The fight to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg megathread

[GeneralMacArthur]

Atlas megathreads on controversial subjects are always cancer.  There's always going to be some Republican f--kwit here to spam the entire thread with derailing arguments and posts that quote 200 other posts to ensure the thread is completely unreadable.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Stop posting fake news about Republicans opposing the vote.

No Republican has yet said that they will oppose the vote.  Even Murkowski's statement from a few weeks ago doesn't count.

Republicans are monstrous hypocrites who care about power and nothing else.  What they said a few months or a few years ago doesn't matter.  If we're holding Republicans to their word, might as well put Mitch himself on that list too since what did he say in 2016?  Oh that's right, "you can't confirm a Supreme Court nominee in an election year."

[GeneralMacArthur]

Atlas megathreads on controversial subjects are always cancer.  There's always going to be some Republican f--kwit here to spam the entire thread with derailing arguments and posts that quote 200 other posts to ensure the thread is completely unreadable.

Point of order. How are we supposed to tell apart Republicans of the f--kwit variety and the "normal" type?

The f--kwits are the ones who keep posting the same argument over and over again, and then when anyone replies to them discrediting their argument they completely ignore it and divert the thread down some tangential rabbit hole.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Bad sign.  That essentially tells us that McConnell has already locked up the 50 votes he needs if Collins is allowed to come out publicly against the fast-track confirmation.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Democrats once again can’t accept a loss, don’t understand why they lose, call it illegitimate which leads to no self reflection. This refusal to accept reality is now an inherent problem within the Democratic Party.

The Democrats didn't lose anything.  We won the last election by 9%, the biggest landslide since 1988.

The illegitimate move was the stealing of the Garland seat.  It was straight up stolen.  If you believe that the president should be allowed to appoint a supreme court justice in an election year, you must believe the Garland seat was stolen.  There's no way to reconcile the two without sounding like an idiot.  There can be no doubt now that the seat was 100% stolen, since even the Republicans refuse to defend their actions in 2016.  It's just "lol yeah we did steal it, suck it."

It's pretty telling that many of the Republicans on this thread have been reduced to "lol, we won, so we can do what we want, suck it libs."  There's no actual moral defense of what they're doing.  The hypocrisy is so disgustingly obvious that even someone as dumb as the average American voter can see it.  But the GOP is really only about two things -- acquiring power at all costs, and "owning the libs."  Take those away and there's no reason for you guys to be happy about this.  Fortunately, that's all you need to celebrate an incredibly immoral, unconstitutional set of actions.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So correct me if I’m wrong but I see four scenarios:

A conservative justice is confirmed, Biden is elected President
A conservative justice is confirmed, Trump is elected President
Biden is elected, a conservative justice is confirmed
Trump is elected, a conservative justice is confirmed

All four scenarios get us a 6-3 conservative court. We need to suck it up and take it. They won’t overturn marriage equality, and John Roberts has been a pretty swingy vote. Try and be optimistic.

No.  The Mitch McConnell precedent will ensure that Supreme Court vacancies can never be filled unless the same party controls both the presidency and the senate.

What's going to happen from here on out is that every single election will revolve around the Supreme Court.  Vacancies will go unfilled for years on end.  Get used to 4-4 ties, or even 3-3 ties.

The court would have had only 4 members from 1975-1977, since Nixon and Ford had 5 Supreme Court nominees that they ushered through a Democratic-controlled Senate.  With the McConnell Precedent in place, no Nixon/Ford nominees would have even received hearings.  The vacancies would have piled up until Jimmy Carter got to fill them.

This is a disaster for our democracy and for our country/society.  Every single election from here on out is going to hinge on the Supreme Court.  Polarization will be absolutely maximized because even if you hate your party's candidate and love the other side's candidate, you aren't going to give up control of the Supreme Court, especially after the precedent this right-wing court is about to set wherein the Supreme Court majority is a 5-person dictatorship that can create and repeal laws at will.

This is what Republicans want, though, because in the short-term they get to win.  And I'd bet all the money I own that some of the first cases heard by the Trump Court will be on all the voting rights issues that help Democrats, so Republicans can maximize their electoral advantage and entrench their minority rule.

[GeneralMacArthur]

In the last 15 years, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Ginsburg have died, but no one died on the court between 1954 and 2005.

It seems like it used to be more common to retire under a hostile President. I don't think Douglas liked Ford much and Hughes retired (the first time) to run against Wilson.

