This. Why were they allowed back into power right away ?

I'd also say things like banning guns and state militias for a generation or two.

Yes. And thanks to a media that is part of that donor class they have no way to make an informed vote on issues.

The humanoids vote the way they're programmed to vote.

Ok cool, so just a long occupation. Like we did in Afghanistan? Or did you have in mind more of a Vietnam situation where we changed hearts and minds?

I'm sorry, did Vietnam or Afghanistan attack us directly ?

So you would have just surrendered and let Lee take your wife and daughters if asked ?

That's one way to deal with hostility.

For all the authoritarian bros that want to occupy the Confederacy again, ACB is a dream candidate. The civil libertarian right HATES her.

All twenty of them?

Let’s check in with Rand Paul to see what he says about that!

What’s that? He already pledged to vote for her no matter what and says corona is no big deal because he got it and peed in the pool and everyone’s fine? Got it.

im not denying that but what am i saying is for whatever reason, they are not far left liberals

I dug into Amy Barrett’s history, reading probably way more than her stuff without getting paid.

Her academic writings have a strong conservative and textualist bent, but really nothing that crazy. Academic writings almost by necessity need to be more rigid and more textualist just to be internally consistent and edited for publication.

Her judicial history is just too short. In a few cases that have been brought up by media to prove she’s a conservative, she ruled/dissented on the side of being conservative but the case facts were such where more centrist/liberal justices might have ruled/dissented the same. The abortion case where she tried to get a rehearing was trying to uphold an Indians law making it illegal to treated aborted fetuses as waste. The law is so specific and of a fact pattern that even some liberals would be okay with, I am not sure it’s a good test. On most hot button issues, she just hasn’t been tested.

What I do find concerning is, in the few cases involving criminal defendant rights, she consistently ruled against defendant even in cases where Scalia likely would have ruled against the state. But again, cases were few and it’s not 100% clear she’s more or less conservative than Scalia.

Her writings suggest she’s a textualist with strong conservative leanings but not dramatically so. Again, not much to go on here.

What does scare me is she’s a member of a group called “People of Praise.” Look it up, pretty scary stuff. That and she is 48.

There is a significant chance, more than for other candidates on Trump’s list, she’s crafted her judicial options over past three years to compile conservative bona fides just for this nomination and she will end up being a Trojan horse much more concerned with her own legacy and place in history than with her partisan leanings.

There is also a chance her youth, and many you g children, will end up moving her to the left over time.

Yeah, wishful thinking is all I got now.

An idiot eye doctor hasn’t done his homework on a SC nominee? Hard to believe.

Guess that’s why conservatives have been so satisfied with their last 3 nominees.

Conservatives seem to love this. ACB would be the 3rd conservative member of this court (with Roberts and Thomas) who was on an appeals circuit for <3 years before getting the call-up to the big show. This would apply to Lagoa as well if she was the pick. (the only analogous liberal is Kagan, who didn't come from an appeals court and whose previous jobs were dean of Harvard Law and then Obama's solicitor general - Sotomayor/Breyer/RBG did major time on appeals courts before being nominated)

Lagoa's had a meteoric rise under Trump-cult leaders which can only mean she must be a total ghoul. From 2006-19 she was on a Florida state appeals court. DeSantis made her Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court his second day in office. Eight months later Trump nominated her to the 11th circuit. A year after that she's on his SCOTUS shortlist.

What were the conditions of surrender?

Also, the Union viewed the conflict as a Civil War, not a war against another country.

lol no

there’s a very long paper trail on ACB.

Lol Grizy:



She absolutely loves the government. It really comes through in her takings clause opinion.

Also, yltsi:

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bi...568002%3AS%3A0

Takings Case ^^

Bonus points: she shot down a challenge to *literally* the Barack Obama Presidential Library on a lame takings argument.

She’s also a stickler for good lawyering, and seems to work from a mindset of “the little guy is probably wrong”. The one big exception to this that I found was her opinion, on an appeal from SJ dismissal (take that fwiw) in the University Sex Assault case: it’s a good read, too (and she—and the panel—got it right).

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bi...:N:2362429:S:0

I read about 20 of her opinions and a few other cases she joined with full panel and it’s extremely clear that she loves government.

