it's all just hot air.
Wyoming (the least-populous state) has .183% of the US population, so it should have .183% of the US House seats if they were fully proportional. It actually has .230% (1 / 435)--about 1.25× the power it should have. Rhode Island getting two House seats gives it about 1.34× the power it should have. Montana having only one seat leaves it at about 0.673× the power it ought to have.
As quantization errors go, the House's quantization isn't terribly distortive.
The alternative view is that CA, MA, and NY already get a Democrat candidate 95/270 or 35% of the way to the Presidency with just 20% of the population. Do those states really need a greater impact?
"Fair and just" is out the window as soon as others get to decide how the fruits of 40% of my labor gets spent without my consent. At this point, we might as well just change the rules as we go along because you can't really point to the system we have now and say "it's fair" or "just" in a 100% clearly defined and unambiguous sense that we can all agree on.
That is because the people of the USA don't want the ~40e6 people in California to be able to dictate policy for the ~2 million people in Kentucky. Most Americans are perfectly okay with this because there hasn't been any serious effort at an Amendment to grant each citizen with similar amounts of power in the Senate.
> Most Americans are perfectly okay with this because there hasn't been any serious effort at an Amendment to grant each citizen with similar amounts of power in the Senate.
This doesn't follow. There is no way to amend the Constitution by a national popular vote so the opinion of the majority of Americans is irrelevant to the question of any Amendment's passage.
A more likely reason such an Amendment wouldn't exist is that a majority of states favor the status quo, because most states are small and benefit from their current outsized representation in government.
One of the mechanisms for beginning the amending of the USA constitution is via a 2/3 vote of both houses of Congress. The USA House of Representatives assigns political power approximately proportionally to population and it has never passed any proposed amendment to proportionally elect Senators or delegates of the Electoral College.
Source: Article V
Edit: Corrected 3/4 -> 2/3
Edit2: I stand corrected. The Bayh-Celler proposal was passed by the House and filibustered in the Senate in 1970.
40e6 people in California aren't a bloc. The blueness/redness of a state is nothing more than the arbitrary balance of urban vs rural population. States are "purple" in actuality.
The major geographic divide in US politics is urban vs rural, not state vs state
His constituency is all of Kentucky. Senators do not split their states, they represent it as a whole.
McConnell rules through the consent of half the senate, not alone.
This is literally the purpose of the senate. We are a union of states, and the senate is where each state is granted equal power. One could argue that states should have been defined differently, but the point was that large states should not have absolute control over small states.
Edit: I'm loving the downvotes without comments. They're clear indication that some people are either not arguing in good faith or that they simply do not understand how and why the us is set up the way it is.
The only reason Mitch Connell withheld the nomination was to prevent a vote he would lose. Kentucky's representative prevented a vote where California's representatives would have had a say. Kentucky decided that California did not need to be consulted on this matter. This sort of behavior is hostile to representative government.
People are probably reacting to some combination of unnecessary partisanship and the false equivalency. McConnell stated that appointments should not be made near the end of term while the White House and Senate are split between different parties. That is not the case now, so it's hard to see how you can call him hypocritical. You can disagree, but I think you could find a more constructive way to disagree than that post.
What's more "unnecessary partisanship" then refusing to follow the Constitution because the President is of a different Party (a concept which is not part of the Constitution)?
Are you arguing that the Constitution requires judicial appointments to be made within a certain time frame? Where in the Constitution are you getting that from? It's certainly not in the appointments clause, or anywhere else that I can see.
What’s it worth? Ishtar lose the majority and possibly a couple seats? I think they take that, they have no ground to stand on the social issues alone.
It’s sad how many justices will be on the court, appointed by men that didn’t win the popular vote
What do you mean, too weak a president? The president can’t push back on that—-the senate confirms justices, that’s in the constitution:
... and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States...
>It is altogether proper to view a decision by the Senate not to act as a waiver of its right to provide advice and consent. A waiver is an intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right or privilege. As the Supreme Court has said, “ ‘No procedural principle is more familiar to this Court than that a constitutional right,’ or a right of any other sort, ‘may be forfeited in criminal as well as civil cases by the failure to make timely assertion of the right before a tribunal having jurisdiction to determine it.’ ”
>It is in full accord with traditional notions of waiver to say that the Senate, having been given a reasonable opportunity to provide advice and consent to the president with respect to the nomination of Garland, and having failed to do so, can fairly be deemed to have waived its right.
For a long time, Senate approval was a rubber stamp. As the ability to legislate in Congress declined, Supreme Court nominees became a battle ground (see also “Robert Bork”). It would have been good to see him lobby not that he is able to get Merrick Garland, but that the process had been inappropriately politicized. That would have been a rebuke to both sides and maybe even a call for cooler heads to prevail. Just my $.02
Further, Bork was nominated knowing that he wouldn't be confirmed. A gambit that worked. The electoral backlash has served Republicans quite well since.
What do you mean "too weak"? It's literally impossible for the President to push through a judge who the Senate refuses to even vote on. There's nothing Obama, or any president, could have done. It's not within their power.
The thinking on this is that the rules, arcane as they are, say the Senate must “advise” on the Supreme Court pick (or something to that effect). So the argument is that Obama could have said, well, they were given an opportunity to advise and decided not to, so I’m going to fill the seat. The legality of this is grey, but it was discussed a bit at the time.
Clearly Obama should have just done an end-run around Congress, because that's how democracy works in America now, right? Just write an Executive Order and ignore the fact that it's totally and completely illegal. That would show "true grit," breaking the constitution and all...
Used his political (not official) powers to shift the public discourse more effectively. He did not make much effort to attack McConnell's brinkmanship.
If he pushed back, what good could it have done? He couldn’t force the Republican senate to hold a vote and even if he did force a vote, Republicans wouldn’t have confirmed his nominee.
Because it's not about consistency, it's about winning. And McConnell sure is doing a lot of that in terms of his agenda to stuff courts full of conservative justices.
At what point should a President, especially in their first term running for re-election, stop being able to fulfill parts of their duties?
Declaring war? Responding to an attack? Talking to other world leaders? Advocating Congress to act on matters? Signing bills into laws? Naming post offices? Being allowed into the Oval Office?
Independent of this specific situation, there has to be a line drawn somewhere. And that line is Inauguration Day. (A case could be made that some powers cease on Election Day for a lame duck President.)
Yes, the point is that Republicans violated the principles you are laying out here under the exact same situation. So violating this principle again in the exact same way would be the only non-hypocritical way to handle this situation.
One possible strategy for Trump (which would be very much out of character) would be to wait out of respect for RBG and/or the Garland precedent. Meanwhile, he uses the empty seat as a campaign issue to keep reluctant conservatives from jumping ship.
Yep. This is what I fully expect to happen. It's despicable, but it makes way too much sense. You motivate moderate conservatives, and if you win you get to claim the moral high ground. If you lose, you push a lame duck justice through anyway. This is a gift from a campaign strategy point of view.
I feel terrible focusing on the political maelstrom and not RBG's legacy, but these are also important conversations to have.
Trump most likely has had plans for this for months and knows who he's going to pick, expect a choice by the end of next week and confirmation within a month. They don't have much time to get a new person in there so they've had a plan for this for months, if not years.
Trump may try, but it will be interesting to hear the reasoning to rush it before November 4. If Trump is going to win, as he says he is, there is no need to rush.
I believe there is no precedent for the Senate confirming a Supreme Court justice in a lame duck session. If Trump loses to Biden and the Senate then confirms a Trump nominee in a lame duck session, that will probably be the end of the Supreme Court. I’d expect Biden and Harris to just stack the Court, and it to devolve from there.
Remember, there is no law requiring nine justices. Just a handshake agreement and precedent. FDR threatened the stack the Court unless he got his way. And who would ultimately determine the legality of stacking the Court? You guessed it, the Supreme Court.
I think most people agree that it should be the case that we nominate and vote on a justice regardless of the term, however for years ago Mitch set a precedent. He claimed it was because we should wait for an election, when really he was being purely obstructionist and his position now is hypocritical.
In short, it’s not the President’s fault. He should nominate someone. Mitch is the one who said the Senate should not vote. The Majority Leader does have some say over the duties of the Senate as it’s up to him to bring the vote. If it doesn’t change the duties and he was derelict of his 4 years ago then I would have hoped to see some repercussions.
Since you clearly don’t get the context, the Republicans made this a giant issue when Obama had an open Supreme Court seat towards the end of his term. Let’s call a spade a spade: the republicans have no regard for the constitution or laws of the land if they benefit from ignoring it. They will now ignore the precedent they set and place a new Supreme Court justice.
Ultimately, a President with a friendly Senate will always fill the seat. An unfriendly Senate is going to delay the heck out of it. Any rhetoric around that is pretty much just noise. They will send someone through as they've published a couple of lists and have been filling the lower courts pretty quickly. It is not like people weren't aware Justice Ginsburg was very sick.
Frankly, given the President, I would bet it will occur within the next week or two. I do wonder what the polling will be like on this issue. I can actually see a couple of scenarios where Democrats would want to run on a filled seat.
> An unfriendly Senate is going to delay the heck out of it.
You hit on the problem without seeming to realize it. The Senate didn't delay the heck out of anything. McDonnell flat out refused to do anything about Garland's nomination. He declared the nomination "null and void" based on no precedence, case law, and certainly not any interpretation of the Constitution. The Senate majority leader should not be able to shut down the Senate and prevent it from performing its Constitutionally mandated tasks. If the Senate didn't want to confirm Garland they should have held all the appropriate hearings and held an approval vote. If it's the Senate's will that Garland not be approved that's fine. It was singularly McConnell's will that Garland not be approved so he just never allowed hearings. No matter your political leanings that should be seen as abhorrent if you profess to want law and order.
You hit on the problem without seeming to realize it.
Wow, being a bit insulting there. I am stating how it works. The Senate Majority leader can do it. That's how it works. Supposed to doesn't really matter when talking about what will happen.
> He declared the nomination "null and void" based on no precedence, case law, and certainly not any interpretation of the Constitution.
Ultimately a legislator's job isn't to respect precedence or case law. It's to create new law (and presumably precedent).
I don't think your point is unfounded, I just think arguing for a legislator to behave like a judge takes away from that point (unless you have a good argument why they should, but I think including that argument would be good at that point).
Early noise on Twitter is that Biden’s response to a filled seat is an expansion of the court to 11 seats.
Not sure what the calculus is. If it’s unfilled, Biden will fill it. If it’s filled, he’ll expand the court. Not sure if that also depends on a senate flip, but I have a hard time believing the senate doesn’t flip during a Biden win.
It would be a proportionate and appropriate response, and hopefully restore an equilibrium in response to a constitutional crisis provoked by McConnell.
Far from a disaster, it will be something approaching mandatory to restore faith in the institution. The disaster already came. But because this response would come in the future and the disaster happened in the past, some people have the psychological reaction of thinking that a new thing is unacceptable while uncritically accepting bad things that have already happened, which is called shifting baseline syndrome.
It is correct to say that they have had plenty of time to provoke a constitutional crisis. It is also correct to note that they could have resorted to abusive procedure even worse than the one they already did. Which is like saying they created a category four hurricane instead of a category five.
I'm still surprised the Democrats try to discuss compromise at this point. You can't compromise with someone running a madman strategy, realistically I don't know any true independents on the political spectrum at this point.
The Democratic Party legislates as if it represents all Americans. Which means compromise.
Rarely has the Democratic Party held all three branches recently. Holding the senate is a huge win for the republicans - they can be as obstinate and block things and only need a barest majority to do appointments and many other procedural shenanigans.
Like what the fuck is the house supposed to negotiate with? “We won’t pass bills”: the republican senate is entirely happy not to have bills passed. Now what?
The Republican Party is entirely devoted to debasing government and spoiling the notion of governance.
Well, the house explicitly has financial powers, and they can impeach officials. If the house was republican and the senate was democratic, you would see much more financing for projects Trump wanted. Like, just to make up the most ridiculous example we could think of, a giant wall...
Respectfully, you probably do know independents. We just don't often talk about our political views to people who say compromise is dead and you have to be on one side or the other.
I'm an independent, who will be voting Democratic. The Democratic party is spineless, corrupt, and oddly radicalized in some ways. But at least they're not explicitly trying to undermine pillars our constitution and democracy are built on. The Republican party has shown they are enemies of a free America, opting to focus on wealth and power concentration.
To me, being independent means recognizing that both parties align themselves with some things I do not stand for, and some things that I do (though to be fair, the Republican party holds almost no views that I hold at this point). That doesn't mean I view them as equals, and that doesn't mean I'm on the fence. I'm throwing in with Democrats this time, but I'm very far from calling myself a Democrat.
I think you misunderstand how independents think. I'm not sitting on any fence; I have pretty strong political beliefs, which just don't align well with either of the major factions in modern American politics.
It's more like the congress exercised there constitution power to do fuck all if they wanted. Just cause it's a shitty thing doesn't make it un-constitution. What happened to Obama was his party didn't have the votes to approve someone so it didn't happen that's it.
If they hold hearing for a 45 nominee before the election, they prove they were acting in bad faith. The expectation is that the president gets to appoint judges during his term, unless there is a reason to deny the nominee. By denying that they challenge the power of the executive branch. I.e. Does the president only get to pick a judge if the senate is a majority from the same party?
It's a bad faith enforcement of the constitution. In democracies like the US, precedents are as powerful as laws. This was not literally breaking any laws, but this was as bad as breaking a law.
Doing things that are so obviously destructive to the whole institution of government that the Founders thought it wasn't worth writing down in the era of quill pens on sheepskins, because they couldn't imagine anyone being evil enough to do it? Yes, that's what bad faith is. It's things you can technically create a justification for that contradict all decency.
Yes and there is tons of case law on what the Senate actually needs to do and the result is "fuck all". The Federal government is designed to gridlock rather then forcing things to happen.
No, what happened is that Mitch McConnell refused to even allow a vote, and even Republican senators wouldn't have been able to vote for the centrist proposed by Obama.
There's no probably about it or thinking required. That is literally the law. The President nominates a replacement, and the Senate votes to confirm it or not. There are plenty of layers of politics, posturing, and pomp added on, but the law is simple and clear.
I mean legally it's always been this the Supreme Court has been very clear on every cases regarding confirmation that Congress is free to act or not act at it's leisure.
This wasn't always the case, here's an excerpt from the wiki on recent changes making this the case:
"Senate cloture rules historically required a two-thirds affirmative vote to advance nominations to a vote; this was changed to a three-fifths supermajority in 1975. In November 2013, the then-Democratic Senate majority eliminated the filibuster for executive branch nominees and judicial nominees except for Supreme Court nominees by invoking the so-called nuclear option. In April 2017, the Republican Senate majority applied the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominations as well,[2] enabling the nominations of Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to proceed to a vote.[3][4] "
The filibuster has always seemed anti-democratic - it’s not in the constitution, and I’m pretty sure that historically it was a way to make give the minority senators more power at the expense of the people.
To be fair, they passed the ruling for non-supreme court justices. Republicans extended it to include them in 2017. Still, an example of terrible governance and foresight on both sides.
That would be incorrect, unless you are talking about a regular federal judge and not a Supreme Court justice. In the latter case, it was a rule the Republicans changed in 2017 to benefit themselves.
I find this “thems the laws” theme in this thread pretty outrageous. Congress used run on decorum, arcane rules, and norms. Those norms were thrown out the window when the Senate refused to even have a hearing on Merrick Garland. Arguably, they had a legal requirement to do at least that. But now we’re supposed to pretend that “rules are rules”, and this is all totally normal.
I was specifically replying to the comment "they aren't following the constitution or laws".
Sure, it may be very hypocritical to fill the seat before the election, but has politics not been hypocritical? And in "norms", the refusal to have a hearing on Merrick Garland is not the first example. Congress flouting "norms" goes back centuries.
Obama had more time left than Trump so the hypocrisy coming out of the Senate will be that much richer.
> “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” McConnell said
> “You’d have to go back to 1888 when Grover Cleveland was in the White House to find the last time a vacancy created in a presidential year was confirmed by the party opposite the occupant of the White House,” McConnell said in March 2016
> “We think the important principle in the middle of this presidential election, which is raging, is that the American people need to weigh in and decide who’s going to make this decision,” McConnell said
> Speaking in his home state of Kentucky on Tuesday, McConnell was asked what he would do about a high court vacancy if a seat were to open up [in 2020].
“Oh, we’d fill it,” McConnell said
Precedent doesn't mean anything because what happened wasn't a legal ruling. None of the rules changed. Senate acted the way it was allowed to and will act the way it is allowed to now as well to get our guy in and keep their guy out.
This is a laughable inability to distinguish between 'I don't like it' and 'it's unconstitutional and illegal', mixed with obvious massive hypocrisy.
When the Republicans refused to confirm Garland, they did it fully within the processes laid out in the constitution.
If the Democrats had the senate now, we can guarantee they would have blocked every Trump nominee past and future. Or do you think they would have allowed Kavanaugh through? Of course not, they tried everything to stop him, inside and outside the process. And I know you cheered their efforts.
You're just being massively hypocritical. You want the Dems to block Trump nominees by any means necessary, but if elected Republicans simply use established processes to do the same thing it's "no regard for the constitution".
EDIT: Clarify garland situation, doesn't change the point.
Do you know how laws are often interpreted? It's asking what is the faith and meaning of the law, NOT what is literally written in paper. This means past precedents are incredibly important for defining what a law is. Refusing to hold a vote for a nomination of a qualified supreme court justice is not against the law on paper, but it is against the meaning of the laws and the precedents of how the president interacts with the supreme court.
It is not the senates job to decide if a nominee is worthy of being nominated, or if the president should make a nomination. It is their job to vote on the nominee. They did not do that.
The word you're looking for is 'norms' not 'precedent' (since this wasn't a court case).
And yes, I agree, the norms have gotten way shittier over recent decades. Both sides participated in this, back to the character assassination of Robert Bork, and the dems reneging on their promises around the Reagan migrant amnesty and probably before.
It is hypocritical and childish to put that all on one side.
Merrick was a pretty moderate choice who had been praised by many Republicans. Since they never voted on him, we don’t really know if they would have changed their minds and voted against him.