"Hostile president" didn't used to be a thing.  All this hyper-partisanship really began with Nixon, and even then, he initially tried to get a segregationist on the court, then reverted to normal picks once Congress put its foot down.  The politicization of the court kicked into high gear under Reagan with the Bork nomination, which conservatives still complain about 33 years later (see Bret Stephens' op-ed in the NYTimes today).  But even then, the Democrats approved Anthony Kennedy unanimously.

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/1308219073927413761

I told y'all.  Collins wasn't gonna announce she was opposed to the nomination unless McConnell already had this wrapped up.

[GeneralMacArthur]

All the GOP grievances in that tweet are just hearings that happened and became contentious for one reason or another.

The GOP seems to think that Democrats went out and recruited, or paid off, Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford.  Or that we somehow forced Bork to commit the "Saturday Night Massacre" or misrepresent what he did.  None of those are true.  The reason these nominees had these problems is because they were bad nominees.

If any Democratic nominee ever had these kinds of problems, you can guarantee Republicans would jump all over them.  Democratic presidents, however, have done a much better job of vetting their nominees, so Republicans have been reduced to wimpy "scandals" like Elena Kagan's opinion of military recruitment on the Harvard campus.

Also the Estrada hearing wasn't even that wild, it was just your standard "we think this guy is too extreme, send us someone who is less extreme and we'll confirm him."  The urban legend about Democrats shooting him down to prevent Bush from nominating a latino, which was heavily-promoted by the W administration and which OSR recently repeated on this very forum, is completely false and can be easily disproved in less than thirty seconds.

All of this is standard politics and none of it comes anywhere close to the Republicans inventing rules out of thin air to deny the president his constitutional prerogative to appoint a supreme court justice.  That's so far beyond the pale that it demands condemnation from anyone who cares about institutions, norms or the constitution.  The fact that Republicans are now perfectly willing to let Trump appoint ACB is just overwhelming and undeniable evidence that their Garland stonewalling wasn't based on any principles beyond "Republican good, Democrat bad."

[GeneralMacArthur]

To echo what the other posters have said:

The GOP is an utterly disgusting, completely amoral, anti-American organization that consistently torches traditional American democratic values in the name of short-term partisan gain, and this is their pinnacle.  Checks and balances are now out the window as the GOP has turned the Judicial Branch into an extension of the Legislative Branch, and fully intend to use it to maintain control of the Executive and Legislative branches long after voters have turned against the party.

Democrats are fully justified in packing the courts.  This is the bed the GOP has made by turning the Supreme Court from a non-partisan institution into an extension of the legislative branch that the party in power dominates by any means necessary.  That's the game the GOP wants to play, now they can suffer, and I hope they suffer terribly.  I hope the blue avatar hypocrites on this board cry for days when we bring back the Voting Rights Act that John Roberts repealed.

This is the environment the Republicans have created.  Naked partisanship, pure hatred, no-rules anti-democratic gamesmanship.  Democrats didn't want it to be this way.  Barack Obama had deep and naïve faith in high-minded ideals of bipartisanship, cooperation, and democratic norms; he was rewarded with six years of hyper-partisan brinksmanship and obstruction, capped off with the stonewalling of a Supreme Court nominee.  The Republican Party has made it clear that they want to go down that path.  No Republican has any right to complain when Democrats decide to take the same path.

And the thing is, we Democrats don't want to take this path.  We are still the party of Obama and Biden, and the vast majority of us want things to work.  We want our democracy to work.  We want to live in that country Obama dreamed about.  But the only way to get there is to defeat you so thoroughly that you give up on this path.  The only way to restore our democracy is to utterly annihilate the enemy, the party that has spent the last decade seeking to undermine and destroy it.

[GeneralMacArthur]

"We want to live in a land of sunshine and friendship with the other party but in the meantime we'll have fun destroying them and watching them suffer until they conform to our wishes"

Sure, sure  ... we all know which impulse will win out in the end if you are given the chance. 

You know, we tried, we really tried.  Rewind to 2008 and early 2009 and listen to what Obama was saying, look at the agenda he pushed, look at how he governed.  Or even better, go back to when Bill Clinton was president -- everyone on the left hates him now because of all the bipartisan compromises he made!

But that's over now.  We stretched out the hand, and you cut it off.  We've only got one hand left, and we're not gonna make the same mistake.  We're getting a gun in eight days, and we're going to use it to deleted, just remember that it's your own damn fault for turning this into a gunfight in the first place.