Alright then, who are the “civil libertarian” members of Congress that are well educated and dislike her?

lol that’s a trick question and you know it

In any event, even if there were any, none of them is going to step to Trump if he nominates her. There’s not a chance in hell of this going like Miers’ nom.

I have strong suspicions it's because experienced judges all have rulings that taint their ideological purity.

The need for ideological purity and penchant for nakedly political appointments aren't without historical precedent. We've seen it happen with both major parties during times of political polarization and/or when the more extreme wings of the respective parties are in charge. FDR's nominations were even more nakedly political than Amy Barret. Lyndon B Johnson put a crony into SCOTUS that would literally tell him how the Court was going to rule on any issue and eventually had to resign due to blatant ethics issues that surfaced.

Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, as justices at least, are well qualified justices who likely will keep politics at an arm''s length.

Amy Barret likely will do the same (to protect her husbands job and reputation if nothing else.) Her route to Appelate court was nakedly political but she served her 3 year stint there competently.

The GOP (and rest of us frankly, by not voting more and participating in political process more often) are definitely attacking many of the things that make USA exceptional. Trump has made a mockery of the White House. Mitch has made a mockery of the Senate/Congress. SCOTUS, for all of its faults and anti-democratic traits (by design), still stands as a testament to America's institutional strengths (namely the respect for rule of law, even if we disagree with the laws and even the justices that make the rulings).

Trump (and conservatives) ran super good getting 3 nominations with Senate. Are they doing it while representing ~45% of the country? Yeah. But the constitution was always designed to create rare circumstances while the minority could exert control. I think this trait has become a feature, intended or not, that has kept America from lurching from one political extreme to another as support for one party rises or drops below 50%. Its a feature that forces more ruling by consensus rather than my the imposition of the will of 51%, whatever that coalition happens to be at the time, on the rest.

I think the ask of Democrats and RINOs (I still consider myself an R but most would say INO) to get out of our current situation is clear: What are our solutions for Middle America?

That's the only way to chip away at the unified resentment much of the GOP base has toward, as they'd perceive it, the coastal elites who, increasingly, look, speak, grow up, and just generally have totally different experiences growing up. Take the 2016 election for example, Hillary, the Dems, and even liberals essentially giving up on steel and coals workers, caused enough unions members that historically voted reliably Democratic to flip for Trump, taking PA (definitely) and Ohio (probably) with them.

More recently, many posters around have wanted Manchin to just leave the Democratic party and some even said John Lewis wasn't worthy of the admiration he got because he became an Establishment Dem and, in essence, was ideologically tainted.

You will struggle to find any judge, liberal ones included, that would rule differently on the takings case.

Some conservative judges may have blocked lockdowns, not liberal ones who recognize public safety in extreme situations can justify small and temporary intrusions on freedom of movement.

As for consistently ruling for the government in general, that’s true with even the most liberal federal judges around, especially in cases where the government is the defendant. Frankly most suits and appeals against the government are garbage. A lot of appeals in particular are last ditch efforts by people exercising their right to appeal knowing they are on shaky legal ground. In criminal cases, there is also an asymmetry in that the government can’t appeal a not guilty verdict due to double jeopardy.

Thanks for the historical context, didn't know that.

This seems like a very Hillbilly Elegy/economic anxiety sort of take, and there's lots of evidence it was not economic anxiety that turned Pennsyltucky and Ohio deplorable.

I mean, Establishment Dems are the establishment for a reason; the people who use "Establishment Dems" as a term of slander are out of power and don't have a meaningful voice in anything. There's as little sense in talking about them vis-a-vis elections as there is talking about the Proud Boys, they don't represent mainstream views about the future of the Democratic Party.

The coal gaffe was when I started to think she may lose, but not for the gaffe itself, but rather what it exposed. Obama did all these things to hurt the coal industry, and only after his admin did this were democrats concerned about job training, etc, to the point Clinton heralded a $30B assistance package. I imagine an obvious question these coal miners asked was, where was this assistance when your team essentially got me fired?

The coal mining union members always leaned socially conservative and, yes, a little racist. But they did reliably vote Democrat until it became obvious Dems didn’t have solutions for them.

For at least some of them, economic disaffection was a but-for cause, at least a tipping point, to vote for Trump.

