|
|
Monday, May 15, 2023
POLITICO Massachusetts Playbook: Zeroing in on Gen Z
Friday, October 16, 2020
RSN: FOCUS: Eugene Robinson | Republicans Are Trying to Make Court Expansion a Mortal Sin. Don't Let Them.
16 October 20
Who Are the People Who Come But Will Not Contribute?
How is it possible that nearly “400,000” people have come to “Reader Supported News” this month and only “237” have responded to our fundraising appeals.
We serve the interests of our supporters. That’s you.
With urgency.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
16 October 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
FOCUS: Eugene Robinson | Republicans Are Trying to Make Court Expansion a Mortal Sin. Don't Let Them.
Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Robinson writes: "It is Republicans who have tried to warp the court's dimensions in recent years. And they're doing it again right now."
s Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings begin and the 2020 presidential election enters its final stretches, Republicans are accusing Democrats of wanting to manipulate the size of the Supreme Court to achieve political ends. Let's be clear about one thing, though: It is Republicans who have tried to warp the court's dimensions in recent years. And they're doing it again right now.Whether Democrats would consider returning the favor at some point in the future is entirely hypothetical and depends on a host of unknowable variables. Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris are right not to be baited into answering a question — "Will you or won't you?" — that presently has no meaning.
Ask them again if and when Biden is president and Democrats control both houses of Congress. Then, and only then, will Biden's view on expanding the number of Supreme Court justices be meaningful — because then, and only then, will court-packing be an actual possibility.
But there is more than one way to skew — or unskew — the ideology of the high court by manipulating the number of sitting justices.
You could do it by effectively reducing the number of seats on the court to eight, keeping one seat vacant for more than a year and refusing to give an eminently qualified nominee even a committee hearing — as Republicans did with Barack Obama's nominee Merrick Garland in 2016. Or you could rush someone through a hasty confirmation process at a time when voters are already casting ballots in an election that your party, according to polls, is likely to lose — as Republicans are doing with President Trump's nominee this week.
If one party did such outrageous things, cementing a conservative majority on the court for a generation, the other party, assuming it had the requisite power, might theoretically believe it is justified to add seats to the court to restore its ideological balance.
The Constitution, which does not specify the number of seats on the court, allows all of the above. Republicans have tried to paint "court-packing" as an unthinkable horror, an unprecedented departure from norms and traditions. Having transformed itself from the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Trump, however, the GOP has no standing to lecture anyone about norms and traditions. And the fact is that a decision by Democrats to expand the court would be nothing more than a variation on the "court-warping" that Republicans would achieve with Barrett's confirmation.
If Democrats were to win the White House and Senate and keep control of the House, they would have options for how to respond to the long Republican campaign to capture the courts and the shenanigans they've used to pursue it. Expanding the size of the Supreme Court wouldn't be their only option.
Democrats could and should enshrine rights the high court might no longer recognize — among them women's reproductive freedom, same-sex marriage and unobstructed access to the ballot box — in legislation. That would almost surely require eliminating the legislative filibuster in the Senate, which would occasion more GOP howling about, yes, norms and traditions. But the Senate under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has become little more than a smaller, less efficient version of the House: a chamber in which the majority steamrolls the minority as a matter of course. Why should Democrats pretend otherwise?
It will still be a problem, however, for the highest court in the land to be seriously out of step — perhaps for decades — with the nation whose laws it interprets. Conservatives used to denounce "judicial activism" when they saw it being practiced by liberal justices. They now embrace such activism by justices who share their conservative ideology and who try to pull the country back into the past.
The Supreme Court presently takes a view on Second Amendment rights that not long ago would have been considered extreme or even loopy — and that thwarts the will of a majority of Americans for meaningful gun control. The court takes a radical position on the role money can play in politics by limiting what Congress can do to level the field. Of course, we should want justices who will follow the Constitution, not the opinion polls. It makes sense to have both conservative and liberal justices on the court, reflecting the ideological divide in the nation. It does not make sense, though, to have a durable majority tilting the scales of justice in one direction only.
I could argue against the notion of adding seats to the court — the GOP could make a tit-for-tat response when it gets the chance — and I have no idea what Biden thinks. But there is no reason for the Democratic Party to engage in unilateral disarmament — and no reason to answer hypotheticals. Let's have the election first.
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
RSN: FOCUS: David Sirota, Andrew Perez and Julia Rock | Court Expansion Is an Easy Answer
14 October 20
Today as of 9:am: 7,507 visitors - 4 donations, totaling $80.
You know that can’t work. What will you do?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
13 October 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
FOCUS: David Sirota, Andrew Perez and Julia Rock | Court Expansion Is an Easy Answer
David Sirota, Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, The Daily Poster
Excerpt: "To court pack, or not to court pack? This is the question that Democrats are trying to avoid answering - even though Republicans have been successfully packing the courts for years."
s the GOP races to try to install Amy Barrett to the Supreme Court before the election, Joe Biden and most competitive Democratic Senate candidates — other than one — are running away from queries about whether they would support expanding the court.Republicans have not suffered from such equivocation — instead, they have for years tried to pack the courts, both through contraction and expansion. In Washington, they have pushed to shrink the courts and they have blocked Democratic presidents from filling judicial appointments — moves designed to increase the power of GOP-appointed judges already on the bench. In states, Republicans have pushed to expand the courts to increase their number of appointees.
