Anthony Kennedy has now secured his legacy. He stands with all the assholes who didn’t vote, or voted for a third party candidate, in the last presidential election — as a person who did nothing, who cared about nothing, who stood by and watched the country swirl down the drain.
Buh-bye. History will not be kind.
RIP USA
I’ve already put this notice up on my blog as well.
Freuding Freud: Abortion will be illegal in a huge number of states within 3 months of the end of the next SCOTUS term – so 15 months from now – if the republicans can find a case lingering in appellate limbo that even remotely touches on abortion. What are the odds that they can’t?
Don’t worry. It’s too close to the election, so Mitch McConnell will never let Trump’s nomination to come to a vote, so as to allow the people’s will, as expressed in the composition of the new senate, to prevail. That’s his firm principle, and there’s no way he will depart from it.
I’m filled with dread and despair. Fascism is taking control of the entire government and a good portion of America is cheering it on.
The very concept of supreme judges being selected for life by a partisan president is peculiar, to put it mildly. They should have a finite term, just like everybody else does. When a president can be voted into office only for two terms, why can the judges appointed by him be in place for generations? It does not make sense.
But, almost nothing in the USA makes sense once looked on close enough. We are truly fucked (yes, even we in EU, because USA has the unfortunate habit to spread shit around).
Fuck. I can’t even with this country anymore. I want to resist. I’ve marched. I have my congressman on speed dial. I’m trying to get people to vote in November. I don’t see how any of it is going to matter. Trump is going to nominate Milo to the court and everyone will furrow their brows and approve him anyway. It’s a helpless feeling and I don’t see how decency, or even some form of not evil, has a chance in my lifetime.
I mean, the guy is 81 and relatively conservative (even if he was moderate enough on some issues to be a swing vote). Seems pretty understandable for him to retire under a conservative administration. Had Hillary won, I can almost guarantee he’d have found the courage to suck it up and keep ass in seat another couple years.
I think we’re about to witness the quickest supreme court approval in history though. The republicans *have* to get this done before November, or they risk the dems potentially picking up enough seats to do to them what McConnell did to Obama (assuming the dems would actually fight and play politics for a change). They’re going to be looking to fill that seat with a partisan shill like their last pick, and they’re probably looking to do it quick.
An unabashedly conservative supreme court is an issue though. Not just for the obvious things, gay rights, Roe v Wade, but for pretty much any policy victory the dems manage to get when they inevitably get back into power. Oh hey, they managed to pass medicaid for all? How many red states are going to challenge that in court to try and strangle it in the crib? I’d wager more than a few. Gun reform? Checks on religious liberty? Campaign finance reform? Consumer protections? Good luck.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 85 and a two-time cancer survivor too. I’d give it pretty even odds that the Trump administration could get to pick three judges before this is all done.
How Clinton has any credibility after fucking up this monumentally is beyond me. It baffles me that she can walk into a room and not be laughed right on out of it. Same goes for most of the senior DNC members who backed her so hard, and actively screwed over any opposition. Losers. Unbelievable losers.
if there was ever a case when a filibuster would be an appropriate strategy this would be one. The habitual delaying tactics that have been used by republican in congress should be used as well. If the democrats have any courage left they should use it or be judged as an utter failure of convictions by history.
uncle frogy
Funny, PZ, you literally just posted something pointing out that the Democratic Party’s values are out of sync with progressives, and now you’ve fallen back on “people who voted third party are responsible for this!!!!”
Tell you what: when the Democrats start reliably running candidates who have positive reasons to vote for them, beyond “if the Republican gets in they’ll shoot your dog”, third-party hatred will start to make sense. Until then, it’s analogous to the apocryphal exchange between Emerson and Thoreau about being in jail: the question isn’t “why are you voting third-party”, it’s “why do you keep voting for Democrats who you know will betray you on every major issue even if they can win?” Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is famously a definition of insanity.
(In case anybody has failed to note: all the Big Name Democrats have endorsed Cuomo, a right-of-center white male cishet 1%er, in the Nixon/Cuomo primary. Funny how we were told there was a special place in hell for women who wouldn’t support women when it was the rich white right-of-center Hillary Clinton running, but Hillary Clinton herself has no problem picking a man over a woman. One might almost suspect that the party leadership is more interested in protecting right-of-center “centrist” values and the privilege of the rich than in actually standing up for any sort of principle.) (Nah, couldn’t be.)
