Squeegee Beckenheim
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New SCOTUS Judge II: The Wrath of Kavanaugh
- Thread starter Meadmaker
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Squeegee Beckenheim
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smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Looks like the Dems will open a full investigation of Kavanaugh if they win control of the House in November.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/politics/kavanaugh-house-investigation.html?module=inline
Minoosh
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Seven years before that I didn't expect to see a black president whose middle name was Hussein, either. I didn't expect the SC to legalize gay marriage throughout the country. And I had a sinking feeling the day Trump announced, because I knew there was a lot of resentment towards immigrants. The Internet had helped hate speech flourish and I watched with dismay.
What gives me a little hope is that there are always unintended consequences. I can't predict what they will be; that's kind of the point. So whatever the master plan is, to make the U.S. into "The Handmaid's Tale," for example, people are going to push back on repression, or find ways around the haters ... and I don't believe all white people are haters, or even all Republicans. If we do end up stuck with a bunch of right-wing reactionaries, there is going to be division in their ranks because there are always factions. Xenophobia will be balanced by big business interests. It was already evident when the Republicans tried to pass an immigration bill. Farm states wanted their cheap labor and would not agree to a requirement that they use E-Verify to vet hires. Congress has not actually stampeded to Build The Wall.
I don't think a bunch of angry white people can send the country back to the 19th century. I'm not taking anything for granted; I'm dismayed by the current state of affairs. But I don't think most people really want to make abortion illegal, for example. (Too big a chance it will just result in more people of color, maybe). My Trump-voting relatives disagree with each other on a number of issues. Human contrarianism is not going to stop. When you get a bunch of people in office who are fundamentally not interested in cooperation, they will find ways not to cooperate with each other. The Republican platform IMO is not a winning game plan. We'll see how long it takes for that to sink in.
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Belz...
Fiend God
I think you're exaggerating. And that doesn't help discussion if we claim, say, that the Republicans are going to make it so that we have to eat babies.
I'm not sayin they won't make decisions that will hurt minorities and women. I'm sure they will. I just think we shouldn't exaggerate the claims beyond what we can expect.
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Belz...
Fiend God
That's funny, I've heard the opposite.
Maybe if we all spent less time bitching about the other side and more time discussing with them, with the intent of finding common ground and compromises, things would be better?
Belz...
Fiend God
Democracy inconvenient, eh?
Minoosh
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And I predict that on reproductive rights, if it comes to it, private groups will be in place to give all women access to family planning services, including abortion. I sure as heck don't think that Americans in general are against contraception. There may be a few, but all in all I think just about everyone wants to make abortion as rare as possible and wants all babies to be fervently wanted.
Meanwhile there surely will be people who will resent the SC for not going far enough and not being willing/able to roll back all national gains in safe access to abortion. "Conservatives" will be attacking other "conservatives" who don't pass some ideological test.
Meanwhile there surely will be people who will resent the SC for not going far enough and not being willing/able to roll back all national gains in safe access to abortion. "Conservatives" will be attacking other "conservatives" who don't pass some ideological test.
Travis
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It won't happen all at once. It will start with small things and grow incrementally.
Someplace will pass a law barring Muslims from being in the police force. Because ISIS is scary. It gets upheld by a 5-4 decision with the argument being that surely the Founding Fathers didn't envision dirty Muslims being part of America.
Then someplace will ban legal immigrants from holding government jobs. Because you can't really be sure they actually are legal. Watch it also get upheld as legal with a 5-4 decision.
We already have concentration camps for illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. Ah, but what really is an illegal immigrant? Someplace will pass a law that expands the bounds of who might be considered suspect and next thing we know legal immigrants are in the camps. Will they get their day in court? No. Because another 5-4 decision says that only people that have already proved they are citizens have rights to lawyers and a day in court. So the camps grow and the people inside find themselves in a Kafka limbo. Barred from even being able to prove they don't belong.
Then some prickish sheriff somewhere decides he doesn't like a local newspaper and detains the entire staff for unspecified reasons that they are undermining America. Another 5-4 decision says that this is perfectly fine because the Founding Fathers definitely wouldn't have liked fake news.
And then it keeps growing.
Meadmaker
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The world is not about to end. We'll survive.
The first presidential election I voted in was to cast my vote for the losing re-election bid of Jimmy Carter. We were sure that Ronald Reagan was going to cause America to be destroyed, and since it was the Cold War era, we meant that literally. We survived. GHWB was just a continuation, but then Clinton was elected, and oh but there was wailing and gnashing of teeth from the other side. He surely would destroy America. He didn't.
