A side shoot from the Guardian link above
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Arguably Trump’s most consequential act was adding two conservative justices to the Supreme Court. They are young, pro life, and will shape things for years to come.
One of the concerns over the way the Supreme Court is operating these days is that it isn’t giving enough time to cases, and the shadow docket is too full, and things are being rushed through. In this latest ruling they didn’t add their name to it, much less show their working, and the dissent was more scathing than usual, omitting the courteous word “respectfully” and the dissent language was more biting.
John Roberts is a conservative, appointed by Bush, but he has lost control of the Supreme Court and is getting steam-rollered by the new conservative breed.
Not sure what the answer is, but the Republicans are going to run the show in the court for years to come, unless some sort of reform takes place, or more justices are added to the nine, to give the Dems a majority. Still, that would be unsatisfactory, as I don’t like the idea of justices being either Democrat or Republican. It should be bigger than that, and more noble.
It is not.
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I was going to ask exactly that question. Why the heck is a court of law political / been politicised?
Crikey it’s like United having a board member on the FA or a Sky TV member on the select panel for TV rights to the newly formed PL. Nothing that stupid ever happened did it? 
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Because 30 years ago the Republican party came to accept they were on the path to becoming a permanent minority party if they did not change their ideology. Rather than doing what was necessary to become more popular, they enacted a strategy of figuring how to rule from the minority. The politicization of the court was a central pillar to that. Partly it was to use it as a motivating factor to get out their base for elections (if you dont vote for our guy they will get the court and then we’ll never be able to ban abortion). However, over time it also became a legit play on reshaping the court itself. As a party, they have basically outsourced the nomination of candidates to a group called the Federalist Society, a conservative organization with a very specific conservative judicial philosophy. Theirs is very much a minority philosophy that does not hold much sway in elite law circles, yet they now represent 6 9ths of the supreme court.
Republicans claim it wasnt them who statred it and justify all their subsequent politicization of the court on the treatment the Dems gave to a nominee at the end of the Regan era called Robert Bork. This is the story they tell themselves, and they’ve said it enough that most people accept it as fact. To “Bork” something even now has a specific meaning in US politics referring to an unfair coordinated attack designed to sink an otherwise good candidate. But their argument is bullshit. Bork was such a brazenly political nominee to the court that it was essentially a big fuck you to everyone who wasn’t in the republican party.
Bork was the third most senior man in Nixon’s justice department during watergate, and in that capacity he actively participated in Nixon’s obstruction of justice and as such had no business being anywhere near such a position. If you have heard of the Saturday Night Massacre, it was Bork who carried it out. Nixon was being investigated by a special prosecutor called Archibald Cox. He was to Nixon what Mueller was to Trump. Nixon reached a point where he wanted to fire Cox to end it, and the person whose authority that could be done under refused and resigned in protest. The second in line followed suit when asked. Bork was the third in line and complied.
Bork is reported to have been promised the next SC nomination in exchange for carrying out Nixon’s wishes, but Nixon was removed before there was another appointment to fill. Regardless, in the decade in between Bork remained one of the top candidates for positions, but continued opposition to him due to the Nixon connection and pressure from civil rights groups made Ford then Regan overlook him before eventually picking him at his last opportunity.
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The justice system is always inherently political. There are certainly many Supreme Court justices who served without ever having been judges in lower courts. See Elena Kagan as an example. Another example is Earl Warren, who was chief justice for the most pronounced liberal wave of Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Lately, American politics on both ends of the spectrum have become more extreme. That has infected everything, including the judicial system. I don’t think blaming one party illuminates the situation completely.
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The estimated cost of the US involvement in Afghanistan = $300 million per day, every day, for 20 years.
Imagine what could have been achieved with that money.
As Tupac said “They 've got money for war but can 't feed the poor”
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Does that mean the can fund a US version of the NHS now?
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They didn’t write it on the side of a bus, so sadly not.
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But it is one party’s fault. Pretending the Republicans didn’t set that course is just historically incorrect.
