U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

karl this is some excellent scenario running and first rate use of the Fighting Baseball thread and i applaud it

i have a rejoinder percolating but it may take a while to get around to crunching the hard numbers so i just wanted to say that for now

_in 2031, the golden boy brett kavanaugh, just 66 years old, FUCKING DIES OUT OF NOWHERE and it's REALLY EMBARRASSING FOR HIM_

whoa how did he die?!

xp thanks doctor c! your questioning of that was really valid, and i don't think my answer is any sort of proof of anything. i got lazy and didn't project it out to 2045 (my original goal), but even though i ended with a slim 5-4 liberal majority by 2037, i don't think it takes much to keep it at a 5-4 conservative majority either. then again, maybe the republicans will truly never win again (lol) and it will be 6-3 liberal by 2040, who knows

So we get 40 some years of this...from an article Barrett co-wrote as quoted by SCOTUS blog

The article also noted that, when the late Justice William Brennan was asked about potential conflict between his Catholic faith and his duties as a justice, he responded that he would be governed by “the oath I took to support the Constitution and laws of the United States”; Barrett and Garvey observed that they did not “defend this position as the proper response for a Catholic judge to take with respect to abortion or the death penalty.”

https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/07/potential-nominee-profile-amy-coney-barrett/

Can't wait for her book, "Jesus is the Speaker of MY House"

@ Karl - okay! you've already gotten there, but yeah basically my rejoinder would be that you didn't actually end up showing "a 6-3 conservative court for the forseeable future, and possible a 5-4 majority for another 20-30 years." but the scenario was worth it anyway. a quibble: you don't game out the Senate, which i respect because that would be even more absurd fanfic work, but it's worth allowing at least dice-roll possibilities that the Dems control the Senate during your Republican admins, AND that they stand firm against prematurely ghoulish ideologues like Sleve McDichael, whose pasty-faced appearance and hot-mic comments during the nominations process turn the public against him. i would not put money on that chance myself, but it's at least possible.

also though, a fair bit hinges on that first d10 roll and some choices about the EVENTS - suppose Biden rolls a 6 in 2024, and is re-elected to a foggy but popular second term, his "Reagan in the late 80s" zone, AND ALSO that during that term, Thomas has a health scare and decides to retire. i don't know that the odds are so heavily stacked against something like that.

obviously in that event, Biden's replacement pick would be the mushy, not-all-that liberal Rey McSriff (48), a former bank-industry lobbyist, seen as a move back in the direction of racial and gender diversity on the court who will at least be a reliable liberal vote in civil-rights and abortion cases.

so in january 2029, we've got:

roberts is 74
alito is 79
gorsuch is 62
the golden boy is 64
barrett is 57

kagan is 69
willie dustice is 58
bobsun dognutt is 50
rey mcsriff is 50

eight years of the biden administration have left many festering wounds unaddressed, but thankfully the republican "gold team" have been mostly braying in the margins without control of either congress or the executive to formally empower them. on the other hand, in the absence of the Cotton presidency, World War III has not happened, but let's say AOC wins in 2028 anyway. why not?!

thus, following B.K.'s horrible death in 2031, AOC's super left-wing appointee is able to remain in office. you didn't name them but it's pretty obvious you had Shown Furcotte in mind. maybe kagan is worried enough about the next election, and spooked by what is by then a Sunday-morning-show conventional wisdom about "the Tragedy of Ginsburg," that she retires too. by this point AOC is not fucking around at all and appoints millennial twitter SJW Raul Chamgerlain, 44. if AOC goes on to win a second term and also grabs the Alito seat, then in 2035 we have:

roberts is 80
gorsuch is 68
barrett is 63

raul chamgerlain is 49
willie dustice is 64
bobsun dognutt is 56
rey mcscriff is 56
shown furcotte is 53
todd bonzalez is 50