Bush and Obama. Each would be the end. They weren't.
And the fact that each president would get Supreme Court nominations was a major reason to fear the pending apocalypse.
So now Kennedy is gone and Kavanaugh is in, assuming nothing truly dramatic happens today, and even if it does, someone like Kavanaugh is in. Abortion rights are in jeopardy. Do you know what that means? It means politicians will actually have to be open about their stance on abortion. For the entire lifetime of most Americans it has been a back burner issue because it was a Supreme Court ruling. I suspect that Roe will be overturned completely, or possibly abortion rights will be restricted via regulation, and there will be some women who would prefer an abortion who will end up with a baby instead. I'm not happy about that, but it isn't the end of the world.
The end is not near. Get out and vote. There's only so much they can do with gerrymandering to rig things. Most people don't want a country like Travis has described, or even a sane version of that.. If the court actually does something that pushes us a little bit in that direction, people will push back at the ballot box. It's a temporary problem.
The first presidential election I voted in was to cast my vote for the losing re-election bid of Jimmy Carter. We were sure that Ronald Reagan was going to cause America to be destroyed, and since it was the Cold War era, we meant that literally. We survived. GHWB was just a continuation, but then Clinton was elected, and oh but there was wailing and gnashing of teeth from the other side. He surely would destroy America. He didn't.
Bush and Obama. Each would be the end. They weren't.
And the fact that each president would get Supreme Court nominations was a major reason to fear the pending apocalypse.
So now Kennedy is gone and Kavanaugh is in, assuming nothing truly dramatic happens today, and even if it does, someone like Kavanaugh is in. Abortion rights are in jeopardy. Do you know what that means? It means politicians will actually have to be open about their stance on abortion. For the entire lifetime of most Americans it has been a back burner issue because it was a Supreme Court ruling. I suspect that Roe will be overturned completely, or possibly abortion rights will be restricted via regulation, and there will be some women who would prefer an abortion who will end up with a baby instead. I'm not happy about that, but it isn't the end of the world.
The end is not near. Get out and vote. There's only so much they can do with gerrymandering to rig things. Most people don't want a country like Travis has described, or even a sane version of that.. If the court actually does something that pushes us a little bit in that direction, people will push back at the ballot box. It's a temporary problem.
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acbytesla
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Even though your lead in to this sub-topic was hyperbolic, I don't think we should underestimate the multi-generation setback to liberal principles this right-wing court can cause.
I have little doubt that Roe will be eroded into effective non-existence. Unlike Meadmaker, I think it's a big deal to take away rights. And I don't expect these religious whack jobs to stop there.
Meadmaker
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The interesting thing to me is that as my life has gone on, I've seen America grow more and more liberal (in the true sense of the word, not left/right, but I mean tolerant). Issues that are considered major controversies now were not even a possibility when I was young. Gay marriage was a scare tactic used by conservatives to warn of what was at the bottom of the slippery slope. Transgender issues? Wasn't even a thing. Now we have legal weed in some states, porn novels as best sellers and hit movies, sexual harassment laws that actually punish people for sexual harassment. We've had a black president. A woman has gotten the majority vote in a presidential campaign, and a Jew has gotten the majority vote as vice-president. Those things could not have happened when I was young.
And through it all, the panic about the evil conservatives who will destroy our way of life has gotten more and more strident and over the top. You would think that we were living in some theocratic nightmare of a country because some people, and now almost certainly a majority of the court, thinks that a cake baker should be allowed to turn down customers in certain, very limited, circumstances.
There will be some rollback, temporarily, but, really, it won't be that bad.
And through it all, the panic about the evil conservatives who will destroy our way of life has gotten more and more strident and over the top. You would think that we were living in some theocratic nightmare of a country because some people, and now almost certainly a majority of the court, thinks that a cake baker should be allowed to turn down customers in certain, very limited, circumstances.
There will be some rollback, temporarily, but, really, it won't be that bad.
Craig4
Penultimate Amazing
Good. This will push the narrative that women and men who respect the rights of women cannot get justice from a Supreme Court with Kavanagh on it. It's important people understand that. The continued investigation will also keep Kavanagh front and center in the news media, likely making his life and his family's life in the DC area unbearable. There's always the faint hope he will be so harassed and humiliated that he'll want to leave the bench.
There are basically no government facilities that do elective abortion. A major part of the (fairly successful) push against abortion is to limit the ability of private groups to do abortions. The majority of the push, for years, has been against these private groups you speak of. A whole lot of private clinics have been shut down.
