Barrett proving to be even more retrograde than expected, extreme right on every single issue she has been asked about. Based on her answers so far, she would be the most ideologically reliable conservative justice.
she came out as a climate denialist
the ranking democrat on the committee is 100 years old, and keeps asking barrett about her kids. fawning, enraptured. feinstein sure went for the throat against those children who wanted to talk about climate change, though
feinstein was the only senate endorsement obama made in 2018–after the state party backed kevin de leon
Yep, that was really what made me comment. I knew with her pedigree that on a wide range of social issues she would be profoundly conservative, but she doubled down on that with climate change denial, repeated use of the term sexual preference to characterize homosexuality, declined to affirm that a president who won’t abide by the rulings of the Supreme Court is a threat to America’s form of constitutional government, and seemed untroubled by the principle of said president pardoning himself.
I actually didn’t think they would be able to find someone who checked every single possible box, but they appear to have done so.
oh man, and she wouldn’t say she agreed with griswold, either
if she wasn’t bad news, the federalist society wouldn’t have picked her for trump
Oh sure, but even Alito and Thomas have their little quirks that on particular issues. Barrett may as well be a robot programmed by the Federalist Society.
And these people are still appointed for a lifetime, as if it was still the 18th century. Completely ridiculous imho.
I think the outcome will be the President and Senate switching to Democrat at the forthcoming election. Barrett will be installed as they have the votes. To the degree she becomes an activist, dismantling what Dems care about e.g. ACA and Roe v Wade, the response will be to add more Justices of the ilk of Kagan or Sotomyer, making the total number greater than nine.
That will tilt the balance back, and there will be a big fight over it, but there’s nothing in the Constitution to prevent it. The Dems will feel justified because the Republicans blocked Obama’s nomination with almost a year of his Presidency to go, and are now about to install another Justice with just a couple weeks to go before the election, which is in fact already underway and approx 20M ballots have already been cast.
The outcome will be a Constitutional Amendment over the composition of the Supreme Court, possibly with language to clarify the timing of the selection process too, to prevent the sort of crap we’ve been seeing.
I cannot envision a Constitutional Amendment to resolve this ever getting through the process. With the weird exception of the 27th, the US has not been able to pass an Amendment since 1971. Look at the failure of the ERA, which by today’s standards has been completely superseded. No one is even interested in expending the political capital to try.
The US is simply too polarized to amend the Constitution now.
This country is beyond the point where a constitutional amendment is possible. The bar to pass one is just far higher than a congress in the current environment can agree on, even for the most uncontroversial issue.
The whole issue of “court packing” though really illustrates the failings of the media in this country and how criticisms from the right that the MSM is biased to liberals is really nonsense. The GoP have spent 20 years making the federal courts a political wedge issue. They spent about 7 years of Obama’s presidency unilaterally changing the structure of the federal courts for brazen political reasons by simply refusing to consider a wide range of Obama appointments. Trump’s biggest accomplishment that he is running on, the number of federal judges he has appointed, is not a real accomplishment of his. It is simply the result of inheriting a Federal judiciary that had historical levels of vacancies ready to fill. Some on the left have spent the last few years debating how to use the same rules to try to bring balance back, yet the GOP frame this as a brazen political power grab. It is reasonable that Biden should be asked to answer questions about it, but even the supposedly liberal press present it to Biden through the dishonest prism of the GOP, resulting in moderate minded people responding to it like it’s some radical idea that has no antecedent that requires such a conversation to be had.
Yep the democrats should just stack the supreme court with 50-100 appointments of youthful justices, ranging from moderate to hard anti-federalists. That will force the issue. They have conceded far too much ground over the last three or four of decades on this while the republicans have continually appointed ideological, one eyed retards going back to Scalia. The republicans are responsible for making the supreme court overtly political; time for them to pay the price and realise what this means when it’s ‘not their turn’.
Old, needless and now even harmful political traditions, without even remotely thinking about changing or reforming them.
But you know, ‘The greatest democracy in the world’ and all that…
It’s an astonishing decision on about 3 different levels. Even more so given the idea was floated about a week ago and was universally panned, so they knew exactly how this would be perceived. What is is even more astonishing is that it is being reported that someone at NBC News approached ABC to see if THEY would move the already scheduled Biden event.
It is important to note that NBC News and MSNBC technically have different management, but if I had to guess at what they were thinking here, then id say it is in preparation for the pivot they think they need make in how they are perceived if they are going to be taken seriously in a Biden Administration. They know they will need to challenge him and know they wont be taken seriously with those criticisms if they are still perceived as the network of Trump resistance (lol). So, they are now putting out signals they can point to that they played this election with a straight bat so they can then accuse Biden of blowing up the deficit on day 3 of his presidency and think they’ll be taken seriously.
It’s absurd. It’s like they learned no lessons from 2016. And it’s almost like they dont understand that simply doing the news well will bring more viewers than any sort of theatrical attempts to position themselves on a political spectrum.
this is the third or fourth time he’s bragged about that
Trump’s response last night to being asked to disavow Q Anon was to pretend he didn’t know who they were or what they believe. I get the angle he is going for, but I dont understand why more people, including the people asking the question able to provide a follow up, dont treat that as the disqualifying response that it clearly is.
“Mr President, can you tell us your thoughts about this known national security threat?”
“I dont know anything about them.”
“Why do you think it is an acceptable answer for someone whose job it is to know about these things, and about which you are supposed to get briefed on daily in your PDB?”
“I dont know anything about a PDB.”
Not directly related to Trump, but Joni Ernst — one of the Republican senators that he probably needs to win to keep the Senate — just had a major flub during her debate last night with her opponent
The moderator asked her what the price of soybeans were and she was WAY off; meanwhile her opponent was asked the price of corn and was right on the money, no pun intended. Why does this matter? Well, for a number of reasons, but particularly because Iowa farmers got whacked by Trump’s trade war; meanwhile, Ernst basically went “don’t worry about the trade war, it will come good eventually.” Her obliviousness to their suffering just showed how disconnected she is from her constituents.
Given that she was already polling three points behind — still within the margin of error, to be sure — it’s a bad look at a bad time for her. A lot of (pretty much all of) the GOP senators have hitched their wagons to Trump to try to save their jobs, so I would love it (and find it highly ironic) if she — along with Gardner, Tillis, and McSally — all lost their seats BECAUSE of that. 
McSally is on course to become the first person ever to be responsible for turning both senates seats over to the other party in consecutive elections. And it is no less than she deserves.