Be kind. He does seem to be acknowledging now that there really was a 2012.
Baby steps.
Sorry – I am reading “taxpayer” there as an individual, as opposed to the business, because that’s the thrust of the Halbig complaint.
But isn’t the text CRYSTAL CLEAR?
Nonsense. I issued the decree on October 10, 1973. It’s about fucking TIME for it to kick in.
No. Mark down these predictions instead:
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The Republicans will do better in the popular vote in 2016 than they did in 2012. So they’ll beat 48%.
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Clinton will exhibit similar weaknesses as she did in 2008, which means the Republicans will also win more electoral votes than in 2012.
Now here’s a couple ifs to hedge, since it’s too early for definite predictions:
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If Obama is at 40% or lower in 2016, the Republicans will win the election.
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If Obama is at 55% or higher in 2016, the Republicans will lose the election.
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If Obama is between 40 and 55% and the nominee is Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, or Ted Cruz, Republicans will underperform their 2012 performance. If the nominee is anyone else currently known to be likely to run, they will outperform 2012.
Save this post.
Will you acknowledge it if you turn out to be way off? “Heads I win, tails don’t count” is not an attractive proposition.
That’s why I made the caveats clear. You guys missed the ones I made last election, or just chose to ignore them.
Is that a yes?
It’s always a yes. Have I not owned my previous election prediction failure? Just don’t forget the caveats this time. If Obama manages to turn the ship around, Clinton will coast to victory. If the GOP is nominates the perfect foil for Clinton, like Bush or Cruz, she’ll also win easily.
Oh, forgot about Rick Perry too. Rick Perry is awful, although I can’t predict whether he could win or not. Count Rick Perry as an solid “I don’t know.”
So you predict a GOP victory anyway, based on some sort of historical cycle Hannity told you about, but you cannot name who it will actually be who does it.
There’s an old principle of politics, you can’t beat somebody with nobody.
I honestly don’t know, actually. I see you making a lot of predictions which strike me as obviously wrong or at best wishful, but I’m not familiar with your post-result rituals where you claim success or acknowledge failure.
These predictions are presented before your comments on Obama:
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The Republicans will do better in the popular vote in 2016 than they did in 2012. So they’ll beat 48%.
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Clinton will exhibit similar weaknesses as she did in 2008, which means the Republicans will also win more electoral votes than in 2012.
Are they also dependent on Obama’s performance? I assume (2) is dependent on Clinton getting the Dem nomination.
Briefly returning our attention to the subject of the ACA subsidies, Post columnist Ruth Marcus writes about her fear that the Supreme Court may not save Obamacare again:
This is emblematic of the kind of thinking I believe permeates the viewpoints agitating for affirming the IRS rule. “We have to, because of the bad effects if we don’t.”
But that should not be the role of the courts. Congress made a mistake in predicting how the rollout would unfold, and as a result their decision to not give subsidies to federal exchange customers looks retroactively really bad.
Now, Richard Parker has been an able advocate for a different argument: that at worst the statute is ambiguous, and under Chevron the courts should defer to the agency. But that’s not the majority voice I’m seeing in the blogosphere, and in this thread’s beginning. Here the point is much simpler: the court should fix this, because the result if they don’t will be a poorly implemented policy.
In my view, that’s not an indictment of the Left, it’s an indictment of mainstream commentary on the law as a whole. The widely-followed pundits are, as a whole, awful. And they are particularly awful about writing on anything requiring technical expertise.
For every Ruth Marcus, there’s a Bill O’Reilly, who said this about Halbig:
What the fuck does that have to do with Chevron deference? Not a damn thing, of course. Because he is not doing legal analysis and neither is Ruth Marcus. He’s trying to get eyeballs on media advertisements.
Not as bad as claiming there was a “decision” based on absolutely no discussion whatsoever in that direction, and all discussion and evidence in fact being to the contrary. :rolleyes:
Any guess why?
Do please tell us more about using “the blogosphere” as you personally perceive it as your authority for, well, anything.
Wrong again. The result would be an unintended, as well as stupid and inconsistent, policy.
You know that, but persist in lying about it anyway. Why?
IIRC Obama pretty much said this is what he was looking for when he nominated Sotomayer.
Nonsense.
There are lots of circumstances in the law when it is entirely proper to consider the equities of a decision, or when judges are called upon to assess circumstances that inevitably call upon their experiences with the world (such as whether someone in a particular circumstance is objectively justified in feeling a certain way). Generally speaking, statutory interpretation does not involve this kind of examination of the equities, or judgment call based on common sense and life experience. But desiring someone with the right temperament and experiences to address those areas of law that do call for those kinds of judgments says nothing about whether Obama wanted Sotomayor to color her statutory interpretation decisions with her feelings about optimal social policy.
IIRC he said nothing like that at all. Do you have a cite?
That is not the correct interpretation of his words, IMO.
If he meant what you say then there’s nothing special about these people over anyone else.
He was saying that these people have unique challenges and problems which judges need to consider in applying the law.
It appears that Justice Sotomayer herself also understood it along the same lines.
I think you’re confused by a couple of things. First, Obama’s discussion of the capacity for empathy is characteristic-neutral. Any given judge could have more or less empathy for another. And empathy is indeed very important to being a good judge. Second, and relatedly but independent, someone with a life experience more similar to “poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled,” can more easily empathize with that person. In Sotomayor, Obama believes he got both things–someone with life experiences very diverse from the sitting Justices, and someone with a significant capacity for empathy.
And it is true, of course, that “poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old” have “unique challenges and problems which judges need to consider in applying the law.” That’s why you want a judge with the capacity for empathy, so that you can see the issues from these different points of view. To choose a trivial example, the decision to run away from police approaching your block may seem like probable cause of criminal activity to someone who has never lived somewhere that the police routinely abuse people, or to someone who lacks empathy.
Sotomayor was read an out-of-context Obama quote and replied that “He has to explain what he meant by judging. I can only explain what I think judges should do, which is, judges can’t rely on what’s in their heart. They don’t determine the law. Congress makes the laws. The job of a judge is to apply the law. And so, it’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it’s the law. The judge applies the law to the facts before that judge.”
That’s exactly right, and doesn’t in any way contradict what I’ve said.
In short, you’re conflating a desire to have a judge bend the law out of sympathy with the downtrodden–something Sotomayor disavowed and which Obama was not calling for–with a desire to have a judge correctly apply the law in those minority of situations in which the law calls for judgments that require empathy in order to correctly apply it.
Still, it’s not at all unheard-of for a judicial nominee to simply lie to the committee about their views, or even about not having them, in order to let their supporters hear what they want to hear, and keep their opponents from hearing what *they *want to hear. E.g. Scalia, Thomas, Alito …
And you also seem to be overlooking that the Supremes don’t often *get *the cut-and-dried simple-reading-of-the-law cases. Those are resolved at lower court levels. What they do get are the law-*making *cases, and for them it very much matters that they be connected to society, not isolated and wordsmithy.