Yes I’m sure everyone attending the Woman’s March was only motivated by whatever issues personally affected them, and nobody gave a crap about anyone else that was there. That’s sure how it looked to me.
In addition to the silly notion that women only care about themselves…
Roe isn’t just about abortion. It’s also about all kinds of other nonsense that men try to pull when they’re in office, like requiring spousal consent or requiring that abortions be regulated like brain surgery. All that other bullshit happens in blue states, too. Not California, I’ll grant you, but a majority of the country certainly.
And the earlier note about how Roe gets overturned is right. It’s actually sort of hard to see how it gets done without either imperiling substantive due process cases that do matter to Californians, or opening the door to claims that abortion itself is unconstitutional.
The statement we were respond to was:
Yes, it’s certainly possible to go further, but that’s not what was postulated.
Kind of a nit pick, but it depends on how you are defining “red” and “blue” states. The majority of the states, by quite a margin, are Republican. So those things can happen in a majority of the states, but still not happen in Democratically controlled ones.
What does it mean to be democratically controlled? All three branches of government?
This stuff happens in all different kinds of states, is my point. It’s not just Alabama and Kansas. It’s Pennsylvania. In Delaware, they never abolished the criminal prohibitions on abortion. If Roe was overturned, the legislature would have to act to change the law. IIRC, their Senate is split 50-50, so it’s not clear that would happen.
I can’t imagine a more useless or misleading statistic than this, especially in a year where California’s general election Senate race was a choice between two Democrats. It surprises me that Democrats still naively parrot it.
Did you feel that it was a substantial shift when Bush 43’s judicial appointments were blocked? Really what you describe is just continuation of historical practice. It seems the modern Republicans were just more adroit at it.
As mentioned upthread, historically denying a presidential nominee has been happening since the founding. You say that by escalating ‘everything breaks’ or something along those lines. I don’t think so. Your assessment seems predicated on things happening that you don’t like. I’m sure in the future the pendulum will swing and things will lean more towards your ideological preferences. Maybe sooner than later.
If they believed it would be beneficial to the country and their goals, then it could be defended as a legitimate tactic. Ultimately I think it would cause more harm to the party initiating the actual default than it would accrue to them benefits, but that’s a choice they can make. We as voters can choose to penalize them electorally, or change the rules to prevent that from happening, or not.
They weren’t protesting, they were cheering, like all those Muslims in Jersey on 9/11!
I don’t find the terms “red” and “blue” to be particularly useful in this type of discussion. That’s all. Better to speak of “controlled by Republicans”, “controlled by Democrats” or “not controlled by just one party”.
PA is indeed mixed, but can it be considered “blue”? Again, not sure that term is useful.
I think we are in vehement agreement. 42 states are at risk, depending on the current state of their laws. If, like DE, they never bothered to take unconstitutional laws off the books, then the GOP can block changes.
(You assume Delaware would take some action even though its Senate is nearly 50-50 split because of the party labels of its members. I wouldn’t make that assumption. If all it takes is one Democrat to defect, that’s a pretty slim reed when it comes to criminalizing abortion.)
OK. Again, my major complaint, such as it is, is the use of “red” and “blue” since they are not very well defined.
I’m basing it on a lot more than that. The state senate is an anomaly in a state that has voted D in every presidential election since 1992, is 47-28-23 in registered D-R-I, has both state senators in Washington DC as Democrats, and it’s only Rep is also a D. If the Senate blocked legalized abortion upon the overturning of Roe, it would flip to a a lot more Ds in the next election and self-correct.
This data isn’t the most current, but it sure looks like DE skews pretty heavily towards pro-choice.
Your post seems to have been ignored, but I will pipe in to say I heartily endorse your idea. It would also probably add “extreme medical vetting” to picking a nominee in addition to ideological vetting.
Of course, the same could be done just by limiting the SC justice terms in some way.
I’d rather see a 10-year term limit than a minimum age of 70. Why make the court exclusively geezers?
But I doubt that would change things. Once you politicize something, it’s going to stay politicized.
Any term that is not divisible by four will make some presidents appoint more during their 4-year term than others. So let’s make it 12. It also plays nicely with the 8-year maximum term for one President and the (usual) switch of parties after two-term presidents, randomizing things a bit.
Of course, the initial appointments under such rules have to be spaced out by 2 years or so, and deaths in office will screw the spacing up. Guess that could be taken care of by some fiddling with the rules.
The more common proposal I’ve seen is a single 18 year term for SCOTUS judges. Summary:
The deaths in office would scramble the “every 2 years” thing pretty quickly. How does the proposal handle that? (The article is behind a paywall)
I don’t know. No one is allowed to die! The penalty is death.
It would still be politicized, but each vacancy would be a much smaller thing. Still significant, but a 10 year term (or 70 year old) is probably only about half or a third as much as at present, on average, and I think it would result in a similarly lower amount of rancor and awfulness.
For deaths, vacancies could just be left alone until the next slot opened up, and then bumping each other justice down the line. For example, let’s go with 9 year terms (since there’s 9 justices). Every year, one of those expires, and a new slot opens up. If one justice dies, then rather than immediately filling it, it stays vacant until the next normal expiration (that year or the next), and the remaining justices move “back” a year (functionally extending their terms by a single year).
With 9 year terms, unless I’m screwing up the math, every single President gets 4 justices per term.
I like it. It is elegant enough, causes no vacancies much longer than a year, and I think would make the Supreme Court much more stable and less controversial (like the set-in-stone 4-year term makes the US government more stable than the parliamentary model).
So - suppose that Republicans had given Garland a hearing, but voted him down - and always planned to vote him down no matter what. Obstructionism or not obstructionism?