Justice Kennedy is retiring

[MarblesMom]

1 hour ago, Don'tlikekoolaid said:

I think the States is in the middle of another civil war, red vs blue.

Not that I want this to happen, but I have been predicting a civil war for years....in fact, I think there is one happening now, just not full-scale and officially proclaimed. 

Our country has issues that need to be acknowledged and discussed and FIXED .... and .... well, it's overwhelming.

[JMarie]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I gave the disgust reaction, but this is what I really wanted to post:

I've also seen Judge Jeanne Pirro's name bandied about. Just hit me over the head with a shovel if that happens.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/06/27/donald-trump-jr-says-having-jeanine-pirro-on-the-supreme-court-would-be-awesome/23469723/

Quote

Not long after Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he’ll be retiring, Donald Trump Jr. got behind a potential replacement, reports The Hill. 

He tweeted on Wednesday, “This would be pretty awesome,” in reference to a posting that said, “Introducing Supreme Court Justice Jeanine Pirro,” and featured an image of her. 

According to Politico, Pirro, a Fox News host, has expressed interest in getting a government job. 

The outlet noted earlier this month that “Pirro has repeatedly told Trump’s aides and advisers over the past 18 months that she’s interested in taking over as the nation’s” attorney general, a job currently held by Jeff Sessions. 

If she were to receive and accept a nomination to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Kennedy, there is a very good chance, should she be approved, that the balance of the court would be altered significantly. 

While Kennedy voted with both conservative and liberal justices, comments Pirro has made on her show suggest she may not be as willing to straddle that line. 

For example, she just recently suggested that liberals who criticize President Trump are “un-American” and “rooting for” the nation’s “failure.” 

 

[47of74]

 

If she was yes I’d be rooting for exactly that.

[Don'tlikekoolaid]

2 hours ago, RainbowSky said:

Impeach then what? 

I really don't know and that's the heartbreak of it, there is no easy answer.  Just want him gone. I despise liars.  America needs better not some dangerous person like him.

[AlwaysExcited]

I'm 99.9% sure that his pick will be a white, hardcore conservative woman. If not Pirro then someone else. 
USA, get ready for your Serena Joy. 

[RainbowSky]

2 hours ago, Don'tlikekoolaid said:

I really don't know and that's the heartbreak of it, there is no easy answer.  Just want him gone. I despise liars.  America needs better not some dangerous person like him.

Impeaching doesn't mean he's gone. Ask Bill. 

 

Also, if he's gone, we get his next in line who has a last name that starts with  P.

Much better . 

I mean at least he wouldn't tweet about "Haha my button's bigger haha!" Then become n admirer and buddies with said person. I think.

[AmazonGrace]

Racist theocracy, here you go https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/1012071040082685954?s=19

[dramallama]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/here-are-some-of-the-top-candidates-to-replace-kennedy-on-the-supreme-court/

[formergothardite]

9 hours ago, RainbowSky said:

I mean at least he wouldn't tweet about "Haha my button's bigger haha!" Then become n admirer and buddies with said person. I think.

Pency-poo would be just as awful as Trump, he would just hide it better so the GOP evangelicals wouldn't have to deal with him being openly offensive. Trump alienates people, Pence will unite them. I don't want Trump gone unless Pence is also gone. 

[Black Aliss]

17 hours ago, Don'tlikekoolaid said:

I have been watching the news today and now I'm all depressed. Babies in cages, trade war, lies about N Korea and how Trump fixed everything NOT.  All kinds of bullshit in the White House.  I think the States is in the middle of another civil war, red vs blue. Stupid fucking fundys think Trump is God's soldier...Jesus.

I'm reading a good novel, "The Plot against the President " by Sam Bourne published in UK.  It's like the Day of the Jackal for today.  Impeach the Trump asshole. Please.

America Canada still loves you!  Please get well soon!

Impeach won't happen and even if it did it'd be damned hard to get the senate to remove him from office. 

I'm glad you still love us, but please prove it by not letting Doug Ford become your next PM. kthxbai

I couldn't decide whether this belong in the Maxhell Tigger vs Tiger thread or here, but I had to share it somewhere. Possibly NSFW.

