Three weeks? Three days, and I’m not sure they will wait for the funeral.
call me unkind all you want. She was given an opportunity to retire when she was healthy and she refused.
Now we’re probably going to lose Roe, the ACA, voting rights and who knows what else because RBGs ego was so big she didn’t think anyone would be as good as her. She set back the causes she believed in for decades because of it.
Not really. It’s an emotional time when a figure beloved by a group passes after a lifetime of work and I understand that. But in the grand scheme of things many power sources are shifting in a progressive way on a few fronts. As long as elections and transfers of power remain mostly peaceful I think you’ll be if not pleased at least not overly dismayed over the next 20 years.
Now packing courts could lead to tit for tat stacking of institutions which would raise the stakes even more for federal elections. What would be nice is for Congress to claw back some of their power from the executive and grow a spine and tackle some of the more difficult issues they punt to the judiciary. Then the court wouldn’t be such a prize.
And then republicans will file a lawsuit, it’ll go to the SCOTUS and the supreme court will probably overturn it.
Democrats can pass health reform, green new deal, voting rights, etc. But whoever Trump nominates will be more like Kavanaugh.
There is a party at the white house now for sure. I will be surprised if her family does not ban Trump from the funeral like McCain did.
One of the Obamas? Hell, justo really rile 'em up let’s put all four of them on the bench.
There’s no chance of any of this. It’s an all out knife fight every election, and every vacancy. McConnell and the Republicans obviously aren’t pulling back on this fight. It would be absolutely nuts for the Democrats to do so. I hope to God they do what they think McConnell would, in their shoes.
In three or four years of debating this topic, I’ve never heard someone adequately explain how they expect D’s to be able to pull this off without the R’s doing a retaliatory court-packing of their own, on an even bigger scale, years down the road when they get power again.
In one sense, I will defend my conservative buddy (I actually like octopus 
). He’s not wrong in that if it comes down to this, to packing the courts, it’s a sad fucking commentary on “democracy.”
Of course they will. It’s already a knife fight. The Democrats lose nothing by fighting back. You think McConnell wouldn’t pack the court, if he had the majority and the makeup were 6-3 in favor of the liberals?
We’re already there.
FUCK. I was really starting to hope she could hang on for another four months. They couldn’t get her on a machine or something? (Please tell me she didn’t have a DNR.)
This already dumpster-fire of an election just got a bunch of gasoline thrown on it. The only slight silver lining is that I don’t think this is going to help Trump or Senate Republicans running for reelection, unless they somehow handle it magnanimously…which they almost certainly won’t.
Exactly. The institution is pretty much dead already. Ramp up the knife fight until the country has had enough and institutes term limits, or age minimums, or something else that would eliminate SCOTUS as such a partisan political prize.
The Obama kids can be on the court. There is no requirement of having a law degree or an age requirement.
This thread, and the others like it, makes me wonder if this event will directly cost Biden votes by causing despair in his base and making them decide there’s no point to voting because they’ll never get the laws and country they want anyway?
Look at this thread, after all. I don’t see any enthusiastic voters here. Quite the opposite.
Mitch McConnel isn’t actually important. The GOP would use the exact same tactics no matter who was majority leader.
This assumes that Obama could have gotten a nominee (replacing Ginsberg) approved by the Senate.
By the time of your story, with Ginsberg saying ‘who are you going to get,’ there was no way for an Obama-nominated judge to get the 60 votes needed (recall that use of the ‘nuclear option’ didn’t happen until the Gorsuch confirmation, in 2017).
So despite the wish of some to attribute RBG’s failure to resign in 2014 to “ego,” the fact is that Obama wouldn’t have been able to get anyone as progressive to replace her. Not even close.
Politics aside, I’m sorry. She was an incredibly distinguished jurist, whose career began at a time when it was difficult for a woman to become a lawyer, never mind a judge, never mind a justice of the Supreme Court.
On a personal note, she was a law school classmate of my father (still living at 87). My father was also a federal judge, although a district court judge, and they were in occasional touch over the years and met once in a while at judicial conference events.
I suppose I’ll have to tell him about this tomorrow. Although he lives in a “memory care” facility, he’ll understand immediately how bad the timing is. He despises Trump and admired Ginsberg. He’ll be upset.
I’m enthusiastic (and desperate) to do anything I can to save the country from corrupt clowns like Trump, and corrupt manipulators like McConnell. This makes me more certain to vote, if anything.
I expect Mitch to keep that in mind when choosing Ginsburg’s replacement. Do you think he will bother finding a nominee who has graduated from high school?