... and our biggest problem is that sometimes McSriff aligns with the conservatives to dissent in 5-4 corporate-law decisions, and we see a lot of online left grousing about how Biden wasted a pick on her.

now yes, i admit........... this depends on the democrats winning four straight national elections. IMPOSSIBLE you say? or merely... improbable???! depends how much faith you put in changing demographics etc. but if none of the Dem-appointed justices die in office, they can also afford to lose one of those elections! because it might be that the Republicans can only replace Thomas or Alito with McDichael or Dorque, giving them an edge in age but not a leg up in the balance of the court.

todd bonzalez makes history as the first male latino justice

is there a relevant quote linking Barrett's sect to The Handmaid's Tale?

there must be. ominous lord, truth is stranger than fiction

xp

doc casino, first of all, obviously i had Shown Furcotte in mind. but secondly, the rest of your scenario seems plausible!

obviously gaming it out like that is a goof, but i did actually learn a few things. or maybe not. i feel like just laying out their ages, combined with the fact that they have lifetime appointments, explains 99% of the game:

christmas near-future:

roberts is 65
thomas is 72
alito is 70
gorsuch is 53
the golden boy is 55
barrett is 48

breyer is 82
sotomayor is 66
kagan is 60

that there is a stacked deck, combined with republican weakness (in terms of what we might expect, possibly overoptimistically, from their presidential chances for the next few decades after elevating a white supremacist fascist to the presidency and then ripping the country to shreds in an attempt to keep him there). even with a couple 2-term democratic administrations in a row, through 2036, there is still a decent chance that at least 5 or even all 6 of the conservative majority stays right where they are, their ass-molds worn deep

in unrelated news, just before i fell asleep face down on the couch last night, i ran across a disturbing headline about increasing the maximum human lifespans beyond its current soft limit of 125. apparently the consensus is that it will soon (10 years?) be possible to extend human lifespans using genetic modifiers, physical devices, and secret codes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_extension jfc

agreed, it's a useful exercise to grasp exactly how much the age advantage of the GWB and DJT appointees presses on into the future. but also, focusing too much on that just takes us into a zone of gloom, so unless it's directly useful for motivating present-day action and the long-term fight, i think it's also useful to bear in mind all the ways that the scenario could suddenly break down. nobody saw Scalia's death coming, for example, even though he was 79. that ended up working out horribly for the cause of justice and freedom, but it could have gone differently. so long as our rights are subject to these bizarre matters of fate and circumstance, we may as well remind ourselves that there are ways the probabilistic parts could break our way.

and the stacked deck there does look better the moment Biden can replace Breyer, which i think we all do need to be praying for (or whatever equivalent practice).

and... all these scenarios also presume a successful barrett confirmation. tbh, i'm pretty doom-and-gloom about that, seems like there's no reason to think it won't happen. but it's still probably not good for my head to already accept her as a solid number until 2049 or w/e. like if i'm driving myself crazy with all the bad things that have already happened, and the ones that could probably happen, and the ones that are near-certainties, that's a lot to do to my head, if i'm not also considering the good equivalents of all of those things.

there's also some non-zero chance that, in the event that a Democrat wins the presidential race four times in a row and this permanent 5-4 Court keeps shutting down every exciting thing the people are turning out to vote for, then a mandate for court-packing develops much much more quickly than we might expect right now.

so long as our rights are subject to these bizarre matters of fate and circumstance, we may as well remind ourselves that there are ways the probabilistic parts could break our way.

otm

i know that's not a convincing or comforting thought for everyone, but to me that really is what gives me hope

NEW: Senate Democrats say they will press President Trump’s SCOTUS nominee to commit to recuse herself if the justices hear a case that could impact the outcome of the fall elections, @mkraju reports.