 

 

Spoiler

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[JMarie]

3 hours ago, formergothardite said:

Pency-poo would be just as awful as Trump, he would just hide it better so the GOP evangelicals wouldn't have to deal with him being openly offensive. Trump alienates people, Pence will unite them. I don't want Trump gone unless Pence is also gone. 

Pence would be just as awful as Trump, in his actions, but at least he wouldn't insult people at every opportunity (like Trump's habit of giving people stupid nicknames, like Crooked Hillary and Lyin' Ted Cruz).  Pence would at least have a "presidential" demeanor, not that I want him to take over.

[dramallama]

1 hour ago, JMarie said:

Pence would be just as awful as Trump, in his actions, but at least he wouldn't insult people at every opportunity (like Trump's habit of giving people stupid nicknames, like Crooked Hillary and Lyin' Ted Cruz).  Pence would at least have a "presidential" demeanor, not that I want him to take over.

I fear that Pence's more subdued (especially compared to the raging dumpster fire circus that is Trump) demeanor would make him a far more effective president, and that one's a True Believer.  I fear Trump tweeting something stupid and getting us all killed but I equally fear Pence as president smiling politely while completely destroying the remaining social safety net and installing as many true believing theocratic judges as possible at all levels.

[caitrona]

15 hours ago, AlwaysExcited said:

I'm 99.9% sure that his pick will be a white, hardcore conservative woman. If not Pirro then someone else. 
USA, get ready for your Serena Joy. 

Yep. 

My first instinct was Allison Eid, but her husband is Egyptian, so that's probably a deal-breaker for trump at the moment.  Next guess is Diane Sykes. I think he's going to favor female candidates because the litmus test for being on the short list was willingness to overturn Roe (and/or Casey), and anti-choicers have been lining up test cases so it can go up as soon as next term (assuming the Democrats & "moderate" Republicans don't manage to block confirmation until after the mid-terms).  When the truth of "being anti-choice is anti-woman" is pointed out, then they'll get to point to Token Woman Justice™ & her majority opinion (which they'll probably have her draft, to amp up the optics even more).  And we're fucked. 

The only way I see a male candidate get the nomination is if he's REALLY worried about midterm results and/or Mueller, and then he'll go for one of the (sadly many) dudes who think Presidential authority should be sweeping (except for the black dude, duh) and rarely challenged.  None of the female candidates have been really explicit on that.  Roe/Casey will still go, and we'll still be fucked.  Gosh I'm cheery today. 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good op-ed: "Don’t want a right-wing Supreme Court? Do everything you can to stop it."

Spoiler

Our constitutional system of “checks and balances” works only if those in a position to operate the levers of checking and balancing do their job. It is clear that a Republican Congress and Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have no taste for such work. For the moment, President Trump is mostly unchecked and unbalanced.

It is equally clear — not only on Trump’s travel ban but also on issues related to voting rights, labor rights and gerrymandering — that the Republican Five on the nation’s highest court have operated as agents of their party’s interests.

And now things stand to get even worse because of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement. He was, at least on some occasions, a moderating force. His replacement by another conservative hard-liner in the mold of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch would give right-wing interpretations of the law free rein.

This court’s direction was troubling enough with Kennedy there. On the travel ban, for example, the majority that included Kennedy discounted the obvious (practically every word Trump has said about Muslims) to make a decision based on a rather absolutist view of presidential power, about which they were skeptical when Barack Obama was president.

When it comes to access to the ballot, they are pushing the nation back to the jurisprudence of the pre-civil rights era. The majority’s shameless ratification of a racial gerrymander by Texas’s Republican legislature, wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in dissent, demonstrated its refusal to enforce the “right of equal opportunity.”

And on Wednesday, in what might be seen as a companion to the Citizens United decision that enhanced the influence of corporations on our political life, the majority voted to undercut organized labor’s ability to fight back. In Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees , it ended the practice of public employee unions automatically collecting fees from nonunion members on whose behalf they negotiate contracts, tossing aside 41 years of settled law and crippling the broader labor movement.

As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent: “There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion. The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this Nation’s law — and in its economic life — for over 40 years.” The majority overruled precedent, she wrote, for “no exceptional or special reason” but simply “because it wanted to.” That’s judicial activism, and it’s bringing back the Gilded Age.

