Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died
npr.org
npr.org
Rest in peace Ruth. I hope if there's an after you and Antonin are living it up.
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.
The entire world would be a better place if they do not follow the argument presented here.
The whole thing was clearly created on a principle of opposing friendships between powerful forces.
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.
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.
-Washington Post
36% 9-0
10% 8-1
20% 7-2
11% 6-3
23% 5-4
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.
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.
I get confused with all the sailing terms in common vernacular, but generally the sayings go
"I like the cut of your jib"
"That gybes well with me"
Noting that none of them make sense, I think leeway is possibly the worst
I had never seen the "gybes" spelling before. Is it like tire/tyre? Looks Welsh to me!
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.
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.
SC justices are appointed for life for the very reason to help ensure they are not political but instead apply the standards of legality.
It's not perfect, but it's less politics than when people campaign for constant election/re-election to a position.
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?
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.)
What may seem natural for you isn't for others.
Thus system are designed considering that.
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.
But, after watching Scalia, how can you not like him?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0&ab_channel=Ameri...
https://youtu.be/TRS-jdgHok4?t=105
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
How many people have you seen converted from dangerous beliefs by isolating them away from dissimilar thinkers?
I have seen no evidence whatsoever that refusing to interact with people deradicalizes them. The filter bubble phenomenon suggests the opposite.
I'll take a strategy that's known to work with unclear scalability over a scalable one with no evidence it works, every time.
Would you mind explaining further?
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).
Are people born racist? Does education an outreach not work? I really don’t see why you’d be so certain.
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.
Obviously this is not true.
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).
If you didn’t know this or chose to ignore it, your model is incomplete and you don’t understand one side.
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.
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.
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?
"It's time to stop arresting these filth only to have them released the next day and start just putting them down"
--seen literally yesterday in a popular politics IRC chatroom, to general agreement. I think many people don't entirely realize how bad it's gotten.
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.
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.
Pulling posts, breaks the thread.
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.
Now that I feel secure, I can see where you're coming from when you call it a game though.
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.
"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.
Was that your point?
Kudos to you for leading by example.
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.
It could be just a reflexive thing to seeing a given username show up too often. I wouldn’t presume it was any deeper than that.
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)
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.
Then I lost your thread.
Then I agreed with you, "we're terrible"
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
I think speech can definitely lead to violence - and speech can also counteract it. Neither directly, but the delta has real-world repercussions.
Or to look at it the other way - can you come up with an example of violence, that wasn't preceded by rhetoric?
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.
I’m afraid you do not understand the fire with which you are playing.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich#Role_in_politica...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ocasio-cor...
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?
Here's the latest one: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/police-shooting...
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.
This is the language and thought pattern that is the problem. It is not okay to use this kind of language.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
It is such a wide gap in outlook
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.
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?
I mean christ, Trump _still_ brings up Vince Foster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
Agree that zero-sum thinking is a net-negative.
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.)
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.
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”
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?
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”.
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.
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.
And I'm not even an American nor live in the US!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is so hard to accept others and let them articulate their view.
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.
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.
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 fascist Either 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
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.
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
“Why would I listen to these whiners? I already know what I want.”
One would hope that it'd be orthogonal to conservatism/liberalism or any other political spectrum, but I suspect it's not.
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.
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 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
I thought that was remarkable in a positive sense as well
https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/13071014175225610...
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.
Edit: Fwiw, the RBG movie about her is on Hulu now.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/trump-suprem...
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.
Honest curiosity and debate is tricky business here.
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.
Let's see just how long it takes him to release a public statement going back on that one...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/justice-ruth-bader-gin...
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...
The next few months are going to be exciting.
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 say this as a completely dejected person knowing that the Republicans will fill that seat with another solidly conservative judge, not out of glee.
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.
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.
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].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_...
This is not a normal government.
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.
Power grabbing is the game.
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.
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.
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.
And that was my point.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
That explains a lot :)
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.
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?
It's not impossible but doesn't seem likely.
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.
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.
Whereas Mitch's philosophy is "no candidate will be entertained as being possibly acceptable or suitable".
Trying to drawn parallels between the two is grasping at best, disingenuous at worst.
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".
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.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2719115/Senate-SC...
Also:
1. Don't impeach a president in an election year.
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.
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.
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.
There's always another election coming up.
