U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

not showing up to hearings would only make them go faster

and you know I don't like Schumer but even so

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/chuck-schumer-delay-neil-gorsuch-vote-236315

meanwhile I've never heard a senator use his time for such partisan ends as Ted Cruz. At this moment he's calling out "my Democratic colleagues" after having delivered a three-minute paean to the Federalist Society.

i hope HOOS is there and will dump a big pot o' chicken stock on him

perez fwiw https://twitter.com/TomPerez/status/844275364411183104

and https://twitter.com/TomPerez/status/844275841215447041

I'm impressed.

I heard Franken grill Gorsuch on the truck driver; Gorsuch weasled out of it.

This guy is definitely a weasel. Unfortunately, a smart and qualified weasel. It is kind of a shame that this is the one decision Trump got right this early on, not putting forward some ridiculous TV judge or something. Don't get me wrong, I wish he doesn't make it to the bench. Unfortunately, this is not a guy they are going to stop.

Sheldon Whitehouse led him have it on the question of dark money.

I dunno if there's a way to stop him. Dems opposition seems p united to me at this point. The elephant in the room is whether or not McConnell can hold his caucus together to get the majority vote required for the nuclear option (which he probably does, I dunno who is "principled" enough in the GOP to vote against Blobfish in favor of Senate tradition or whatever)

Xpost He's taken a few direct hits for sure, but he is handling it as well as anyone in his position could be expected to handle it. Better, probably.

I don't see Mitch gettin 8 Dem votes on this. He might get Manchin and one or two others, but that's about it.

xp

esp w the Russia/FBI flap as cover, there's no reason any of the Dems will need to break ranks. Trump has handed them a perfect excuse (that has nothing to do with Obama, or Garland, or even Gorsuch) not to confirm.

We never had hope in stopping him. The victory was supposed to be the principled stand, suitable for fund raising and primary purposes.

it looks likely to me that that's gonna happen. If McConnell goes the nuclear option (and why wouldn't he), it is going to look like the sad and desperate maneuver it is.

if we can't get Collins or McCain or (lol) Graham to vote against the nuclear option there's really no hope

https://i.imgur.com/pA7uwWa.jpg

https://history.denverlibrary.org/sites/history/files/cdm_6295.jpg

fuck john elway

Could anyone look more like an aged frat boy than Elway?

The Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth announced Thursday that she would join fellow Democrats in blocking a confirmation vote on Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee.

Duckworth, a combat veteran of the Iraq war who was first elected to the Senate in 2016, cited in a statement the refusal of Gorsuch to meet her as one key reason for her vote.

“Judge Gorsuch has not made the effort to meet with me in person to answer the serious questions I have about his record and he in fact cancelled a meeting we had previously scheduled,” said Duckworth. She added: “I refuse to vote to end debate on a nominee who refuses to provide any answers to my questions.”

More than 30 Democrats have announced their decision not to support Gorsuch’s nomination. Forty-one votes are needed to keep Republicans from achieving the 60-vote super-majority required to end debate on a supreme court nomination.

Gorsuch is an asshole after all: hours before this announcement, he'd canceled an appointment to meet Duckworth and Cortez-Masto.

I want Tammy Duckworth to run for president so bad

otm

Gorsuch is such a smug looking prick.. I liked Schumer using his 'theres no republican judges or democrat judges' quip to burn his ass about Garland.

labor lawyer's what if the election had turned out differently-- sigh...

As Democrats agonize over Gorsuch’s confirmation, let’s think for a moment just how much we lost. With a five to four majority of liberal justices, how would the country have changed?

By a five to four vote, gerrymandering of congressional districts would have been struck down. Even more than “money in politics,” gerrymandering decides who controls the House of Representatives. A center-left Court might have made a redistricting system based on independent, non-partisan commissions the law of the land.

Of course, a liberal Court, would have been likely to reverse Citizens United. More importantly, it might have revisited an earlier, even more pernicious precedent, Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 case that established that money is a form of speech. Now, if the Democrats ever do regain legislative majorities and pass campaign finance reform — say, at some point in the next twenty years — a conservative Court will cite Buckley and Citizens United to strike it down.

At some point, a center-left Court might have declared education a “fundamental” right. In Rodriguez v. San Antonio School District, a 1974 case, the Supreme Court ruled five to four that no such right existed under the Constitution, meaning public school children in different districts had no claim to equal state funding. Forty years later, in a far different world, there is even more reason to declare education a fundamental right. The enshrining of a constitutional right to public education would have been monumental. But now? It’s out of the question.

Or consider race discrimination. The 1976 decision in Washington v. Davis held that laws with racially discriminatory effects don’t violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as long as they don’t have a discriminatory purpose. In 2001, in Alexander v. Sandoval, the Court applied the same reasoning to narrow minorities’ ability to sue under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. A liberal majority could have reversed those decisions and made it easier for victims of discrimination to have their day in court. Instead, a center-right Court will continue with the status quo, and may well dismantle what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.