Time for some history. The GOP senators never expected a moderate like Merrick Garland, who was named by senators in the news before Obama announced his confirmation.
Obama is more of a realist than many in his party. He knew going in that no one would make it through the Senate, and that's why he nominated Garland. Why waste a quality Democrat jurist on a lost cause? I bet he was tempted to nominate Kavanaugh...
I believe the parent comment was mocking the exact stance that Republicans took four years ago, and the fact that they will very certainly not take that stance this time.
True, but we’re talking politics and politicians. Compare Biden before and New Biden on issues. They ALL would do that. There is no real holier than thou politician.
"In the run up" meaning that Scalia died in February 2016, nine months before the election, and the very solemnly contemplative senator from Kentucky announced “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president."
It wasn't even in the "run up" to the election - Scalia died in early February. Garland was nominated in mid March. Obama had 10 more months in the Presidency (~23% of his presidency left when Scalia died and McConnell said we shouldn't fill a vacancy in an election year).
Not sure why you are downvoted, this is correct. What the R's did to Merrick Garland was a disgrace. What kind of wink and a nod agreement is that? They should codify this into law, not keep perpetuating it forever. How long until it's 'oh, he's only got 3 more years left...lame duck!'
I hate that it's become bad to send people your thoughts and prayers. It may not do anything, but to have meant so much to so many people is something worth thinking about.
It's only bad if you're doing it when you have the option of doing something helpful. Like politicians offering prayers for tragedies that are the result of bad public policy.
It's not bad to send thoughts and prayers! It is only considered hypocritical when someone offers those thoughts and prayers despite protecting/enshrining/supporting/etc. the thing which directly resulted in the tragedy. For example, strong supporters of gun rights and those who suffer from gun violence. I also extend my deepest sympathies to her family and those who she was close with. It is hard to lose someone, and I am sure it is even worse when a lot of people will be disgustingly cheering the death.
The fact that we're so fast to assign these values to people we don't know on the internet makes me sad at times. I get it, it's just how people are.
You bring up a good example, but I'd probably be in the category of believing guns are good for a democratic society (or at least so deeply entrenched that they can't get pulled out at this point). However, I also believe in some pretty strong gun controls and requirements for a more modern society. I'm not foolish enough to believe that people with guns could win a civil war in the day of modern weapons, I also don't think it's the most important civil liberty to protect for a free society. But it's a political pressure that can do some good, and there are very few practical means of getting rid of it, and I'd rather we focus on global warming while making reasonable changes to gun laws to minimize deaths where we can.
Every reader of this paragraph will have a different reaction to my personal level of hypocrisy when I send thoughts and take a moment of silence for the victims of any shooting. It's subjective, but without that context I assume a lot more would find my thoughts and prayers objectionable. I get your stance, there's a lot of the never my guns people on the internet, and a lot among politicians.
I've just personally been pushed by tribalism to not be able to talk to many people on the internet over my personal beliefs and share ideas. I enjoy the other side of every argument, but when people get attacked for their ideas they tend to shutdown and look for others who agree more.
> I'm not foolish enough to believe that people with guns could win a civil war in the day of modern weapons
I know HN hates opinions like this, but I'm a very staunch 2a supporter. My position is that citizens should have so-called "weapons of war", the same automatic weapons that the military carries with tons of ammunition. Joe six-pack should be able to walk to his local gun store and buy an M60 if he so pleases. In such a case, there's a very good chance that civilians could win a civil war.
Do you also believe Joe six-pack should be in any way trained to be able to use that M60? Should be held to some standards, be they ethical or professional? Maybe require a license? Or does the 2A mean all bets are off?
I'll be honest - after the last few months I don't know if I trust an armed American populace any more than an armed government. Simply putting guns into the hands of vigilantes doesn't necessarily lead to a freer state. I certainly don't want idiots like that couple in St. Louis to have even more firepower.
Sure, but I don't particularly trust the gov't to enforce those standards. FWIW I think an idiot is much more likely to do something stupid with a handgun than with a twenty pound belt-fed.
I see nothing principally wrong with what the couple in St. Louis did (i.e. defending one's property), though the wife was an absolute dumbass to point her handgun at the crowd. Anyone competent knows not to do that without serious intent to fire.
I understand your position: moron with automatic is possibly more dangerous than moron with semi-auto. But I think there are risks and downsides to living in a free society, and that's one.
Given that there's a relevant situation, how do you feel about BLM doing peaceful protests, rather than grabbing some guns and killing the cops/politicians that defend them?
I think a civil war over the murder of a few people is not yet warranted. We've still gpt the ballot and jury boxes before we get there. And it is worth noting that not all protests have been peaceful, though it only takes a few bad actors to classify one as violent. I do think that a heavily-armed populace could reduce the rates of police brutality.
After watching a 2018 documentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg and seeing her work as a lawyer in the 70's, fighting and making and winning cases for pure social justice in the highest court of the land, RBG became an instant hero to me.
She will always inspire me, here or not, to fight for justice and what my conscience tells me is right. I have a great deal to say and a great deal to fight for. When it gets tough, she will be there to keep me standing.
Thank you, Ruth, for being such a fully self-actualised individual. You have shown the way. I am forever grateful.
> It only takes a majority in the senate and house to add a seat to the SCOTUS
Exactly. If Biden wins and the senate flips, they'll just add two justices (for 11 total) to get a majority. The right will scream bloody murder, but won't be able to do anything about it.
You're really expecting a landslide, aren't you? Democrats are doing the exact same thing this time they did last time, and they're expecting the virus to save them. It might not happen...
It wouldn't take anything close to a landslide for the senate to flip.
My point is: if the Democrats win the senate and the presidency, it doesn't really matter if Trump fills this vacancy. There is zero doubt they will stack the court when in power if he does.
There is plenty of doubt about whether a Democratic majority in the Senate would add seats to the Supreme Court. It would only take a couple of holdouts to stop any bill that does this, and a lot of Senators are really reluctant to do anything that might be construed as rocking the boat.
I absolutely think that Democrats should expand the court, but (along with substantially reforming the filibuster) I don't have great confidence in Senate Democrats to actually do it if the opportunity presents itself.
I hope you're right. Stacking the court with a certain sort of justice would convince a lot of people to give up on this polity. The sooner this threat to humanity can be broken up in smaller parts, the better.
The precedent for 9 did change. Republicans changed it to 8 justices in 2016, and then back to 9 again in 2017 because it suited them politically. I don't see why Democrats should be shy about changing the number of justices this point.
The Senate doesn’t actually have to vote to confirm a Supreme Court justice.
> and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court
There is nothing except precedent to say the President can’t just directly appoint justices. And then when the appointments are inevitably challenged, who would ultimately rule on it? The Supreme Court. Tah dah. This is how democracy falls apart.
"Advice and Consent". I'm pretty sure "consent" is where we get the need for Senate confirmation, and you'd have to strike that word to allow a direct appointment.
You can lawyer consent to mean a lot of things. Many legal scholars and lawyers argued that the Senate did consent in 2016 when Obama made his nomination. He sent his nomination to the Senate, and they thought about it for 9 months without rejecting, and therefore they consented.
It’s way more open to interpretation than you’re suggesting. It has never been challenged.
Yes, it is not hard to imagine how Trump would have interpreted that precedent if the situation were reversed and the Senate was under Democrat control
Proposed patch: in cases like this where all of SCOTUS has an obvious conflict of interest, the decision is made by a single judge who is elected to an N year term by a national popular vote for only this purpose. Democracy saves the day?
I think the patch including a general election is good. But I think say every 5 or 10 years a justice is given an approval vote-have it rotate across the bench and one or two per year, not many. I’d they get less than 67% approval then they’re removed until after the next general election-no fillers until then. Give a time lag to let people consider their first choice before the second choice is made.
See, I actually See a lot to be recommended by adopting a much more proactive management of policy makers through a vote of no confidence than this "get in, blank check til next election" system we have. Though I'd still want to timebox the change to the fundamental political process and only affirm it as permanent until say 15 years of it's successful exercise.
Like I said, it’s never actually been challenged. Consent can mean a lot of things. For example, if I tell you what I’m going to do, and you don’t say not to do it, did you consent? I could argue yes. You could argue no. This has never been litigated on the subject of a Supreme Court nominee.
And my overall point here is that the Supreme Court would decide whether the move was legal. If the court is now stacked, well that’s just tough shit. There is no other immediate remedy except to amend the constitution. Good luck.
Oh yeah? What does that take the form of? Does it take the form of people who have ideas that you don't like not being there when you open your eyes back up again?
1- Ideas don't make people - actions do. If someone is a good neighbor, citizen, friend and father/mother, a valuable and contributing member of their community, that their beliefs on abortion/politics/gay marriage/etc carry little weight compared to the years of actions and toil that they put in to make our society better.
2- The person who has the ideas you don't like shares more ideas that you do like than you don't. Most people want to see America grow, they want to see their children live free, avoid unnecessary harm, etc. The sliver of disagreement is small compared to the pie of agreement.
3- That we are all inherently flawed and primitive and therefore will be wrong 99% of the time. This means that even if you believe with all your conviction you are right on a point, you can remember you are probably just as wrong on more points than you are right on. It's called practicing thoughts of humility, it's a virtue we should all strive for.
One thing I like to point out is between Johnson and Clinton, Republican presidents placed 11 Supreme Court justices in a row (Nixon 4, Ford 1, Carter 0, Reagan 4, GW Bush 2), though the picks were usually not extreme because Democrats controlled the Senate except during six of Reagan's years.
After Bill Clinton seated two liberal justices there has been an unending cry about how liberal the court is.
I saw her speak at West Point about a year and a half ago. In a room including colonels, generals, and cadets, she riveted the audience with humor, stories, wit, and insight. My favorite insight was her sharing her friendship with Scalia. Their nearly opposite politics didn't stop them from things like he would secretly pass her notes while hearing cases to try to make her laugh.
Her sharing contributed to my befriending a few people with opposite political views, against this nation's tide of increasing polarization and beating opponents without trying to understand (Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind contributed too). Among the results: less anger, more understanding, more self-awareness, though also more confusion among friends and family to why I would talk to someone who voted that way.
There is no more fitting of an eulogy than what she stated for herself,
"Q. When the time comes, what would you like to be remembered for?
RBG: Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability, and to help repair tears in her society. ‘To do something,' as my colleague David Souter would say, ‘outside myself.’ Because I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid."
Sad day, she was a champion of the people - a fighter for both women's rights and civil rights. Her iconic status was earned. Would recommend the 2018 documentary "RBG" for anyone interested in her life and career.
Why are there life-terms on the Supreme Court? Doesn't that incentivize the justices to hold on past their prime, dying waiting for a new president or resigning in a politically motivated fashion? And don't life terms create a race to the bottom where younger justices are favored for longer remaining life?
The founding fathers thought that the US constitution would look like the UK. President = King, Congress = Parliament. The judiciary was practically an afterthought, and like UK courts, would be subordinate to Congress. “ In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
Note the “such exceptions and under such regulations”.
As history turned out, Congress has barely used this power to rein in the courts and in the mid-19th century on the courts grew more and more powerful and have become a sort of mini-legislature.
James Madison already recognized this, writing in 1788 that he realized a mistake had been made in the constitution: “ as the Courts are generally the last in making their decision, it results to them, by refusing or not refusing to execute a law, to stamp it with its final character. This makes the Judiciary Dept paramount in fact to the Legislature, which was never intended, and can never be proper ... ” (https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch17s25...)
Most likely because the founding fathers didn't expect the justices to be split on party lines. They were intended to be impartial judges ruling on a limited set of federal laws.
I would assume also because people also just didn't live as long back then. Life was in general a 20 year term. Average life span in 1800 of 50 years. Today it's 78.6.
Life expectancy at birth was low because many people died in childhood, bringing down the average. Those who survived childhood lived much longer lives.
I used the historical list of US Supreme Court justices [0] and averaged the lifespan of the first 20 justices. The average was 67 years. Maximum was 91 [1].
>I would assume also because people also just didn't live as long back then.
This is false. The statistic doesn't imply this. Longevity has not increased significantly, it's that life expectancy from birth has increased because childhood illness became less of a concern. Once at adult age people generally still lived long, ignoring accidents which really wouldn't be a concern for the type of people who would be justices.
It is not like people dropped dead at 50. People who survived usually hit their 70s even when the expectancy was in 30s and 40s. The average is low because lot of kids and people died young.
The proper metric here would be life expectancy of active lawyers/judges in their 30s and 40s . They have double advantage of both generally surviving all the diseases till then and wealthy and educated enough to afford medical care available.
Even if the idea was that people may not survive long, it is a unpredictable and inconsistent way to set policy.
I'm sure the founding fathers expected Supreme Court justices to be rich, white, landowning men. What was the average age of that demographic back then?
Given the appointment age of most justices, 20 years and life aren't much different. Furthermore, lots of justices resign a couple years before death. RBG was practically begged to resign, but alternately believed Hillary would win and/or thought she could outlast Trump.
The idea is similar to tenure. You can do and say what you believe without influence and pressure from either party. It also dodges influence peddling preparing for leaving office. For example, in the defense department, officials will make recommendations and then leave office and profit from those same companies. If you're in office for life, this common (and almost impossible to prevent) kind of corruption becomes basically a non issue.
The federalist papers would shed light on such things, but actually reading them (and the wealth of nations)is likely to turn you into an independent who dislikes both parties.
Given the appointment age of most justices, 20 years and life aren't much different.
The last 4+ justices appointed were in their 50s. Gorsuch was 50. A top name on the short list both times was Amy Coney Barett, 48. They've been grooming a 38 year-old, Justin Walker, for the court. He went from a few months of litigation experience to the federal bench to the DC circuit in a year.
Notice how all these people also look very healthy? They're trying to get people who will last a lot longer than 20 years.
I'd add the requirement of at least a year of criminal defense experience since this is almost completely lacking currently and it shows in the horrible decisions the court makes.
In India we have a fixed retirement age. Of course extensions can be granted on an exceptional basis, But in general you serve till a fixed retirement age and retire.
It also makes sense. Cognitive ability deteriorates with age. And you don't want very old, with illness to rule on important things.
The supreme court structure is very different for india. The strength of court currently is 34 judges and keeps increasing. Any single case goes to a bench of typically 2-3 judges . The largest ever bench was 13 when the 1973 constitution amendment case had come .
The idea behind no term limits is, the judge can choose to retire doesn't have to.
You have invested a lot of effort in getting a judge to the top as a country. you don't necessarily need a arbitrary date to retire.
Each individual has a capacity to serve upto different age unique to them. Setting a common age for all is not efficient, plenty of judges for example are employed in india post 65, in arbitration and government commissions.
It makes sense not have term limits when the court size is small.
The problem for america is that everything is political: judges and their retirement . In a 2 party first past the post/ winner takes all system that is inevitable.
The constitution doesn't specify how many justices there are. Or what the criteria should be for appointment. It isn't even clear who appoints/confirms them.
There are a lot of unplugged holes in the constitution. This is just another issue...
Just in case it becomes relevant in the next few days:
"'The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,''
It's past time for Democrats to stop "taking the high ground" and acting like their policies actually matter. Moral victories are hollow when your democracy is being gutted.
Yes, because it's the Democratic party who said that we cannot vote on a Supreme Court nominee during an election year only to 180 four years later. Please, show me all these relevant examples of Democrats being such brazen and open hypocrites. This pseudo intellectual "both sides" non-sense has done as much damage to this country as Republicans slide into fascism has.
I said nothing about both sides being equally wrong, that’s something you projected around my comment. I was sharing a completely true observation. It’s a really common sentiment for people everywhere.
To me, it’s a separate and unrelated idea that partisans on “both sides” have similar thoughts about strategy. It has nothing to do with which side is right about an issue. Don’t you think it’s interesting that there are people who have the exact mirror image of your thoughts? It doesn’t make you curious, or reflective?
Personally, for any sort of meme like this, I’m automatically skeptical of the idea behind it, just because of how often I see it thoughtlessly repeated.
I've been a conservative. My whole family is conservative. There is no secret I just haven't clued in on in their platform that's holding me back from understanding them. I understand them and their motivations just fine. They are largely just wrong and ignorant on so many issues. There is a reason that it was found Fox News viewers know less about current events than people who don't watch any news at all. It was designed to be that way to build an electorate which refuses to hold their politicians responsible for anything. This level of misinformation was specifically designed by Republicans (Roger Ailes) to prevent Republicans from ever turning on Republicans again regardless of their conduct or behavior. It's all recent history. It's all documented. I don't know why we have to pretend their plan to subvert the democratic process has been anything but a terrific success for them. I don't know why so many people are interested in pretending that both sides are the same.
This doesn't even get into the damage that Republican Newt Gingrich has done to our legislative process, or the unprecedented obstruction put forth from Republican McConnell. Republicans are literally destroying our democracy, and it's right there in plain sight for everyone who isn't a Fox News addict to see.
I disagree entirely and in fact most of the rest of the world have laws against Supreme Court Justices serving well into old age like this. Her health problems were known during President Obama's term and it was nothing more than hubris on her part to continue serving.
It's fairly irresponsible to work until the day you die if a sudden death can have absolutely devastating and life changing consequences for a significant number of people.
I think it shows she was as hungry for power as anyone else.
"In 1999, she underwent major surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to treat colon cancer. Ten years later, she was diagnosed with early stage pancreatic cancer, for which she also had surgery. In 2014, she went to the hospital after suffering chest pains during one of her famous workouts and discovered she had a blocked artery. [1]
She had been a supreme court justice for almost 20 years by then. Regardless of whether Obama's pick would have been watered down by lack of congressional control, her vanity has made things much worse and tarnishes her entire career.
Edit: So I don’t regret this entirely, she is deserving of great respect even if she made a possibly grave miscalculation.
We do not know the outcome yet, and whether intended or not this could result in something bigger working out in the same way WeWork’s failure could turn out to be a boon to RISC V.
She should have retired before 2016 and let someone step up. Occupying the seat of power until you keel over at the age of 85 is a peculiar expression of ego and selfishness.
True, but in 2009 the congress was acting in a fairly reasonable way, and Ginsburg had already been on the bench for 29 years at that point. It was major failure of Democratic leadership that at a time when they controlled all branches of government they failed to make any significant reforms, such as admitting new states, expanding the size of the House of Representatives, or appointing judges.
