RBG leaves the stage.

JoeMorgue said:
Yep. Roberts would vote to turn America conservative at the drop of a dime, but he won't vote to destroy it.
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When I saw him speaking at the court this morning my primary thought was: Our democracy is now in your hands.




Also, was Justice Thomas arguing with his wife about whether he could sit down? I think he was and I could totally relate.
 
I understand and agree with most of your arguments. But...

Segnosaur said:
Piling on too many charges also risks making the Democrats look 'petty', since all the republicans would have to do is target the weakest of the charges.
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If you meant they could use the weakest charge as a talking point, sure.

But they would have had to refute each and every charge put forth in the impeachment. If nothing else, it would have exposed the obstruction charges contained in Part 2 of the Mueller Report to more of the population, even if acquittal in the senate was foregone conclusion. I know lots of people who never read any of the Mueller Report and the Law of Primacy means what sticks in their minds is Barr's assertion there was "no obstruction". I also don't think the "perfect" phone call was their strongest case.

But I agree we're pretty far off topic - for that I apologize.
 
Trebuchet said:
Oh, it won't in it's current form. It'll simply be The Party, the only one allowed under the Trump Dynasty.
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There will be token opposition parties who's leadership has a string of such mysterious and unfortunate accidents like in Russia.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
That assumes the Republican Party survives.

Right now, I’m hoping it doesn’t - at least in anything resembling its current form.
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This is an important point that too many people ignore.

The reason the GOP has done all these bad-faith and dishonorable things is to maintain power and minority rule without moderating to appeal to the voters.

The answer to their bad-faith assholery is not to tie one hand behind your back and worry about 'what they will do if you do this'. They're not limited by what you do. They're dishonorable.

Those changes, things like restoring the integrity of the Supreme Court, democracy strengthening voter rights protections, representation for places like DC, would mean that the Republicans would have to appeal to the voters again to have power. This means that getting the power to 'do the same thing back' involves stop being the bad-faith actors they currently are.

The Dems have to stop worrying about 'seeming reasonable' and being 'responsible'. The GOP dictated the terms of this battle, so screw them. They don't actually care about it, neither do their voters, but they are the minority.
 
tyr_13 said:
This is an important point that too many people ignore.

The reason the GOP has done all these bad-faith and dishonorable things is to maintain power and minority rule without moderating to appeal to the voters.

The answer to their bad-faith assholery is not to tie one hand behind your back and worry about 'what they will do if you do this'. They're not limited by what you do. They're dishonorable.

Those changes, things like restoring the integrity of the Supreme Court, democracy strengthening voter rights protections, representation for places like DC, would mean that the Republicans would have to appeal to the voters again to have power. This means that getting the power to 'do the same thing back' involves stop being the bad-faith actors they currently are.

The Dems have to stop worrying about 'seeming reasonable' and being 'responsible'. The GOP dictated the terms of this battle, so screw them. They don't actually care about it, neither do their voters, but they are the minority.
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The problem is that Democratic voters do care about these things.

ETA: I was reading Dems in your last para as Dem Politicians. Rereading I see that you could be calling out all Dems which makes my post seem silly and redundant. Luckily I'm comfortable with that and will just leave it there.
 
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Segnosaur said:
Probably. I agree, its a hail mary.

I'm just thinking... flipped Senate seat in Arizona, Murkowski deciding to vote against it, and maybe Romney having second thoughts (perhaps Trump loses big, and Romney wants to distance himself with the long-term goal of another presidental run.)

Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
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If Romney wants another chance at a national election, the best possible move would be for him to declare loudly and often his principles as being opposed to rushing through a Supreme Court appointment and get 3+ other Republican senators to support him in this, followed by all 4+ of them voting their declared principles. He would suddenly become an actual maverick, shaking up the Republican leadership and getting a fair number of swing voters to think, "Hey, I like Romney's style."

Who knows? Showing McConnell up like that could make it so that turd doesn't even get to be minority leader when the next Congress starts.

The stark reality, however, is that as strong and powerful as Republicans want to act, in the Senate at least they are all weak as kittens, knuckling under to McConnell every chance they get.
 
Babbylonian said:
If Romney wants another chance at a national election, the best possible move would be for him to declare loudly and often his principles as being opposed to rushing through a Supreme Court appointment and get 3+ other Republican senators to support him in this, followed by all 4+ of them voting their declared principles. He would suddenly become an actual maverick, shaking up the Republican leadership and getting a fair number of swing voters to think, "Hey, I like Romney's style."
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That requires a clearly erroneous belief that republican voters care about things like ethics and morals to give a loser like him a second chance. He is as big a loser as the war dead to republicans and as such should know better than to even hope for a second chance.
 
