U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

in other news - ratings down! Sad!

An estimated 25.6 million people watched President Trump announce that Brett Kavanaugh will be his second Supreme Court nominee.

That's down from the 32.4 million people who saw Trump's similar prime-time announcement of Neil Gorsuch's nomination last year, the Nielsen company says. Summertime television viewership is generally lighter than in the winter, when Gorsuch was picked.

Fox News Channel had the biggest audience for the announcement, with 6.6 million people. Trump defender Sean Hannity anchored Fox News' coverage of the event.

ABC won among the three broadcast networks. ABC interrupted an episode of "The Bachelorette" for the announcement.

don't they factor out viewers who were already watching and couldn't be bothered to give up on their interrupted programming

controversial opinion -- there is probably not a good reason for any republican to oppose kavanaugh

which is why it won't happen

agreed. neither Collins nor Murkowski are at risk of any negative consequences for voting "yes".

guys, I might vote no

The myths about Roe v. Wade debunked. Share with your friends.

still don't understand why McConnell hasn't been outed

Would imagine that if one isn’t paying for it or raping children, one is less likely to get one’s spot blown up.

blown, you say

As it were

"qualifications" are trash

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/brett-kavanaughs-qualifications-dont-matter.html

It will be far down the list of concerns with Kavanaugh, but the formalization of the permanent security state is now on the horizon. https://t.co/cYlyGnAfj4

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 10, 2018

fourth amendment just isn't Original enough

i'm not a lawyer (are these people?) but if it were my job to come up w a reason the state can read your email whenever it wants i'd prob try to make an argument from public infrastructure-- if you don't want to be unreasonably searched or seized, hide a letter in a box instead of transmitting it over the govt-supported network. (obv real constitutional govt would support both a network and its privacy-- yknow, the post office.) but they 1) can't do that because they don't believe in public anything, including the post office; and 2) don't do that because why would they, there's 60 years of postwar precedent explaining why they can look in the box too if they think it's important.

are internet service providers really "government supported networks" though?

I mean surely less so than the USPS

Absolutely no one will like this, but RBG’s track record of hiring black law clerks (& other staff) is not defensible by any honest person, especially anyone on the left (who would savage these numbers if they were true of Alito) https://t.co/5s3uUlPdvs

— Ian Samuel (@isamuel) July 12, 2018

more data needed

she’s apparently hired one black clerk in her time on the SC

how many clerks overall? i genuinely have no idea. mind you, that does seem pretty bad, and is maybe more interesting than the utterly apples-and-orangey comparison between her circuit court career and, i guess, the entirety of his career overall...?

bearing in mind also that she is thirty years older than he is and enrolled in law school a decade before he was born, and what that implies about the state of the profession and diversity of candidates at these different points in time. i'd love to see a really thorough non-RW article on this! but out of context, from an NRO blogger who used to clerk for Scalia and worked in the GWB DOJ, it feels like a smear job, with a swiftboaty quality since RBG herself faced discrimination in seeking out clerkship work early in her career. obviously that doesn't make it impossible that she could have been racially biased in her hiring - just raises my spidey sense.

sure, I don’t have the data on everyone’s clerks, so maybe it’s premature

but it seems less than ideal

that's a lotta tickets

the classic problem all good baseball-loving americans can definitely relate to and absolutely should NOT question any further https://t.co/Akx14OuwW8 pic.twitter.com/zbHTTZQuBo

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) July 11, 2018

i do not understand the economics of admission to your yankee 'based ball' games but that seems... suspicious

Na na na, fuck anyone giving the same hiring parameters to a jewish woman who went to law school in the 1950s to a white man who got his JD in 1990.

White men need to feast on themselves before even thinking about it.

lol at the "friends finally paid him back" explanation. like hey guys no really....i know you're good for it anytime but i kinda need the cash right now....

who among us has not been super-chill about friends leaving us six figures in the hole for baseball tickets and just being all luck 'pay me back whenever dudes, nbd'

Na na na, fuck anyone giving the same hiring parameters to a jewish woman who went to law school in the 1950s to a white man who got his JD in 1990.

― Yerac, Thursday, July 12, 2018 10:54 AM (eighteen minutes ago

ok man

OK dude.

And yeah, I am too lazy to look it up what they are forced to disclose upon scotus start but it is relatively easy to track financial transactions between accounts, to include brokerage, although he doesn't seem financially savvy enough to have real investments.

Corey Robin suspects that Kav's fan club is embarrassed by his "poverty" (thread)

1/ The way we talk about money, debt, and wealth in this country fascinates me. This article about Kavanaugh's financial situation is a good example. https://t.co/QKXI5Ksn33

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 12, 2018

I was baffled that that was "breaking news" or even "newsworthy", like it has no bearing on anything wgaf

breaking news, Kavanaugh left bad tip at Noble Roman's in 1983

I think it's a little weird that he's so bad with money. On most background checks it is a red flag.

Good point, he should hold out for President.

Give him some time to rape someone first.

Are people really buying this bullshit baseball tickets excuse? gmafb

no not buying it

friends not buying them was the problem iirc

lol

We are all truly fortunate that Jeffrey Dahmer did not attend Yale Law School

— Chase Madar (@ChaseMadar) July 13, 2018

He's prolly a ticket scalper. That seems about right for this administration.

schumer continues to showcase his LBJ-esque mastery of the Senate

“I’ll be 71 years old in August, you’re going to whip me? Kiss my you know what,” said Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) when asked if Schumer can influence his vote.

...But it could prove impossible for Schumer to persuade senators like Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana to vote against Kavanaugh. All three supported Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch last year, and all three say that their decision won’t be swayed by Schumer no matter what he does this year.

“My decision won’t have anything to do with Chuck Schumer,” Donnelly said.

“I’m going to vote the way I’m going to vote regardless of what the leader says,’ Heitkamp said.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/13/schumer-supreme-court-fight-centrist-democrats-716654

please do tell us what mysterious leverage he has over these ppl that you know about but that Chuck Schumer doesn't

Senate of today is a v different place from the Senate of 1958

I mean that article isn't bad but it's got a sensationalistic headline designed to make him look as weak as possible. The reality is that if he's going to get any of those Red State Democrats' votes, they're not going to be protected in their home states by saying they were just doing what the Majority Leader told them too, they're going to frame their votes as being bold voices of independence/"the right thing to do" - because that's what will play better with their voters. Schumer can't help them win their elections by telling them what to do/cracking the whip, and he knows this. Everybody in the party knows this.

I think the most he can do to threaten them is withhold fundraising support for their elections, but that's not in his interest either, he needs those seats. If he has any other material that he can cut any deals with, it won't be done publicly, it'll be done behind closed doors - I guess he could promise them something based on the contingency that if they vote "no" and then they magically get back the Senate majority he could promise them something on bills, committees, etc. but that's a pretty empty promise at this point.

At this point Manchini voting YES for Kavanaugh would surprise me. He'll likely win re-election.

With the addition of Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court would have five reliable votes — also counting Gorsuch, Roberts, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas — to effectively overturn Chevron and complete the 30-year judicial assault on business regulation. In the future, even a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress would find it difficult to enact major new regulations. More than the travel ban and the tariffs and the tax cuts, that is likely to be Trump’s most enduring economic legacy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/07/11/how-this-supreme-court-pick-could-cement-trumps-real-economic-legacy/?utm_term=.e1704f94d00f