At the Supreme Court level, Republicans stole a majority when they denied a hearing for President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court choice for 293 days before Trump took office, and placed Neil Gorsuch on the courts. They minted a more conservative majority with Brett Kavanaugh. Amy Coney Barrett and a 6-3 balance on the court, arriving via a grim bit of luck, would just be the icing on a decades-long, ultra-conservative majority that threatens Americans’ reproductive rights, voting rights, labor rights, health care rights and civil rights.
If Democrats have any interest in protecting Americans’ fundamental rights, they only have a few options. They can try using parliamentary tactics to successfully block Barrett’s nomination, which Senate Democrats have been reluctant to do, and they can add more court seats later. This is reality, and it is precisely why Democrats are getting so many media questions about adding court seats.
The easiest way to talk about whether to expand the court is to cast it as an issue of values and policies that people actually care about. If — as they insist — Democrats are firmly committed to protecting reproductive, voting, labor, health care and civil rights, it shouldn’t be difficult for any Senate candidate to say they will consider all options available to protect them, including expanding the court.
In that sense, Democratic support for expanding the court is synonymous with supporting popular, essential liberties like a woman’s right to choose, workers’ right to form unions and Americans’ right to not be thrown off their health insurance because they have a pre-existing health condition.
By contrast, Republicans only want to talk abstractly about process and court size and not about policy — because their judicial nominees’ opposition to abortion rights, health care protections and union-rights are wildly unpopular.
Adding court seats to the Supreme Court is just one more area where Democratic politicians are lagging to the right of their voters. A Marquette University poll taken shortly before Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death found that 61 percent of Democratic voters support increasing the size of the court. Support for Democrats’ 2010 health care law, the Affordable Care Act — which the Supreme Court could strike down next year — is at a record high.
Creating More Questions By Refusing To Answer Questions
As Democrats try to avoid answering questions about the court, they’ve ended up stumbling into more media questions about packing the court — the thing they’re actively trying not to talk about — while sounding evasive.
"They'll know my opinion on court-packing when the election is over,” former Vice President Biden said last week when reporters asked him about adding seats to the Supreme Court. He added: "Now, look, I know it's a great question, and y'all — and I don't blame you for asking it. But you know the moment I answer that question, the headline in every one of your papers will be about that."
When a local reporter in Las Vegas told Biden that adding court seats is “the number one thing that I’ve been asked about from viewers,” Biden responded: “Well, you’ve been asked by the viewers who are probably Republicans who don’t want me continuing to talk about what they’re doing to the court right now.”
Democratic Senate challengers in key swing states –– Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, Mark Kelly in Arizona, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, Sara Gideon in Maine, and John Hickenlooper in Colorado –– have said outright that they oppose adding judges to the court, or attempted to dodge the topic.
One Democratic Senate Candidate Gets It Right
At least one Democratic Senate candidate seems to understand the situation: Over the weekend, Montana’s Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock said that if he is elected to the Senate, he would consider expanding the Supreme Court. Here’s a snippet of the Associated Press report:
Bullock rejected the confirmation process of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying it could put parts of the Affordable Care Act in jeopardy. Daines has expressed support for a court case seeking repeal the health law, which is set to be heard by the court days after the Nov. 3 election.
Bullock said that if Coney Barrett was confirmed, he would be open to measures including adding justices to the bench, a practice critics have dubbed packing the courts.
“We need to figure out the ways to actually get the politics out of the court,” Bullock said. “That’s anything from a judicial standards commission, or we’ll look at any other thing that might be suggested, including adding justices.”
Republicans were quick to attack Bullock for this position, but there is little evidence that the exact number of justices on the court is some top-of-mind concern among voters. There’s absolutely zero evidence that voters want the Supreme Court stuck at nine justices, even if that means those justices doing wildly unpopular things, like throwing out protections for pre-existing medical conditions.
“The Number Of Supreme Court Justices Is Not Fixed”
Of course, any legislation to expand the court will inevitably be met with GOP claims that Democrats are violating the constitution. However, expanding the court is totally consistent with the Congress’s enumerated powers.
“Under the Constitution, the number of Supreme Court Justices is not fixed, and Congress can change it by passing an act that is then signed by the President,” wrote Scott Bomboy, the executive director of the National Constitution Center. “Article III, Section 1, starts with a broad direction to Congress to establish the court system: ‘The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.’”
Over two centuries, the court’s size has been adjusted. If the founders wanted the court permanently set at nine justices, they would have put that into the Constitution. They didn’t. They gave Congress the flexibility to adjust the court’s size. That power allows the legislative branch to make sure that the court doesn’t become a star chamber totally disconnected from public will.
In light of that, if a Democrat like Bullock can make a sober-minded case for court expansion in a deep red state like Montana, then any Democratic candidate should be able to make a similar case.
Refusing to make that case — or running away from questions about court expansion — is not just cowardly, it is politically stupid. It forsakes an opportunity to turn a conceptual battle over the Supreme Court into a much more tangible, down-to-earth battle over policies that affect people in their daily lives.
Republicans don’t want to talk about those policies, but Democrats should.
Trump's Friday Meltdown: Begging Iran, Ditching Ukraine, and Blaming Everybody But Himself – 7/31/26
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM! ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON MI...
-
04 April 23 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News Dahlia Lithwick | Let Donald Trump Cry It Out Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Lithwic...
-
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON Right now, we are standing on the edge of a he...
-
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON We love making ice cream, but our mission has ...