Hubris and poor leadership. It was always rare to have control of all three.you use it when you have it.
Instead of acting on key agenda, there was hardly anything done given the power they had.
Say what you will about the republicans with similar control they will absolutely enact a lot of changes in their agenda. I may not like their agenda at all, but I can appreciate how they go about it.
From up here in Canada it was weird to watch. Obama spoke really loud about his agenda and desires and was extremely popular and they controlled all three and then turned around and didn't really get much done for fear of the moderates in their own party, or something, I don't know. The ACA looks really... like... huh? Neo-Feudal health care.
Or they weren't really interested in doing the things they said they were going to do and in fact the Democratic party is in general far more to the right than it claims to be to win elections. And I think that's the more likely and more concerning aspect of American politics is this "ratcheting effect" towards the right; the Republicans come in with a fairly extreme agenda (in the context of the rest of the western world's politics), do a bunch of fairly extreme things, then the Democrats gain some modicum of power and do very little to reverse it, and the cycle continues.
Spot on. Bernie's rise in 2016 was partly in response to that . The actual left is powerless despite the response Bernie got in both his runs without large contributions.
Joe Biden is very much in the centre at best, given the new focus on trying to woo republican voters the party is shifting to the right.
Unfortunately the Obama era (or maybe the coming Biden gov't) reminds me of another prominent historical liberal/social democratic gov't that came to power in a declining but powerful imperialist country with huge promises of ending war, resolving social and economic injustices, etc. but then governed weakly with poor compromises and bad leadership...
That gov't I'm thinking of would be the Weimar Republic.
It's also completely orthogonal to her life's work. Why would you spend a lifetime dedicating yourself to democratic ideals, when you know that, if you pass, you would be replaced not only by someone who doesn't share those ideals, but by an individual whom would change the tilt of the court.
I am not American and I am not familiar with the legacy of justice Ginsburg. Looking at it from a non-American perspective, I would find it very odd for a supreme court judge, who is supposed to be non-partisan and neutral, to favour one party over another, even just in the matter of choosing a successor. Wasn't justice Ginsburg of the same mind?
What has become clear over the past 100 years or so is that people have ideas, and they work to find logic to support them working backwards. Laws all need interpretation, there's no way around it. And by ideas, it appears to mean ethical frameworks these days. The interpretation of laws is very much based on the ethical framework of a person even if they possess the same logic.
The proxy for the parties then become the judicial versions of literal constitutionalism (Republicans today, more literal typically means more conservative) and statutory interpretation (liberals), which then cause a clear split in conclusion for many cases, increasingly so.
This is a natural reflection of American society slowly drifting and polarizing into two groups of thought, and judges are human minds, not computers.
Hmm, I’m ambivalent about people who do this. I think if you know your time is near, you should take it easy. Do some mundane things. Yes, I know “but it’s the only thing I love doing”. I disagree with that choice.
Yeah, right, most people don't have that kind of commitment so their job. It's not a good match for most people. Probably not something everyone should emulate.
The potential ramifications of this are chilling. If the Republicans mishandle this, it could drastically increase the chances of widespread conflict around the time of the elections.
Widespread conflict will get Trump elected, this is already proving the case as people see 'violence' instead of 'protesting' Trump is getting momentum. Don Lemon on CNN literally asking for people to calm down due to this fact.
Edit: Trump's support grew consistently as public support for BLM waned in face of the 'perception of violence' [1] - which Trump's team sees and is why he's pushing a 'law and order' message. The risk of BLM is that 'empathy' will easily be overwhelmed by 'concern' if pictures of violence play out on their TV screens every night. People will always chose public order over almost anything else.
Trump's 'Law and Justice' messaging may not be helping, but his approval ratings have improved as the protests have continued and none of the data in the article diminishes that.
It doesn't surprise me that many people support Biden as the mostly likely to 'quell tensions' etc. - however - that's not the same thing as the instinctive response to seeing widespread violence on TV.
Listen to Lemon [1]:
"“It’s showing up in the polling. It’s showing up in focus groups. It is the only thing right now that is sticking,” Lemon said ahead of "CNN Tonight" on Tuesday. “The riots and the protests have become indistinguishable."
This I believe.
More directly from Nate Silver here [2] where he is unsure there is a correlation, but since that article, the meme has continued and Trump has drifted up for no other apparent reason along the same trend line.
I don't like the man, the 'trend' is not good. Just a few weeks ago it looked like this would be over, now, there are many paths for him to come to win.
A showdown over Ginsberg replacement may be the decisive battle.
All I found was two allegations against a single doctor. That's horrible if true, but it seems like a typical case of medical malpractice that has nothing whatsoever to do with the administration.
Perhaps it was a single rogue doctor, though I wouldn't use "typical malpractice" to describe such a heinous act. What I do see is this: orders coming right from the top on specific detention policy.[1] They were willing to do child separation in the innocent days of 2018, and they got away with it. What is stopping these same people from getting bolder with their ideas and orders?
> What is stopping these same people from getting bolder with their ideas and orders?
The law? Your complaint is about the administration overzealously enforcing existing laws. How does that lead you to believe that they would begin completely ignoring the law?
According to your source, "child separation" was an incidental effect of prosecuting illegal immigrants for crimes. When I was prosecuted, I was also detained and separated from my family. It was unpleasant to say the least, but it was fair. I don't see why illegal immigrants should be given preferential treatment. Crime has consequences.
I really liked her and her opinion was often something I learned from.
I do think there should be a mandatory retirement age in the Supreme Court.
I also think so for being president or governor.
I think that RBG was laser sharp till the end but I can think of many presidents and wannabes that are and were not.
I don’t want that to devolve into a political debate over specific candidates. It is just a fact that on average health and cognitive abilities and flexibility decline with age. An for one of the most difficult and stressful jobs in the world you need to try and ensure someone who is still on top of their game.
For POTUS we have a law stating the minimum age for the president. Since we already have that imposing a maximum age is reasonable and not ageist
Or I would support doing away with both and define a series of physical, cognitive tests as well as knowledge of the world and general knowledge. All of which would score a candidates suitability for the job. To be administered by a non partisan agency that is aggressively independent from new or old administrations. That would have weeded out some horrific presidents we have had. And will have.
Trump will nominate a successor in the next couple weeks. McConnell will start the process, but delay the vote until after the November election. This way:
If Trump wins, McConnell can say that he was entirely reasonable and consistent, and he waited until after the election to ensure that the people really wanted Trump's SCOTUS nomination to be confirmed.
If Trump loses, McConnell still has the option say hell with it, and ram Trump's nomination through anyway. Any Republican Senators who might be worried about re-election chances will already have kept or lost their seats. I expect election results won't be final enough to call by the end of election day like they usually are, but even if it takes a couple weeks, that still leaves over a month for the Senate to vote on the nomination before their session ends at the beginning of January.
The other possibility is that McConnell will just get it all done immediately. He likely has the numbers now -- I doubt any of the fence-sitting Republican Senators would vote no, even those who are up for re-election this year -- and it's not clear that he actually gives a damn about appearances at this point. Waiting could also have a downside: it's possible that enough Republican Senators who have lost their seats in the election could feel too uncomfortable confirming a nomination of this magnitude during their own lame-duck session. But again, not sure how much these people will care about fairness when the chips are down.
High information Republican voters will know what he did and why, and will probably support his decision. Low information Republican voters will not know about his hypocrisy. Non-Republican voters won't vote for him regardless.
I expect McConnel to just create some reason why things are different this time, or, if he wants to be a troll, to say "I was wrong in 2016" or just to not address the hypocrisy and go right on ahead nominating a new Justice.
> I expect McConnel to just create some reason why things are different this time
I believe he already has. I read something a few months ago (can't find it now) where he was asked about replacing a hypothetical vacancy before the end of this year, and he hand-waved his way around the hypocrisy.
A political showdown over the nominee would very well be the decisive moment of this campaign and determine the presidency.
The Dems took a huge risk with Kavanaugh going after the way they did (allegations against an 18 year old at a party where technically nothing happened???) but were saved by a a deeply emotive testimony by a woman who pulled a lot of heartstrings and came off credibly.
That was an incredible risk because if that performance was not across the line ... it would have completely backfired.
Also - merely making a nomination makes Trump look strong.
Winning a competition against Dems - which I think he can because he has the votes - looks strong.
I don't see any way for the Dems to win with this unless Trump nominates a total fool.
Trump is flirting with the same poll numbers Hillary had las time and Biden is not a strong candidate ... this is not a good position for the Dems to be in.
> Also - merely making a nomination makes Trump look strong. Winning a competition against Dems - which I think he can because he has the votes - looks strong. I don't see any way for the Dems to win with this unless Trump nominates a total fool.
The conventional political wisdom after Kavanaugh was that Democrats would be demoralized for the 2018 election and would fail to retake the House. What actually happened was one of their biggest House wins ever.
> Trump is flirting with the same poll numbers Hillary had las time and Biden is not a strong candidate ... this is not a good position for the Dems to be in.
Kind of? There's no Johnson this time getting 8% of the vote (at this point in the race), so that group is dispersed between Trump and Biden. So while Trump is about where Hillary was at this point, Biden is cracking 50% in national polling on average, which is much higher than Clinton in 2016 and definitely not good for Trump.
Biden is much stronger than Hillary at this point, especially in swing states like Florida, where he is polling well with older voters (a complete flip from 2016, where older voters in Florida went decisively for Trump). If you look at Clinton's support in Florida it looks like a sine wave over the race. Biden's support is much more steady, so that is a difference. Biden wins Florida and it's over.
Why shouldn’t the Democrats goad Trump into waiting after the election to nominate by a) implying he’s afraid he’ll lose and b) whispering about sweetheart plea deals via Schumer or someone
because neither of those things are meaningful to him? He doesn’t think he will lose, obviously, so saying he does is meaningless- and because he doesn’t plan to lose, a “sweetheart deal” is similarly meaningless.
Long term I think we're good, eventually somehow things will settle. Short term it's going to be horrible no matter what outcome in the November elections, the country appears divided beyond repair. Two steps forward one backwards as the saying goes but it appears we're now taking more like ten backwards.
Also, why bother? Electoral College means my vote counts for shit and half the Presidents since I’ve been able to vote were elected by losing the popular vote. It’s tyranNy of the minority and it sucks. I still vote, but it feels more and more Sisyphean as time goes on.
> Breaking: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who refused to consider President Obama’s choice months before the 2016 election, said in a statement Friday hours after Ginsburg’s death: “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”
Thank you. I concluded the same and have begun to look for a therapist. RBG has been a hero of mine for 15 years. The impact of her death was my first thought when Trump won. For me, at this time, the glass has 10% of its capacity. But I will find help to see that as 10% full.
Always keep in mind you are not responsible for, nor could you change, RBG's lifespan. You are not responsible for the outcome of an election. If Trump is reelected it is not because of you, if Biden wins it is not because of you.
The quote isn't literal about your children. Weather we as individuals choose to participate or not, our lives aren't an end, the story continues with the royal our children.
Either we: (1) set them up for success at our expense; (2) set them up for success at no expense to us; or (3) set them up for failure to benefit ourselves.
Sadly so far, too many of us as individuals have been choosing (3). Hopefully enough of us as individuals have been choosing (1) and overall it balances to (2). However, currently its looking more and more like in aggregate we are ending up with (3).
But, with the looming threats of AI and climate change, I believe (1) and (2) are off the table. I don’t want to bring people into a failed system where they are (on average) doomed to failure. I wish I didn’t see things as so dire, but these ate the conclusions to which zi have come.
I’m pretty sure that if this was a D congress and a conservative dying then Republicans would simply not acknowledge the death until January. The weekend at Bernie’s solution.
Eternal rest grant to her, O Lord; and let light perpetual shine upon her. May her soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Something that the Democrats need to realize is that they (especially Obama) assumed too much good faith in the congressional GOP.
You can stick to your principles while doing it but, when you are against a party who now considers its last nominee (Romney) a radical BLM leftist, when they go low you need to be ready to kick them in the head.
There is a desire, specifically and especially on the left, to get so caught up in their principles that people believe it is the primary source of change.
For example:
What should be the first acts and priorities be of a democratic administration?
That’s how you think about politics. About power. Lock in any advantage and expand it. Democrats have popular support for their policies but cannot for the life of them think strategically.
Being embarrassed about wanting to be in power is a perpetual problem for leftism (It's understandable - it involves saying yes to the institutions you probably want to reform).
Consider Corbyn in the UK - Awful polling from day 1, doesn't help much with Brexit, loses 2 elections (One meh, one disaster) but the lessons learned is that they won the "argument" and it's all good?
To be fair, most American "left" politicians are hardly left, with the exception of Sanders and the handful of DSA-affiliated Congressmen. Although popular support for more-left policies seems to be forcing them (reluctantly) farther leftward.
To be fair, it is hypothetically possible that Corbyn did the best he could have done, considering he was being terribly smeared, even vilified, by all the big media organizations in UK AFAIK.
The Corbyn fans love to talk abut media smears but they neglect to mention that he never polled above 0% net approval in his entire term as leader.
Starmer, his replacement, is a man of intellect, principle, and service to the public - he is already doing better than Corbyn ever did - i.e. the media who didn't like Corbyn were writing amicable praise of Sir Keir (the mail love a nickname) even when he was making a mockery of their man (Boris)
The reason for that is that Starmer is a corporate stooge who doesn't present any threat to the merciless extraction of value from the working class. Of course they have no objection to the kind of competition which would have no adverse effect on their interests if it prevailed; their praise is evidence of Starner's complete lack of merit.
The media besmirched Corbyn BECAUSE he was a decent man with the interests of the public at heart, which is unacceptable to the owners of the media apparatus.
Now, now. Starmer might not be a militant marxist, but he spent a good chunk of his life fighting for workers' rights in court. He also served faithfully in the shadow cabinet under Corbyn - are you saying that Corbyn chose a "corporate stooge" as his shadow minister, and on the hottest issue of the day at that (brexit)?
One of Corbyn's lackings was that he was unable to make friends in his own party, to the point that half of his own rank & file literally sabotaged him at the last election. By calling good people all sorts of unwarranted names we're only going to see a repeat, and $deity knows this country deserves better than yet another Tory government.
The section of the rank and file that sabotaged him did so because they are possessed by a vile ideology that virulently opposes any concession by the powerful to the mass of the people. Being unable to befriend any of that metastatic species redounds greatly to Mr Corbyn's credit. They are not "good people".
Now Starmer may not be ideologically committed to the ruthless exploitation of the public like they are, but at the very least he harbours delusions about the possibility of compromising with a right wing, both within his party and in the media, that is implacably and rabidly opposed to any project of positive reform. They will never relent in their shameless calumny and perfidy until Labour's program has been completely neutered.
Democrats have popular support for their policies but cannot for the life of them think strategically.
You think they don't understand this stuff? Democrats have been deliberately "failing" to get shit done for 20 years. They keep holding out progressive and populist policies, tantalizingly close to enacting meaningful change -- but nope, somehow it always seems to be a matter of political strategy, badly run campaigns, and bad messaging that derails things.
Surely the Republicans haven't somehow had the better political strategists for decades. They aren't always better funded and they aren't always better organized. And certainly they don't have access to some kind of magic politics potion that the Democrats lack.
The only plausible scenario that I can see is that the Democratic party leadership has no interest in actually getting policy enacted, as long as they keep their cozy niche in power. Another 4 years of Trump will help them do very well in the 2022 midterms, and it will help keep their friends at the NYT, CNN, and MSNBC in business.
It would also explain why they hated Sanders and the DSA candidates so much. Liberals (not to mention leftists) who actually wanted to take power at the national level and actually do something? That would fuck up the whole game.
Basically you'd have to show me some actual evidence that Democratic party leadership actually wants to do anything other than campaign on a progressive platform and consistently almost-win. The whole thing seems worked to me.
I don't think you need anything that conspiratorial, it's not that centrist Democrats really don't want to get anything done, it's just that they really are basically okay with the current neoliberal consensus.
Well, one is the claim that Democrats don't get anything done because they have a secret commitment to keep things the way they are so that voters have a reason to come back to the polls for them, and I'm saying maybe the reason is simply that Democrats are mostly fine with the way things are. Maybe your point is that this is a distinction without a difference, which I guess I'd mostly have to agree with.
The difference is that it goes beyond being okay with a policy consensus. The current presidency is an exercise is dismantling the checks and balances in the US government and an experiment in pushing the limits of propaganda and keeping the public complacent in the face of crimes committed against them by their government.
For example, they had to have known that McConnell would kill the Trump impeachment. But they went ahead with it anyway. The only explanation I can see for this is that they wanted to somehow signal their opposition to Trump with their core voter base, while wasting and effectively discrediting the usefulness of a last-resort tool for asserting their authority.
And what is Biden campaigning on? What is his campaign even doing [0]? Where are the attack ads branding Trump as an anti-American grifter? This feels like 2016 all over again, except with the added danger that we already know how dangerous Trump is, and if he wins again he'll have nothing to lose -- and his handlers in the halls of power will take full advantage of it. They know they are ruining America and they simply don't care, they'll just run to the bunker when shit gets bad for normal people [1].
This kind of thinking assumes that the ruling party can unilaterally make policy changes, which is not possible in the American system currently (e.g. fillibuster).
w.r.t Sanders: he lost in a small d democratic primary. It wasn't the leadership: it was the voters that chose Biden over Sanders.
Controversial view: no, we shouldn't. Have you see how stupid people are? How easily they're manipulated? How little they understand about how government works? Any you want politicians pandering to these people?
If it weren't to the stigma of "literacy" tests and how the were historically used, I'd be fully in favor of "licensing" voters.
Paying people to vote is pretty out there. I think we should at least put election day on a weekend. Spread it over both days, even. This feels to me like a relatively easy small step that would really help make voting easier in a way that doesn't open itself up to voter fraud arguments (as far as I know).
The literacy test that I took wasn't even controversial. Back in middle school my civics teacher actually had us take one of these literacy tests. While very few people in the class passed the test (I think just myself and one other person), anyone actually familiar with the text of the US Constitution should be able to pass it. Sadly almost no one in our class was familiar with the US Constitution.