Under a center-left court, we may have been able to make progress on gun control. Though federal law makes it impossible to sue firearm manufacturers, there could have been a chance to sue state and local governments under the same Title VI if their lax regulation of dealers had a discriminatory effect on African-Americans. Or if lax policies led to high levels of violence that traumatize young children — and create mental and emotional handicaps —these governments could have faced liability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The death penalty would have been gone. To the young who wonder what the late 1960s were like, here’s what I sometimes say: No one was being executed. The liberal Warren Court had the death penalty on hold, and was about to kill it.

We could have hauled corporate America back into court. A center-left Court would have stopped the use of arbitration clauses that bar class actions against them. All kinds of federal and state laws — now dormant and impossible to enforce by consumers — would have sprung back into effect. Had Clinton won and replaced Scalia with a liberal justice, private lawsuits would have done more to punish Wall Street than putting in a Torquemada to head the SEC.

A labor movement might have come back, or at least survived. The Court could have reinterpreted the Wagner Act to allow “members only” bargaining. That is, a union could have the right to bargain at least for those who want to join, whether the union is the exclusive representative or not. Without a right to collect dues when it is “exclusive” representative, and without a right to bargain when it is not, what’s left of the labor movement now will get even smaller. Thanks to Trump’s victory, it is a near certainty that the conservative Court will make “right to work” the law of the land.

Finally, what might have been the biggest change: the country’s best judges in the lower courts would know that if they did the brave and bold thing, the Supreme Court would have their backs.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/03/28/judge-gorsuch-and-what-could-have-been/

how much do lawyers charge to daydream?

Good archival essay by Scott Lemieux on Alito and the filibuster: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2005/11/on-the-filibuster

it is to laff

https://twitter.com/tinyrevolution/status/851528354683604992

lol that so won't happen

bet?

I bet you a dollar.

see you in four years!

I would say we could at least thank McConnell for definitely proving with his Garland pocket veto that voters don't give a shit about procedural or institutional norms but the Dems did a shit job of making that into a pressure point so who knows really

Betting on this doesn't change anything. People should light up the phones demanding that Markey apologize for being such a fucking twit

Since he claims to speak for all Democrats I suppose even a disenfranchised DC loser like me can call his office on this one, eh?

TROY, N.Y. (AP) — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says the “partisan hostility” surrounding the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch is of concern because it could undermine public confidence in the apolitical nature of the judicial system.

Roberts spoke Tuesday at an upstate New York college a day after Gorsuch was sworn in by President Donald Trump at the White House. The appearance in Troy was billed as a conversation with Rensselaer (rehn-suh-LEER’) Polytechnic Institute President Shirley Ann Jackson.

When Jackson asked about the “extremely partisan” confirmation process, Roberts said politics don’t carry over into the court’s decision-making. Roberts says the judiciary does its business in a “completely non-partisan way.”

I feel like perpetuating this myth is generally considered the most sacred task by SCOTUS judges

Roberts said he was an umpire -- he just calls the shots, recall.

Good thing there was nothing partisan or politicized about the handling of the Garland nomination - then you would have really seen the gloves come off!

It was so non-political, he didn't even need a hearing

all of the justices act like the partisan jockeying in their confirmation hearings are beneath them. It's part of this larger commitment (that does actually cut across party lines, afaict) to the idea that non-partisan impartiality is a defining characteristic of the courts. Dem and GOP-nominated justices both pay homage to this cuz they know it increases their power relative to the other branches, it gives them an air of authority that compensates for them not being elected. The other branches can always say they represent the will of the people via voting, but SCOTUS judges don't have that defense. They're supposed to be *above* all that, messy elections, party politics, etc. But of course they aren't, so it's annoying to see this myth clung to so desperately.

It's like they all fear that once that mythology is stripped away, the entire edifice of the courts will crumble. Maybe they're right, idk.

Panem baby

Bork was the last justice to joust with senators about his jurisprudence, and the Dem majority (and some Republicans) were so repulsed they voted against him. Ginsberg started the practice of saying shit.

er, Bork was the last nominee

so glad Bork never got confirmed

Never forget:

On one of NRs early cruises, the first one the Borks attended, I met the judge for the first time at NRs cocktail party and offered to get him a drink. I asked what he was drinking. A martini, of course, was the reply. I said I would join him. We bellied up to the bar and asked for two martinis. The bartender started to make them when Judge Bork looked at him and said, give me those (meaning the gin, vermouth, and the shaker). The bartender dutifully turned them over and the judge proceeded to make our martinis the way they were SUPPOSED to be made. A great man with a great sense of humor.

great man that was more than happy to do Nixon's massacring

the rudeness to the waiter is an example of the great man's great sense of humor

let me show you how you're SUPPOSED TO fire a Special Prosecutor