OK! It's About Time. The Court Thread!

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Red State USA would be a 20th century factory-farming/oil and some non-union manufacturing. They'd be low on entertainment, athletics and brainpower.

Canamerica would have higher prices and higher taxes, but economically superior and much better enviornmentally & socially & hockeyily.

I guess this depends on how we divide up the military tho.

[Lefty Specialist]

Canamerica would have healthcare for everyone at least.

There's no good way to do this. Every red state has its blue enclaves and vice versa. What I do see is an increase in political violence, aided and abetted by the Supreme Court. At some point someone is going to say, 'I don't care what the Supreme Court says, we're going to do X.' They'll dare the Federal government to enforce it, and violence will ensue.

It'd be nice to live in Canamerica, but Red America has more guns and less brains. They're going to start enforcing things blue states don't like. Abortion is just the beginning; voting rights, privacy rights, contraception, gay marriage and the rights of women and minorities in general are all on the chopping block.

[MFS62]

Why the "originalism" argument of the conservative justices is BS. (Yahoo reprint from Time magazine.)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/supreme-cour ... 10618.html

Later

[batmagadanleadoff]

A Word of Advice to Chief Justice Roberts: Retire

You got what you came for, and now things are out of your control.

Excerpt:

I have a modest proposal for John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court: Resign. Today. You're only 67. You have many productive and lucrative years ahead of you at some white-shoe law firm in or around D.C. You've achieved your life goals, politically. Money power is firmly embedded in our elections, and landmark voting rights legislation lies in ruins. Your work here is done. Go make some money; because frankly, you've lost control of your majority, it's gone barking mad, and if you stay much longer, they’re going to have to pad the walls of your chambers.

[***]

[T]he new, carefully engineered conservative majority on the court is made up of fanatics and vandals. And they have the votes; Roberts is a figurehead

Read it all at:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... challenge/

[batmagadanleadoff]

I' ve been repeating the idea that the party that controls the courts controls everything. So often that I'm sure youse are sick and tired of hearing it by now and I don't even blame youse. But the judicial abuse being generated by the Trump polluted courts is starting to reach the point where the media is finally starting to sound the alarm bells that need to be sounded. Below is yesterday's opening monologue from MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell where he tells it like it oughtta be told and recognizes that the only fix is for the Dems to expand the courts, especially SCOTUS, so as to dilute the GOP stranglehold on the federal judiciary. It's the only solution. What other solution is there? For the Dems to wait 30 years for Gorsuch to retire and to cross their fingers hoping that Gorsuch (lol) retires under a Dem administration? That's not an answer.

If you have 10 minutes to spare, catch the first 10 minutes of the link below, but especially beginning at the 9:10 mark.

Personally, I think he should have made this speech six years ago, before the Trump -Hillary election when this was all on the line. But the Dems react rather than pro-act, and it took the overruling of Roe, this crooked bag job in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant case and the scary case coming up where the SCOTUS might rule that state legislators essentially can do whatever the fuck they wanna do with state elections, including picking election winners themselves notwithstanding the vote counts.

[MFS62]

The new diverse supreme Court now checks off all the boxes:
A Black woman
A Jewish woman
A Latina woman
A certifiable Handmaiden.

Later

[Ceetar]

a drunk, a Russian agent, an insurrectionist and a (well many) misogynists.

[batmagadanleadoff]

More scumbag cuthroattiness from McConnell and the scumbag Republicans. Because when it's about filling judicial vacancies, McConnell will kill your mother and after that, your dead relatives, to ensure more GOP judges.


McConnell opposes allowing Democrats to replace Feinstein on Judiciary Committee

(Without Feinstein, who's too sick to serve, Biden and the Dems can't fill judicial vacancies.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... committee/



So when are the Dems gonna play some hardball of their own? Because otherwise, what's the fucking plan here? To wait 30 years and hope that when Gorsuch finally retires, he does so under a Dem administration? To pray to their gods that Clarence Thomas suffers a fatal heart attack in the next 12 months? Is that the fucking plan?

Hey! You fucking jackasses! Expanding the court is constitutionally permissible. Grow a pair, ferchrissakes!

[batmagadanleadoff]

SCOTUS rejects the batshit crazy independent legislature theory cooked up by scumbag GOP think-tankers and no doubt funded by the Koch and Devos families to further erode demicracy. The theory was too crazy even for this fucked up court.

Three scumbag justices dissented, though: Gorsuch and you could easily guess the other two very dangerous wingnuts.

Later today, I'm gonna read some of those nutjob dissents.

[Edgy MD]

We waste so much time and energy drawing and redrawing and redrawing again district maps and then legislating and litigating who gets the right to draw.

The entire electoral map can be drawn up fairly in less than a second by a computer programmed by a tenth-grader.