I'm totally okay with a test where the only document you need to study from is the US Constitution.
The whole electoral college is non-intentional gerrymandering. The candidate with fewer votes has been winning since 2000, and winning with a wider and wider vote margin. A major political goal should be getting the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact done.
I don't think the changing media landscape can be disentangled from this, which is a trend happening for unrelated reasons. If the only thing happening was urban concentration, then the mathematical predicted response of politicians would be that the liberal part becomes political-center and the conservative part skews further right.
The Electoral College is specifically intended not to line up with the popular vote. It is the final chance for the conscience of the people of the United States, unfettered by anything, to weigh in on the merit of those the masses have chosen as candidates for the highest office. The Faithless Elector was a feature; not a bug.
Or at least it was until it was perverted by the two major National Conventions. As mentioned earlier, read the Federalist papers for more context; but be prepared for a let down when it starts to sink in how much care was put into the system just for things to go off the rails, and I don't mean because of things like suffrage or the Civil Rights Movement either; but by the slow degeneration of the integrity of the system through the death by 1000 cuts of self-centered legislation, dismantling and delegation of Legislative authority to the executive, excessive politicization of the Judiciary, non-mandating of sunset dates for legislation, and the cancerous taint that is the lack of House or Senate limits on consecutive terms.
To me, the most relevant difference between then and now is the looseness of the union. It makes sense that all states get an equal vote... only when the votes don't really matter. If California broke up into 5 states, they would get 5x the power by the holy virtue of making that administrative decision.
An alliance of states can make sense. Everyone at the table knows they're not equal, because they're representing totally different entities. However, they all have a voice because they all have decision power. In an alliance, votes don't make sense as a decision-making apparatus with power. The gathering is for the purpose of international diplomacy, and freedom of action is determined by the real capabilities of each sovereign.
>To me, the most relevant difference between then and now is the looseness of the union.
To me, it is the terrifying ease with which instantaneous information/sentiment propagation can be utilized to sever one from a rational ground state and whip up a furor with which to push through an carve up of the Nation's civil liberties that truly sets us apart now.
Even reading literature from the time, it factors heavily in that to prevent misbehavior and oppression by a majority, there must be a realistic point of view taken as to the weakness of such a large mass to chaos and lack of coordination to operate in concert. This is a point that I don't think many truly appreciate that the Founder's understood and accounted for. To them, the majority was not always right. In fact, it would be accurate to state that the structure of government they settled on was designed to effectively serve the purposes for which it was intended, and no more; so great was the risk represented by such an edifice. The amount of Liberty preserved so great, and the sacrifice of civil freedoms was meant to be as minimal as possible, leads me to believe they saw legislation as more of a failure state than as a desirable State of affairs. At least in as much as said legislation did not tend to reinforce and preserve the Unity of the Nation as a whole.
>If California broke up into 5 states, they would get 5x the power by the holy virtue of making that administrative decision.
That is dead on point. By the way, Federalist Papers 6-10 touch on the ills of factionalism, and the delicate balance that must be struck between the number of representatives, and the population they represent. It was a conscious decision at the time to try to satisfy suffrage in order to safeguard the liberties of the Nation as a whole.
Sure. I was pointing out that there's up-and-down fundamental issues with the American voting system that would take a massive reform to fix as mere tweaks alone won't suffice. I think we'd agree on this.
That Democrats identified the Republican inability or unwillingness to either woo or eliminate the new voters only further argues in favor of their strategic acumen.
Democrat senators Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid first introduced a filibuster for judicial nominees, and then ending the filibuster for judicial nominees when it was politically convenient for them.
There are so many unpacked assumptions and unevaluated arguments here it would take a book to work through them all.
To give a short version - if you oppose a filibuster, then don't use it to prevent Merrick Garland from being on the court.
Nothing about Schumer's position on the filibuster in 2002 can be used to argue that the trajectory of court appointments since then is a culmination of any logically consistent argument in response to it.
I'm well aware... but in this particular sentence he or she is talking about specific Democrat, not the Democratic Party, and as such, seems grammatical.
They did. Reid's cloture vote to end the filibuster applied to federal judges, not Supreme Court justices. Before the vote on Kavanaugh there was a cloture vote to end the filibuster.
Obama didn't assume anything. He was a senator for 12 years (federally for 4) and had plenty of experience by that point to know how partisan legislative bodies are and how members will die for their parties perceived glory. I don't believe for a second that in the aftermath of Clinton's impeachment & Gore's 500 vote loss in the state being governed by his opponents brother with tens of thousands of votes lost or miscounted that any prospective politician anywhere in the US would expect good faith from their opposition.
He was a great orator and liked using that come together message as an attempted bait to push popular support in his favor, though. It was also a great excuse for pushing an extremely conservative healthcare bill through congress as if it were some major achievement for his more progressive supporters.
You mean Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore's choice for Vice President when he won the Democratic nomination for president in 2000, and went on to endorse Republican John McCain for president only 8 years later?
The facts are that Democratic Senator Max Baucus, Chairmen of the Senate Finance Committee and Obama's pointman in the Senate who was responsible for writing the language of Obamacare (Romneycare) invited a cabal of insurance industry lobbyists into the negotiating room to write the bill and specifically excluded all single-payer advocates from the negotiating table. Its pure revisionist history to suggest that Obama and his minions did everything they could to push a public option (let alone single-payer or even a Medicare-for-all type provision). The facts are that Obama and the Democratic leadership caucus were determined to pass a bill that enshrined the predominance of the for-profit, employer-based health insurance industry. Obamacare (Romneycare) was designed from the beginning as an effort to preclude real, substantive change and improvements to our healthcare system by implementing some very minor improvements (such as the pre-existing conditions clause) and some cosmetic changes. This was abundantly clear to everyone who was paying close attention at the time and not getting their information from corporate news outlets.
Or maybe present a better alternative that gets people to vote for your side?
Your party aggressively screwed over a candidate who could have energized the base and still would have captured 99.99% of the center in a trade for a principle-less barely coherent snooze fest of a human being who would toe the old party line and then you claim the only remedy is to play as dirty as the other side?
Excuse me for not buying it.
I voted for Obama but the democratic party is bordering on as repulsive as the republicans these days and this type of thinking is to blame.
Bernie? He lost to Hillary by almost 4 million votes, then lost to Biden by 9 million votes (The largest margin since 2004) - how is that motivating the base.
He's a protectionist idealist who the republicans were dying to run against because they knew he'd be easier than Biden.
At the same time, from the Republican perspective... They won "fair and square", and then largely liberal-staffed agencies and other organizations delayed and resisted the implementation of Republican policies as much as possible. The other side wasn't playing fair, why should they?
This idea that either the Republicans or Democrats have faith or principles is absurd. The Democratic brand is one of principles and altruism, but their actions do not reflect this.
The only people I've seen principled is Justin Amash, Rand Paul, Ron Paul and Ben Sasse. Beyond those few, everyone else is pretty much playing power games.
Very very few people in Congress do anything but vote along party lines on pretty much everything.
I don't know how you can democrats are principled to a fault with a straight face when you have Nancy Pelosi who is just the Democrat's McConnell.
Lmao at thinking anyone who names their kid after Ayn rand could be principled. All the libertarians in congress are fine with raising the deficit when the republicans are in power but cry about fiscal responsibility when democrats are. The democratic party is the party of fiscal responsibility.
Rand is short for Randal. He was not named after Ayn Rand.
His full name is Randal Howard Paul.
Also, which libertarians have been fine raising the deficit? They are pretty much the only ones that consistently argue against it whether the budget increase comes from Republicans or Democrats.
Lmao at actually believing Randal paul isn't named after Ayn Rand. I see you've fully embraced the cognitive dissonance that has made republicans so successful. I hope democrats can do the same. I'll give credit to Ron though. That was a very principled thing to do, respect.
Everything is relative. Obviously politicians aren't principled in an absolute way. But democrats absolutely are more principled than republicans. They have failed to lie like republicans do. They don't gerrymander as effectively. They refuse to utilize fake news to energize their base like republicans do.
They did all of that during the primary against Bernie Sanders. They went so far as to call him a Russian plant. And the rigging of the Iowa caucus result reporting was unconscionable. They only reported districts that Sanders was not leading in, making it look like he lost. It took a week to report results districts he was popular in and he ended up winning the popular vote.
He lost the 2019 primaries even worse. Minorities see class reductionist for what is is, racism from privileged middle class whites. It's clear that Bernie doesn't give a fuck about black people and they killed him for it.
I don't know about head kicks. I think you just need to be a political realist. The reality is that you need (edit: cooperation of the) Senate and Presidency to get a Justice nominated. Obama didn't have the Senate and didn't get his pick for Justice. Trump does, and will get his pick.
The whole "Republicans are hypocrites" thing is true - but obviously so. Whatever was said about not doing it in election year was simply a political lie they felt they had to say to avoid the "We are doing this because we can" reality.
Kennedy, Souter, and Thomas were all approved by a senate of an opposing party. Apparently you have to go back to the 1800s though to find a case where a Democratic president had a nominee appointed by a Republican Senate.
You have to have the cooperation of the Senate I meant. Obviously, in cases where a President of one party has a nominee appointed by a Senate of another, the cooperation of the Senate was there.
Make it absolutely clear to McConnell and Democratic leaders in the Senate that if McConnell fills this seat in an election year, then the Democrats must increase the size of the SCOTUS.
McConnell needs to fear the reprisal more than he fears the delay. Because you're right, this is about power. Nothing else matters to them. So make them fear this.
You can expand the number of seats on the Supreme Court via a bill passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president. So we'd need the presidency, a majority in the House, and a supermajority in the Senate to invoke cloture to end the inevitable legislative filibuster from the Republicans. So even with a blue wave in November, that's not possible because it is extraordinarily unlikely that we gain a supermajority in the Senate.
The only other option to pass such a bill in the Senate would be to gain a Senate majority and use that Senate majority to end the legislative filibuster, which is the last filibuster anyways. With the filibuster out of the way, we'd just need the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress.
> The only other option to pass such a bill in the Senate would be to gain a Senate majority and use that Senate majority to end the legislative filibuster, which is the last filibuster anyways.
This is what I call for in another comment. There's no way to get a supermajority in the Senate, so the legislative filibuster would have to die.
Who is "we" in this comment? Democrats? Not Republicans? Progressives?
While your comment is both technically and strategically correct, this sort of binary "us vs them" mentality has caused america such harm and always strikes me as somewhat reductionist. I wish more focus would be on policies and individuals instead of D vs R (as if greens, libertarians, socialists, etc simply do not exist in america's 300M+). Perhaps i am just romanticizing an impossible future, though.
I strongly agree with your desires, but I've also been sucked into the D vs R world lately. While I've always been politically left, I despise the 2 party system.
I'm of the opinion that a first past the post and winner take all voting system will almost always produce a 2 party outcome. As such, until we change the voting system I've decided to stop considering myself independent and throw in with the party most closely aligned with my views.
I don't think your imagined future is impossible, though! I just think it's heavily discouraged by our voting system. We can change our voting systems, though. I'd really strongly encourage you to check out and support Ranked Choice Voting (or other proposed voting systems). I don't think it's a silver bullet, but I think RCV would go a long way to breaking down the 2 party system
I think I’ve seen that movie before; Gaining control of two branches and then using that power to cement absolute control by seizing the third is what the bad guys do.
They will. The SCOTUS as a nonpartisan institution that isn't a political football is 100% dead if McConnell confirms a nominee before the election.
It's time Democrats recognize that, and play offense when they have the ball.
It's sad to see the institution end as a non-political body, but it's been happening for the last couple of decades. This will be the absolute end of it.
SCOTUS is already clearly partisan if the newly departed justice's final wish is for a different president to appoint her replacement. Playing politics up until the end.
Genuine question for anyone following Supreme Court decisions since the inclusion of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. How have either of those two nominations contributed to decisions in a way that undes RBG's life work? If they haven't, on what basis are you coming to the conclusion that the third nominee to SCOTUS would somehow be radically different than the first two?
I personally haven't read an opinion from either that most democrats would be disappointed with. Most people actually don't follow what the supreme court does and the extent of the attention they pay is just making sure that the president they support gets to pick SCOTUS justices.
We can compare the stated philosophies of RBG against those of the two most recent nominees and the shortlisted candidates put forth in the past week and see that they're very different. It seems very plausible to guess that, given a large majority, these people will enact these philosophies. No?
Damn right it is. Once she passes the President and Senate get to nominate a replacement. RBG isn't somehow deserving of a candidate that maintains her legacy. In fact, she has zero say in who her replacement is.
The current status quo is that SCOTUS is staffed based on who happens to die and who happens to be President at that time. That's a terrible design: Roe v. Wade should not hang on whether there was an economic recession two years ago.
So if there's a court-packing arms race, that may not be a bad thing. It would bring this anachronism to a head.
If the Supreme Court becomes a more partisan institution that shifts in viewpoints every 4 years, that's not ideal, but I think it's quite a bit better than the status quo where so many people see every appointment as an existential threat.
You want to split McConnell and Trump starting now. McConnell will throw Trump under the bus the moment he loses and has done the nomination. If Trump holds out he can bargain with the Democrats during the lame duck session on immunity.
I think we're about to see some of the more arcane rules of debate in the Senate take center stage: repeated quorum calls, filibuster, cloture, etc. I suspect this will not go down without a fight.
Hillary won the popular vote by 1.1% and currently the Republicans hold a razor thin Senate majority and have been substantially outpaced by Democrats in the House, so I'm not really sure where you get the idea that there's a "far disproportionate share of power/representation". It seems pretty proportionate to me.
Polls are notoriously unreliable and easy to manipulate. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". I'm not even saying that you're wrong -- I'm saying that we have no way to know whether you're correct or not based on the numbers you threw out. We would need some good sources to even begin to evaluate the truth of these assertions.
The assertions themselves are so unbelievably vague that they could easily go either way with cherry-picked polling. Most people support abortion in cases of rape, so if you do a poll asking if people think some abortion should be legal, you will easily get a majority. If you ask about easy access to abortion in the 9th month, you get far lower levels of support. Saying "most support legal abortions" is practically meaningless without specifying what type of abortion they support.
I know many people who vote Republican only because of abortion. The fact is that pro-life people see this as the greatest injustice of our society by a wide margin. The left is motivated by BLM and the right is by pro-life.
Getting the most votes isn't what translates to forming a government in the US. The big things are: having your family members run state governments, setting district lines, and setting up laws to prevent people that disagree with you from voting. Not to mention just having a lot of money to bribe already elected politicians.
As an absolute leftist, I think you're overstating the effects of gerrymandering. State gerrymandering cannot win statewide seats, nor the electoral college.
Anti-voting regulations, while frankly absolutely despicable, I've not yet seen any studies regarding a significant effect. Do you have any data on that?
People do vote for these things, but if you split voters is a particular way you can ensure that the minority hold on to power (Gerrymandering and the Electoral College).
If you're looking at a 60/40 split though, even the extreme levels of gerrymandering can't override it. So what are the other things that people vote for - they must have a large rightward split if people keep voting right wing, in the face of all those left-leaning polls on policies.
That’s not how elections work in the US, 60/40 is not a big enough divide to undo a gerrymander. The majority of the liberal population lives in dense urban areas and thus their votes get “wasted” as they’re reliably Democrats, while sparser regions which consist of the minority view get more representation compared to their actual numbers.
Add to that the fact that many voters are single issue voters, so their opinions on different policies don’t end up amounting to much.
So even if some policies are popular overall, they need to be popular enough to overcome these things to form a durable coalition that advocates for them in the halls of power.
Proportionality isn't one to one because half of Americans aren't republican and half aren't democrat. The problem is that polling data is absolutely awful at showing absolute support for the individual parties platforms and membership numbers are largely biased compared to what the electorate actually wants, but there are plenty of articles about GOP tactics to hold power from a minority bloc position.[1]
I wish I bookmarked the statistics on this because they were eye opening to me, but 2016 polls were showing about 40% democrat to 35% republican leaning in the country. So if the public at large is 5% more blue than red, but Republicans hold near-even seats in government, thats a bias in their favor. And as this and many other articles show this isn't the product of random swings of popular support but structurally orchestrated power grabs meant to keep a minority party in power.
Edit: And to be fair the Senate isn't a democratic institution whatsoever to begin with. Its going to naturally lean red because there are many states with low urbanization and population that produce permanent seat Republican senators. Because the distribution of states has nothing to do with the distribution of people that lends the senate to be hugely incongruent with the actual ideological makeup of the populace at large.
"As they go to the polls in a historic presidential election, more than six in 10 Americans say neither major political party represents their views any longer, a survey has found."
Do not make the mistake of thinking the politicians who represent you are particularly principled people.
The left has been talking about stacking the supreme court since Kavanaugh. Democratic senators played games with the filibuster. There are plenty of other examples of weaponizing politics that I could cite (from both sides).
I would like to see Senate Republicans show some fair play and wait for after the election, though there is some wisdom in wanting to avoid the possibility of a split decision should this election go to the supreme court.
Seems highly unlikely that John Roberts would let any decision on the election be that close. He's too much of an institutionalist to not find some way to bring along most, if not all, of the Justices. Given that, it's really quite preferable that the seat go unfilled, eliminating the possibility of a 5-4 decision with Roberts writing the dissent, a situation that really would spell doom for American democracy.
You don't think making the court an explicitly partisan institution by just stacking it whenever you are in power is going to be a bad idea? You don't think it will destroy the collegial attitude of the court that allowed Ginsburg and Scalia to be friends? You don't think Republicans will just do the same thing in response?
Judging by the wikipedia page on judicial leanings[1], Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Gorusch are all fairly moderate, whereas Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor are (relatively) more ideological. Only Alito and Thomas are particularly conservative.
And it's not like rulings have always been one-sided. I know plenty of conservatives have their gripes with Roberts.
Democratic appointees even held all nine seats during the 40's, and Republicans didn't stack the court.
Stacking is a bad idea, but the GOP would do it if they controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House. The GOP of the 1940s is not the GOP today. That political party is gone off the rails. The last time they were fiscally responsible, Eisenhower was in the White House.
The Supreme Court does need to be expanded though. It hears half the cases it did fifty years ago. While they are at it, split the Ninth Circuit. Give California its own circuit since the majority cases originate from that state.