The Economist had a good article called “Shooting an Elephant” from 2016 soon after Trump won GOP primaries, Marie le Pen was making waves in France, Boris Johnson was going for full on hard Brexit and, as foreign minister, sabotaging the Prime Minister that gave him the job.

I would say until about that time, I was really only focused on help inner city kids on education and basically believed the solution for coal miners was to move and retrain themselves for the new economy. To this day, I still believe if people rationally responded to economic incentives and are informed of the choices available, a lot of the economic and social issues in America would resolve themselves or at least be sufficiently covered up.

But in democracies (Democratic Republics too), people’s feelings matter and we have limited life spans. I, and I suspect a majority if not most, of the people posting in this thread have been fortunate enough to born into situations to best exploit (at least better exploit than most of those born in middle America) the type of economic growth of (the type that’s knowledge/education driven and urban) the most prosperous decades in world history, ever. Even with the Great Recession and Covid, the economic progress of last 30 years is unprecedented, especially if you look at it from a global perspective.

I still believe, and I have said so in other posts, hat markets will correct eventually and the children of coal miners will by and large be much better off than their parents, in general. Some middle cities will even become regional knowledge and tech hubs as big cities reach saturation and some knowledge work that doesn’t require cutting edge talent will filter down. Las Vegas has a growing IT sector built around call centers. Nashville is already a regional tech hub serving all kinds of startups focused on the southeast region. Iowa, exploiting cool weather and central location, has a thriving IT industry revolving around data centers.

But I have become convinced the gradual dispersement of economic benefits through economic forces alone are not enough. We, myself included, have failed our fellow Americans in Middle America (and inner city kids too but that’s a separate issue) for last 20-30 years. That’s most of most people’s productive and what should be happy years. That’s not an acceptable outcome for anyone. Even libertarians should find the sheer waste of the brain power of nearly half of the population unacceptably inefficient and definitely worthy of collective action.

I have been asking myself how the **** we, as a country, got to where we are since Trump won GOP nomination l. The death of RBG and the stress from filling out tax forms that literally nobody (IRS included) will review for 70 hours a week since like June are making me extra reflective nowadays.

I have no answers.

I spent my entire life in cosmopolitan global cities, having rented apartments or lived in dorms in London, Taipei, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Amsterdam. After my poker/travel years, in my interviews for law school and jobs, I used to say I’ve met all kinds of people throughout my travels and I felt that equipped me better to understand other people’s points of view and to find solutions for them.

I have come to realize I know very little about people living in Middle America. What are their pain points? How can we help them? How can we persuade them?

I have no answers. I am not part of the solution.

Do you have answers? If not, you’re not part of the solution either.

As the linked article explains, if Democrats won the Senate, the more subtle move would be to pass a law that requires that six justices vote yes on a cert petition in order for the court to hear the case. Current, uncodified SCOTUS practice is to require four votes to hear a case.

This would dramatically reduce the likelihood of the Court hearing cases on hot button social issues. It's an interesting idea. I'm still not sure it would be possible to pass such a law without eliminating the filibuster.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN26E3A9

Not sure how I feel about potentially allowing circuit splits and inconsistent rulings persist for decades when a majority is ready to rule. Every time a majority in SCOTUS is denied its ability to make a ruling, the majority justices have additional incentive to politicize SCOTUS decisions even more. We’re going to end up reading into dicta in barely related decisions for guidance and you bet the justices will take every opportunity to shape decisions of lower courts.

Make it 5 to hear and let the centrists, or as is certainly often the case, justices waiting for better fact patterns/arguments to push forward their interpretations of the law/constitution, deny cert. I think this promotes more behind the doors deliberation and allows the justices to craft better decisions and avoid making case law before they are ready without artificially suppressing a majority opinion.

The current uncodified informal rule of four I think is SCOTUS tradition saying if four justices think a case is important enough to hear, the court, ready or not, needs to make a ruling.

A codified rule of five would be Congress saying “nah, wait till you’re ready.”

I'm not too worried about the Court refusing to resolve circuit splits for poliical reasons. Few Circuit splits involve highly political issues, and I suspect that most justices would be too embarrassed to argue to their colleagues that the Court should avoid deciding the sort of circuit split that the Court traditionally has taken up.

But I definitely share your concern about the bolded.

lol you are a Republican so politically you agree with those people and yet you dont understand them? just straight up bizarre.