I don’t get particularly emotional about politics, but I was thinking today about how much things have changed since when I was young. Going back 20-30 years there was very little mainstream acceptance of homosexuality - gay marriage was not even on the radar. I did not even know what a gay person was until maybe second or third grade - there were no representations of anything like that in mainstream media.
When I look back, I remember homosexuals being thought of not much differently then than pedophiles are thought of now. These political changes, however, can have huge consequences for people - consequences I would not experience. Sometimes I forget how brief a time it has been since we lived in a world where being a homosexual could land you in prison.
I wouldn’t blame anyone in such a position for fighting tooth and nail against any reversion to a former time.
…and yet there you are in post #18, ignoring everything you said in post #13, demanding answers and cites.
Wesley isn’t “wildly speculating”. He’s made a case. You are welcome to disagree with it. He doesn’t have to provide “one cite” just because you insist that he does though.
I speculate you have heavy bias as well. But that’s just my opinion. What do you intend to do about that?
I guess the one of the answers to the question in the OP is that people will come up with rediculous Alex Jones type theories and accuse anyone who questions them as being too biased to see the “truth”.
Truly landmark cases do not hit the court very often. Most make small changes if at all. I predict people will think the sky is falling but in reality there will be a slight shift to the right in the country due to small changes in precedent. Roe is not going away. Marriage equality is not going away. Social Security is certainly not going away. There will be some more rulings solidifying the right to refuse service on religious grounds. There will be more precedent in favor of the 2nd amendment and private gun ownership. There will not be a big shift in how people live their lives.
However, I’m not exactly famous for my psychic abilities so take it for what it’s worth.
With Scalia or Gorsuch the Supreme Court was composed of nine Justices broken down as follows:
[ul][li] 2 liberals[/li][li] 2 moderates[/li][li] 1 right-of-center (Kennedy)[/li][li] 1 right-winger (Roberts)[/li][li] 3 rabid dogs[/li][/ul]
There have been many many cases in recent years that have been decided by a 5-4 vote with Kennedy casting the deciding vote. Sometimes he voted with the rabid dogs, sometimes with the liberals, as in Obergefell v. Hodges. All of those liberal decisions are now in danger of being over-turned. Any Justice whom Trump appoints will be a rabid dog, but the R’s chose to “rub in” their capture of America with a particularly despicable one.
Chief Justice John Roberts will be deciding every important case now. The other eight might as well stay home.
The “good news”, to use that term strangely, is that Kennedy’s retirement may not matter much — he was increasingly voting with the dogs. All of the following cases were decided in 2018:
[ul]
[li]Husted v A Philip Randolph Institute — in a 5-4 vote (Kennedy joining the dogs) SCOTUS ruled that Ohio can purge its voter lists using a discriminatory procedure.[/li][li]Abbott v Perez — in a 5-4 vote (Kennedy joining the dogs) SCOTUS overruled a lower court ruling that Texas gerrymandering to disenfranchise blacks and hispanics was illegal.[/li][li]Epic Systems Corp v Lewis — in a 5-4 vote (Kennedy joining the dogs) SCOTUS decimated workers’ rights to unionize or join class actions[/li][li]Trump v Hawaii — in a 5-4 vote (Kennedy joining the dogs), Trump’s anti-Muslim immigration policies became the law of the land[/li][li]Janus v American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — in a 5-4 vote (Kennedy joining the dogs) SCOTUS effectively installed “right to work” (actually the “right to scab”) for the public sector.[/li][li]National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v Becerra — in a 5-4 vote (Kennedy joining the dogs) SCOTUS ruled that crisis pregnancy centers were not required to tell women seeking help that abortion was a legal option.[/li][/ul]
(Kennedy also joined the dogs in Carpenter v United States, but Roberts joined the liberals so a 5-4 decision, no thanks to Kennedy, affirmed that police need search warrant to get cell tower data.)
The five judges who upheld what remains of the ACA are still on the court. Kennedy joined a dissent arguing that the whole thing should be struck down, root and branch.
Nothing of the sort has happened. It is a fairly standard belief that the reason Kavenaugh was chosen by Trump was his stance on the ability of the president to be prosecuted. This would also explain why, when skeletons were found, he wasn’t just withdrawn and replaced with someone else who on Trump’s list who was not so controversial.