I don’t even accept the notion that the Dems are “extreme” in any kind of way, they are portrayed as such by right wing media. They call Biden a communist for fucks sake.
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You might find this article enlightening, especially this paragraph, which highlights how it was democrats who ended the filibuster for approving all federal appointees but Supreme Court justices. It was this action which Republicans used as justification to end the filibuster for Supreme Court justices in 2017.
"On November 21, 2013, the Democratic majority Senate voted 52–48, with all Republicans and three Democrats voting against (Carl Levin of Michigan, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Pryor of Arkansas), to rule that “the vote on cloture under Rule XXII for all nominations other than for the Supreme Court of the United States is by majority vote,”
You are really close. Now, why did Reid take that action?
The whole point of my previous post was that just because Republicans say something publicly as their justification for acting a certain way doesn’t mean that it has to be taken on face value.
What point is that supposed to demonstrate?
That Supreme Court appointments are more about politics than they are about judicial experience.
You are making the point that it is generally accepted that one does not have to have been a judge to be considered a qualified candidate for the SC. There is absolutely nothing about the nomination of any such individual, or their existence, that justifies a both sides defense. And certainly not Kagan who was a remarkably uncontroversial nominee, one who was reported to have been preemptively supported by Scalia.
Kagan’s a predictably “liberal” vote on the court who replaced a predictably “liberal” vote. Nothing much controversial in her appointment. Of course, both sides consider their nominees’ political bent when nominating them to the bench. To argue otherwise would be contrary to the evidence of the many decisions made by the Court.
It seems to me if we wanted a more apolitical court, both sides would agree to nominate candidates with deep experience deciding cases at both the District and Appeals Court level. They rarely do that, however. They pick academics and solicitor types who, if they have any bench experience at all, are nominated to some Appeals Court for a few years to give them more legitimacy.
It’s to pose a question for which there can be no definite answer, but had the situation been opposite (Republican president, Democratic Senate) do you think a Democrat Senate Majority Leader wouldn’t have at least considered the same tactic used by Mitch McConnell in 2016?
On healthcare in the US, the fundamental question is, “Who is it for?”
Is it for the benefit of the patients, so there is great care, affordable and easily accessible to as many people as possible? Or is it for the benefit of the people who work in and around healthcare, and numerous symbiotic sectors, plus shareholders, to all make good money from it?
The question I posed is rather binary in nature, but in truth there’s a sliding scale between the extreme positions. Be that as it may, as an expat who has lived here for 13 yrs, it is clear to me that many, many millions of people are making a good living from the status quo.
As such, meaningful reform, to anything like Western European models, will be hard to come by.
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Kagan is an odd choice to use to support the argument I think you’re making - she is liberal therefore her nomination is the equivalent of what the GOP have been accused of doing to and with the court. I’d encourage you to revisit the response to her nomination. The biggest criticism of it was not her lack of bench experience, notable the Solicitor General is often referred to as the 10th justice. It was the fact that she was seen a moderate consensus builder whose presence would shift the court to the right.
Regardless, even if she was the sort of nominee you are presenting her as, an example of liberal politicization, it is not a remotely comparable to the points being made about what the GOP have done, both from the majority and minority. And so as to your final question, the evidence is there from Bush’s second term - the Democratic led senate did their fucking job and filled the court vacancies in a way that McConnel prevented from 12-14 and completely shut down from 14-16.
In my mind there’s room for both. Fundamentally for it to function you need a government that is ready to provide the required support. From there there is still sufficient room for supply chains to make profits.
For me the real question is whether that model is sustainable. That’s where your right wing will say “no” and your left wing will say “yes” (based on the UK version of left and right).
Ultimately though I think the real challenge is getting people, and everything we eat etc. to be more sustainable etc. Education and a healthier population (probably wealthier too) leads to less pressure on any health service. At the moment we’re going in the opposite direction and that is largely due to poverty, and a food industry that to my mind is out of control.
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