Ruth Ginsburg dies

[Darth Yan]

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/10030697 ... dies-at-87

Well it happened and with only two months before election and 4 months until inauguration. And with McTurtle and his ilk planning to stack the court I'm more worried for this country. Court packing is looking awfully appealing right now.

[Agent Fisher]

Oh damn. I didn't always agree with her views, but she was a grand old lady who deserved all the respect she was due.

And now for this shit show to get even more shit show. Obama should have been able to get Garland, and Trump should be able to nominate his choice. But since the Republicans wanted to play stupid games back in 2016, the Dems should play those games right back, and let who ever wins the Election get the pick.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Oh damn. I didn't always agree with her views, but she was a grand old lady who deserved all the respect she was due.

And now for this shit show to get even more shit show. Obama should have been able to get Garland, and Trump should be able to nominate his choice. But since the Republicans wanted to play stupid games back in 2016, the Dems should play those games right back, and let who ever wins the Election get the pick.

There's literally nothing the Dems can do here. There's no filibuster for the Supreme Court and the Republicans hold a majority.

[Galvatron]

Lest anyone forget:

[Darth Yan]

Some people are arguing they'll wait until the lame duck session to force things through. Quite a few republican senators are vulnerable this year and they'll have more time.

McConnell's still a piece of shit.

[Highlord Laan]

Hope to God for a blue sweep. Then pack the court and abolish the electoral college.

[Lonestar]

Hope to God for a blue sweep. Then pack the court and abolish the electoral college.

How would they "abolish the Electoral College"?

What's the scenario you're envisioning where they get an amendment through?

[Agent Fisher]

Oh damn. I didn't always agree with her views, but she was a grand old lady who deserved all the respect she was due.

And now for this shit show to get even more shit show. Obama should have been able to get Garland, and Trump should be able to nominate his choice. But since the Republicans wanted to play stupid games back in 2016, the Dems should play those games right back, and let who ever wins the Election get the pick.

There's literally nothing the Dems can do here. There's no filibuster for the Supreme Court and the Republicans hold a majority.

Oh, damn, didn't realize that.

[MKSheppard]

2020 is pretty wack. So that was September. October, Aliens show up?

[Darth Yan]

They can possibly impeach a justice but that depends on who they chose. I wouldn't mind if they impeached Kavanaugh given that he certainly lied in his hearings and is probably a rapist

[loomer]

Naturally, the next few weeks will largely see her problematic judicial history and tacit endorsement of the repudiation of tribal sovereignty ignored in favour of a homogenized idea that she was a great dissenter, a leftist thinker, and a true hero. While it's a shame to see an icon go and especially under potentially devastating circumstances, I'm not looking forward to the lionization that liberals will try and push as part of the counter-campaign.

[Darth Yan]

This is LITERALLY the first I'm hearing of it and in many ways her record is fantastic (she's fought for feminism, racial equality, and much more). Many great people have large flaws (FDR was racist and anti semitic for instance). Oliver Wendall Holmes is regarded as a great judge....yet he also gave us Buck v Bell, widely regarded as the SECOND worst supreme court decision after Dred Scott

[bilateralrope]

Some people are arguing they'll wait until the lame duck session to force things through. Quite a few republican senators are vulnerable this year and they'll have more time.

McConnell's still a piece of shit.

Would anything stop Trump from using the lame duck session to nominate himself ?

[Rogue 9]

I am curious as to why everyone who wants to bash her for City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York waited until she was dead to do it. It isn't like she wasn't a frequent topic in the news and pop culture; there's been lots of opportunity to do it without waiting to shit on her grave first.