(Not saying you're wrong. If I repeat something, I like to have direct sources)
He’s basically that the partisan makeup of the Senate as of the most recent election should be the controlling factor.
It has the veneer of a neutral rule, and that’s all they need.
https://mobile.twitter.com/senatemajldr/status/1307121192516...
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.
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.
Further, there’s this: https://thehill.com/regulation/454463-ginsburg-dismisses-cou...
There are lots of things to argue but that isn't one of them.
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:
https://www.newsmax.com/michaeldorstewitz/democracy-republic...
And slaveholders (the spiritual inspiration of modern Republicans) had manipulated the Court to themselves since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Circuits_Act
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.
It shouldn't be this way, but it is.
For some perspective, there were only 31 states at the time.
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.
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
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.
Of course it does! The Constitution splits the nomination/confirmation process between two political branches. The process is supposed to be political!
The founders explicitly said that they didn't intend the system to be partisan, and indeed warned against the dangers of partisanship.
Of course they themselves formed parties a few years later. They weren't as wise as everyone seems to think.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] - https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/14/pennsylvania-j...
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.
My own opinion is that the orders are constitutional.
IMO they didn't work out in anyone's favor. Our country is a mess, and the majority of people dislike both of the 2 major ruling parties.
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.
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”
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.
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.
But the argument that "it's OK for us to do it, because they would" seems a bit thin.
It's OK to loot this store because if I don't someone else will...
And it's OK to do anything I like as long as I can point a finger and say "but he'd do it too"
So, yeah, this is a textbook case of hipocrasy, but being hipocratic doesn't matter as long as we win.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2016/02/supreme-court-vacancies-i...
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?
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.
https://www.mediamatters.org/national-review/national-review...
> 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.”
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.
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.
[1] https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/701953299268902912
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,
>in the last 4 years
I’m talking 30 years. The last 4 years are just end results of other forces.
Also - america has never produced an event like the trump presidency. Does that feature when we discuss abuse of power in the last 4 years?
I know of no Democrat action that is comparable.
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.
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 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.
That's a weird way of saying "nominated a candidate via the regular process".
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.
https://supremecourtpress.com/chance_of_success.html
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.)
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).
> Asked what he would do in circumstances like these, McConnell said: "Oh, we'd fill it." [the supreme court seat]
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.
I mean I can believe both of those sets of people exist, but hardly that they're numerous enough to dictate the election strategy.
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.)
so the solution is to ban abortions, contraceptives, and same-sex marriage altogether?
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.)
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.
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.
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.").
I guess it’s the libertarian thing. Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.
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.”
Obviously not. To begin, no religion I’m aware of would preclude informing the patient in that circumstance. And few libertarians believe that individual freedom requires allowing deception of others, as in your hypothetical.
Apart from that, weighing individual liberty interests is always context-dependent. E.g. consider the various wrinkles when it comes to self defense. For a libertarian, forcing doctors to perform a procedure that involves killing something (whatever you think that thing is) in non-emergency circumstances just because that might leave too few people in an area willing to do that probably falls too far on the side of ignoring individual liberty. It’s the basic libertarian position: you may have a right to something, but you don’t have a right to make someone else give you that thing.
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.
Among voters, but Trump would/did(?) throw the GOP under the bus to get elected.
It's apocalypse for the democrats.
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.
The risk of not winning either is too much. They'd rather get the "win" and campaign on the win.
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.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_...
> 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.
So no, I won't cite something else.
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.
The National Review article links to the source data, data from CRS and data from senate.gov. CRS is the Congressional Research Service.
Then you're back in the 1800s. But we routinely look back to the 1800s to establish what is accepted practice in our government.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Routinely?
This sounds a lot like "originalism", which is controversial at best.
There are no principles, just power struggles.
If HRC was president, McConnell would follow his 2016 policy. With Trump president he'll make a new policy.
There are no repercussions for bringing home the bacon to your constituents at any cost.
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.
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/21/17352230/al-franken-accusation...
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.
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.
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.
[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.
It might be more constructive to speak with precision about a claim of such import.
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.
Would have played out the exact same way if political tables were turned.
Or just gonna stop there since that's what you'd like to believe?
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 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.
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?
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.”
"So far the following GOP Senators have pledged that they will not consider a Supreme Court appointment until after the next inauguration.