— Ana Cabrera (@AnaCabrera) September 25, 2020

That seems a little dumb

I mean it makes sense but they'd still have a 5-3 advantage anyway

"Will you commit to not doing the exact thing you were hired for" is a dumb question

and... all these scenarios also presume a successful barrett confirmation. tbh, i'm pretty doom-and-gloom about that, seems like there's no reason to think it won't happen

i will continue to return to my dumb "we simulate the future and then experience it in real time, somehow diminished, as something that was already familiar" theory, until someone or something convinces me that it's not accurate. in that line of thinking, you can already see the barrett confirmation and how it happens. i already saw a headline, last night, talking about how barrett was confirmed in October. i looked at the calendar and it was september 25th, then re-read the headline and it still said that she was confirmed in October, past tense. i can't remember where i saw it, and i had a socially distanced hangout with a friend last night and got way too drunk. but still, it was there all the same.

that was just a drunken horror, but i woke up today and it's still there. the republicans have the votes. 2 have been allowed to deviate (murkowski and collins), which just so happens to allow exactly enough remaining republicans to unilaterally install barrett. what a coincidence. this outcome has already been focus-grouped on a national scale - it turns out that most republicans think it's a great idea, most democrats think it's a bad idea, and the majority of "independents" think it's a bad idea. it sounds like most ideas these days. so they'll do it, because they can.

we're currently simulating the outraged response, right now. at least, i am. and then, when it happens, it won't be the first time.

---

^i think all of that is a very bad way to go about thinking about life, believe it or not. but that's what i see happening over and over, lately.

xpost they're not asking her to not be a justice, they're saying 'Hey, you were literally just nominated by one of the President candidates in this election 5 minutes before the election, maybe it's a conflict of interest for you ruling on a case challenging his results".

But this is the primary reason they are in such a rush. If she can't guarantee to hand over the election, it's pointless for Trump. Surely he already told her she needs to deliver that vote, or there would be a different pick.

lol of course it's not going to actually happen but would you rather the Democrats not try it first so that they can frame it as "Justice Coney Barrett refused to recuse, she and Trump win, while Americans lose!"

I mean, compared to other things they should be trying, this is VERY low on my list of importance and I wouldn't want it to take the place of promising to pack the fuck out of courts, but we're kinda fucked unless someone has a McCain surprise during the vote.

@ Moodles - isn't the primary reason McConnell & co. are in such a rush that Trump has a good chance of not being President in 3.5 months? and they want to grab another Supreme Court seat for all the reasons you would expect them to want that? potentially covering his ass in a stolen election would just be the cherry on top.

Trump and McConnell have different motivations, but this is Trump's pick, not McConnell's

technically, but which one of the two is able to exert the most control over 51 republican votes?

(amy barrett, but pure coincidence, happened to be exactly who mcconnell was pushing for)

trump, on the other hand, has the federalist society publish a list for him so that he can make his fantasy list of 25 candidates (which included tom cotton and ted cruz) seem more legit. i'm sure they arranged it in a way so that trump felt that was the crucial decisionmaker who made the tough call, but there are probably a dozen other people that had more to do with this pick than trump

Lucky for them there are so many justices out there willing to both undermine the integrity of a major election and nuke Roe v Wade. Funny how those interests conveniently line up.

xp

I think you are sort of right to extent. Trump is obviously not hand picking justices based on some deep judicial reasoning. But rest assured, he's asking any potential justice one question and one question only, and if they don't give the correct answer, they aren't going in front of the Senate.

by the time it gets to trump, it's like "oh great leader, we just simply can't decide between the bounty of perfect candidates on your list! you are so impressive, you know much more about their judicial record than ANY other person we have ever met! please, decide for us with your strength and genius! we have OPTION 1) Amy Barrett, OPTION 2) Barbara Lagoa, or OPTION 3) Michelle Obama. and also many people are saying barack obama favors Lagoa over his own wife! george bush also prefers Lagoa. Please decide for us with your wisdom and intuition!"

haha, sorry. i am in an extremely goofy mood this morning. i think they'd actually do a version of ^^ in the earlier stages, before whittling it down to a set of "options" where he actually can't mess it up

Perhaps rather than asking "will you recuse yourself?" they should be asking "did the president request you rule in his favor if the election is contested?"

xp

Certainly possible

This goes to a larger pet peeve about these confirmation hearings, which is that there are always questions about how someone might rule in this or that case, and the answer is always that they can't speculate about a hypothetical situation. It's a meaningless line of inquiry designed as a gotcha that no one actually cares about.