They will 100% fill that seat before Jan 20th. The outcome of the election does not matter. Anyone who thinks otherwise really doesn't understand McConnell and the gang. They'll let Romney dissent, it'll be the impeachment vote v2.
I saw some interviews with her, pretty amazing lady. Sad to see her go.
Why would they? There are no consequences to bad behavior!
Republicans push tax cuts through for the wealthy, leaving the country deeper in debt. So what do Democrats do when they get back in power? Let those cuts stand!
Imagine, if, for every Republican shenanigan, their price to pay would be much higher than any potential gains. They would think twice about being assholes then. But as things stand, they suffer no consequences! So why would they ever change??
Can you explain what you mean? The nuclear option [1] is used by the majority party in the Senate to end a filibuster by the minority party. Democrats are the minority party in the Senate and hence have no such option available to them.
> This is about power. In politics, nothing else matters.
Sounds about right.
> the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
Realistically, they have until the last day of the current congress which runs until January 3rd, 2021. The Senate has 37 working days remaining in 2020. It would be an amazing feat if they manage to do it, but you bet if only as an animating fight for the party faithful who are historically depressed right now, they're going to try.
Justice Harold Hitz Burton is tied for the record: 0 days. There was less than 24 hours between nomination and confirmation. He was at least the 10th to achieve this feat. McConnell will require exactly as many days as he deems most politically expedient.
The cynic in me says they will leave the seat open through the election, with full intent of filling it in the lame duck sessions, to keep it as a drive for GOP votes. "Don't let the Democrats fill the seat!"
How would it be an amazing feat? Trump already has a list of candidates, and all it takes is 50 Senators to say yes (plus Pence breaking a tie if they somehow don't get 51). There's no requirement to allow any but the most perfunctory of floor debates, and the filibuster has been eliminated for SCOTUS justices.
Guaranteed McConnell will ram this through with plenty of time to spare.
He could have it done by Wednesday if he wants. Just pick the youngest and most ideological from the Federalist society's list and give them an up/down vote and the President can sign off in no time.
Trump's campaign has been blasting SCOTUS picks to their email list for weeks. From the latest one:
> Did you hear the news? President Trump has released his shortlist for candidates for the Supreme Court. Here is a sneak preview of a few of the names on the list:
> Senator Tom Cotton
> Senator Josh Hawley
> Senator Ted Cruz
> And more…
Wow Hawley and Cotton have risen meteorically. I would have half-expected Hawley's crypto-unionist populism to have kept him off such a list, but he'd surely be better than the others mentioned. Somehow, he ran for MO Attorney General without promising to further brutalize minorities. Within two years he was in the Senate and now within two more years he would be on the Supreme Court? Wow.
I think it hinges on their (Trump, really) confidence on winning in November. No reason to do it now if you're sure you're going to win. No reason to worry about possible repercussions in the form of lost voters if you're sure you're going to lose.
Trump's chances of winning will drastically increase with another Republican Supreme Court Justice.
The election will likely be contested. When some strategically selected counties in Florida start anulling mail-in votes the Republicans will be glad to have a person who will dispute in their favour.
Mitch McConnell in 2016: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president."
I'm curious what his argument would be for this being different.
They just won't both bother responding. I remember Adam Schiff's arguments during the senate part of the impeachment procedure - "Is there any doubt he did it?", there was no real response to this. Mitt Romney is now the radical amongst the congressional GOP.
The type of politicians who kicked the chair out from under their own leader during watergate are probably rare amongst democrats and non-existent bar one (https://youtu.be/qS-aFfJe20U) amongst these republicans.
The justification is the president and senate were controlled by different parties. You can already see that spin online. Also no joke, his argument was based on something Joe Biden said as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992.
I still feel like that may not be easy. Doesn't take many Republicans (4?) that are skeptical about Trump being re-elected, and open to tit-for-tat to stall or halt this.
"Already, Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have said that there is not enough time to confirm someone before November.
Collins told The New York Times earlier this month that she'd oppose seating a nominee in a lame-duck session if Joe Biden wins the White House."[1]
This is the Republicans' opportunity to stack the court overwhelmingly in their favor and guarantee the end of progressive and liberal influence in Constitutional law for a generation. The repeal of everything from the ACA and gay marriage to Roe V. Wade is on the table.
They're not going to turn that down just to mess with Trump, this is way bigger than Trump.
That is compelling, but I wouldn't overlook tit-for-tat. Senators live to be re-elected, and there are lots of close races in this exact timeframe. Four "we will take a dive" promises could make a difference.
"About four-in-ten Americans (38%) approve of Trump’s job performance"
I assume that is well below the percentage of Americans that call themselves Republican. Not fully understanding your point. The language in your link seems to confirm it's a serious issue for Trump.
That depends entirely on the votes that happen this year. The point is, those republicans aren't going to risk losing almost all their guaranteed votes that come from republican voters.
That’s a bingo. Any supposed conservative that stands in the way of a conservative majority on the SCOTUS would be run out of town on a rail by their own party’s base.
Remove the Publicly visible Like Count and those kind of conversations and connections are easy.
The Like count makes people defensive or aggressive especially when they are called out in public leading to never ending reaction and counter reaction cycles.
Without that dumb random signal interfering in conversations all kinds of strange connections are possible.
I see it at work meetings between highly competitive people who dont have anything in common with each other. I see it on whatsapp chat groups.
But I don't see it happening on FB, Twitter and on the News. These mediums favor reaction-counter reaction over solutions.
Connection takes time and the right environment. Anyone who wants connection and solutions to trump reactions, please have those conversation in an environment without random signals interfering with the process.
People were horrible to each other online long before modern social media, and indeed in print and in person long before that. While some people do indeed pursue likes for their own sake, it's not the root cause of social aggression.
Sure, if you have a network of troll buddies to upvote you. But you're assuming that everyone is motivated by the same incentives, in this case popularity. This is necessarily true, and one reason we know this is because some people keep trolling even when their accounts are banned or they're recognizable enough to be rejected by the community.
A lot of trolls are 'salt collectors' - saying obnoxious things to garner offended reactions and then screenshotting the comments of upset people to share with frens on a different platform. They don't care about popularity, only engagement. In organized influence operations, the goals of troll groups are to steal time or resources, or disrupt the cohesion of target groups.
All these negative behaviors existed before social media; they're well known to operators of fora, usenet discussion groups and so on, as well in the multiplayer game space. This taxonomy of motivators for 'griefer' gamers might also broaden you understanding of what drives trolling behavior: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2017.1306109
To me it seems like an extremely solvable problem. Facebook could do an A/B test right now of removing all likes and see what happens. You'll get an answer as to some of the effects in a week. The question is what metrics you decide on determines "moderate" as opposed to "extreme".
To anyone at facebook - please dissuade me if I'm being naive here - I'm always looking to update my mental model of this.
Thats a fairly extreme statement - you're saying that "because extreme events also used to take place, the internet is not involved, and in fact is a help". So to you, the internet is a completely neutral platform with no side effects? I do not think you will find many people on the planet that will agree with you.
I like how Slashdot handles it. Posts and comments do have counts, but the range is reasonably narrow, from -2 to +5. This allows for modding down noise, and modding up the signal, but this excludes the comparative phallometry typical for FB and twitter threads with hundreds and thousands on upvote counters.
And not everyone can vote. As a casual but everyday user, I was issued mod points one time in over 20 years. (Though lately I rarely read or comment there anymore.)
The like button is my performative social stupidity amplified. My stupid is loud enough already.
In all those generations of horrendous behaviour there are predictable patterns. At our best we are wonderful curious intelligent and kind, but in the heat of the moment, most of us don't have a lot of emotional self control, so we need to plan ahead to make better behaviour effortless and stupid behaviour effortful.
The like button is a mini version of the gun control debate, of course guns don't kill people on their own (actually... says boston robotics in the corner). I have close friend, a well respected law graduate now working in another field who said this week he'd love to have a weapon to wave at people who cut him off in traffic. This is a man who has worked for years to build a life and career, and he lacks the judgement to not escalate a trivial tiff with a stranger to a life or career ending act of stupidity.
I have seen it with friends busy bashing each other on Twitter/FB but being able to reconcile on a Whatsapp group or a private meeting.
Its not that on Whatsapp groups some members of the group aren't entertained by a good fight and goad/encourage both sides. Its that when its private and social status and social signaling is less of a priority and people you trust/respect can step in and cool things down and refocus the conversation on solutions.
In the public square there are thousands of retards who will show up to encourage both sides to keep fighting. It benefits the platforms. Conflict is much more engaging than a boring conversation on lets work out the details.
Maybe people are now, more often than not, talking to Human nodes in a network, and the network outperforms you in presenting data that will match a confirmation bias.
So it would imply that you can reason with an individual who isn’t acting as node.
This doesn't make sense to me. There absolutely was a "like count". There were votes for decisions and there were citations for opinions. Academia is bitter for that reason. Yet, with the same incentives and much higher stakes they remained friends.
The other problem with most online communities is that there's almost no limit on output. All else being equal, someone with an active offline life is going to have a smaller presence than someone who's terminally online, someone who spends more time listening to others is going to have a smaller presence than someone who spends more time talking, someone who puts more effort into their posts (proofreading, look up evidence) is going to have a smaller presence than someone who haphazardly shoots off comments, and someone who reserves comments for when they have something important to contribute is going to have less of a presence than someone who comments on things they don't know anything about.
Things like mods (most people don't have the time commitment), voting (terminally online people will be able to vote earlier and more often, driving the conversation), front page thresholds (a small group of people acting as filters for new submissions), and time limited submissions (the longer you wait to comment the more likely the conversation will have died) just skews things even more.
For all the discussion about the low quality of online conversations, there seems to be very little discussion about the environments we've created and what kind of discussion these environments encourage.
Even if the counts are private, counters create an ulterior motive beyond substantive discourse in the desire to collect likes. Their signals constrain speech as posts are authored. Just like the profit motive, the like motive greatly skews reality from beneath the surface of what is being said.
And to disagree with someone, you should have to at least open your mouth. That's a conversation. To just be able to dislike or downvote let alone anonymously is harmful for everyone, even the person downvoting. Instead of exercising speech, it's a slap on the wrist response.
Removing context removes nuance, and removing nuance removes intellect.
I'm sorry, but this is wildly naive. It isn't "likes" that are causing the problem. It is things like the fact that one side appears to be in the early stages[1] of a UN defined genocide[2]. I'm not going to be friendly to you if you think lower taxes or some other excuse is more important than the human and civil rights abuses that party supports.
The whole reason most people join that side is that it’s no longer safe to publicly express any opinion that isn’t either anodyne or extreme. This generates constant, subtle pressure which - over years - drives increasingly extreme behaviour.
Yes, I think the far right have gone much further than the far left in that regard; however, IMO its a question of when, rather than if, social progressives take up arms (given the path I see social media taking).
We need to get off public-by-default platforms that feel semiprivate. Everyone gets bad/wrong ideas; talking about them with our friends is how we stop them before they become part of our identity, but it’s no longer safe to do that.
Uninformed sterilization has happened in the past in this country too. Look at doctors at some Native American reservations. It's quite abhorrent to stereotype an entire of party based on the sensationalism of an extremely small subset of actors.
Also the 'band wagon' effect is a widely documented cognitive bias - so there is merit to the idea that "likes" can create bias.
>It's quite abhorrent to stereotype an entire of party based on the sensationalism of an extremely small subset of actors.
Meanwhile the president was just on a stage in Minnesota talking about "racehorse theory"[1]. His biographer has previously described it as follows: "The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring."[2]
I don't know where I would get the idea that he is in support of eugenics.
I am using the words of the president and leader of the party. The party that abandoned precedent a refused to draft a platform in 2020, instead choosing to just support the president.
So did he say it while in office? Did he create a policy or direct agencies to engage in eugenics? Please tell me where there is any evidence of a state-sanctioned offense of this nature.
Using your logic, we should label the Democrat party the same because under Carter's watch Native Americans were sterilized and the party supports an organization started by a eugenics advocate (Planned Parenthood). Don't forget Biden's comments on race while in office...
Hold the perpetrating individuals accountable and stop stereotyping entire classes of people.
Click on that Twitter link. Trump said these things yesterday. You are comparing something that happened literally yesterday to things that happened 4 decades or even over a century ago.
This is how I learned that being in Congress means immunity from being fired for literally not doing your job. Regardless of your views, you shouldn't be refusing to help keep the government functioning.
Yes, a WaPo narrative. And it's "a top google result".
Trump's crime is "refused to criticize people involved in recent deadly clashes in Portland". I assume he will also be charged with not jumping the gun on Rittenhouse too? Basically, support the opposition narrative or else.
Same thing happened with Charlottesville, Trump daring to suggest there where leftist culprits too. I don't see Biden criticizing the rioters and their enablers too harshly - must be that same brand of hypocrisy that allowed Biden to suddenly not "believe women" when an accusation was aimed at himself.
A quote from another WaPo article: "the president’s backers are rallying to defend businesses and fight back against Black Lives Matter"
so, "defend businesses" and "fight back" show the differing context. Trump is fanning the flames, but the fires where started by emboldened rioters. You think people will sit back as this stuff happens and not be divided? I'm not sure I even blame Trump too much - Dems engage in hyperbolic, divisive rhetoric just as much to vilify Trump and his supporters.
I realize that my comment is now lacking context because koolba's is flagged, so you might think I'm trying to argue about the protests. This is not the case.
Koolba said, paraphrasing from memory, "only the left is violent, and only left-wing leaders refuse to criticize that".
So I posted a news source talking about right-wing violent protest and a right-wing leader refusing to criticize it.
I'm carefully avoiding arguing about the issues here, so I can talk to koolba about their skewed perception of the behavior of the sides.
I disagree with Koolbas claim, I simply disagree that a google result yielding a biased source is proof of anything. I didn't address Koolba since I think the statement so obviously hyperbolic that I didn't believe it was made in good faith.
The context of criticizing violence is also unclear, as there is a difference between violence, and counter-violence.
Where in anything you linked to do does it indicate that there are conservatives rioting, looting, or burning buildings?
There have been many peaceful assemblies of conservative protesters, some legally bearing arms, which interestingly have been condemned by the Democrats. But there are no mass mobs destroying property and causing mayhem. There’s no conservatives defending such behavior because it does not exist.
It’s unique to the left. Minneapolis, Kenosha, Oakland, you name it. It’s left wing mobs that destroyed those cities.
This has nothing to do with conservatism, right-wing politics, or Republican party politics. It has to do with the relationship between political players in a healthy political atmosphere.
A non violent process through which differences are settled, ideally with at least a veil of integrity, or you’re likely to get the violence it was aimed to prevent.
That's not helpful. There are "rules", and there are "norms".
People follow the rules assuming that everyone is operating in good faith, and that everyone agrees the rules exist for the benefit of everyone. If rules are only there to be exploited, you end up with a disaster.
I mean, sure, you can force through a nomination now and produce a wildly lopsided court. But then the democrats might just win the senate and presidency and decide that they can add four more justices. The rules allow that, too. Is that the world you want to live in?
> It’s not fascism to do things the way the rules/law specifies.
That's not a workable definition. At many points in history fascists were literally the ones writing the rules and laws.
Also, it's not like the law is software proved with formal methods to prevent fascism. There are bugs and exploits that are only prevented from being problems by the integrity of political actors, and some of those can be pretty trivially discovered. The more integrity you remove, the higher the chance you end up with a configuration that results in something like fascism.
You attempt to prevent a literal war of all against all by making various alliances and deals that please all but all small rump of violent extremists.
Unfortunately modern activists and politicians want to make it seem like no reasonable person could disagree with them. This makes it impossible to engage in a dialogue and bridge a gap.
I can see your point, but you have yet to support it with a valid example. I would not argue with you if you had valid examples.
I never said half or halfway. I said the best answer often lies between opposing positions. You are continually changing the subject and creating strawman arguments which do not reflect what I'm actually saying.
The example of someone wanting your things does not have enough background about the circumstances to fully explore. In the context of taxes, there could be a middle ground. In the context of a lawsuit, there very often is a middle ground. In the context of a robbery, the situation does not reflect two arguments in a venue that promotes discussion and it involves someone breaking the law and widely established societal structure, so it doesn't meet the elements of a philosophical discussion.
Your second to last sentence is a slippery slope fallacy unless you can support it with data.
Your last sentence illustrates my original premise - western thinking tends to pick one side or the other rather than meaningfully evaluate thwboptions that lie between the opposing positions.
I grew up in high school with abstinence-only sex ed, rare access to birth control and a bunch of rumors about "pulling out" and period sex preventing pregnancy. No condom lessons at all, just scare videos on STIs. A number of teen pregnancies happened in that school, though I only knew the ones carrying to term.
I am not sure what they has to do with Safe, Legal and Rare.
This motto that was the foundation of the Pro-Choice movement has nothing to do with abstinence-only sex ed.
One of the things that has been losing support and making the issue more polarizing is the fact that many in the Pro-Choice movement have moved to a Pro-Abortion movement wanting to celebrate abortion, and to use abortion as a primary means of birth control instead of a rare occurrence when other methods failed or were not an options.
Also the raise in support for 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions has not helped the Pro-Choice movement, the public when surveyed have an almost (something like 80%) distaste for 3rd trimester and only a slightly more favorable view of 2nd trimester abortions. While they are medically rare, extremely rare, politics is about optics and perception, the Pro-Choice movement is not winning any hearts and minds by supporting those.
//For the record I am very much in the "Safe, Legal and Rare" camp, I oppose celebrating abortion or making it something that should be viewed as a primarily birth control method, I also define life as starting "when the fetus could medically survive outside the womb with normal feeding and care" at which point only medically necessarily abortions should be legal as decided by a medical professional
My wife had to abort due to an etopic pregnancy. Nothing to due about it, would have killed them both. Still bothers us.
My daughter was supposed to be a twin, the other didn’t make it. That really hurts.
I can understand arguments about first few weeks.
People that support giving birth to the baby then killing it. Well, they are the worst sort of killer imaginable.
The "rare" part. Due to bad sex ed and hurdles to get birth control, there were a lot of teen pregnancies. It's not Clinton's fault, it was bad state policy.