Susan Collins Chuck Grassley Lisa Murkowski"
[0]:https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1307115333669580807
The Senate is currently split 53/47, I don't believe Romney has addressed the issue yet. No one should get too bitter and divisive just yet.
Waiting until after the election does nothing to improve their electoral prospects, so for McConnell there's no point in waiting.
Susan Collins will go on record saying she thinks trump jr is just too good of a candidate to not accept the nomination, and that'll be the end of it
So far, Murkowski is the only confirmed GOP defector, and 4 total defectors are needed to prevent nomination hearings before the election.
All of this is coordinated, all of this is staged.
McCain famously did it during his last vote, because he knew he was going to die shortly thereafter.
where's Justice Merrick Garland, then?
> “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
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.
The upside of being the anti-government party is that you don't have to worry about being judged by how well you govern. It's a much easier position.
This is the next logical step.
"[The president] shall nominate, and by and with the [...] Consent of the Senate, shall appoint [...] Judges of the supreme Court"
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.
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.
Note that Trump and McConnell are rushing to fill the Supreme Court, despite 4 years of leaving about half the government posts vacant.
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.
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.
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).
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.
They didn’t use votes. If it had gone to vote, Garland would have been confirmed. McConnell refused to bring it to vote.
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.
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.
Any American politician who appears to have such a regard 9 times out of 10 is a manipulative psychopath who is stringing you along.
The president nominates and senate confirms.
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.
> "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
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/29/oh-wed-fi...
edit: Am I really getting downvoted for pointing out how the current administration already said it would handle this?
edit #2: Individual Republicans are declaring they're against rushing an appointment before the election (https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1307113546136784897).
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.)
And he wins.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...
I believe this is factually incorrect. I'll offer Article V of the Constitution as my citation. Do you have a contrary citation to support this claim?
The major geographic divide in US politics is urban vs rural, not state vs state
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.
Take a look at any number of votes in the past year. There are plenty of Republicans who don't vote on party line (Republican and Democratic)
There absolutely are, they just happen to be a side-channel in this particular system.
We thankfully don’t (yet) live in a country where New York, LA, and Chicago control everything.
So much better!
What choice would you have made in 1787?
The Reapportionment Act of 1929 is the cause of the worst distortions.
It fixes the HoR at 435, and is the main cause of the gross imbalance of power.
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.
So Wyoming gets 4 EC votes.
So... WY gets 4 EC votes with it's 578k population.
My state of NC only gets 15 with it's population of almost 11M.
In what universe is that fair or just?
Those states are 20% of the population and 17% of the EC.
By taking advantage of the tiny states the EC can be won with less than 30% of the vote
https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-pres...
We were supposed to be a group of states with a fairly limited federal government. I think it’s really unfortunate that’s been largely done away with.
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.
This is nonsense. Trump got three million fewer votes than Clinton.
Had Reid not pulled the 'nuclear option' the filibuster from the minority would stop the confirmation.
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.
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.
And which was very much worried about and warned against by the founders, even if they immediately fell into it themselves.
We’re in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma and we’re still in the “last turn sets the new norm” phase. I’m hoping there’s a way out before too long.
- Factually correct. Reid did end multiple filibusters.
- Unbiased - this is an iterated prisoners dilemma in that each side is forced to assume the other will make a worse action given the opportunity.
Why is this being downvoted?
1. The supreme Court is not comparable to any other appointment 2. There's no guarantee that McConnell wouldn't have done this regardless
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.
Well, this is how you become what you're fighting against.
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.
https://time.com/5338689/supreme-court-packing/
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.
So, yes, the total number isn't fixed but the apportionment 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.
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.
Limited ≠ Anti
Representative democracy is also limited compared to direct democracy, for example.
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.
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).
If Obama had a Democratic Senate majority in 2016, Merrick Garland would have been confirmed. That's the precedent.
> 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.
Sure, but it doesn't really matter. The issue is whether or not McConnell can confirm a Trump nomination this year, and he absolutely can.
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.
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).
The Republicans are on the way out of the Senate, and McConnell knows it, which is why he's trying to ram this through now. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/...
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.
Why would you need to block a vote you know you will win?
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).
That's hardly the whole truth. McConnell refused to even hold hearings.
"Elections have consequences" and all that.
Note: 15 nominations were not voted on by the Senate, including Merrick Garland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsuccessful_nominations_to_th...
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.