You might ask: What’s wrong with all these 5-to-4 partisan decisions? Well, there is the matter of the Republican majority in the United States Senate not even permitting a vote on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the court, allowing Trump to fill the seat with a Republican. Every 5-to-4 conservative decision is (in the parlance of judges) the fruit of a poisonous tree of unbridled partisanship.

But the other problem with 5-to-4 rulings was outlined by a distinguished jurist. “I do think the rule of law is threatened by a steady term after term after term focus on 5-4 decisions,” he said. “Politics are closely divided. . . . There ought to be some sense of some stability if the government is not going to polarize completely.”

The words are those of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to the legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen in 2006. And Roberts was right: The court he leads is contributing mightily to the polarization he decries.

A profound mistrust of the court will only be aggravated by the contrast between its approach to the travel ban and its method in an earlier 7-to-2 ruling in favor of a baker who did not want to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple.

The cake decision uses statements by a Colorado regulator critical of religion to decry “religious hostility on the part of the State itself.” The five-justice majority then turns around in the travel-ban case, as Sotomayor noted, and “completely sets aside the President’s charged statements about Muslims as irrelevant.” In the first, involving Christians, the court went out of its way to protect religious liberty. In the second, involving Muslims, it went out of its way to insist that religious-liberty concerns did not apply.

All the recent talk about civility should not stop opponents of a right-wing court from doing everything in their power to keep the judiciary from being packed with ideologues who behave as partisans.

There is nothing civil about rushing a nominee to replace Kennedy before the midterm elections. And no rule of civility demands the confirmation of justices who would leave an abusive president unchecked and use raw judicial power to roll back a century’s worth of social progress.

I've already sent postcards to my senators and representative, though it won't help, because they're all solid Democrats. I've read that sending stuff via snail mail gets the most attention of all.

[GreyhoundFan]

The New Yorker's legal correspondent made this stark prediction:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[NotQuiteMotY]

I just... I mentally can't deal with this. Women, LGBTQ people, minorities... All righteously screwed over unless moderates and Democrats can stall until after the election.

I could seriously spit on McConnell now. Strongarm in order to hold a seat open for 9 months for a presidential election? Waiting for the will of the people! Delay a potentially-tipping nomination for less time for a congressional election? Not the same thing!

Seriously, fuck them all. I don't usually swear, but. Fuck them all.

[dramallama]

Workers rights, voting rights, the list goes on...

 

Steal a SCOTUS seat and get rewarded with a second one.  Fuck everything.

[milkteeth]

What to do When - Not If - Roe Vanishes

 

This is a good article to help all of us prepare what is coming in the months ahead. We need to prepare not only for abortion rights to vanish, but any other protection we have that makes our country a somewhat civilized society. I'm sure in a few months they'll rule that minimum wage laws and environmental protections violate a corporation's free speech or some nightmare like that.

 

Now is the time that we all need to be contacting our Democrat representatives and let them know that they need to do everything in their power to resist Trump adding a new member to the SC. Now is not the time for civility or fucking norms or whatever excuse Democrats always give before rolling over and showing their belly to the Republicans. We need to commit now to the bare knuckle brawl that is coming very soon and if the Democrats aren't up for the fight we will absolutely find people who will be. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"What could happen if Roe v Wade gets struck down?". As this article is mostly graphics, I can't quote, but it's sobering how many states (10 -- including Massachusetts, which was a surprise to me) have pre-Roe laws still on the books that would go back into effect. Four states have laws on the books that would automatically go into effect if Roe is overturned.  Only eight states have laws that explicitly protect abortion rights.

[GreyhoundFan]

[dramallama]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"What could happen if Roe v Wade gets struck down?". As this article is mostly graphics, I can't quote, but it's sobering how many states (10 -- including Massachusetts, which was a surprise to me) have pre-Roe laws still on the books that would go back into effect. Four states have laws on the books that would automatically go into effect if Roe is overturned.  Only eight states have laws that explicitly protect abortion rights.

Ohio's not on that map but I guarantee our shitty state legislators would be sure to ban it ASAP in the event of Roe's demise.  I feel comfortable saying that at least 28 states would have bans very quickly, if they don't already.