Face it, the Supreme Court is not a court, it is a political body, and members of political bodies should be elected and not be appointed, let alone for life.
I’m sure we all remember and sympathize with Sen. McConnell’s plight when he had only a year’s experience as Senate Majority Leader in 2016 and was simply too incompetent to do so much as hold hearings for the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. How he improved a year later when Neil Gorsuch was nominated and confirmed for the Court in jig time! McConnell must have studied up diligently to make such a difference in his performance. I’m sure his well-honed skills will stand him in good stead as he jams the next nominee through as quickly as possible. He’ll do it even if he has to use the nuclear option to stop the Democrats from filibustering. And he’ll lecture them on civility if they object too strenuously. But they probably won’t. (I’d better get a supply of barf bags.)
History is written by the winners; and if you look around you might perceive that we are not noticeably winning at present. I haz a sad.
This bit of news just brought back every horrified, infuriated feeling I had on election night. I’m trying to decide whether or not the sky is falling. I’m leaning towards “yes”. Can there even be good news anymore?
The Vicar: ‘Funny, PZ, you literally just posted something pointing out that the Democratic Party’s values are out of sync with progressives, and now you’ve fallen back on “people who voted third party are responsible for this!!!!”’
You write as though there is something inconsistent in P.Z.’s position, so I think you need a course in logic.
The last presidential election was a choice between “conservative, not very good, but partially sane” and “Fascist, utterly evil, and bat shit crazy”. And you thought not voting was a viable option? Give your head a shake. Give it several shakes. If you didn’t cast your vote for Hillary (bad as she was) you are complicit in kidnapping children.
The Vicar Oh no, not that discussion again, please?
The Vicar, #9
PZ’s post says “He stands with all the assholes who didn’t vote, or voted for a third party candidate, in the last presidential election“, not just in any elections. And you know the only correct choice in the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton.
I guess Vicar doesn’t think you can be both against mediocre Democrats and even more against evil Republicans.
Then again, I don’t think Vicar thinks at all, they just wank.
Xpost from patheos Dispatches
We are fucked then.
1. I’m not even going to bother getting depressed.
2. I’ll keep one eye out as the US spirals downhill into some place I wouldn’t want to live in.
3. A majority of white women voted for Trump in all age groups.
4. And are going to get hammered pretty hard in right wingnut administrations.
Especially if they lose the protection of the US Supreme Court.
Which is looking quite likely.
Women are losing access to contraception and may lose all access to abortion.
A lot of people including myself are feeling betrayed here.
We fought hard so women my Boomer age and younger had a far more livable world than it was before.
With a lot of effort and with taking a whole lot of abuse.
Sex discrimination is illegal, contraception everywhere, and abortion is legal.
It’s going to be very hard to hold onto those gains.
Admittedly voted for Bernie in primary and Hillary in general election. Not thrilled by her as choice but at least things could be better than now in at least two ways.
My state will probably put Voldemort in Senate. Unhappy. My apologies to all. Wish we could contribute more toward the bluing of Congress and justice served against our sociopathic POTUS and potential SCOTUS scum.
I am Democrat and despise Jeff Greene. He is pond scum who held my answering machine hostage in his last campaign. Democrats can be as bad as Trump.
As an outsider, there are some really bizarre features of the US political system. How your Supreme Court has been allowed to become a political tool, with major, historically far reaching decisions apparently subject to partisan appointments is beyond me. Has It always been this? Why didn’t the framers see this coming?
@20 – “thus”, not “this”…
Oh and BTW *every* time I click to watch video feed on the FRICKIN CNN app I get bombarded by an attack ad against Bill Nelson as a career politician. CNN app? WTF. I must be a target because Florida. Vomit! I am so voting for Nelson. He has been a political hack pretty much my entire life so fuck you Governor Voldemort.
@unclefroggy
#8
The Republicans ended the filibuster.
CD @ 2:
It’s already as close to illegal as can be in many states. I’m living in one. Next door (S Dakota) is way worse.