Trump openly says that he wants to approve RBG's replacement before the election so SCOTUS will have his back when he challenges mail voting

"This scam that the Democrats are pulling ... will be before SCOTUS, and I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation."
 
ponderingturtle said:
That requires a clearly erroneous belief that republican voters care about things like ethics and morals to give a loser like him a second chance. He is as big a loser as the war dead to republicans and as such should know better than to even hope for a second chance.
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True, and I don't know how likely Romney would be to think he could get a second chance. Still, the concept was proposed and I gave my thoughts.

I would never vote for Romney myself. He's a plutocrat who stated quite clearly that he doesn't give a **** about the poor, or he at least told that to an audience he thought would be receptive to that message. Either way, he's a bad guy and I don't know why anyone would think that he's any more honorable than the rest of the Republican scum in Congress.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Trump openly says that he wants to approve RBG's replacement before the election so SCOTUS will have his back when he challenges mail voting

"This scam that the Democrats are pulling ... will be before SCOTUS, and I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation."
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Trump and his party are pretty sure they can't win a fair election and are doing everything in their power to tip it their way. I'm 85% sure they'll succeed.
 
Segnosaur said:
I guess the question is, what could they have done differently. The republican-led senate had control of the confirmations. Not many options for doing an end-run around that. ...
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Made a bigger public stink about it, for one thing. One of Obama's faults was to be too nice.

They could have made a bigger public stink about Comey's Oct surprise instead of sitting quietly by waiting for him to finish investigating Weiner's laptop.

The GOP manages to make their faux outrage work well for them. In these two cases the outrage wasn't faux.
 
Segnosaur said:
... A bit off topic. However, lets face it... the republicans in the senate were never ever going to vote to convict Stubby McBonespurs, even if they had video evidence of Trump personally handing the nuclear launch codes to Putin. And the impact of the Mueller report was affected by all the redactions.
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Again, the Democrats were ineffective for one reason (IMO) is they were in disagreement internally about the impeachment.

Piling on too many charges also risks making the Democrats look 'petty', since all the republicans would have to do is target the weakest of the charges.
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The Democrats only look petty because they fail to control the message.


Take this for example:
I saw a news clip of Biden where he talked about 'stacking' the supreme court. He said he didn't want to talk about it now, because it might detract from the outrage people currently feel towards the Republicans for their actions. Which makes sense... keep people focused on unethical acts of the republicans (rush to confirm Ginsburg replacement) instead of debating whether your response (expanding the court) is a good idea.

I doubt the threat of an expanded court would have stopped the republicans anyways... so talk about how bad the republicans are now, wait till after the election, and if they win, THEN start packing the courts.
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If the Democrats allow the GOP to control the framing of this as "stacking the deck" then they've failed before they've started.

This is not about stacking the deck, it's about righting a wrong starting with the denial of a vote on Garland. And I mentioned before, if the rebuttal to that is that McConnell was acting within his political right, then so is Biden** if he expands the court to 11 members.

**Depending on the Democrats taking back the Senate.
 
JoeMorgue said:
If we decide to go forward with changing the size of the Supreme Court it is vital, vital that we assign it to some metric or it will just seem like some power grab.

"The size of the Supreme Court shall be set at 1 justice per X" X can be population, the number of cases they see in a year, the number points scored in that years Superbowl... I don't care but it has to be something. It can't just be "We're making it bigger because right now we're the minority on it."
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Nope, adding 2 justices RIGHTS A WRONG.
 
Originally Posted by Stacyhs View Post
What we can count on for many years to come is a very conservative SC where Republicans get their way on pretty much everything they want. And that scares the crap out of me.
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angrysoba said:
Let's be a little reasonable on this.

Can the Republicans "get their way on pretty much everything they want"?

Do you foresee the Supreme Court just making up judgments and saying that anything and everything that a Democratic President and Congress want to pass will be vetoed as unconstitutional?

Or even going further and dicatating policy and writing bills and declaring war because they will just say that as the interpreters of the Constitution they noticed that if you rearrange all the letters then it gives them all their own powers?
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Yes, let's do be a little reasonable about this which your interpretation of my post is anything but. What I'm saying is that anything the Republicans back which are brought before the SC will almost certainly be decided in their favor. Abortion rights? Yep. DACA? Yep. LBGTQ matters? Yep. Gun rights? Yep. ACA? Yep.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Trump openly says that he wants to approve RBG's replacement before the election so SCOTUS will have his back when he challenges mail voting

"This scam that the Democrats are pulling ... will be before SCOTUS, and I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation."
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Trump is such a goddamn idiot. Does he really not understand that "I want this judge on this court in time to make a decision in this case in which I have a direct interest" is the quiet part he wasn't supposed to say out loud? I mean, it's one thing to say that you're appointing a judge because their political ideologies line up generally with yours; it seems like another to appoint one, and insist on their quick approval, only for your political sake in a particular case.

Anyway...one would hope that any judge with an ounce of honor in their makeup would feel obligated to recuse in that situation.
 
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