I’d absolutely oppose a ruling that abortion is the deprivation of life without due process of law, and have said so many times. I may have created confusion when I said, “If the Supreme Court agreed with me that abortion kills a human being, and ruled that abortion is the deprivation of life without due process of law and forbid it, would you be equally glad?”
But to be clear, I mean: I think abortion is the killing of a human being. If the Supreme Court agreed with me on that point, and then went further to find that abortion is the deprivation of life without due process of law, I’d oppose that. Even though the result would be a welcome outcome otherwise.
This cannot be allowed to happen. Ginsburg needs to put some sort of alert system on her body so that liberals can intervene and transform her into this before conservatives see.
When you’re 85 recovering from broken bones takes significantly longer. Anyone have any theories as to how long she will be out–or if she will be forced to retire?
There is no way that she’ll retire voluntarily while Trump will be able to choose her replacement. If she gets to a point where she would need to retire, she’ll instead go in indefinite hiatus (where “indefinite” means “until a sane President is in office”). Heck, in the worst case, she probably has instructions to be kept on life support indefinitely to delay a declaration of death (where “indefinitely” has the same meaning as above).
Supreme court justices are replaced only on death or resignation. They don’t have an “unable to fill the duties of the office” clause, like the President does.
While Republicans wouldn’t be able to replace RBG as long as she has a pulse, her absence would still amount to 0.5 the loss for Democrats. The 5-4 conservative rulings becoming 5-3 instead don’t make a difference, but in the event that some conservative justice has to recuse himself or is otherwise absent, they could still prevail 4-3 should Ginsburg be on indefinite life support.
I think it would be a ridiculous move. We’ve got the majority in the Senate - use it. Yeah yeah I get it - the Democrats are all bent out of shape because Obama didn’t get to nominate a final Justice, and instead we got two conservative Justices. So? Three conservatives would be better. Four would be better still. Nine would be best of all.
Textualist Justices are better for the country, therefore getting textualists on the Court is more important than playing footsie with the Democrats.
That’s a totally bizarre declaration that’s not just wrong, it’s wrong on several levels.
First, there’s no evidence that textualists are “better for the country” in any objective sense, and certainly an argument to be made that the spirit rather than the letter of the Constitution is conducive to a more realistic application to social and technological circumstances that are so dramatically different from what they were hundreds of years ago that the framers would have found many of them completely beyond their comprehension. Indeed some judicial scholars believe that in some circumstances the most important guidance for Supreme Court decisions should come first and foremost from unwritten foundational principles and societal norms and mores.
But the part that really makes this hilarious is that most of the “textualists” are just pretending: their “strict reading” of the Constitutional text always ends up strangely inclined to yield exactly the interpretation they want, with little if any concern about what words actually mean or what the framers actually meant, or the historical circumstances in which the words were written. In many cases over recent decades “textualism” or “strict constructionism” has been nothing short of raging activism dressed up in sanctimonious pretension. Scalia was an absolute master at this game.
Anyway, back to the topic. RBG didn’t break anything, she just has three fractured ribs. I can’t speak to how it affects someone of her age or what other complications there might be, but it’s generally something that doesn’t require intervention and repairs itself fairly quickly. She should be just fine. She’s very lucky she didn’t fracture a hip or get a concussion, which often happens when elderly people sustain a fall.
How can that be when Brett Kavanaugh is practically the poster boy for “bad behavior”?
There is no mechanism in the judiciary to remove judges who have become incapacitated in one form or another. Generally other judges supposedly try to persuade judges whose health is failing them to step down. I saw it somewhere described as akin trying to get your elderly parent to stop driving. Usually there is some pushback but most will eventually come around and step down of their own accord.
But not always, Justice William O. Douglas suffered a severe stroke but continued to try to work for almost a year after and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him (presumably the other justices try to work around him and have his clerks pick up the slack).
In the end the only way to get an incapacitated judge of the bench who refuses to resign is to impeach them and that is super rare.
MSM would respond by switching the narrative from “Garland is the rightful nominee” to “he’s worse than Hitler!@!!” Useful idiots would agree because the TV told them to.
When you said, “We’ve got the majority in the Senate - use it.”
This is simultaneously an endorsement of correct use of process now, and implicit jocundity at the abuse of process norms surrounding Garland’s sotto voce rejection.
But Trump would not gain much of anything – that is, no ardent opponent of Trump would say, “Well, he did the right thing; perhaps I should re-weigh my opposition.”
Still, Obama’s appointee deserved a hearing; Trump could do the right thing for no reward except the value of doing the right thing.
Not holding my breath that he, or any partisan politician, would be that. But it would nonetheless be the right thing to do.