1. It’s likely legal abortion will be gone in 6 months.
2. The same group in power now, christofascist right wingnuts, also want to destroy the social safety net. Abolish food stamps, reduce Medicaid, increase low income housing rents, attack public education, and so on.
This will result in a huge class of poor women with children they didn’t want and can’t possibly support or take care of, living in extreme poverty.
You think life in the USA is hard now, just wait a few years.
It’s on track to get a whole lot worse for a whole lot of people.
Fortunately, Future History records that the Honorable Alex Jones, after the fastest SCOTUS confirmation in history, died of an aneurysm after ripping off his robes and shirt while rage-wanking over the defendents during his very first Supreme Court session.
@thecalmone, #20
You asked a fair and straightforward question and I respect that.
To answer your first question: yes. The Supreme Court in the past invalidated abolition in the Dred Scott v. Sanford case which helped precipitate the Civil War, ruling that black people were not people at all and therefore abolition was not a legal action anywhere. After the Civil War the Supreme Court routinely invalidated antitrust, consumer protection, and labor laws for decades and also endorsed segregation in the decision Plessy vs. Fergusson. Only the threat of court packing by FD Roosevelt in the 1930s convinced justices to retire or step back, preventing their invalidation of much of the New Deal during the Great Depression. Its only been during a brief and long gone window that the Supreme Court was anything but a bastion of reaction.
The reason why its gotten worse is because conservatives have had a multidecades project in order to ensure that courts are packed with conservatives that will drag this country kicking and screaming back into the grotesquely inegalitarian capitalist dystopia (even worse than what exists now) that used to exist in the United States. Accordingly, all of their nominees are preselected in order to be incapable of basically changing their minds and producing any kind of liberal, much less leftist, outcomes at all. Simultaneously liberals (whom I’ll get to in a bit) are so committed to moderation and proceduralism that they are totally and chronically outmaneuvered by conservatives-even though the results of this have been disastrous really for the last 20 years since the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush through judicial coup.
As for what the founders thought I honestly don’t respect them all that much but a more charitable explanation is that they didn’t really conceive of a supreme court that would accumulate massive powers of judicial review combined with relentless unaccountability (lifetime terms, no specific ability to invalidate bad judgements through referendum or Congressional act, no recall provisions and impeachment as an impossibly high standard, et cetera).
@TheVicar, #9
You’re better than they deserve and I wish you well. I’m out.
@20 thecalmone
The fact is, no government, no constitution, no document, no anything…is absolutely idiot proof.
If enough people in a society want it to go backwards, then the society goes backward.
Hitler took power in an advanced society, more or less legally.
The fault here is down to the voters in the USA electing a lot of right wingnut christofascists.
Women are losing access to contraception and may lose all access to abortion.
A lot of people including myself are feeling betrayed here.
We fought hard so women my Boomer age and younger had a far more livable world than it was before.
With a lot of effort and with taking a whole lot of abuse.
Sex discrimination is illegal, contraception everywhere, and abortion is legal.
It’s going to be very hard to hold onto those gains.
hemidactylus
Yes it is and I remember the back alley butchers and the coat hangers. Our rights are screwed and when I see smarmy sessions & pervert pence faces it scares the hell out of me.
Women are losing access to contraception and may lose all access to abortion.
A lot of people including myself are feeling betrayed here.
We fought hard so women my Boomer age and younger had a far more livable world than it was before.
With a lot of effort and with taking a whole lot of abuse.
Sex discrimination is illegal, contraception everywhere, and abortion is legal.
It’s going to be very hard to hold onto those gains.
Yes it is and I remember the back alley butchers and the coat hangers. Our rights are screwed and when I see smarmy sessions & pervert pence faces it scares the hell out of me.
Sorry I don’t know how to delete the first post siting the next poster of the post. This crap has my head spinning in fear.
rietpluim @ # 10: Face it, the Supreme Court is not a court, it is a political body, and members of political bodies should be elected and not be appointed, let alone for life.
Pls review the multiple problems due to electing judges as consistently demonstrated in so many states: corrupt decisions, institutionalized bigotry, good-old-child mutual backscratching societies, & Moore.