As for Roe vs Wade, they don't need to overturn it to overturn it. They don't need to make any ruling that officially contradicts that decision in order to nullify the effect of that decision. All they have to do is to allow the continuation of the death by a thousand cuts end of abortion, by:
- allowing ever-increasing restrictions on the ability of clinics to function (overly onerous regulations, such that only purpose built facilities can do it),
- longer and longer waiting periods, even if that means that some pregnancies continue into the "late-term" phase during the waiting period,
- continuing to define "late term" as earlier and earlier in the pregnancy, such that more and more potential abortions fall under the term
- using the longer waiting periods to force women to watch anti-abortion propaganda
- increasing restrictions on abortions by underage people - even if that pregnancy is the result of abuse (including incest)
- allowing "fathers" the right to prevent a woman from aborting
- easing and encouraging punitive lawsuits by people who feel they have been psychologically harmed by abortion,
- ever increasing restrictions on where abortion clinics can be located (even if that means an entire state ends up off limits),
- ever increasing limits on what sorts of abortions can be considered to be medically necessary,
- ever increasing regulatory requirements on the health professionals who actually perform abortions
And so on. All of these things already happen, but are sometimes slapped back a bit by courts if they are not careful enough about making it appear to not have the goal of completely banning abortion. If the courts start allowing more and more of that sort of thing, then it's very easy to foresee a situation in which abortion becomes completely illegal, without ever actually overturning Roe v Wade.
For example, a state could pass a law that states that abortions cannot be done in regular hospitals. Then pass another law requiring clinics that do abortion to have facilities just like hospitals - doorways wide enough to fit gurneys though, requiring abortions to be done in rooms equipped just like surgical suites (even if the "abortion" is nothing more than taking a pill), and so on. Then require the doctors who perform the abortions to have visiting privileges at a hospital within X distance of the clinic, require them to have vastly more expensive malpractice insurance than other doctors. Then just go ahead and change the state's legal definition of "hospital", such that all of the clinics that worked to meet the abortion requirement now meet that definition, and since you have already banned abortion in regular hospitals - you've just banned abortion, with no law specifically stating that's your goal.
Variations of all of this have been passed in various places already. The idea is that abortion remains legal on paper, but is regulated out of existence anyway.
The lower bar is just to narrow the scope of R v W, stating that it only applies at the federal level. This would prevent the federal government from banning abortion, but would allow state, county, and city governments to do so.
With a more conservative SC all or any of this is easily plausible, likely even.
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A look at the numbers:
A majority of Americans do not want Kav on the SC.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...inee-opposed-by-most-americans/?noredirect=on
A majority of Americans do not want Kav on the SC.
phiwum
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You know, some folks defended your bizarre fantasy as mere hyperbole. You could've done them a favor by not doubling down.
acbytesla
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No one said the world would be destroyed, only that things would get progressively worse. I look at Ronald Reagan as the beginning of that slide. 1980 is when the Moral Majority became a force. They were neither moral nor a majority. But that allegiance with the do anything for the rich drove a wedge into the poor religious working class and effectively made so many vote against their own interest. From that time on, the battle cry of the GOP was God, Guns and Gays. Ronald Reagan began shifting the tax burden away from the rich and onto the working class. He went after the unions and gutted the NLRB.
Reagan was a hero to the rich as his tax cuts put billions into their pockets. But he also ushered in the biggest tax increases on workers by increasing payroll or FICA taxes. Also, lots of everyday things that had been paid for by taxes all of a sudden had fees associated with them. What makes this important is from his election to this day middle and lower class incomes have been flat while the upper class has seen their wealth skyrocket. Even today where unemployment is very very low wages haven't moved. There is no problem getting a job today, just don't count on it paying a living wage.
I give the rich credit. They pulled off a masterful plan. But it helps when you have deep pockets and can buy politicians. The powerful will only continue to accumulate power gerrymandering every district they can. They will get away with purging voter rolls and more and more voter suppression. Democracy is dying and justice is only for those who can afford it.
RIP America.
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Just like the Voting Rights Act, you don't need to overturn a law or court decision in order to gut them to the point ineffectuality.
You don't understand at all, do you? Who other than "private groups" do you think provides abortion services now? And what do you think those private groups can do in states that make abortion illegal, other than maybe running buses to states where it is legal? And some states have even tried to make leaving the state for the purpose of obtaining an abortion a crime in itself.
And no, not just about everyone wants to make abortion as rare as possible. That would mean making it illegal. No woman should be required to bear a child against her will.