[loomer]

I don't know, I've seen plenty of people criticize her before now - I'm particularly fond of Dussias's critique in last year's BYU Law Review 2018 issue 6, but I've seen them crop up here and there more generally and outside of academia (and within, even to the extent that Australian legal academics were yakking about it at one event I went to where efforts for Indigenous sovereignty movements were on the table) for the last five years or so with a big spike of them with the release of On the Basis of Sex, which you can easily observe by checking the google trends. And of course, when we ask 'why now'? Well, gee, why might a group of people publicly respond to the public lionization of someone who did measurable and serious harm to their interests at a time when that lionization is firmly in the public limelight? Why might they want to contest the construction of a legacy of uncritical adoration of such a person as it's actively being undertaken? Why indeed?

[Raw Shark]

It's too bad that the courts are closed on the weekend, a flood of gay marriages on International Talk Like a Pirate Day would probably lighten the mood a little. I've already loaned my tent to a couple of guys I know so they can camp outside the courthouse Sunday night.

[Solauren]

2020 is pretty wack. So that was September. October, Aliens show up?

I have aliens down for Jan 2021

[Knife]

They can't filibuster, unfortunately, but if they retake the Senate they can impeach.

[Gandalf]

They can't filibuster, unfortunately, but if they retake the Senate they can impeach.

On impeachment, would Biden and his team be up for such a thing even if they had solid majorities?

[Edi]

If the Democrats get the Senate and the presidency both, what they should do is go full nuclear and eliminate the filibuster in Senate, increase the size of SCOTUS to 13 justices and grant statehood to both Washington DC and Puerto Rico. There is absolutely zero incentive to give a shit about what Republicans would say about that, since they are going to lie, slander and make baseless accusations anyway regardless of any attempt to play nice with them. The only thing they understand is a direct application of force.

[Coop D'etat]

They can't filibuster, unfortunately, but if they retake the Senate they can impeach.

On impeachment, would Biden and his team be up for such a thing even if they had solid majorities?

Impeachement isn't a Biden decison if he wins, its an action by Congress.

It's also the even more of a MAD action than packing the court, so I'd consider it vanishingly unlikely anyone would seriously try it unless they had incontrovertible evidence of malfeasance.

[Gandalf]

It's funny seeing so many think it's a "gotcha" moment pointing out Republican hypocrisy on nominating in an election year. Do people expect it to work, as though Republicans are going to go "Oh right, we did say that" and then wait a while?

Impeachement isn't a Biden decison if he wins, its an action by Congress.

Evidently I was wildly misinformed on the subject. Thanks for the help.

[bilateralrope]

Pelosi won't rule out new impeachment to delay SCOTUS vote if Biden wins

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Sunday would not rule out impeaching President Donald Trump or Attorney General William Barr if the Senate seeks to push through a Supreme Court nomination during the lame-duck session should Joe Biden win the November election.

Speaking with ABC's "This Week," host George Stephanopoulos asked Pelosi about suggestions some have made that if Democrats win this fall and Republicans move forward on a Supreme Court nominee to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the House could move to impeach Trump or Barr in an effort to stall the nomination.

"Well, we have our options," Pelosi said. "We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now, but the fact is we have a big challenge in our country. This president has threatened to not even accept the results of the election with statements that he and his henchmen have made."

"So, right now, our main goal and I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg would want that to be, would be to protect the integrity of the election as we protect the American people from the coronavirus, and that’s — I have faith in the American people on this Sunday morning," she continued.

Stephanopoulos followed up, asking if she was not "ruling anything out?"

"Yeah. We have a responsibility. We've taken an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," she said. We have a responsibility to meet the needs of the American people. That is when we weigh the equities of protecting our democracy requires us to use every arrow in our quiver."

Pelosi also pointed to upcoming Supreme Court arguments on the Affordable Care Act, set for Nov. 10, just after the election. Ginsburg's death means one of the justices who voted to uphold the law in 2012 is no longer there, and Obamacare's future may now be in peril as a result, particularly if a conservative-aligned justice is confirmed before then.

"So the president is rushing to make some kind of a decision because he ... doesn't want to crush the [pandemic,] Pelosi said. "He wants to crush the Affordable Care Act."