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!
It’s sad how many justices will be on the court, appointed by men that didn’t win the popular vote
or even the Electoral Vote. Remember that Bush v Gore was decided by the (Republican leaning) Supreme Court, not the electoral college.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/29/oh-wed-fi...
I feel terrible focusing on the political maelstrom and not RBG's legacy, but these are also important conversations to have.
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.
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.)
Just for fun, here's another irrelevant quote:
“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.”
- Ruth Bader, on whether the Senate should hold hearings and a vote on the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
A giant has fallen.
Extremism in any shape breeds further extremism. I hope society is about to do a “big blink”.
It only takes a majority in the senate and house to add a seat to the SCOTUS or a state to the union.
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.
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.
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.
This is also, not to say I want freaking TRUMP to appoint the next justice. I just don't want to see it become a game of who's got the most votes.
I was very opposed to Obama losing his appointment.
I just don't want the precedent of 9 to change.
I completely agree, but at this point I think it's inevitable.
> 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.
It’s way more open to interpretation than you’re suggesting. It has never been challenged.
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.
Among others.
After Bill Clinton seated two liberal justices there has been an unending cry about how liberal the court is.
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.
"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."
I made this in her honor, https://i.imgur.com/3OlCIum.png
i pray for peace and rest to her and her family, and grace and mercy, wisdom and forebearance for us.
Why not 20 year limits?
https://clickamericana.com/topics/health-medicine/us-life-ex... https://www.everydayhealth.com/senior-health/what-life-expec...
Those probably aren't the best places for me to get numbers, but I think they're good enough for a rough example of what I mean.
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].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_justices_of_the_Suprem...
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.
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.
Both parties are a blight that should never have gotten enshrined the way they are.
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.
It also makes sense. Cognitive ability deteriorates with age. And you don't want very old, with illness to rule on important things.
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 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...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Justice_of_th...
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.
There are a lot of unplugged holes in the constitution. This is just another issue...
"'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,''
-Senator Mitch McConnell in 2016
His words mean nothing. Unfortunately, he does what he wants, not what he's said. His past proclamations are merely inconvenient distractions.
Because of that, they will get their way.
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.
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.
https://www.psypost.org/2020/07/consuming-content-from-foxne...
https://www.businessinsider.com/roger-ailes-blueprint-fox-ne...
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.
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.
It doesn't bode well for the upcoming election.
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.
That gov't I'm thinking of would be the Weimar Republic.
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.
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.
It shows poor judgement.
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.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/what-cult-ruth-...
I weep for those without, you will not have the recourse those of the last half century had.
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.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/02/trump-black-lives-m...
Except it doesn't seem like the violence and rioting so far has actually helped Trump:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-law-and-order-me...
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.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/513742-cnns-lemon-warns-o...
[2] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/could-a-backlash-agains...
1627 points and 1263 comments yet no longer on the front page.
A moderator, please explain.
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.
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 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.
"President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate."
https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/press-relea...
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.
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.
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.”
I am deeply disappointed at anyone celebrating her loss.
"Take a moment. Breathe.
And then we fight for our country the way she always did for us. Or we will lose everything."
https://twitter.com/MaryLTrump/status/1307109748744114177?s=...
“We don’t inherent the world (our country) from our parents. We have it on loan from our children.”
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.
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.
Time to watch “The Supremes” episode of West Wing and cry.
They do not give a fuck.
That’s not how they see power and it is why they have a far disproportionate share of power/representation than their support across the electorate.
This is about power. In politics, nothing else matters.
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?
Healthcare? Nope.
Climate change? Nope.
A federal holiday for election days? Yes.
Passing legislation mandating mail-in ballots? Yes.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
We should pay people to vote, that would help turnout (up to about as much as it would ever get).
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.
Early voting (in several states already?) does a good job of this IMO.
I'm totally okay with a test where the only document you need to study from is the US Constitution.
Reminds of me of 3rd grade when kids would make a christmas tree out of their scantron tests. That is what we need -- randomness added to voting.
But in terms of direct action that democrats could pass in the first week (the bills exist already), those are my picks.
Gerrymandering would take a constitutional amendment. Yes, it would help more, but that’s a moot point if the people we’re talking about can’t do it.
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.
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.
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, 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.
