Running SCOTUS thread

What did McConnell do when he refused to allow Garland's nomination to advance and held the seat open for Trump?

I don't agree with increasing the court to thirteen and appointing all liberal justices or somesuch. I do think that there should be term limits on the Justices, staggered in such a way that over time every President elected appoints a replacement. I'm not sure how we can get there - but as things stand, the neutrality and legitimacy of the Supreme Court is under water.

Every one of these justices, in their confirmation hearings, said that they believed in precedent and settled law, and they're throwing those precedents overboard wholesale.

 

I'm not sure. I think extremism on either end of the spectrum is dangerous, so I look at some of the MAGA politicians the same way I look at The Squad. They're mostly all grifters, opportunists, or true believers in a radical way of thinking. The last category is the most dangerous.
Hopefully all of the raving lunatics burn themselves out without dragging the rest of us along and we can throttle back and regain some sanity as a society. Once Trump fades into the sunset maybe that'll happen, but I have doubts it will. The two extremes are feeding off each other to the point that whoever replaces Trump or Biden will just become a surrogate. There was one person who had me excited in the primaries but he didn't gain much traction.
All I do know is that we're playing with a dancing Jenga tower in 50 mph winds right now. Any wrong move might topple it. Radical shocks to the system like packing the court are the wrong move.

 

I don't disagree. Yet the various federal agencies abused the power they were given, so here we are. Like you said upthread, every regulation is a reaction to someone being harmed. This ruling is no different. The agencies harmed people, and this is the pushback. A regulation on the regulators.

 

Who excited you in the primaries?

 

Which ones?

 

The thing is that often Congress wrote very general rules because the various congressmen of both parties did not want to be held responsible for the consequences of those rules. It was easier to give general direction and turn it over to the Department of Whatever to manage. In a general sense, I feel much better about scientists and experts in the various fields making those decisions than Judges, who are expert in the law but don't know squat about the subject they're ruling on.

There will be an absolute wave of lawsuits to overturn regulations, many of which are not unreasonable but cost money that corporations would rather pocket.

Some of that is already happening. Florida just put in a law allowing high school age kids to work up to thirty hours a week.

 

McConnell's move was slimy, I'll grant you that. But that's political gamesmanship, not packing the court. Maybe that's semantics, or different verses of the same song, but it's not changing the rules because you lost a game.

Changing the structure of the court how you suggest would require a constitutional amendment, wouldn't it? Congress is welcome to try, but I don't see it happening.

 

I really liked DeSantis. I know he's not a favorite of folks around here, but I thought he had a good, level-headed approach on how to get things done without abusing the powers of his office. What's more, he was very conscious about not abusing the powers of the governor's office. Heard several longer interviews with him where he explained what he was doing, how, and why, and you could tell it was measured and calculated.
FWIW, I didn't vote for Trump in the primary even though my state voted well after he'd locked up the nomination. I still voted for DeSantis.

 

Without that move it's a 5-4 court, and there would be more moderate opinions. Instead we're getting a lot of 6-3 votes railroading through judicial activism and tossing aside fifty year old precedents. I remember when the right hated making law from the bench and was entirely against it.

 

Isn't it though? The game said the sitting President replaces a Supreme Court Justice when there's a change during his time in office. McConnell said oh since it's a President opposite my party, we won't let him. If President Romney had appointed whomever, that would have been done in five seconds.

the entire history of the court had acted that way, until 2016.

 

It's different when the Republicans do it.