I suspect the Constitution authors may have gotten this one right: only the fully secure resist pressures well. I doubt an elected Court would ever have gone so far as Brown or Griswold, never mind Roe or those ~’60s First Amendment cases that opened up so much. Definitely not enough to prevent the present disaster, alas.
Who can say how far a Trumpanzee court will go? Even in Florida in late June, I feel a chill.
To be fair, he has been saying he was waiting for a Republican president to retire at least since Obama was in office. I think blaming him is pretty myopic. This court rebalancing is really the fault of the Republican’s who held up Obama’s SC nominee for over a year.
“He’ll do it even if he has to use the nuclear option to stop the Democrats from filibustering.”
Already done with the Gorsuch nomination. No filibuster for SC nominations.
Pierce R. Butler I didn’t mean to say that the court should be elected. I meant to say that a court should not make political decisions.
#9 The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)
That hit home for me with Gillibrand’s political action committee’s endorsements of Cuomo and Crowley over Nixon and Cortez. Off The Sidelines was formed explicitly to support women running for office. Perhaps, just perhaps some “Big Name Democrats” have some plausible excuse for endorsing corrupt old white guys over these women. (Which I haven’t seen) But if an organization’s endorsement’s completely fly in the face of their mandate, there is simply no excuse.
I am absolutely kicking myself for supporting Gillibrand’s pac. That gets to the heart of the problem when trying to work with centrist “triangulators”. They’ll claim to support something like identity politics and then throw it out the window at a whim if it’s not self serving. I certainly wouldn’t have supported their work if their slogan was “Women’s voices matter. Unless we support the other guy”.
And there you have it. What am I supposed to do now, tell the family and friends I may have convinced to donate to not support them now? After all they do a little good, right. If I do that I’ll be working against whatever good they might do. That’s what centrists do, a little better than the other side. Except where they don’t. So of course I’ll just walk away, hopefully a little wiser. Definitely a little bitter.
I don’t like Hillary Clinton and I think she was clearly a terrible candidate but I also think that she would have been a better President than what she campaign implied. And very obviously with a cherry on top, she would have been a better candidate than Dontard Trump in any shape or form.
The people who argued for third party candidates are among the most politically stupid, and illiterate possible. You primary and make sure that a true liberal and progressive wins. But if you lose the primary, you fucking vote with sanity for the clearly less bad option. No fucking excuses.
Is it okay with you if we blame him for all his ghoulish decisions up until now, though? Any mollifying mouthnoises made about A Prudent Time to Withdraw is as useless as his unearned reputation for swinging when we need him. He’s complicit in all of this and it’s risible to suggest that he’s doing this right now for any other reason than partisanship. His centrism was loathsome and also hollow, because it’s been put paid here. He knows exactly what his replacement will look like under this administration and he’s fully aware of the consequences of that. At the very best, he thinks he can influence the decision about nominees. Not fucking likely.
I hear Roy Moore has a bunch of free time these days, so I imagine he’s probably on Trump’s short list.
Isn’t this apropos of, like, everything though?
Old white guy waffles around the mediocre middle, gets feted by prosecutors, defendants and fellow justices for his sanctified “swing vote”, to the point where it’s sometimes called the Kennedy court instead of the chief justices’ court, then gets a little tired cashes out his glory and heads to retirement.
Meanwhile a woman 4 years his senior keeps trucking on to do as much good as she can with the time she has left.
Fuck mediocre white dudes.
This is what happens when democrats decide to stay home.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/03/12/4-4-million-2012-obama-voters-stayed-home-in-2016-more-than-a-third-of-them-black/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.28b164a738c8
I wonder how may German social democrats decided to stay home in the 1930s.
rietpluim @ # 35: … a court should not make political decisions.
Then who decides what to do when the politicians get into a logjam or violate the Constitution?
The problem is that the left underestimates their adversaries. A Supreme Court full of right wingers would not come as a surprise. For decades the Democrats and their followers alike allowed without any resistance reactionaries, conservatives and religious nuts of all kinds to spread their propaganda. The so called “Culture War”. The right won. Because the left is so noble, so magnanimous, so complacent about being “the bigger person” who gives in first (sometimes even before the fight).
Therefore the right was able to shift the Overton Window on abortion and many other issues (not to mention Climate Change) .