The top three amendments (in my opinion) that the US needs most:
- ending gerrymandering
- taking money out of politics (federally financed elections)
- forcing votes on nominees within a certain time period, otherwise they are assumed confirmed
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.
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].
[0]: https://sirota.substack.com/p/where-is-bidens-ground-game
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2020/03/27/billionair...
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.
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.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/mitch-mcconn...
Do you think that might have affected the ability of the current president to successfully appoint a supreme court justice now?
Childish. Come on.
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.
*Democratic
Chuck Shumer, a Democrat, is a member of the Democratic Party.
When used as an adjective the correct usage is “Democratic”
By analogy, you'll more often hear "Texas senator Mr Bean" (using the singular noun) vs "Texan senator Mr Bean" (using the adjective).
In any case, it's not something anyone should get worked up over.
"democratic senators"
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"democrat senators"
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"democratic senators" site:breitbart.com
> About 1,010 results (0.32 seconds)
"democrat senators" site:breitbart.com
> About 2,300 results (0.27 seconds)
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.
Remember that they got rid of a public option in negotiations to win Republicans over. And got zero Republican votes.
Obama was many things, but he was not good at congressional politics. He saw himself as about the fray, and it showed.
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.
https://pnhp.org/news/max-baucus-should-not-be-deciding-heal...
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.
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.
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.
He's a protectionist idealist who the republicans were dying to run against because they knew he'd be easier than Biden.
Also just because a person loses a primary does not mean they are they weaker candidate in the general election. The math can easily go the other way.
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.
What they should do is physically barricade the Capitol. I’m not really joking. It will come to that.
My first guess of the most action they will take:
Staging a walk-out of the vote.
There was nothing procedurally that Democrats could have done to stop Kavanaugh. If there were, they would have.
They cannot stop this nomination by traditional means.
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.
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.
So if there's a court-packing arms race, that may not be a bad thing. It would bring this anachronism to a head.
Maybe we have LOTS MORE justices. Then each appointment would not be so politicized because their influence would be lessened. See https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/12/academic-highlight-epps-a...
One party coalition has demonstrated they will do ANYTHING for power, and now there are very few good choices available.
Either respond in kind, or face permanent defeat
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.
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.
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'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
This threat assumes that Democrats would take this action once they control the House and Senate.
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.
I saw some interviews with her, pretty amazing lady. Sad to see her go.
I’m curious if they wait until after the election. Dangle it in front of their base as “we have to save this seat”.
Or maybe it’s actually a dis-incentive for republican turnout because RBG dying was a strong selling point for next term.
It will be interesting for sure.
EDIT:
I take that back. They will confirm before Election Day. They need a fifth judge for Trump to contest the election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
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.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/gop-man...
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.
Anti-Abortion: about or above sixty percent of Americans support legal abortions
Climate change: two thirds of Americans view it as a top priority and that the benefits of action outweigh the costs
Guns: sixty percent to two-thirds of Americans support stricter gun control. 90–92% support mandatory background checks
Taxing Wealthy: again, sixty percent to two thirds support higher taxes on the wealthy.
Those are the pillars. Those are the core propositions.
Americans do not support them or not by a margin of 1.1%
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.
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.
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.
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?
The other two depend very much on how you ask the question. It’s nowhere near as simple as you make out.
So the Democrats are basically complaining that they can't stop a Trump nomination, but only because they changed the rules themselves.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/21/harry-reid-sen...
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.
Considering the court has had a Republican majority since 1989, I don't blame them.
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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_leanings_of_United...
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.
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??
Both the democratic party and the republican party only represent a small fraction of the electorate, for your information.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/25/american-pol...
"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."
Also, the US needs a maximum age limit for SCOTUS justices.
Will they do it? maybe? probably.
This is their chance to mold our country's sociopolitical landscape for decades.
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.
It would be a perfect game theory move to do it, no merit in holding out.
Guaranteed McConnell will ram this through with plenty of time to spare.
> 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…Rest in Peace American Republic
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.
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.
So it would imply that you can reason with an individual who isn’t acting as node.
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.
To anyone at facebook - please dissuade me if I'm being naive here - I'm always looking to update my mental model of this.
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
[1] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/17/hyster...
[2] - https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
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.
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.
[1] - https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1307124621389463553
[2] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...
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.
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.
If a government moves forward with literal genocide, I won't blame any person who takes up arms against it.
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.
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.
What exactly do you think politics is?