This weekend, Trump pledged to quickly fill the now-vacant Supreme Court seat and nominate a woman to it following Ginsburg's death Friday due to complications from pancreatic cancer. A frontrunner for the position has emerged in the form of federal appeals court judge Amy Coney Barrett, 48. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has promised to quickly begin the confirmation process once the president makes his selection.

Democrats have sharply criticized McConnell, who refused to hold any hearings for then-President Barack Obama's 2016 Supreme Court nominee, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland, citing that fact it was an election year and that the American people should have a voice in the selection.

McConnell said there was not a contradiction in his two stances because the Senate and White House were under control of differing parties at that time, where as now Republicans control both.

"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," he said in a statement. "We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president's Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year."

The argument didn't hold water with Democrats, who pointed to remarks from Republican senators like Lindsey Graham who have said they would not consider a Supreme Court nomination in an election year.

"Today it seems that Senator McConnell has lost his faith in the judgment of the American people and wants to hurry up and put somebody on the court," former President Bill Clinton told "This Week." "And the president does too. So they — their position is 'do whatever maximizes your power.'"

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Democrats demanded no confirmation this close to the election.

“The way this happened so close to the election, that the next president should be able to make the decision. The people pick the president, and the president picks the justice,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said. “You’ve got people voting right now, including in my state.”

Republicans countered that if Democrats held both the White House and Senate, they too would move forward with a nomination — regardless of circumstance.

"If the shoe were on the other foot and the Democrats and the White House and the Senate, they would right now be trying to confirm another member of the Supreme Court," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told "Meet the Press."

Democrats are now scrambling to figure out how they can possibly stall the selection or counter it if they win the presidency and Senate back this fall.

Currently, their options are limited as they hold a 47 to 53 disadvantage in the Senate, which abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in 2017. Democrats need to convince four Republicans to vote against a nominee.

Should they recapture the Senate and White House, Democrats may add seats to the Supreme Court.

In a call with Democratic senators Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., suggested an openness to expanding the court.

"Let me be clear: If Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans move forward with this, then nothing is off the table for next year," he said, according to a source on the call. "Nothing is off the table."

In a statement following Ginsburg's death, Schumer repeated McConnell's remarks from 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

"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," Schumer tweeted, quoting McConnell.

Obama himself jumped into the fray on Friday and pushed for the Senate to not immediately fill Ginsburg's seat.

"A basic principle of the law — and of everyday fairness — is that we apply rules with consistency, and not based on what’s convenient or advantageous in the moment," he wrote.

Assuming no Democrat flips, it only takes 4 Republican Senators to vote against whoever Trump nominates before the election to end that nomination. How many Republican Senators are in a position where supporting Trump here might cost them their seat at the election ?

Also, would a second impeachment slow down the nomination process by enough to push it past the inauguration ?

[Nicholas]

Assuming no Democrat flips, it only takes 4 Republican Senators to vote against whoever Trump nominates before the election to end that nomination. How many Republican Senators are in a position where supporting Trump here might cost them their seat at the election ?

Also, would a second impeachment slow down the nomination process by enough to push it past the inauguration ?

How many Republican Senators do you think are in a position where they can afford to piss off the pro-life and culture war wings of the Republican Party by voting against a nominee likely to support overturning Roe v. Wade a week or two before the general election? My bet is any Republican Senator who did that would see enough Republicans voting for Trump and then writing in the Supreme Court nominee for Senate to cost them the election.

Nicholas

[bilateralrope]

A few years ago I saw an opinion piece by someone who thought that overturning Roe v. Wade would be bad for the Republicans. Basically, the writer was saying that there are a decent chunk of voters who are pro abortion, but still vote Republican because they think that Roe v. Wade means abortions can't be touched and are they ignore the issue. But if Roe v. Wade gets overturned, suddenly abortion becomes an issue in those voters minds.

Not sure how true it is, but since Democrats get to question any nominee, making the nominees stance on abortion clear to everyone seems a good tactic.


Also, if Mark Kelly wins his Arizona Senate race, he could be seated by Nov 30 because the incumbent was appointed to the position.