He is also right that it is suspicious that Republicans already had a list of women saying that he had not raped them and was of good character within a day of reports of the issue. It is highly suggestive that they knew about the issue before the public did. Yet, he was not withdrawn.
None of that is a conspiracy theory. None of it involves an implausible number of people keeping a secret. No patchwork with even more conspiracies is needed to fix problems. All it involves are Trump acting in a manner to benefit himself and McConnell knowing about something that had been submitted in July and trying to mitigate it should something happen. And it makes a compelling case that these two things are true.
Finally, Gorsuch was relatively uncontroversial compared to Kavenaugh. There wasn’t some scandal or anything. There weren’t even any hidden documents. The only controversy around him was due to his judicial stances and how Garland had been shafted. As a conservative leaning judge, he was about as uncontroversial a pick as could given the environment in which he was nominated.
Even if you disagree with the reasoning, I don’t see anything mockworthy about any of this.
This is about the right of it. A lot of people are talking about Kavanaugh being on the bench as if it dramatically changes things in the immediate sense. It does not.
Anthony Kennedy was a conservative justice. Liberals are highly focused on social issues and particularly Roe v. Wade, to a lesser degree Obergefell v. Hodges. Kennedy was an “ally” on those issues. But on most of the consequential supreme court decisions of his time on the court, Kennedy actually ruled as a predictable conservative jurist. He was generally very much in lock step with the other conservatives when it came to matters relating to economic regulation, corporate regulation, law & order, etc.
It seems like many people think because the GOP has 5 “movement conservatives” on the court, suddenly they’re going to just blatantly issue a huge glut of decisions that basically turn America into a fascist country. They’ll strike down all voting rights protections, they’ll let poll taxes come back, they’ll make Trump able to pardon everyone, they’ll reverse the outcomes of elections, they’ll impose gerrymandering on un-gerrymandered states, they’ll cover up Republican crimes…
The reality is if five conservatives on the court is all it took for that to happen, it’d have happened years ago, it didn’t. In theory the Supreme Court could go crazy and rule all kinds of crazy things, but that would so implode the legitimacy of the court that the first time you had Democrats controlling government again (and simple knowledge of history predicts this will happen) the court would basically be gutted, because the legislature and the executive have power they can actually enforce. The Supreme Court’s power is entirely based on it being a respected deliberative body. Without that respect, it has no power.
Will from now on the selection questions focus just on their judicial career? Ex. How and why they voted on this or that case? What rulings did they overturn or have overturned?
Or will they bring up things from 36 years ago when the person was in high school?
My understanding is the appellate court is where the real power is, not the district or supreme court. That is why McConnell is trying to put as many Appellate judges on the bench as possible.
Obama appointed 55 appellate judges in 8 years, while Trump has already appointed 26 appellate judges in just 2 years. McConnell is prioritizing them.
I still think the most dangerous thing they could do is outlaw the union shop. It is clear they thing the working man/woman should have no rights. As for social security, the Reps have been trying to get rid of since the early days of W. They have given up on the legislative side but if someone with standing sued over it, they could rule the entire thing unconstitutional. I think Roberts would resist, but I am not sure.
One thing for sure: if one of the liberal judges retires, all bets are off. Anything could happen. BTW, the Votemaster (in a piece signed by Zinger, a prof. of history in CA) claims that the main effect of the Dred Scott decision was to render the court irrelevant and its decisions were widely ignored until after the war.
A real gun rights case, one that ruled that so called “assault weapons” and machine guns are EXACTLY the type of arms protected by the Second Amendment, might be the one, huge, history changing case the left has been afraid Kavanaugh might help usher in.
Yup, lots of fertile territory in RKBA. Ideally, we’ll see SCOTUS overturn semi-auto / “assault weapon” bans and mag capacity limits struck down. I don’t have much expectation that SCOTUS will overturn the machinge gun almost-complete-ban, but I do hope that they’d strike down the ATF’s torturing of the english language in their attempt to reclassify bump stocks as “machine guns”.
I don’t think Roe will be overturned until or unless conservatives get to a 7-2 majority. Roberts and Gorsuch seem to be the types who would uphold Roe, Obergefell etc. for stare decisis’ sake.