I just want to quote this because it pleases me to do so.
Oh, and I join in congratulating Justice Jackson in her well deserved elevation to the high court. I look forward to reading her dissents.
Let’s say that Clarence Thomas dies in the next few weeks. or at least some time before Breyer officially steps down. Would Justice Jackson take Thomas’s seat?
No. She is the nominee for Breyer’s seat. The new nominee would be for Thomas’s seat.
This is correct. However, there is precedent for switching a nominee from one seat to another – John Roberts was initially nominated to fill the Associate Justice seat being opened up with Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement. When Chief Justice Rehnquist died, President Bush withdrew Robert’s nomination and resubmitted him for that seat. But he hadn’t been confirmed by the Senate yet.
A Founding Father defended the British after the Boston Massacre.
Turns out that Biden saying he’d appoint a black women to the SCOTUS during the election wasn’t a giant mistake.
You know, if Republicans take back the White House, and Democrats get the Senate, I don’t want us even considering one of the president’s Supreme Court nominees. Let them chew on that. They bitch about it? Say McConnell started this bullshit.
This is a good point for all the hand wringing it induced. I defy anyone to point to a single Senator who would have voted otherwise had Biden nominated Jackson without having previously pledged to nominate a black woman.
Congrats on getting Jackson onto your Supreme Court. Now, any chance she can slap some sense into that fu*king Clarence Thomas??
There’s no slap harder enough to accomplish that.
I don’t know how anyone with a straight face can say that Republicans have politicized this process. The Warren Court used the judiciary to bring in left wing ideas that could not get passed through the Legislature. The Republicans simply wanted to return the Court to the non-political branch that it was and this stuff started when Bork got borked. The Dems have made it clear that they want “their” Court to continue to legislate. When that happens, no wonder it gets political.
What a mess we ended up with there. He should be removed by congress.
The simplest explanation is that you are not in the same “community” as the straight-faced people.
To go back just a brief period of time before that, prior the Warren Court the SCOTUS was busy declaring parts of FDRs New Deal unconstitutional. It didn’t start with Bork or with Earl Warren (who was appointed by a Republican POTUS as I’m sure you know).
What is your explanation for the lack of vote on Merrick Garland, and 47 no votes on an obviously qualified justice? Do you imagine that a democratic candidate could nominate a normal, qualified justice who wasn’t approved by the federalist society that would garner 40+ republican yes votes like they could 20 or 30 years ago?
The SCOTUS was never an apolitical branch.
This. Doing some quick research on Earl Warren just now led me to discover that Merrick Garland’s treatment wasn’t the first time that had been done. Earl Warren announced his retirement in 1968, and LBJ made two nominations, one for current associate justice Abe Fortas to become the new Chief Justice and for Homer Thorneberry to be appointed to Fortas’s associated justice seat. A filibuster conducted by Republicans and southern Democrats led to both of those nominations never coming up for a vote. Suffice to say the Nixon went a different way after he won the 1968 election.
ETA: I realize a filibuster isn’t the exact same thing as what McConnell did to Garland, but it’s close enough for practical purposes.
For being too conservative? That is impeachable now?
Because you guys rejected Bork for being a conservative. Yes, he got a vote, but it politicized the process to where you get no vote on Garland if we can wait to get a Gorsuch.
It generally was except when it dishonored itself with things like Dred Scott, Plessy, and the Lochner Era decisions. If you look at past confirmations, most of them were done on voice votes even with an opposing party in control of the Senate. It was realized that they were basically doing boring lawyer’s work and that if the nominee was qualified, then no problem.
The Warren Court really changed that with its expansive protection of criminal defendant rights. I am a criminal defense attorney, but I feel that their ivory tower intellectualism made it such that the modern plea bargaining system had to come into existence because they had created so many rights out of whole cloth that society simply cannot provide all of them.
I had assumed it was for repeatedly refusing to recuse himself in cases where he had a clear conflict of interest due to his wife gaining a direct (and him gaining an indirect) financial benefit from particular outcomes.
Either that, or the potential connection to the January 6 insurrection, although that’s a less compelling argument at the moment as that does appear to mostly apply to his wife.
But if you prefer to assume it’s the “conservatives are being persecuted by liberals” narrative, go for it.
This does not compute. Tons of republicans were voting for democratic-nominated judges in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. It makes no sense to look at Bork to justify the 2010s-20s obstruction strategy. That is clearly not when the norms broke. Even your internal logic for the justification for your position makes no sense.
Marbury v Madison was a political ruling incidentally about a guy who was appointed as part of a slew of judicial appointments made by Adams and the federalists immediately before they were about to lose power. It was the right decision but it was still politically motivated - it ultimately determined the practical role of the courts in our political process which answered questions that went beyond simply reading the text of the constitution.
And Dred Scott and the like can’t be handwaved away as bizarre anomalies. Dred Scott in particular was a ruling on the dominant political issue of the day, and one that every politician involved in appointing every one of thise judges involved realized the judicial significance of.