The whole notion that these are not political picks driven by an obvious agenda is so out of date and ridiculous, it would be better to drop the pretense.

Yes how can we expect lawyers and judges to speculate about hypotheticals

The point is, they don't. It doesn't matter what we expect. We've seen this game play out over and over, so expecting it to change is folly.

If you are expecting any of this to operate under a set of unwritten norms that were trashed years ago, you are being played.

my homie is seriously sharing this op ed and trying to accept Amy w an open mind and open heart so I guess he’s just a Sorkin Republican now jfc

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/26/ive-known-amy-coney-barrett-15-years-liberals-have-nothing-fear/

lol

also by "O. Carter Snead" a name designed to make me want to punch the person
https://www.hoover.org/research/planned-parenthoods-hostages

There is nothing to fear about Barrett’s intellect. She has an incandescent mind that has won the admiration of colleagues across the ideological spectrum.

getting Rich Lowry flashbacks

Sooooo fucking tired of SCOTUS nominees called "brilliant" as if what they do requires anything other than keeping the clerks happy as they cobble your opinion together.

I for one was worried that she was actually illiterate.

The GOP has been functionally illiterate since 1981.

Those concerns assuaged, I look forward to strapping on my legally mandated cilice every morning to get me ready to face the day.

time to invest in chastity belt manufacturers

i think i saw incandescent mind open for gene loves jezebel in '87

time to invest in chastity belt manufacturers

Clasping hands meme with BDSM nerds and Opus Dei

Xpost
Moodles, I wasn’t disagreeing with you

yeah and the story said he announced it from the bench and he wasn't in court today? so maybe he's about to retire but the story got some basic facts wrong

In addition to helping the billionaire class, this will make it easier for the Democrats to throw more money against Mamdani, AOC, and any other progressive who dares to challenge the establishment

Absolutely. It gives even more power to the millionaires/billionaires who give to D's as well as R's.

And again of course highlights the insanity of treating money as "speech" — most people can talk or write social media posts or make protest signs, but most people don't have millions and billions of dollars. It's created a whole separate category of speech accessible only to the tiniest number of the most powerful people.

Nina accidentally posted a pre-write apparently

ffffffuuuuuuuck, this is an actual reoccuring nightmare of mine

"Samuel Alito retired today at the senseless age of 76."

He was eaten by wolves

Meant to post here:

That Thomas concurrence will be quoted or indirectly filtered down to every bigot who believes trans people are fucking sickos on psychiatric medication. It'll get buried b/c of the citizenship decision. And it comes on the last day of Pride. It's enervating. Expecting the decision does nothing to mitigate its gleeful malice. He's practically giggling.

Roberts throwing shade at Kav and Alito in his majority opinion in Barbara is the day's only delight:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH proposes a similar ad hoc exception to his owninterpretation of the Citizenship Clause. Under his rule, the Clause generally does not promise citizenship to children whose parents are “not U. S. citizens.” See post, at 9 (opinion concurring in judgment and dissenting in part). Yet it must grant citizenship under the “facts and circumstances” presented in Wong Kim Ark—even though Wong’s parents were not U. S. citizens. Post, at 5, n. 3. Like the exception proposed by JUSTICE ALITO, JUSTICE KAVANAUGH’s exception is at war with his supposedly “unifying” principle of the Clause.