In general, though, it's been seen as a core responsibility for activists and politicians to channel their constituents' passions towards productive ends. There've always been a lot of toxic people in the world - that doesn't have to lead to toxic politics.
But perhaps it's the other way around? That the voters are led to believe there are extremes? And only extremes? Most reasonable people understand few things in the world are truly binary.
But when everything is framed as red v blue, what choice is there? That paradigm is topped with confirmation bias, media hyperbole and social media misinformation.
I have a diverse group of friends and colleagues. No one I know wants this.
Is it though? Most people are more politically center and the extremes of the political spectrum keep trying to pull politicians towards the extremes. When that failed to work, they started pulling out the "you're either with us or against us" card forcing people to pick sides or be ostracized if they risked being nuanced.
Politics and media have become extreme because they are dying "industries." The internet has (pardon me) disrupted both of them. Severely. They crank up the hyperbole in order to try to justify the need for their existence. That cycle can't go on forever. In fact we see the results weekly. For example, politicians aren't moving the needle so more and more people resort to protesting (and yes, rioting).
I'm not an advocate of violence. But it's easy to see the level of frustration and disgust wasn't being addressed.
I started agreeing with you when you said politicians were failing people.
I disagree sharply about the riots, though. I think bad actors use things like social media (and even traditional media) to whip people into a frenzy. That's where the violence comes from, and it is rooted in politics more than a reaction to it.
We should come to some agreement and maybe give some people 3/5ths of their rights, as has been done prior. That should solve these "extreme" positions with some much needed compromise.
This won’t happen. I’m a reasonable person and happy to change my mind with evidence, and don’t say this lightly, but the republicans do not give a crud about any of this. They are the most conniving and soulless individuals that exist. This is coming from a recent former republican. I miss George Will’s Republican party.
That was not too long ago that we had a Peace Nobel Prize president who actively continued conflicts and initiated new ones. I hope you appreciate the irony of the whole peace prize theater.
- Afghanistan (from which he promised to stop the conflict, did not happen).
Interesting, I am talking about the previous administration, and your answer is to talk about something totally unrelated. You like pulling strawman on people?
And I had been talking about administration members arrested, and your solution was to talk about something totally unrelated, so it’s particularly rich of you to make this accusation when this is literally what you just did.
>How many people were killed by wars started in the previous administration? I'll let you ponder on that.
You're whatabouting really hard, and so I threw it back in your face. You complain about Obama "starting wars"? Well he didn't start any wars - that was GW Bush who started wars, and it was under GW Bush that 500,000+ humans were killed, not Obama.
So if you want to demonize someone, you might not want to lie about it and say they started wars when they didn't, and completely ignore the fact that the one who did start the wars actually killed an atrocious amount of people.
> No, the US never declared war on Libya. WTF are you even????
They didn't declare war on Iraq either, neither in 91 nor in 03. They didn't even declare war on Vietnam. Were they not at war with Vietnam, when they invaded the country and committed countless war crimes?
> Sorry, the US was never "at war" with Libya.
They bombed the shit out of Libya. At some point "not at war" becomes meaningless, you're just arguing semantics.
Libya was a military engagement authorized by United Nations Security Council. So don't go blaming the US for everything, the United Nations is who you should be angry at.
Don't confuse United Nations with United States. You should be mad at all the countries in the United Nations then, not just specifically the United States.
And no, they didn't "bomb the shit out of Libya". You're overreacting, and I wonder what agenda you serve.
Right. War. Just as in Vietnam, where it was even called the Vietnam War, or in Iraq, multiple times, the Gulf War and the Iraq War. Semantic games are boring.
> You're overreacting, and I wonder what agenda you serve.
Good grief, not everybody that disagrees with you has an agenda.
There is no reason to 'other' people like this. Parties are things that people adhere to, some for a season, some for a lifetime, but they reflect very little about their worth as human beings.
I come from a large family and we represent the whole spectrum of political beliefs, in a single generation, and all my sibs are equally kind and selfless, regardless of their political affiliation.
I think they were referring to the elected Republicans, not lay people. I'd be curious to know which elected (R) Senator/Congressperson you would consider kind and selfless.
> They are the most conniving and soulless individuals that exist
The Trump Republicans are far better in terms of war crimes. Not "better in terms of war crimes" is some sort of crowning achievement, but its hard to get much lower than srone striking Americans on foreign soil. To say Trump isn't an improvement over Busch just boggles my mind.
"Gallagher was acquitted on all but one of the charges he faced on July 2, 2019. He was found guilty of posing for a photograph with the teenager's corpse in violation of Uniform Code of Military Justice article 134, "General article"."
And the justice decision was made by a jury, Trump had nothing to do with it:
"The jury for Gallagher's court-martial was composed of five enlisted men, including a Navy SEAL and four Marines, plus a Navy commander and a Marine chief warrant officer, after the defense had rejected several other candidates."
The pardon of Trump was for the demotion and the prison time. Where do you see any information that he considered a "war criminal" after his trial?
There's a lot more horrible things happening in Yemen and absolutely nobody in the West cares. But everything is political nowadays, anything that's related to Trump gets high coverage, while there's probably somewhere like 200 000 people who have died so far in this ongoing conflict and it barely gets noticed.
The war wasn’t started by Obama so I’m not sure what your point is. In fact the current administration has been supplying the Saudis with all the armaments they need making the situation even worse.
Check your facts before posting blindly about media bias.
> The war wasn’t started by Obama so I’m not sure what your point is
Never said anywhere Obama started this war. I am talking about the media constantly ignoring Yemen, except when a drone strike kills a civilian and the drone strike happens to be from a President they despise. How strange!
I can't remember Obama strikes causing so much embarrassment during the last administration. Surely there is absolutely no journalistic bias at play.
Holy fucking hell. You're in for a ride if this is the short list. As an European I really really hope that y'all can turn this shit around in November, otherwise it's good bye US.
"BREAKING: Trump will quickly pick a replacement for Justice Ginsburg, and Sen. Mitch McConnell & the Republican-controlled Senate will move to confirm his nominee,creating a new political flashpoint in election while firing up evangelicals & shoring up GOP base and vote for Trump"
The frustrating thing about the center is the propensity to take things at face value, no matter how bad faith. It has been patently obvious for decades that the Republican party plays by a thoroughly cynical playbook. A credulous centrist elite accepts each new plot twist as the status quo, after a genteel interval of whining.
Enough is enough. People in favor of good governance need to end a system that allows a minority of voters to elect a President. That allows a minority of voters to elect a Senate majority that represents a minority of citizens. That allows a minority of voters to elect House majorities. That refuses the franchise to largely minoritized citizens of DC, Puerto Rico, and the other teritories. That does not allow the present and formerly incarcerated to vote. That allows unaccountable moneyed interests to blast the electorate with propaganda. That has, as a final check, a court of 9 life appointees.
For a long time, the country managed to float by on tradition, but our refusal to build a modern government is presently our downfall.
> The frustrating thing about the center is the propensity to take things at face value, no matter how bad faith. It has been patently obvious for decades that the Republican party plays by a thoroughly cynical playbook. A credulous centrist elite accepts each new plot twist as the status quo, after a genteel interval of whining.
It took me a long time to realize this, but I don't think "bad faith" or "cynicism" is the right way to look at how these Republican politicians are behaving. Both of those terms still imply a certain level of respect for the humanity of the other party and a desire to create some consensus, even if through subterfuge.
No, the Republicans are acting like Democratic politicians are enemies in war. It's not "cynical" to hide information from or mislead the enemy. It's just battle tactics. They aren't trying to reach consensus, they are trying to destroy.
It was tactical move and it worked; not unlike what McConnell did to Obama's Supreme Court pick in 2016 when the GOP controlled the House and the Senate. Politics is hardball, always has been.
This is ridiculous. It’s also what the republicans believe the democrats are doing. Both sides are absolutely certain they are right. Funny how that works.
I don't think it's a "new" political flashpoint. RBG was 87, with cancer, it's not a surprise.
McConnell has certainly laid plans for an attempt to force a crony through as quickly as possible before the election. Hopefully it won't happen before Trump gets flushed.
Doesn't need to happen before election - whoever wins the election, the current folks will be in office until January. They can press this forward before or after the election.
Only after reading about this did I realise that RBG was Catholic. There would have been a lot of familiarity of thought and philosophy in their backgrounds.
In some part, it makes it easier to disagree. Some of the arguments have been going on for centuries.
I don't have a link but I know it's happened in a few other HN comment sections.
Of course we have no clue as to how HN's algorithm works and what they do to mitigate manipulation on this platform. I definitely notice corporate spam on certain topics from time to time.
From what I've read Supreme Court Justices get more liberal with time, whether appointed by Republicans or Democrats, rather than hewing closer and closer to their original positions.
"My extended family wishes for me to return to Italy for my own safety"
This is ridiculous. As long as you stay out of high-crime ghetto areas, you are as safe in America as most places, moreover, the crime rate has been dropping for 30 years.
Trump hasn't changed anything aside from possibly creating conditions for some protestors and police to be clashing.
Also - consider that a slightly conservative Supreme Court is not really 'out of step' with America, just one side of America.
Theres a sliding scale of it though. The disinformation and anti-intellectual campaigns are generally weaker in mainland Europe and as a consequence the governments are less broken.
The US is at the point where 30-40% of the country would drink bleach and shoot their neighbor at the presidents command while probably similar numbers are functionally illiterate. Not to say the democracy has been functioning, but you can't have a functional one with these preconditions.
And its structurally intentional. This is all a product of decades of machination and effort to craft this cultural zeitgeist of zealotry and active war against one another while robber barons pillage the commons.
There's a tendency to overstate the popularity of our politicians. The President received 46% of the vote with 56% turnout, which means only 26% of the eligible vote. And many of those voters "plugged their nose" at the polls (though they may do it again).
We have minority rule in this country, and many people don't realize how small the minority is. Both political parties are hugely unpopular (even with their own members sometimes) and fail to represent the majority.
Then talk me down from my lofty vantage because looking at ICE internment camps and seeing women forcibly sterilized en masse is making it awfully hard to not conflate my WW2 history curriculum with the present day.
To be fair, there was only one doctor forcibly sterilizing women, and it appeared to be for personal profit rather than some eugenics directive from above. It's bad, but it's quite as bad as you're making it out to be.
If we're going to compare it to WW2 where they were doing experiments on humans and running eugenics projects, I think we should acknowledge that this is fundamentally different than that. Someone who didn't read the intercept story [1] might take the WW2 comparison too literally and think we've begun official mass sterilization programs. We haven't. What happened is tragic and awful, but it's not the same thing that Hitler did.
Unfortunately, in a global world run mostly by the US, China and Russia, Europe won't be immune from these effects; in fact, it isn't, since such ideology is clawing through there as well. Moving away will work in the short run, but it will only delay the inevitable.
The only way the entire world gets through this is an equal amount of intelligent, thrifty democratic zealotry and luck. If we fall, it's only a matter of time until the entire world goes with.
He was literally talking about consuming disinfectants. His fans somehow retconned that to a soviet study from the 70s that went nowhere, and somehow acted like that was better.
If you are not an American it's hard to understand the extent to which there is a cultural vortex where everything around you feels manufactured.
I left seven years ago and now live in a terrible third-world dictatorship actually. It's not that America is so bad to live in (if you have some money), but that things should be much better for young people especially and the justifications for why it can't be better are so deeply warped.
I see this on HN all the time - there will be some discussion about a problem that America has, and some one will suggest some solution. And then there'll be resounding cries of "that's impossible, too expensive, can't be done etc", but the suggested solution is something that > 50% of other western nations already do and there's plenty of evidence for it's effectiveness.
Those other nations have very different setups though. I don't believe anyone thinks it's "impossible, too expensive" as in physically impossible, but rather "impossible to do it and keep the basic setup of the American society as it is".
Of course it's possible for the US to have the same social systems as European nations, but every American would have to pay a lot more taxes. I understand "it's impossible" to mean "it's impossible to do in this configuration". You can build a sky scraper instead of a single family home, but it's impossible to do on the same budget.
Also this is a good article written a few years ago that tries to tamp down a bit of the RBG cult, and that she should have retired during Obamas term if she really was concerned about keeping a liberal justice on the SCOTUS.
The foresight wasn't about her being old, the foresight was about just how much the next Republican administration would skirt precedence and the rule of law.
It was obvious she should have retired then. I think she was great but her not retiring during Obama’s last term was arrogance. And now there is a good chance that filling the Supreme Court with another republican justice will motivate a lot of anti-trump voters who will hold their nose and vote him in just to pack the courts.
That is absurd. She could have retired halfway through Obama’s second term. Obama didn’t have any political courage or will to fight McConnell. He was thinking “we will win the next time anyway” which was also political arrogance.
If he did have courage we would have had Merrick Garland. It wouldn’t have been easy but it would have been worth the fight. If you’re saying that he was powerless against the Republicans then what’s the point in a president?
"If Obama had courage we would have had Merrick Garland" is a non-obvious conclusion that has widespread disagreement. If you're sure it's correct, can you post your reasoning of the techniques that Obama and the Democrats could have used that would have inexorably led to Garland's confirmation? Please make the argument.
As an Irishman in Canada and previously lived in the US, I can safely and concretely say the political and governmental grass is greener in both countries above the US.
As someone from outside of the United States, no. The treasonous corruption in the American Republican party is uniquely much much worse than basically anything going on in the rest of the western world.
Edit: The clusterfuck that was Brexit was pretty bad though.
Sure, but I could name many countries that are not nearly as bad as the USA is now. The same could be said comparing the USA to say, Belarus. Both are bad, clearly Belarus has much worse corruption.
That's true, but the united states is the big prize, which means the US is where greed and corruption is playing hardest. Having lived in the US and out of it, I believe that other places and not less selfish or petty, but there are places where greed and corruption just doesn't have it's shit together.
Honestly, no. The USA is uniquely fucked up. Seriously, everyone else in the rest of the stable world-leading countries is looking in with disbelief every week
We just had our Finance Minister quit because he was taking money from a non-profit that gets most of it’s money from the Federal gov’t. Oh and his daughter got a cushy job there too. Completely based on merit no doubt.
Trudeau says “oh we’re sorry about that”. And that’s it. No harm no foul.
Though Trudeau et al have done two serious problems (SNC-Lavalin, We), they do not hold a candle to the grifting and absolute corruption that is Trump and GOP.
Further, the much vaunted "checks and balances" of the US system have been shown to be a complete sham given the enabling that McConnell has allowed, the court packing that went on with the Supreme Court and this is happening with the lower courts. And that's not even getting into the impeachment trial.
At least with the Westminster system the electorate can throw out bums and have a clean slate where the new party can sweep away the more terrible stuff of the previous administration. The Liberals were able to backtrack on some of worse things the previous Tories, and implement some important policies relatively quickly (e.g., climate change).
If the CPC manages to get in, at the very least they'll probably cancel the completely useless Order in Council regarding firearms, and perhaps at least implement more useful gun violence policies (like reducing inequality). Of course if they continue to reject carbon pricing (or perhaps at least move toward cap-and-trade) then their chances of getting in are slim giving the general public's view toward climate change.
If anything th me parliamentary system has fewer checks and balances since the execute and legislative branches are one in the same.
Not to mention the Canadian senate just rubber stamps everything.
I think the corruption is much better hidden in Canada and plus the lower level of political engagement, you end up with a seemingly better system, that is in fact no better.
And SNC-Lavalin was a mockery of the separation of powers. The PM tried to pressure the minister of justice to go easy on a company that was also a big fundraiser. Jesus, the US has seen that blatant amount of corruption since Nixon (maybe the Iran-Contra).
> If anything th me parliamentary system has fewer checks and balances since the execute and legislative branches are one in the same.
How are those "checks and balances" working out in the US?
At least in a Parliamentary system and major issues can be fixed with the next majority of the Opposition. In the US system it is hard to get anything passed (even when it is important), and if something bad is rammed through, good luck trying to reverse it. Unless you delegate to the Executive branch.
Oh he didn't have to quit. That was a political decision by Trudeau. Morneau as soon as the news broke of the financial dealings, he "paid back the $40k in travel expenses I had forgotten about".
Trudeau made a calculated political decision - Moreau could hurt the chances of the Liberals staying in office, so he had to go. It also avoided a separate inquiry into Morneau, but at least we'll see what the inquiry finds about the charity overall.
And beyond the Conservative party, nobody in Canada seems to really care.
Is the point to say that Ardern is somehow above it all? She just suspended the election, citing Covid, even though there were no transmissions for over 3 months.
Err - what? The whole reason the election has been delayed is because of community transmission in Auckland. Additionally all parties have agreed to the suspension. In fact it was the opposition who called for the intitial suspension.
The major opposition party and most of the minor parties wanted the election to be suspended. It wasn't electioneering, it was literally just making sure thousands of people didn't go to the polls during a pandemic.
Of course I will have zero surprise if the right wingers now start pointing back to it as if it was a bad thing, because blind opposition to everything is just what they do. But at the time everyone was calling for it.
If you are an American and you are professing hate for America (as many in this thread are) I feel bad for you.
This is my home and I love it here. America has made mistakes, it will make more, it has corrupt people, evil people, good people, inventive people, thieving people but it's contributed quite a lot to this world socially, technologically and in many other ways.
I find this entire hate for America thing shallow, short-sided, ignorant and deeply disturbing and have very little use for people who professes this sentiment.
I always found it interesting that part of the American mythology is that it's a safe haven for the oppressed and ravaged peoples of the world who left their home country for a better future, but that the exact same thing, applied to the US, is somehow unthinkable.
What if you, at some point, find that the America you love makes it abundantly clear that it does not love you back, though? At risk of affirming Godwin's law, I'm sure that a lot of people living in Nazi Germany thought Germany was their home and loved it there, too. But at some point, you have to cut your losses, though.
Warmongering I'll agree with. Powerful interests have made a lot of bad things happen. We can't change the past but we can and should work to change the future.
However, I'm quite pleased we defeated Nazi Germany and hastened the downfall of the Soviet Union. The rest of the world should be as well.
Racist! Nope. There are racist people here. The country as a whole and an institution is not racist at this point and that very simply an untrue (if popular at the moment) claim.
Indoctrination. Ya, like that from the public school system and Reddit being displayed in this thread?