The right controls our language, from “SJW” to “Cultural Marxism”, “virtue signaling”, to “alt-right” (instead of fascism light, as they should be called). They invent the words, we all use them. And who controls the language controls the minds. A similar thing happened already with neoliberalism, when pseudo-economic terms permeated into everyday language (e.g. “human capital”, “market place of ideas”).
The right did the same thing in the abortion debate, for instance by turning zygotes and fetuses into a “baby”, making abortion even in early stages into “baby killing”.
For a while I thought that only the right was in a bubble, an echo chamber. But the left is ignorant of the tactics of the right, which proofs that they are unable to understand what is going on in the minds of their opponents. Now we pay the price for that ignorance.
But it is never too late (maybe a nuclear winter would be the final straw). There is no room for defeatism. The Overton Window can always be shifted again.
Centrism is a deception, nothing but a constant push to the right. “Reaching across the aisle” brings nothing but defeat and retreat in any issues that should concern a true leftist and progressive. It is high time that the other side, the right, reaches across that infamous “aisle”. It is time that they “become more moderate”.
Why does the left belief that conservatives are acting in good faith? Leftists, stop being polite and civil. Fight for fairness, equality and universal Human Rights! There are no “two sides to every story”! Some ideas are just plain wrong. Pointing that out is not censorship or “hampering of free speech”. It is a FACT (such things exist.) Remember the Nazis? Were there “two sides of the story” as well?
When the right wing gets their way, they will drop their “free speech fight” like a hot potato, putting a gag on us. (Remember “drain the swamp”? Or Trump speaking against the “elites”? That is not a thing anymore.)
And still the left (progressives/Democratic voters in general) still overlook the strength and cunning of the right. Some right wing/libertarian donors and thinkers were working on changing public opinion for many decades! They use many strategies, depending on the people they want to reach (and “brainwash”). The “virus” they spread took on a life of its own. The alt-right and the cult around Jordan Peterson are proof for that.
Some “Cassandras” warned about this for some time (off the top of my head: Philip Mirowsky, Thomas Frank, Jane Mayer), but the left in general thinks that believing in some long term plan from some right wing (libertarian) donors is just an embarrassing “Conspiracy Theory”. As if there is no proof – e.g. the Koch brothers undue influence and all the “think tanks” that those right wing donors founded and sponsor in order to spread their message. Those “think tanks” are seen by the general public as objective and disinterested, filled with scholars and experts without an agenda. Let`s ask them about their opinions on policy shall we?
The new Supreme Court Judge will be chosen from a list of candidates provided by one of those right wing “think tanks”, just like Gorsuch was. What could be partisan about that?
Leftists and progressives, educate yourself! Study your enemy (e.g. read Jane Mayer`s “Dark Money” just to get a taste of their tactics). Otherwise you will continue to lose and a (fascist neo-feudal) oligarchy will rule.
@thecalmone, #20
I don’t know of a better system. I think that the current system is fine. I think that the current problem is half the country is fascist. It’s hard for any system to do better than the current system in that context.
Raven in 28 beat me to it. Also please see Pierce R Butler in 32; electing judges is an absolutely horrible idea.
Give me a better system. Also, remember that any decision that the court makes, it can be overruled with enough popular support, whether by congress passing a new law that clarifies matters, or by constitutional amendment. Again, the fundamental problem is that our citizenry are fucking fascists.
PS:
I think the real big problems in the current US constitution in this regard are:
* We should have proportional representation voting for the congress.
* The votes of persons in big states should count the same as votes of persons in little states for the congress. Given the difficulty of doing this for the senate, at least make this true for election of the representatives of the federal house, i.e. a single nation-wide party list vote for reps in the house.
* The president shouldn’t have a veto over congressional legislation.
* Automatic voter registration. No voter ID laws. Voting should be allowed to be done by mail or by appearing at the designated site at any time over a whole week (or month).
* Optionally, throw on a new constitutional amendment that is carefully crafted for individual spending limits for political campaigning.
EnlightenmentLiberal@44
I’d throw in an independent Electoral Commission to oversee it all. The current system where the winner of the last election gets to decide the rules for the next is nuts.