You may think it’s immoral or gross, but it’s in no way fascism. I hate how much that word gets thrown around nowadays.
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.
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?
I'm not an advocate of violence. But it's easy to see the level of frustration and disgust wasn't being addressed.
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.
I agree. Those violent events are complicated. But bad actors are the sole cause is an over-simplication.
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.
Your either want the right to your own body, or a crusade to stop the murder of millions of babies.
This drives most other politics.
Right to your own body every other week? Last name starts A-H get abortions, rest don’t?
Or maybe by race, undesirable races get genocide? Or maybe the rich ones?
It’s not a topic with much “in between”
1. What defines a human life?
2. When is it acceptable to take a human life?
Advocating for a middle ground is often good. But sometimes it’s fruitless.
Someone decides the want your stuff. Halfway is giving them half your stuff. Tomorrow they want the other half.
So your left with, give up everything or nothing. Take a stand or don’t.
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.
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
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.
I am in the same camp as you.
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.
Politicians are egomaniacs almost by definition.
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.
He pardoned war criminals found guilty by our own military courts.
He is setting up companies to steal oil from Syria and has always stated that we would be fools not to take those military earned resources.
The state kills unarmed people in the US everyday, I see drone strikes in war zones as as far tinier issue than all of the above.
I am unaware of that, do you have any reference?
Trump killed this American on foreign soil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawar_al-Awlaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%9...
You gotta love the journalistic bias out there.
Check your facts before posting blindly about media bias.
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.
It's very possible that more US citizens were killed during the Trump administration, and we won't know for decades until the records are unsealed.
Plus, she's a woman. She'll get branded as the 'RBG of the right'
Edit: sorry to all of you Amy Barrett fans out there.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Procedures_Reform_Bil...
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.
The far, far worse problem is the extremists propensity to take everything as bad faith, no matter how genuine.
I could see it both ways. And I could also see it not actually being a driver in turnout at all.
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.
In some part, it makes it easier to disagree. Some of the arguments have been going on for centuries.
RBC was raised Jewish. Later, after her mother passed, she became non-observant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg#:~:text=Al....
I misread an article; her client was Catholic.
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 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.
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.
Also why we need to win the Senate as well.
I'm also curious about how John Roberts is going to react to what comes after her seat's filled.
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!
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/07/ruth-bader-ginsb...
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).
* The House is voted in by the people.
* The Senate is voted in by the states.
* The President is voted in by both.
No one is being held hostage. This system was created purposefully, and has been the same since its inception.
Your opinion on the matter is meaningless.
However, the law does not elect a president according to whether or not the American people wish them to be president.
Seems like a technicality to me.
Neither was Clinton. Sometimes it goes your direction, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidentia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_presidentia...
If you're talking about Hilary, the majority of Americans did vote for her, not Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
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.
But you knew that.
Clinton also failed to get a majority of the votes in 1996, as did both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016.
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.
The American people are being held hostage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Why wouldn't they? They have nothing to gain from opposing it, and much to lose.
I mean, do you honestly think the United States Postal Service would dismantle its own machinery and send out misinformation about elections?
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.
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.)
Two remaining lines of defense for the American people were (1) Elections and (2) the Supreme Court.
2 is now gone. Republicans (Aka trump) are working hard on 1.
By the way, what happens when election results are contested? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/28/b...
Obama was president 4 years ago.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_...
Can you name which rights have eroded in the recent years? Like, 70, 15, 4 years?
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.
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".
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.
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.
Coming back to this because we don't have free and fair elections today: https://twitter.com/AnthonyTilghman/status/13073605445597061...
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.)
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.
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?
I expect a lot more fuckery to happen, but cancelled elections and the Supreme Court nullifying the 22nd amendment won't be included.
Al Gore legitimately won the 2000 election. The USSC prevented him from taking office.
"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."
-- Tim Kaine, D-Va, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/democrats-war...
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.
"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.”
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'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.
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.)
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).
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.
She truly could see beyond politics, and will be missed by both sides of the aisle.
Karanaugh's interesting interpretation of the law is enough to give him a hard pass but he also lied under oath.
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.
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.
It is precisely that kind of thing. I know several women who have done exactly this, even including hiding abuse from their parents.
> 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
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.
Source?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/09/five-times-bret...
These are fairly clear cut lies to congress.
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.
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.