Here's the bottom line for Americans. You live here. There are lots of good things about the essential set up and circumstances of this country. You presumably have to live here. What you have from the past is what you have. So stop your juvenile whining and destructive misplaced hatred and start doing something positive and make the place you live a place you want to be.
As an immigrant to this country, you have no idea how good things are here in the US. It would be nice to trade those unhappy with the US with those that would be grateful to be here.
Venezuela, Cuba and Vietnam too. Pretty much anyone that has suffered under authoritarianism and communism and wants to live in a country where they have freedoms and are rewarded for their hard work is welcome in my book.
Yes, right before a massive civil war broke out that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. I don't think you're making the point that you think you're making.
You may be right about politics alone. But there's a much greater division in the US right now of worldviews, of which politics is only the most visible interface--probably because politics uniquely forces us to choose collectively one way or another.
The best we can look forward to is a decade of civil war if Biden manages to take office.
Unless someone figures out how to neutralize Facebook and Q immediately. Biden's still talking about being able to make deals with McConnell. We're totally fucked.
It will of course be incomprehensibly darker if Trump manages to hold power.
That's correct, the country is fkd either way. If T. wins, he will cement his dictatorship. If he loses, even if removed from power, the country will be close to civil war.
I suspect, based on your comment, that you and I have a fair amount of conflict in our expressed politics. (I was firmly in the “May RBG hang on for dear life” camp.) Nevertheless, I agree with the core tenet here: term limits would be a major improvement for the SCOTUS, even if relatively lengthy. They would mitigate for all involved parties the otherwise daunting threat of a particular personality, potentially ideologically incompatible with one’s own worldview, holding sway open-endedly and potentially for a generation.
(Separately: I found that the NPR link didn’t work for me at first, and checked NYT; they had not yet posted an obit.)
The courts are politicized i.e. partisan, but holding Gender Equality "activism" up as an example of this would be counterproductive. This would make anything other than extreme textualism sacrilege, although equality is in the spirit of the constitution if not the attitudes of those who wrote it (i.e. They owned slaves).
Being in favour of gender equality, is a political statement - politics is a catch all term for every heated interaction between people that (hopefully) doesn't involve guns. You have to have some political principles to guide your court.
Also relevant, the recent Trans rights supreme court ruling - makes some people uneasy (Politics!) but still absolutely the right thing to do (in vacuo or within the context of the CRA). I would link to it but Visual Studio has just starting rebooting my computer...
It's not even surprising when you consider that SCOTUS judges are, by constitutional design, appointed by presidents, who by design, are supposed to represent the electorate.
If judges were supposed to be pure judges and not activists, they would be selected by an independent process purely based on legal / academic merit.
All judges, but especially Supreme Court ones, are political activists. They just have the education and experience to wrap it in legal language.
Republicans do not always win but do play more hardball, and that is not a compliment. They aggressively use anti (small d) democratic tactics like gerrymandering, disfranchisement, etc. They also enjoy a large structural advantage in the Senate, because the average State is more rural and much more white than the average American.
Should Democrats win the Presidency and a Senate majority, they should prioritize (small d) democratic reforms, stuff that cannot be easily undone in 2024. In particular, make Washington DC a state. This is not hardball, it's just basic fairness: DC metro has one of the highest percentages of Black people, and DC statehood will make the Senate more representative of America (only partially - red states will still have an advantage).
My sense is that the Democratic party has an appetite for this. Should they gain power, they won't make the same mistakes. See HR 1.
I feel terrible for viewing this sad event through the lens of electoral politics, but RBG was a champion for voting rights.
I'm sorry but how exactly did they democrats get in the way last time when Obama was president? Rolling over and saying whats suppose to happen doesn't qualify as anything meaningful as far as I am concerned. If the democrats want support, they need to grow a fucking backbone and show us they deserve it.
You mean when they barely had a majority in his first two years, and that only with the conservative Blue Dog Democrats, and then nothing but bitter opposition trying increasingly unprecedented obstruction tactics for the next six? Remember how most of the people who whine about the ACA not including a public option forget that this came down to one person (Joe Lieberman) because they couldn’t get the votes otherwise?
That’s a great example of WHY you need to vote in every election: it’s not enough to get a narrow win, you need a margin to get much done. If you want candidates more to your liking, you need to start organizing at the local level and building a movement: politics go to people who show up. The GOP has minority approval for most of their positions but is in power because their voters show up at every election.
In the United States, one especially important thing to focus on is electoral reform. Currently, most voters have a binary choice where not voting for the Republican candidate is effectively the same as voting for the Democrat or vice versa. The best long term thing we could see would be more ranked or run-off voting so it’s viable to run multiple candidates.
> I'm sorry but how exactly did they democrats get in the way last time when Obama was president?
How could they? They didn't have the votes, because people didn't vote for democrats. You want democrats to have power in the government: make sure they have a majority.
Fail to see how that matters in states like California and when the former presidential candidate lost with a surplus of 2.5 million votes. Your vote for president only really matters in a handful of states regardless of how many popular votes you tally.
You've shifted your argument. Previously it was that you shouldn't vote because you didn't want to support democratic representatives who "don't have a backbone", now it's that you don't want to vote because it doesn't matter.
I'll also note that your vote for president has no impact on the senate's membership. It's entirely a non-sequitor.
Too bad that wasn't actually the way you win a Presidential election. There is an actual rationale for the Electoral college. Go ahead and argue for different rules but pointing out that the results would have been different if the rules were different isn't that informative.
The fact of the matter is, no matter who wins your vote for President likely does not matter anyway
The biggest problem we have is people seem to only care about the presidential election, your local city /county council, your mayor, your local auditor, property assessor, school board, and many other local positions have a much higher impact in your daily life than the president ever will, and your vote in those elections absolutely does matter
This is my conclusion too. Not only are democrats losers they perfectly fine with it too. They've let republicans out politic them every since Reagan. Another in a long line of humiliating political defeats at the hands of big money.
And if you look at the popularity of their platform it should've been all of them. Republican platform is buoyed by irrational pro-choice one issue voters and Russian funded NRA propaganda.
Democratic party isn't as popular because it's leaders are too principled to make the tough, unpalatable decisions republicans make everyday. They consistently fail to properly market their more popular platform and allow republicans to control the conversation.
I am going to take a stab in the dark, and guess you live on one of the 2 coasts, and have never spent any time in the Rust Belt, Iron Range, or the Breadbasket states???
Because the Democrats have been loosing those people for years and years now
//for the record I am libertarian and support neither party.. and I think Picking Harris as VP is what will cost Biden the elections
The Democratic platform is more popular. Far more people voted for Democrats for president and Congress in 2016 than voted for Republicans. Therefore their platform is the popular one, measured by the number of votes.
But due to the electoral college and antidemocratic structure of the Senate, votes in Republican strongholds have 3 times as much weight as those in Democratic strongholds.
Seems unlikely - at the ACLU she wrote an amicus arguing that giving benefits to wives of male soldiers but not husbands of female soldiers was unjust and the husbands should be entitled to the same benefits (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1972/71-1694), and last year's federal case National Coalition for Men v. Selective Service System ruled, based on the precedent she set in that case, that the male-only draft was unconstitutional. The ACLU, along with a number of women's rights organizations, filed an amicus on appeal arguing that the ruling was correct. (The appeal was organized by a conservative group founded by Phyllis Schlafly.)
There is no evidence that she would be opposed to women entering the draft. The case hasn’t been tried before the Supreme Court, but a Federal Court has already said that excluding women from the draft is discriminatory.
People don't "enter" the draft, that's why it's called conscription. And you would think after decades of having opinions on similar issues she might have expressed a view at some point.
Go back 10 years and as apathetic as voters were in much of the developed world, I had a hard time envisioning how these democracies/republics could fall. Boy was I naive.
There was a time in the US that as bitter as partisan politics could be there seemed to be a level of decency on both sides and a higher loyalty to the institutions of our government.
Nixon resigned in disgrace because it became clear even his own party would not support him. I honestly think that if Watergate happened today, the president's party would defend the president regardless of what happened.
You see active and organized voter suppression, politicization of the election process itself and gerrymandering on a massive yet accurate scale.
The attitude seems to have set in that the ends justify the means. "Look at what the other side does." Abortion in particular seems to be one of those issues where self-described moral voters seem to view anything as justified. Like how anyone can justify to thsmselves bombing an abortion clinic or a church is in any way justifiable is beyond me.
The level of GOP obstruction in the Obama era was utterly unprecedented. The filibuster was defended until it was politically expedient to get rid of it. A simple majority for Supreme Court justices is unprecedented, at least in the modern era. Refusing to even hold a hearing for a Supreme Court nominee is unprecedented and everyone knew that too would be abandoned if ever convenient.
Take Kavanaugh's confirmation. Of course a conservative president is going to nominate a conservative justice. Kavanaugh I believe was on the Federalist Society's list of 25 potential nominees where they expressed no preference among the 25.
The hearings produced some pretty serious baggage for Kavanaugh (ie Ford's accusations). He could've had his nomination withdrawn (or he could've withdrawn himself) and been replaced with another conservative justice with no such baggage but that didn't happen.
What you have is privileged white men, in particular Trump and McConnell, who didn't want to lose face by backing down. Arguably they didn't like the idea that Kavanaugh, another white man, would be held accountable for something that he simply wouldn't have been 20 years ago. So getting him confirmed became a way of rubbing this victory in the face of opponents.
This is what I find utterly unfathomable: so much of Trump's support is essentially religious. By any objective measure, Trump is a reprehensible human being. How any "moral voters" can look passed that because abortion I would never have predicted. It's utterly indefensible.
And this is what concerns me the most: it seems like Trump can do nothing that will rock his base. Arguably colluding with foreign governments, his love affair with despots and tyrants, the political scapegoating of the poor and immigrants and the dog-whistle (some would say steam-whistle) politics of white supremacism. It's so depressing.
So yeah, it's weeks until the election and the standard used to stall Merrick Garland's nomination is completely forgotten (of course). That seat will be filled by the election. McConnell has already come up and said Trump's nominee would get a vote on the Senate floor.
Personally I don't generally have an issue with conservative jurisprudence. At its core, it's a belief the the Constitution is literal. It says what it says and it doesn't say what it doesn't say. If you want it to say something else, there's a process for that (ie a constitutional amendment). Personally I find the "living document" interpretation of the Constitution to be nothing more than populism.
This can be taken too far. Constitutional literalism was used in the post-Civil War era (ie the Redeemer era) to dismantle the rights of former slaves.
As you see in this thread, Scalia is scapegoated by some of the Left as a hater but this is (IMHO) an ignorant view. Read the man's opinions.
What does sadden me is the utterly self-serving, completely hypocritical and utterly inconsistent "the ends justify the means", institution-eroding and obstructionist approach that will inevitably lead us there.
All the baggage you speak of was entirely unproven, and unprovable since they were 30 year old accusations.
All this in an election year where there was hope that maybe Republicans wouldn't have the votes afterwards.
That seems more towards corruption than legal proceedings to me.
Note during the last year of Obama the democrats did not have the majority, so it's not really a fair comparison (what McConnell did would have been impossible otherwise). But still, this is a norm, not a law, in the same way that, with or without another Trump nomination, Biden could legally appoint justices until he has the majority. There's no law unfortunately setting the size to 9.
> All the baggage you speak of was entirely unproven
The best any reasonable person can argue is that Kavanaugh was being less than forthright. His demeanour resonated for many with what a guilty man would do if caught. Worse, he seemed to think he was above these proceedings. Consider this exchange [1].
> Note during the last year of Obama the democrats did not have the majority, so it's not really a fair comparison
Sure it is. If hearings were held and a vote held on the Senate floor where the nominee failed to secure nomination then that's that.
The problem was that McConnell wasn't sure he could defeat the nomination. Having a vote would put a number of GOP senators in a difficult position to vote down the nomination. So rather than risk a vote he might lose, which would have a political cost, he simply refused to hold hearings let alone a vote.
If you think that's the same thing because the Democrats didn't have a majority you're at best delusional and at worst intellectually dishonest.
This will probably be downvoted, but I think it was incredibly arrogant and selfish of RBG not to retire when Obama was in office so that he could pick her successor. She knew she was getting old and had already had brushes with cancer. If she really cared about feminism and liberalism, why not let Obama appoint a younger justice to the court, someone who would fight for those values for years to come? It's not like there is a shortage of great choices.
It's sad to me that people like you think it's more important that your politics are represented in the Supreme Court than that the justices do a good job working together and holding a consistent integral legal standard for the country to follow.
As a fan of the Supreme Court, I think it's one of our least-political institutions. It's certainly the least political branch of government, especially if you compare it to the Legislature (extremely political) and the President (extremely political). It's the only piece of sanity we have left.
And here you call her selfish for not playing politics. Please, consider the value of having a part of government without politics. Consider how rare it is for someone to put other ideals above their political party!
Due to a really old technicality in our electoral system, we keep putting people in the presidency that the American people didn't actually vote for. Both Bush and Trump were not elected by a popular vote.
The majority of American are being held hostage by a minority of voters with a disproportionate amount of political power.
These un-elected presidents have had such incredibly far-reaching influences on the American political landscape, economy, and infrastructure (setting aside the fallout of the neocon's foreign military adventures).
I agree with you that presidents who lose the popular vote have questionable legitimacy. But Bush did actually win the popular vote in 2004 (a majority even) for his second term, which is when he appointed Roberts and Alito.
Edit: As erichocean pointed out, I am incorrect. Although Hilary received the most votes of any candidate, the majority of Americans did not vote for her. I think that my point still stands, however.
Which candidate received the most votes from American voters in both 1992 and 1996?
Based on the definition I understand, the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide is said to have won the popular vote.
You are correct that the majority of voters did not vote for Clinton in 2016. I misspoke. However, she did win the popular vote. More Americans voted for her than voted for Trump. However, against the wishes of the voting public, Trump was elected president.
In general, I don't think popular vote totals for President are relevant because they don't produce a winner, so people don't vote in states where their candidate will easily win. This is true for both "red" and "blue" states.
I frequently don't vote here in CA because my choices win whether I vote or not. I can't be the only one who makes the same choice.
I also live in California, and often feel as though my vote does not matter.
This is sort of the crux of my argument. Our system has reached a point where individual Americans can feel as if their vote doesn't matter because......well, it doesn't. That's a very unhealthy point for a democracy to be at.
I don't believe that is the intention behind our Democratic system (unfortunately maybe it was originally, but I'm working off of our 21st century interpretation of what the democratic system is for, not that of the slaveholding founders).
It was engineered to avoid the tyranny of the majority, not to facilitate the tyranny of the minority (again, ignoring the actions of the original founders).
Some of the most significant policy decisions of my lifetime (from the Iraq war to the present scuffles) have been enacted by presidents who did not even receive the popular vote (with, as you pointed out a popular vote not being a majority vote). That seems to me to be a problem.
This is Trump's chance to score some points. If he defers the appointment he will score some points with people and have a better chance of re-election. If they ram it through his chances of winning will be worse than they already are. This is at most a 2d chess move. They'll probably still screw it up.
I think we can all be certain that whoever is appointed by the Federalist Society and approved by Mitch McConnell will make sure Trump wins a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) term.
The American experiment as a free and democratic country is over.
Unless you want to live in a real world version of The Handmaid's Tale, get the fsck out if you still can.
Stop with these kind of comments. Do you honestly think the Supreme Court would allow a President to win a 3rd term? “We can all be certain” should be translated to “I feel like making a crazy rant here”. “Experiment is over” - the election is in 7 weeks, let’s hold off on the “get out while you can” comments until it’s over.
How confident are you in your statement that the “American experiment is over”? Care to bet $10k on there being a free and fair election in 2028? I get “Yes”, you can have “No”.
And the Electoral Integrity Project gave North Carolina's 2016 elections the rating you'd give if it didn't have free and fair elections, and more people were wrongly denied the ability to vote in Georgia's gubernatorial election (overseen by the eventual winner) than decided the election, and so forth.
So, I'm interested in potentially taking this bet. Can you define what you mean by "a free and fair election"? (The EIP's conclusions were widely contested, so I'm not saying we should accept them as a standard, but I would like to set an objective standard.)
> Do you honestly think the Supreme Court would allow a President to win a 3rd term?
Do I think a Supreme Court starting with the current one, with Ginsberg’s empty seat and probably Justice Breyer’s replaced by the kind of people the current Republican Party would appoint and confirm (assuming Trump gets a second term and the Republicans hold the Senate) would allow Trump to serve beyond the end of his second term with a fig leaf of an excuse of emergency preventing normal process, even with the 22nd Amendment in place?
Probably not, but I don't see it as outside the realm of possibility.
> Care to bet $10k on there being a free and fair election in 2028? I get “Yes”, you can have “No”.
No one who has publicly expressed concern about an incipient authoritarian regime can expect to be able to collect and enjoy their winnings if the answer is no, so that's never going to be a bet they'll accept no matter how certain they are of the outcome.
So now we’re claiming the entire US monetary system is going to collapse (and as a result most likely the worlds monetary system)? The more levels down we go in the comments here, the crazier the conspiracies.
> So now we’re claiming the entire US monetary system is going to collapse (and as a result most likely the worlds monetary system)?
No, that's not why outspoken critics of an incipient authoritarian regime would not be likely to be able to collect or enjoy their winnings if the regime was successful in establishing itself. The monetary system is in no way part of the issue.
Understanding how modern societies fail was my professional field.
The United States is following in the footsteps of many countries that transitioned from democracy to authoritarianism. The judiciary was the last remaining bulwark that had been slightly slowing the erosion of democratic rights. With the judicial balance of power now in the hands of a president who has both taken steps to conduct an unfair election and has repeatedly expressed desires for extra-constitutional powers, it is naive in the extreme to imagine that American democracy is not mortally wounded.
America is turning itself into a cross between apartheid-era South Africa and Putin's Russia. While Trump has accelerated this trend, it is a trend far larger than him and it will not be stopped even if Biden somehow becomes the next president. Even if there is a Biden victory and some solution in the Senate, there must be no doubt that a 6-3 GOP USSC will overturn any pro-democratic, or anti-authoritarian, reforms that might be approved by Congress.