I'm slightly surprised at Gorsuch on the birthright case, but not sure why I feel this way

The converse of delight is reading Jackson futilely demolishing Thomas's contemptuously risible argument that the 14th amendment was only meant to include Black people and not the children of European immigrants

xpost A lot of the tea-leaf reading about the case was based on Gorsuch's questioning of the government attorney, which seemed to signal he was skeptical of the Trump position. So either he found some innovative way to thread the needle or just said fuck it I'm licking the boot.

The converse of delight is reading Jackson futilely demolishing Thomas's contemptuously risible argument that the 14th amendment was only meant to include Black people and not the children of European immigrants

― rob, Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Yup! Her opinion is an excellent rundown of Reconstruction history (Eric Foner in the footnotes!).

God damn! It seems to be the case that four of the justices on the SCOTUS not only have trouble reading the plain text of the 14th amendment which is the supreme law of the land. They imagine a nation where Congress can bestow or retroactively remove citizenship by whatever shifting standards can muster a majority.

This blatant disregard for the law as clearly written in the constitution and upheld for more than a century should be grounds for immediate impeachment of all four of them. The fact that they did not prevail doesn't mean their actions should not be viewed as subversive of the law and the state, criminally dangerous, and outrageous in the extreme.

i guess it's still time to pack the court and limit its powers by statute huh

It so happens that I'm reading a first-rate new bio of forgotten Reconstruction hero Charles Sumner, who didn't live long enough to watch SCOTUS destroy the Civil Rights Act of 1874 and eventually rewrite the 14th Amendment to mean that corporations get due process, while Black citizens must depend on states to keep them safe.

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, June 30, 2026 9:57 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i am on a sumner bio as well though maybe not the same one. i checked out one and have the other on hold. i'm on "the great abolitionist", sumner fuckin rules.

I'm reading Zaakir Tameez's new one, just splendid.

thats the one i have on hold!

xpost Wet hot American Sumner

Just read part of the Jackson concurrence taking on Clarence Thomas and it’s beautifully written and wise :

What is more, this alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing. Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people. And the Great Emancipator eventually foresaw that the only path forward that could prevent a return—in any form—to slavery and race-based subordination was to link the fates of all.

That Thomas concurrence will be quoted or indirectly filtered down to every bigot who believes trans people are fucking sickos on psychiatric medication. It'll get buried b/c of the citizenship decision. And it comes on the last day of Pride. It's enervating. Expecting the decision does nothing to mitigate its gleeful malice. He's practically giggling.

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, June 30, 2026 8:29 AM (one hour ago)

ha, i wondered if that post might belong here. anyway, the supreme court has issued terrible decisions before, and i have no doubt it will issue terrible decisions again. i understand why some might see a decision like, say, buck v. bell as exalting bigotry. i see it differently. i see a decision which debases the law.

i am hardly in a position to say what action those who oppose this decision ought to take to correct the injustice. i will note that for some time, the supreme court's decisions have possessed neither law, justice, nor sense. personally, i consider myself a lover of both law and justice, and one who reluctantly tolerates sense. law and justice, i believe, ought to be actively defended. sense, on the other hand, will have its way, whether it is defended or condemned.

Since many of this court's opinions do not stand up as good law, and are not reflective of where society is, I don't think there has to be any hand-wringing when these rulings are overturned. It's just getting to where they can be overturned that's the problem.

Since many of this court's opinions do not stand up as good law, and are not reflective of where society is, I don't think there has to be any hand-wringing when these rulings are overturned. It's just getting to where they can be overturned that's the problem.

― every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in f (President Keyes), Tuesday, June 30, 2026 10:04 AM

exactly. getting to the place where the rulings can be overturned, _that's_ going to cause a _considerable_ amount of... well, it's not the hand-wringing i'm worried about. certainly there's no shortage of hand-wringing as is.

From Justice Jackson's concurrence:
"JUSTICE THOMAS’s telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery."

I guess I should be reading Foner and other historians that you folks have mentioned. I was not familiar with the term “Second Founding “ but it’s a great one.

I am fully aware of the Court's reactionary past; we had a brief crack between 1955 and 1967.