[Benjamin Grimm]

And that's exactly what should be done. An algorithm that only considers population and political boundaries (counties, towns, etc.) and perhaps physical boundaries (like rivers or mountains) but knows nothing at all about race or party registration. The problem, of course, is that for many, the goal isn't fairness but advantage.

[Edgy MD]

Sure, but a supermajority coalition of those who (a) believe in fairness; (b) don't really believe in fairness but want folks to think they do; and (c) don't believe in fairness because they think the other side cheats and that makes it OK for them to cheat but are really exhausted by it all; could go up to Alaska and hammer out a detente on redistricting in a weekend, go home and vote it into law on Monday, and then agree to fight about some other stupid thing on Tuesday.

[batmagadanleadoff]

SCOTUS rejects the batshit crazy independent legislature theory cooked up by scumbag GOP think-tankers and no doubt funded by the Koch and Devos families to further erode demicracy. The theory was too crazy even for this fucked up court.

Three scumbag justices dissented, though: Gorsuch and you could easily guess the other two very dangerous wingnuts.

Later today, I'm gonna read some of those nutjob dissents.

This was even better than I thought. Clarence Thomas dissented, but not to find that the independent legislature theory was valid. Thomas thought that on procedural grounds, SCOTUS shouldn't have even heard the case in the first place.

(Well, on second thought as I write this post, this isn't as good as I just thought it was. All this means is that Thomas didn't want to rule on the merits of the theory. But if he did, I'm certain he would've voted to uphold it).

[batmagadanleadoff]

I was right. In his dissent, Thomas wrote that the majority 's rationale was "unpersuasive". What a partisan hack. Only a nutjob wingnut could support that theory.

[metsmarathon]

it takes a fair bit of vacation to persuade that man.

[kcmets]

Right, 'You want my vote, we need a month on Grand Cayman via the
Purveyor of Pomposity lV. Don't forget that personal chef we used last
time and of course hookers for both my wife and I."

[batmagadanleadoff]

Merrick Garland wasn't the only judge to get Merrick Garlanded. Those 100 or so lower court judicial vacancies that (in addition to the SCOTUS seat vacated when Justice Scalia died) were also blockaded by the GOP during Obama's last term and ultimately filled by Trump are coming home to roost.

The rot in the federal judiciary goes deeper than the Supreme Court

Excerpt:

Trump populated the judiciary with underqualified ideologues, 10 of whom were rated unqualified by the American Bar Association. (In addition, they were overwhelmingly White and male; not a single African American judge was nominated to a circuit court.) Not all of the 54 circuit court judges and 174 district court judges he appointed are ideological kooks or partisan hacks, but the frequency with which outlandish rulings now pop up in high-profile cases suggests how extensive the damage to the credibility of the federal judiciary as a whole may be.

What can be done? First, the number of lower court judges should be expanded to reduce workload and court congestion, to improve diversity, and to dilute the impact of unqualified and intemperate judges. The number of lower court seats has not been expanded since 1990, when there were about 80 million fewer Americans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ot-reform/

In other words, pack the courts, Dems. Not just SCOTUS. All of them. (Even though it looks like the Dems have totally surrendered on this issue. The strategy appears to be to cross their fingers and hope that when Gorsuch and Kavanaugh decide to retire, 30 years from now, they'll retire under a Dem administration). /rollseyes

[Edgy MD]

Expanding the federal judiciary isn't something that can be done arbitrarily by a single party. It needs to go through Congress.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Expanding the federal judiciary isn't something that can be done arbitrarily by a single party. It needs to go through Congress.

If the shoe was on the other foot, the GOP would've done it unilaterally in half a heartbeat - and long ago. The Dems are sad sacks.

And what do you mean by "arbitrarily"?

[Edgy MD]

I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Unless the Democrats control both chambers, it isn't about what they are willing to do, but what they are able to do.

And the Democrats in Congress have indeed put forth active legislation to expand the number of district judges. They've also put forward legislation to expand the size of The Supreme Court.

[batmagadanleadoff]

The Dems controlled Congress for the first two years of Biden's term. If they still controlled the House, they still wouldn't expand the judiciary.

[Edgy MD]

Well, if you want to join me in voting third party, I'm all for it, but they did introduce these acts in the 117th Congress, when they had the majority.

[Edgy MD]

And that went by fast.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Well, if you want to join me in voting third party, I'm all for it, but they did introduce these acts in the 117th Congress, when they had the majority.

I'll pass on the third-party vote. I'm not sure what you think you'd be accomplishing, anyways. Given what I think are your preferences, your third-party vote would only help Trump. And I know that you don't want that. In order to meaningfully overhaul the way we elect Presidents, we'd need to amend the Constitution, which, as you surely know, is an extremely cumbersome and thus, unlikely proposition.

What acts are you referring to from the 117th Congress? Whatever they are, they wouldn't have passed in the Senate, which makes them window-dressing. Which was the point of my first post in this dialogue.

[Edgy MD]

If you don't care about the answer, then I won't bother answering.