I reiterate, the alarm bells are ringing for America as a free society and it is time for anyone who doesn't want to live in The Handmaid's Tale to get out because things aren't going to get any better.
What do your studies say about creating new states to gain more votes in the senate? Something that's already been introduced in the house.
Worse even its being created by shrinking the zone that was purposefully created to not be a state. Puerto Rico would undoubtedly also give 2 more democratic seats, but at least it's a large American territory, not something we're artificially creating for more votes.
The general problem with any kind of pro-democracy reforms is that the people who need to approve reforms are precisely the people who benefit from current antidemocratic policies. No one will approve reforms that will end their careers.
Some of the US' democratic problems could be helped by splitting up the more populous states so their populations have more representation in the Senate and Electoral College, but any such plan would need to be approved by flyover state Republican Senators who benefit handsomely from the status quo.
Given that the GOP party line--echoed by both McConnell and Trump--is that fixing US democracy would be a Democratic power grab, meaningful reforms are dead on arrival. This is especially true as any meaningful reforms would, by definition, remove the Republican party's disproportionate hold on power.
Sadly, I don't see a way out of this. With no route for peaceful reform, the usual escape route for irreconcilable differences within a country is civil war, but the human geography of the United States makes another civil war very unlikely. An inexorable slide into deepening authoritarian oligarchy/kleptocracy seems unavoidable.
>Some of the US' democratic problems could be helped by splitting up the more populous states so their populations have more representation in the Senate and Electoral College, but any such plan would need to be approved by flyover state Republican Senators who benefit handsomely from the status quo.
Do you not see how this could be done by the republican party as well? Split Texas up into 4 parts, make 1 part primarily Democrat, the rest republican?
Besides, I guess your studies are more focused around theory, and not the actual legal government structure in the US. I miss understood. The whole point of the senate was to avoid tyranny of the majority, otherwise 3 states could control the other 47.
The functional manifestation of the American democratic deficit is that the Republican party is able to maintain a near-permanent lockhold on power despite commanding only the support of a minority of the population. Any reform that maintains the status quo by protecting the tyranny of the Republican minority is not beneficial.
Notwithstanding the original purpose of the Senate, shifting population demographics mean that, by 2040, 70% of the Senate will represent the interests of only 1/3rd of Americans. The other 2/3rds of the US population will be forced to live with control over 30% of the Senate[1]. This is not avoiding tyranny of the majority; it is allowing the (Republican) flyover states to dictate to (Democratic) urban areas how they should organize their societies and live their lives.
Meaningful democratic reforms in America mean making its institutions reflect the makeup of America, and that means less representation for rural areas and fewer Republican in power.
Your comments also call into question if you understand that the house is determined by popular vote. The senate alone can not force anyone to live their lives differently. It would require control of both the house and the senate to do that.
And you said near permanent control while being the minority, when Republicans last had won the popular vote for control of the house in 2016.
In terms of erosion of democratic rights by the Supreme Court, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act is the most literal example, as is the decision to prevent Al Gore from taking the White House in 2000 despite being the legitimate electoral victor. A more peripheral example is Citizens' United.
Non-judicial examples include sabotage of the USPS to prevent mail-in voting, the last state election in Georgia (where the then-secretary of state supervised an election in which he was a candidate; needless to say, he won), removal of polling stations in Democratic areas, targeted disenfranchisement of demographic groups that traditionally vote Democratic, Mitch McConnell rejecting measures to increase voter turnout on the grounds that making it easier to vote would be a "Democratic power grab," Republican use of big data to jerrymander safe districts to maintain GOP control of states despite losing the popular vote, FBI interference in the 2016 election by releasing unsubstantiated accusations (the Comey Memo) against Clinton shortly before the election, and, finally, the Republican party soliciting foreign help to illegally acquire and spread disinformation against Democrats.
These are not signs of a healthy democracy.
I can provide sources if you would like but this stuff is everywhere and simple DDG/Google searches about these examples should lead to plenty of information.
I'll grant you "the gutting of the Voting Rights Act". It's both a well-defined target for me read and it seems like a legitimate erosion of rights. Still I would like to read the majority opinion before I make up mind completely. Thanks for bringing it up.
Aside from the Voting Rights Act various voter-suppression activities were going on for decades and I don't see a change there. Wrong? Certainly. But not erosion.
Citizens' United seems like a legitimate court decision to me. I'm not sure I am a fan of the outcome, but the law is what it is. The Congress can make new law if they do not like it, and I might support this change.
Everything else you posted is a grab-bag of complains rather that an actual erosion of rights. I'm sorry. "FBI interference" swings both ways - some of it against dems, other against reps. I would rather they stayed out altogether, but we're far from Hoover days. In any case it's more dirty political infighting and pretty much nothing to do with citizen rights.
So end of the day Voting Rights Act is the only thing I can agree with. Meanwhile we've have also gained significant rights, e.g. gay rights, healthcare rights, women's participation in society, free speech (in particular "indecent" speech).
Bottom line is that I am not buying the "the alarm bells are ringing for America as a free society".
They don't have lifetime appointments - they have appointments during "good behavior." Who's going to determine when they've started behaving badly?
I mean, the history of basically every country that has fallen into single-party rule is the story of good intentions, including the belief that people will listen to the constitution, not counting for much in the face of real-world political power. I'm not saying it will happen to the US; I'm saying it's naive to believe it can't happen.
If you mean that you're treating the Democrats and Republicans as a single party, sure, there's a decent argument for it, but also, it's a "party" that permits significant internal dissent and debate. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union remained a single party until the end, but the country started on its path towards becoming freer and less authoritarian when they became open to internal dissent.
Frankly, independent of actual political goals, the most concerning thing about the state of US politics is the extent to which the Republican Party does not tolerate internal dissent. There was a lot of it in early 2016, and it all evaporated as people fell in line behind a cult of personality (a term introduced at the start of the above process in the CPSU, incidentally). Regardless of whether you're left or right or center or anywhere else, if you're at a place where disagreement with the leader is a reason to question your loyalty and good faith, you're at a place where there's far less pressure for the leader to serve the country than for the country to serve the leader. (This is why it's not particularly helpful that the leader isn't super competent or even that the leader is not on team More-Stupid-Wars - a position that, by itself, I agree with. I also enjoy it when trains run on time.)
Politically charged appointees to the Supreme Court have on occasion surprised naysayers and showed independence or at least made it a point to not be outright impartial.
It really does seem the cosmos has decided that America's time of greatness (however broad the meaning of that word is) is at an end. I hope my comment turns out to be another "who needs dropbox". Edit0:s/this/my.
Based on what? A justice dying and a terrible president who will be voted out of office in 7 weeks? Quit with the sensationalist “the world is ending” comments that aren’t based on anything but you’re pessimistic gut feeling.
You accuse me of pessimistic gut feeling while laying out yours. The election outcome is far far far from certain. I used to deal with coworkers who were similarly smug in 2016 and they were proven to be equally wrong.
Have you? Yes, Trump is terrible, there have been other Presidents as terrible as him in US history (Buchanan, Johnson, Harding) and the ship has always righted itself. He also hasn’t fundamentally altered the American political system. Congress still makes laws, Supreme Court still rules on their legality, President still signs them into law. The comments on here act like Trump has become a Francisco Franco when the fact is he’s likely to be voted out of office in 7 weeks and gone from politics on January 20th.
Congress makes laws, Supreme Court rules on their legality, President signs them into law. This is just procedure. It could describe a well functioning fascist regime or it could describe a rights-based democracy. I don't think Trump will be around forever but the problem is bigger than Trump.
> will make sure Trump wins a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) term
How would a Supreme Court Justice do this? A third and fourth term would require a constitutional amendment, which requires ratification by 3/4ths of the states.
Ok, are you honestly saying that you think a majority of the Supreme Court justices will rule against a direct and clear Constitutional Amendment just to help a President that has no control over them or their jobs?
Has this post really gotten to this point, that we’re just posting crazy claims without any merit or knowledge or research at all? Isn’t HN better than this?
A Republican USSC throwing out the constitution, and the principle of democratic fairness, to put a Republican in the White House is not without precedent.
Al Gore legitimately won the 2000 election. The USSC prevented him from taking office.
Parent asked how they could do it, not why. So I told how. Never said I thought they would do it. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me as much as it should though.
A Supreme Court ruling directly against the 22nd Amendment seems even less likely to me than somehow getting enough votes in Congress and then 38 states to ratify a new amendment to nullify it. Which also seems incredibly unlikely.
I think you’re underestimating the independence that justices feel when they’re appointed. The new appointee would owe nothing to Trump. Look at Roberts ruling for Oabamacare and Kavanaughs recent rulings.
You're ignoring the kompromat. It's presumably why most of these Republican senators have given up all shreds of conservatism and stand by watching Trump turn our country into a dumpster fire.
I'd guess it exists for most politicians. I'm just specifically calling out Republican senators as it seems they're no longer beholden to the US power structure. It's a novel position for me to be hoping the US establishment retakes control, instead of succumbing to whatever external powers are working to disrupt it. Freedom has to arise from the people via technological progress, a collapse will merely drag us backwards.
As for how the creation of compromising material happens - people lust after power to obtain things that money can't buy. Epstein's island wasn't merely for recreation.
If Trump and the Republicans confirm a new Justice, Democrats have indicated they will pack the Supreme Court, appointing as many Justices as they feel necessary to get the rulings they want.
"If they show that they're unwilling to respect precedent, rules and history, then they can't feign surprise when others talk about using a statutory option that we have that's fully constitutional in our availability," he said. "I don't want to do that. But if they act in such a way, they may push it to an inevitability. So they need to be careful about that."
The Constitution and Bill of Rights are interpreted through the Supreme Court. If you pack the court, you have essentially destroyed the legitimacy of Constitutional government. The consequences of this cannot be overstated.
All Constitutional rights will be up for reinterpretation and elimination. This is a very precarious moment in history. Perhaps the end of American history as we have known it. That's a grandiose statement, but it's not an incorrect one.
This is amusingly silly. Changing the composition of the Court is not unheard of and FDR, not exactly known as the poster child of "destroying the legitimacy of Constitutional government," nearly did it in 1937 (and likely would have if not for another untimely death.) https://today.law.harvard.edu/if-democrats-win-in-november-s...
Consider Maduro (Venezuela). He and his government are enduring all kinds of enormous attacks from all around the ("Western") world and horrible malicious interference by USA, but the only thing that we know of that Maduro's side did wrong (arguably) was packing the Supreme Tribunal of Justice.
"Venezuela: UN report urges accountability for crimes against humanity"
“The Mission found reasonable grounds to believe that Venezuelan authorities and security forces have since 2014 planned and executed serious human rights violations, some of which – including arbitrary killings and the systematic use of torture – amount to crimes against humanity,” said Marta Valiñas, chairperson of the Mission.
“Far from being isolated acts, these crimes were coordinated and committed pursuant to State policies, with the knowledge or direct support of commanding officers and senior government officials.”
I appreciate the link to the UN's press release for the new report, but note that my point stands: the attacks on Maduro happened long before this report, so long before they could have been justified.
Furthemore, considering the attacks on Maduro included a smearing campaign from media and governments all around the "Western" world, I will read the Mission's report with a heavy dose of skepticism. (Of course, on the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if the Mission's report was honest.) An example warning sign: it seems strange to entrust the Mission to only three people. Another example, the Mission relied heavily on blogs and similar for the report.
I could have just as easily pointed out that Maduro didn't allow the opposition to run in 2018, or that Venezuela has been starving since 2012, etc, but the your comment coupled with news of the recent report was too much of a contrast not to point it out.
I'm not going to keep commenting about this though. Ultimately, I can't convince people who do not want to be convinced. The Western far Left supports murderous clients much like the governments it condemns - probably moreso. But the West's governments are actually elected, and they operate in the real-politick world. The far Left does its support for tyrants voluntarily as part as its struggle against other Western factions - treating the locals as pawns even more than the Western governments do.
I am not in any way invested in the Maduro regime, but it would be simply stupid to "want to be convinced" of something like this. When I saw a lot of journalistic coverage of Maduro that is not just non-neutral in the presentation, but even uninterested in presenting facts (at least in manner that the reader could verify); so basically just Maduro-bashing - of course I am going to be skeptical.
The uncertainty with the Venezuela-related facts is not the only thing that raises suspicion; the other thing is how deficiencies of democracy (even when the issues are much more clear cut) in non-socialist South America are under-reported compared to Venezuela (take, e.g., the coup in Bolivia, or how the former Brazilian president was seemingly framed, or the Pegasus spyware). One has to wonder why is it that all the big media organizations and most Western governments try to intervene in Venezuelan politics, and not, e.g. in such problems in some Indian state or in, e.g., some ex-USSR republic. I'm not claiming I know the answer, but it seems that some powerful but hidden motivations do exist. (I guess the simplest answer for the journalism part is that journalists need something sensational to write about and it's easy and acceptable to bash on some socialist government.)
From my cursory readings over the last few years, there has been far more coverage of Brazil than of Venezuela, and inasmuch there has been coverage of Venezuela it focused on the US-Venezuela relations angle (which is comfortable to the regime) rather than the 'Venezuelans are dying' issue (which isn't).
But again, this is a distraction. There will always been some excuse by the far Left which is basically 'look over there!'. The issue is not press coverage, but the crimes of the 'socialist' regime (that's how they call themselves, but not the practice, which is why Chavez's daughter's wealth is estimated in the billions).
The legitimacy of the court is long-gone--its nothing more than a political body. Don't like the precedent? Just overrule it and claim it was 'poorly argued'.
Especially funny, considering that Ginsburg was perhaps the most likely to vote based on how she thought the country should operate, and not on stare decisis or leaving issue to congress.
Probably best to not dig into the details too much since this thread isn't about that, but I personally absolutely understand why they characterized it as an "unhinged mob", given you had a very transparent attempt to fabricate a life-altering rape claim in order to hold up a nomination.
I watched every minute of the hearing, read the memo released by Rachel Mitchell (the lawyer hired by the Republicans to ask questions in their stead), and did a bunch of other research around the issue, and it became clear to me that the story was completely fabricated, given that even close friends of the accuser could not corroborate her story, let alone the party itself ever having existed, and Kavanaugh produced a (weirdly) meticulous calendar that showed that he wasn't in the area whatsoever.
Personally, I am a strong believer that sexual assault is a criminal matter. It's not the kind of thing you stay silent about for decades, having never stored any memorandums of the alleged crime (the therapist notes did not name Kavanaugh specifically and were relatively recent), and then try to spring on someone to prevent their appointment. If you really think someone is a rapist, you should try to put them in jail, not just stop them from taking a political position. (And yes, I understand that often victims do not want to bring up criminal charges and I understand why. But if you haven't documented any real evidence, trying to bring up an issue 3-4 decades later is just totally absurd. These are life-destroying claims being made here. Ford (the accuser) had NO EVIDENCE (the "therapist's notes" did not identify Kavanaugh, or go into any detail into the supposed act)).
Anyway, I've rambled enough. Sorry for the wall of text, but I really hate how so many friends of mine to this day still think Kavanaugh is a rapist without a shred of evidence; indeed, it's worse than that because all the evidence makes me personally feel that this was a case of outright deceit rather than false memory or a simple mixup. There were just too many contradictions and changes to the story and lack of detail where it really mattered to make the allegation even remotely credible, even if we use a "there's reasonable cause to believe he was a rapist" standard. That is to say that I don't think Blasey Ford met even an incredibly weak standard of evidence.
>[sexual assault is] not the kind of thing you stay silent about for decades, having never stored any memorandums of the alleged crime
I'm not going to get into any specifics about Kavanaugh, but this is flatly untrue. Plenty of people stay silent about being assaulted. One reason is people like you who will call them liars whenever they come forward.
No I understood your words. You misunderstand the damage your words could cause. There is little in the way of proof that could possibly exist for a 35+ year old rape. You are not only calling this woman a liar because she can't provide something that doesn't exist, but you are also saying she shouldn't even come forward unless she has enough proof to put this man in jail. That shows a total lack of knowledge of these type of crimes and a total lack of empathy towards the victims of these crimes. The end result is that people with your mindset continue to discourage victims from coming forward.
I am aware of that, thus why I immediately followed my statement up with this:
> And yes, I understand that often victims do not want to bring up criminal charges and I understand why. But if you haven't documented any real evidence, trying to bring up an issue 3-4 decades later is just totally absurd. These are life-destroying claims being made here. Ford (the accuser) had NO EVIDENCE
My point is, if you wait 30 years to come forward, you should have evidence. If you don’t have evidence then don’t expect someone to not be confirmed. Again this case was worse than no evidence because the “evidence” presented was mutually contradictory
> If you don’t have evidence then don’t expect someone to not be confirmed.
Basically everybody went into this process expecting Kav to be confirmed, since there is a long history of ignoring these sorts of claims.
"You shouldn't expect justice without evidence" and "people who come forward after decades are liars because nobody does that" are very very very different claims.
I still don't understand how, putting aside the rape allegations, kavanaugh's outbursts about Clinton conspiracy theories, "I like beer", and flat out lies about things like "Devil's triangle" being a drinking game didn't disqualify him.
You can say that the rape wasn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Or that the outbursts were him having a bad day (it's not like SCOTUS is a very exclusive position /s).
But that lie about devil's triangle being a game of quarters is so blatant. It's an incredibly common term that I am sure the average person has heard and can say that was an obvious lie.
There wasn't any credible evidence that he had attended any such party, let alone done the things Blasey Ford claimed he did. Or even that Blasey Ford knew him then. That's why it fell apart. So, yes, "unhinged mob" is a completely appropriate description of the clown car attempt to disqualify him.
If Amy Coney Barrett is the nominee, expect random men to come out of the woodwork claiming that she raped them in college. Recall how hard the left had to reach to dredge up dirt in the Kavanaugh circus but now having to do it against a woman with even less actual material to work with. Still, I wouldn't put it past the wokies to attempt it. Nothing from these people surprises me anymore.
I can't believe the amount of hate and flaming and demonization of a lady I've seen online as this one, she cared about people and the poor and the abused, I think our country is losing its way, and I don't know when we'll ever see her kind of compassion on the bench again.
Rest in peace Ruth. I hope if there's an after you and Antonin are living it up.