It appears Lindsey takes it seriously.

For once I agree with Wookie, there is no way the republicans give up this opportunity before the election. The democrats would fully do the same if they were in the same situation.

lol

Dem's basically gotta say: If you make another bad faith appointment to the supreme court, then all bets are off when we get the majority next time. Filibuster is gone, DC statehood is on, pack the court, expanded voting rights (lol that this is considered a partisan issue), etc.

Pitlyk and Grant are dark horses. Both are female former clerks of Kavanaugh in their early 40s.

This is cute and all, but a 6-3 panel of unprincipled conservative authoritarians gets to decide whether or not Dems can ever win another election.

The mere fact that you can identify a distinction doesn't make the distinction compelling.

Why should anyone care about a rationale that you concede is pretextual (at least for you and McConnell) and that you concede you would happily abandon in the breach?

The only ways they would give it up are if they were very confident of winning or thought it might make the difference in a election. The later is more likely but I suspect they think the risk of losing will be too high. Still must be tempting to make the election more about the supreme court.

Yeah I doubt a hypothetical threat will dissuade them (their whole strategy is to maximize short term sectarian political gains) but at some point chickens are going to come home to roost and a minority using undemocratic means to keep a tenuous hold on power will face a backlash. This is going to entrench their opponents, escalate partisanship and make the backlash worse.

If you're going for authoritarian rule, you only have to win once. There's no backlash in Putin's Russia.

and Republican Senate wasnt going to approve anyone anyway. I guess if she knew they were gonna block everyone then she shoulda retired before whatever election it was that gave them the majority. but libs are dumb about that kind of stuff and I doubt she was an exception.

The main point I was making that I dont think Rococo got.

The trouble is that even if this isn't it almost by accident, it's just matter of time until some more ruthless competent Putin version of trump realises just how easy it would be.

It's a feature if the USA system. An authoritarian bomb waiting to go off

Kind of a different situation. There has been authoritarian rule in Russia going back to before Czar Nicholas

it's just going to be the vulnerable senators deciding if shoving a possible end to abortion and gay/trans rights onto the court is worth losing their jobs.

Dems should be waiving susan collins in republicans senators faces every chance they get. she went from +30 to -12 since kavanaugh. Senators in blueish near blueish states will absolutely get voted out on this..


that being said however, republicans are much more reactive to an open seat voter puh than dems as seen by 2016.. an open seat will give every religious trumper a clear reason to go against every single belief they have(not that they particularly cared) and pull the trump lever. so i'm not sure its necessarily beneficial for trump himself to push one through prior to the election rather than hold it as a reward for re-electing him

The main issue is 50 votes. I can imagine McSally, Collins and a few others not wanting it coming up before, either way they will piss people off. Lame duck it’ll be pretty easy to pass it with the hard core red staters plus whatever purple staters lost.

I agree that she was making a gamble, and that if she really cared about who replaced her she should have retired. However, I would think there is a very good chance her thoughts and stance on the process would have evolved over the past 7 years.

That’s why I bring up the recent nominations. Nothing like that had ever happened before with blocking Garland, and the Kavanaugh process was an order of magnitude more dramatic and high profile than Thomas or Bork. It’s pretty reasonable that, having seen the processes and checks and balances that she spent her life depending on devolve, she realized after the fact how important her staying alive was. Or, on a similar note, she would have been ok with a “normal” conservative candidate that got vetted and challenged the way they had historically been, and not one of the FedSoc robots that are on Trumps list.

Anyways, my main point is when exactly do you think staying on became a bad gamble? As soon as the 2014 midterms happened, she has to hang for D pres AND a D senate. So she was supposed to see that coming in 2012 after Obama walked over Romney and check out?

Not to go all Victor shitlib, but there is zero chance of court expansion no matter how big a D wave there is. That’s a fever dream that Rs are using to boogeyman their base into turning out. There are like 3 total elected Dems who have the stomach to even bring that up.

It’s over for the court for the next like 20 years at least with RBG gone. The only way there’s a lib majority is if Biden wins, D senate majority wins, and BOTH Thomas and Alito croak, because neither of them is walking away in that scenario.

*im assuming someone gets rammed through before the end of the year no matter what. Which will happen

Agree. Right off the top of my head I can think of 5-6 incumbent GOP senators who are in really tight re-election fights. The ones most likely to fall (in descending order) include: (1.) Martha McSally, Arizona, (2.) Susan Collins, Maine, (3.) Cory Gardner, Colorado, (4.) Joni Ernst, Iowa, (5.) Thom Tillis, North Carolina, and (6.) Steve Daines, Montana. Thought not likely, there's a [remote?] possibility Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) and David Perdue (Georgia) could come out on the short end, but there would have to be a true "Blue Wave" election for those two to get knocked off.

Because these six incumbent Republicans are in tight re-election races - where being forced to cast a controversial [pre-election] vote could literally cost them their jobs - they'll persuade McConnell to postpone the vote until after the election. After the election, if they lose anyway, their final FU to the voters in their states will be to vote Trump's nominee in during the lame duck session. Realizing that forcing these vulnerable Republican senators to vote before the election will probably cost him his coveted Majority Leader status, Mitch will try and "persuade" Trump not to put forth a nominee before the election. However, with Trump being Trump, who knows how this plays out?

Politics ... Don't you just love it!?

Oh I agree this is a Doomsday scenario for Ds. I just think they’ll puss out. Like, can you Joe “Let’s get back to the way things used to be civility wise” Biden pushing this?

Hope you’re right tho.

Democracy ended already in the USA. Canada and the European Union should be sending in Troops to ensure a fair election

Another 50 years and you will be sewing and stitching Nike shoes and clothes for Chinese Citizens as Dictator Baron Trump has inherited the throne from Ivanka

And you'll, with a single tear running down your cheek, say "we took our country back"

I agree that lame duck is possibly more likely but also more likely to be thoroughly rejected by the American people.

Also I don’t believe Mcsally gets a lame duck session. If she loses she will likely be shoved out by November 30th because her seat isn’t a normal election seat but a special..

And how does getting rid of the SCOTUS solve what you see as the problem? Maybe I misunderstood your post.

Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito were nominated to the Court by H.W. and W. respectively. Both Thomas and Alito are ideologically to the right of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. It would have been insane for RBG to assume in 2012 that the next GOP appointee would be more centrist than someone like Kavanaugh.

It's a considerable overstatement to say that the same party has to control both the White House and the Senate in order to get a justice confirmed. It's one thing to block a nomination for eight months. It's another thing entirely to block a nomination for 2-3 years.

In any case, there was nothing stopping RBG from stepping down in early 2014 at the age of 80. By that time, she already had a history of pancreatic cancer, which is an extremely serious form of cancer with generally poor outcomes.

But again, I'm not that critical of her. As I said before, she only has one life. It's hard to leave a job that you love, especially when you are great at the job.