Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:That ____ in 1987 was political savagery and set the precedent for all the ____ we've seen since. Somehow EAllusion is ok with that, but what else is to be expected? He was a former federal appeals court judge. He was a Yale law professor. He was a Justice Department official during the Nixon Administration. And what he get from EAllusion is "HURR DURR HE WUZ A NAZI. HURR DURR RACIST."
____ this guy never stops...
- Doc
Seriously, Cam, this is a crazy. Bork was not an ok nominee but someone with substantial baggage. Whatever you feel your beef with EA justifies, defending Bork's nomination and characterizing EA as trying to slander him as a Nazi racist is simply ridiculous.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
honorentheos wrote:It worked because the media sucks? Isn't that an acknowledgment that by avoiding hard press coverage that would have came with a hearing Senators were avoiding exposing themselves to accountability to their constituents?
Yeah, it is.
Kavanaugh just got confirmed while his confirmation was opposed by the majority of voters. His approvals sunk from mildly positive to Trumpish. It may have politically damaged Senators a bit in an election year to not confirm Garland, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't have not confirmed him. They just smartly stayed out of a battle that they had more to lose with than gain. If the path of least resistance is there, they're gonna take it.
Absolutely, yet it doesn't change the facts on the ground. McConnell used the system as it existed to make a play that sequestered Senators from their voters in an environment where Democrat voters seem to largely have been sleeping at the wheel on the importance of the Supreme Court during the 2016 Presidential campaign. These aren't indictments of an argument that the filibuster should be made law and the Senate given a mandate to begin hearings within a certain timeframe. Your argument is that extreme partisanship is not just here to stay but should be embraced and expanded to the court. There is something decidedly defeatist in this view.
No one today believes the Kavanaugh vote will have zero effect on the midterms in a month, and it's probable every Senator up in 2020 will have their stance looked at by voters as well. I don't think you're invalidating the argument that changes to the Senate's role as advisors in the process is more protective of the role of the court than terming justices to ensure every President gets to pick two justices during a term. And more likely to insulate the courts from partisan swings.
ETA: Supposing that the filibuster was still in place, and could not be swept away by a simple procedural vote, how does Kavanaugh end up on the Supreme Court? How do the majority of the people on Trump's list make it onto the court? How is it that the events of the last few weeks wouldn't have required Trump to revisit the nomination process to find someone who could get enough support to get a floor vote? Minus the ability to nuke the filibuster, how does Gorsuch end up on the court rather than democrats forcing the nomination of Merrick Garland to be upheld?
The erosion of the checks on partisanship is what is encouraging further entrenchment of partisanship.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
EAllusion wrote:It's easy to lose sight of this, but it's only very recently that American politics figured out the importance of and developed an ability to ideologically stack the courts.
EAllusion wrote:It's easy to lose sight of this, but it's only very recently that American politics figured out the importance of and developed an ability to ideologically stack the courts.
On the one hand, people are still alive from when that happened, so quite recent? On the other, that was an aberration brought about by Lochnerism shutting down the New Deal that quieted down for a few decades before becoming a permanent feature of politics. In other words, it went from being exceptional to normal. An ideological feeder system for judicial appointments that Republicans rely on has existed only since the late 80's in embryo form.
honorentheos wrote:Seriously, Cam, this is a crazy. Bork was not an ok nominee but someone with substantial baggage. Whatever you feel your beef with EA justifies, defending Bork's nomination and characterizing EA as trying to slander him as a Nazi racist is simply ridiculous.
What are you talking about? I was clearly being 'sarcastic'. This was comedy! Apparently some people here can't read obvious nuance and subtle humor without emojis.
It must have something to do with their level of intelligence...
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
EAllusion wrote:On the one hand, people are still alive from when that happened, so quite recent? On the other, that was an aberration brought about by Lochnerism shutting down the New Deal that quieted down for a few decades before becoming a permanent feature of politics. In other words, it went from being exceptional to normal. An ideological feeder system for judicial appointments that Republicans rely on has existed only since the late 80's in embryo form.
I'm not a Supreme Court historian, but I wonder if the shift was brought about by Roe v. Wade, and the feeling that the court had overstepped its bounds in creating a law or right that wasn't there. If that was a shift in thinking bout the court, then it would definitely create a focus on making sure it didn't happen again.
EAllusion wrote:On the one hand, people are still alive from when that happened, so quite recent? On the other, that was an aberration brought about by Lochnerism shutting down the New Deal that quieted down for a few decades before becoming a permanent feature of politics. In other words, it went from being exceptional to normal. An ideological feeder system for judicial appointments that Republicans rely on has existed only since the late 80's in embryo form.
I'm not a Supreme Court historian, but I wonder if the shift was brought about by Roe v. Wade, and the feeling that the court had overstepped its bounds in creating a law or right that wasn't there. If that was a shift in thinking bout the court, then it would definitely create a focus on making sure it didn't happen again.
I am sure Roe is a major factor, but it's multiple key defeats that have created the obsession with taking over the courts on the religious right. Engle vs. Vitale works them up too.
In general, it seems to have been the Warren Court in tandem with conservative friendly views being poorly thought of by most academics. That gives you both the Federalist society and Republican politicians' relationship with that movement. The left's version is a counter movement against that counter movement.
The wild thing is that the mid 20th century is a small window in American history where liberals had the Supreme Court. It's almost always been a reactionary branch. Conservatives have had the Court for generations now even though Democrats have won the popular vote the majority of that time. And conservative views of the court, at least until right now, have been consistently suspicious of its liberalism. The Warren court is etched in their psyche.
honorentheos wrote:Seriously, Cam, this is a crazy. Bork was not an ok nominee but someone with substantial baggage. Whatever you feel your beef with EAllusion justifies, defending Bork's nomination and characterizing EAllusion as trying to slander him as a Nazi racist is simply ridiculous.
What are you talking about? I was clearly being 'sarcastic'. This was comedy! Apparently some people here can't read obvious nuance and subtle humor without emojis.
Clearly.
It must have something to do with their level of intelligence.
Doc
No argument here.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
It's about 7 minutes long without a transcript so I apologize to those not interesting in listening. The guest, Vincent Bonventre "the justice jackson distinguished professor of law at Albany Law School", discusses the issues of having a politicized Supreme Court and different proposals for attempting to change the court to mitigate it. Many of the ideas in this thread are discussed.
One option that the guest offered as his preferred change (minute 3:20) was to require a 2/3 confirming vote in the Senate for the same reasons I had argued for the codification of the filibuster rule.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
EAllusion wrote:... it's only very recently that American politics figured out the importance of and developed an ability to ideologically stack the courts. .
CFR on this little bit of idiocy please...its like you do not even have access to google, or bing....or aol webcrawler. Chief Justice Rutledge and Chief Justice John Jay can even see the smoke blowing out yer arse. or maybe you think FDR as being "recent" when he tried to stack the court?....dude.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires...seek discipline and find your liberty I can tell if a person is judgmental just by looking at them what is chaos to the fly is normal to the spider - morticia addams If you're not upsetting idiots, you might be an idiot. - Ted Nugent
