I mean, sure, if you assume that the sitting president not being allowed to seat justices (not specific justices, not hardline partisan justices, just any justices) doesn’t illegitimize the court, then there’s nothing wrong here.
Similarly, I can’t help but wonder - would the court be legitimate if, in 2020, under a democratic president, some nutjob started killing off conservative justices, and the democratic response was, “Welp, that’s a real tragedy. Time to seat a bunch of Sotomayor’s clerks (and Merrick Garland for shits and giggles)!”? I mean, after all, it would technically be following the rules, in the same way McConnell did. I think anyone would immediately recognize that the resulting court made a complete mockery of the judicial system - unless we’re still laboring under the bizarre delusion that the court is not political.
I’d like to think you’re wrong. McConnell has shown that the gloves are off at this point. Judicial norms simply are no longer a thing. (Really, the current republican administration has shown that norms, period, simply are not a thing, and that even ethical rules are moot, because who the fuck is going to enforce them when people flagrantly violate them, but that’s another story altogether.) There is no law or rule in place as to how many justices are on the supreme court; there is merely a norm. And norms that only one side has any interest in following are not really norms.
Packing the courts is absolutely a reasonable response to the complete abandonment of norms in the nomination process that McConnell brought about. It’s not enough to just go tit for tat; at that point your enemy always has first move advantage. You have to hit them harder and punish them for defecting.
Also on a completely unrelated note (nothing to do with you, John Mace), if it’s against the rules to call someone out as lying, can it please also be against the rules to blatantly lie over and over and over again in elections?
I don’t see why that wouldn’t be legitimate. Presidents get to nominate SCOTUS justices. There is nothing in the constitution that says it has to be done a certain way under unusual circumstances. Lots of people would gripe about it, but lots of people gripe about all sorts of things.
I don’t see why that would make the Court illegitimate. The Court would have vacancies; the President has the power under Art II Sec 2 to appoint justices to fill those vacancies, with the advice and consent of the Senate.
What is your idea for what should happen? And more important than your idea; what law supports your idea of what should happen?
Legitimacy is about more than just law. If a large majority of the public sees something as illegitimate, it’s unlikely to survive whether it’s strictly legal or not. History shows us many examples of laws or policies that were legal at the time, but considered illegitimate by the public, and they didn’t last.
I think if someone is going to claim in a a debate forum here that something about our government is not “legitimate”, and they mean something other than the legal definition, they should be clear about that. I mean, where do you think the word “legitimate” comes from? And further, if you have evidence that a large majority of the public sees the Garland affair as somehow making the court “illegitimate” (colloquially or otherwise), then that evidence should be presented. If you (the generic you) are just offering your opinion… well, you know what they say about opinions.
And in case anyone has forgotten, we had long discussions about the Garland issue where more than one poster insisted that the Senate was constitutionally required to vote on Garland.
What! “More than one poster”! The Devil you say! Well, that totally proves…I mean, that leaves no doubt that…actually, what does that prove, perzackly?
Sure. And I suppose if a large majority saw future SCOTUS assassination vacancies being filled by a Democrat as being somehow illegitimate, they could absolutely push for a constitutional amendment to reform the appointment process, or more immediately push their senators not to consent to the appointments. That’s a feature of representative democracies.
But you went from BPC’s question about whether the Court would be illegitimate to the assumption that it would be illegitimate based on “large majorities,” believing it illegitimate. Perhaps I’m cynical to a fault, but I believe that if this were to happen, roughly half the country would be nonplussed.
No matter what party benefitted. It would just be different halves, trading sanguinity for anger.
I will say that the Democrats had better do something besides using the court vacancy as nothing more than a fundraising opportunity. I’m sure I’ve received at least 30 fundraising emails since the announcement.
Okay, thanks for being a stand-up dude on the di@k move comment.
Clinton and the DNC likely have just as many illegal activities with people connected to it as the Trump organization has. Perhaps more considering their length of operation in politics. Unlike Trump, Clinton is guilty of how she handed classified information.
Meeting with people or foreign nations does not mean tampering. I’d rather see foreign aid toward elections banned. But it’s not. There is a double standard on which candidate took more money from foreign nations based on the coverage given by the press. That would be Clinton by a wide margin. Bill himself pocketed $500,000.00 for speech in Russia. So the quid quo pro if much higher for Clinton.
To answer your question, what it would take to convince me that Trump actually did the things he’s been accused of? Okay. Frist off getting dirt on your opponent is not illegal in politics. It happens all the time. Having groups pay for political ads is legal, and happens all of the time. An attempt to rig an election, however, is a serious matter!
If there was clear evidence that Trump conspired with various groups to rig the election by tampering with voting machines, and this was proven by forensics with the story corroborated by Russians and USA people on audio or via an electronic paper trail, then I say he did something very wrong.
They did a recount in Wisconsin, and Trump actually picked up votes. There was no such tampering of any voting machine. No person says the Russian imitated or bought their vote. People voted their conscience. Trump won the election fairly.
