The fight to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg megathread

[Indy Texas]

If America is a "center-right" country, why have Republicans only managed to win the presidential popular vote twice in my over 30 years on this planet?

[Indy Texas]

https://twitter.com/Jamie_Weinstein/status/1308227292884336643

Bork failed the character and ethics requirements of a justice through his behavior in the Nixon White House during Watergate.

Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment. Should that have simply been rejected on its face? Should we assume all women are liars? He got confirmed. What more do you want?

Estrada was unqualified - he had never worked as a judge before and the DC Appeals Court is not a place for on-the-job training.

I don't particularly care if Samuel Alito's wife cried. It was her choice to marry a bigot.

Republicans were filibustering any and every judicial nominee Obama put forward. There was no rhyme or reason or good faith argument, just an unhinged fury that The Black President was nominating judges.

Brett Kavanaugh is White Male Mediocrity personified. He's a privileged little prick who had everything handed to him on a silver platter and when he had to actually account for his behavior, he screamed and threw a tantrum on live TV like a spoiled child and completely debased the judiciary.

[Indy Texas]

Compare Kavanaugh and Thomas to people like RBG, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

They aren't scandal-free because Republicans are too nice to play hardball (see the racist smear tactics they used against Sotomayor).

They're scandal-free because Democrats simply nominate better judges.

[Indy Texas]

They need to do this. Keep Ernst, Tillis, Collins, etc, in DC and unable to do any campaigning.

https://twitter.com/ShaneGoldmacher/status/1308479204078563328?s=20

[Indy Texas]

When will the Evangelical community address the radicalism and extremism in its ranks? We're told it is a Religion of Peace and yet...

https://twitter.com/RawStory/status/1308454542808363008?s=20

[Indy Texas]

Republican US Senate candidate accuses recently deceased Jewish woman of "destruction of Western civilization" and blood libel.

But please, let Fuzzy continue to insist the real antisemites are the Zombie Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Ilhan Omar.

https://twitter.com/ehananoki/status/1308438462220185605?s=20

[Indy Texas]

Republicans will probably come to regret going out of their way to alienate the sort of college-educated, salaried white collar workers who are currently working from home and have lots of extra money left over from not going anywhere or eating out.

2000 had the Brooks Brothers Riot.

2020 is having the Lululemon-and-REI Riot.

https://twitter.com/ShaneGoldmacher/status/1308591366142922752?s=20

[Indy Texas]

A drunken Sarah Palin emerges from the boreal wilderness to deliver a rant at Lisa Murkowski for insufficient fealty to Trump.

https://twitter.com/JimSwiftDC/status/1309246452267454466?s=20

[Indy Texas]

What liberals are afraid of:
Being forbidden from getting married, being unable to get on a partner's health insurance, being unable to act for their partner as next of kin during a medical crisis
Being physically or verbally attacked in a hate crime
Being fired, demoted, or denied a promotion at work because of their sex/gender orientation and possibly being thrust into poverty or financial ruin as a result

What conservatives are afraid of:
Having to bake a cake for someone they think is icky, and getting paid for it

At what point does their lack of empathy reach into sociopathic territory?

https://twitter.com/ChapelHill_1776/status/1309998226704080899?s=20

[Indy Texas]

If I'm 20 years old and can afford $10 a month for healthcare, I damn well know all of you can too.

A bunch of sexist fearmongering bigots.

Disgusting.

You think health insurance costs $10 a month. What are you, in middle school?

[Indy Texas]

If I'm 20 years old and can afford $10 a month for healthcare, I damn well know all of you can too.

A bunch of sexist fearmongering bigots.

Disgusting.

You think health insurance costs $10 a month. What are you, in middle school?

He said "healthcare," not "health insurance."  He probably just buys a bottle of aspirin every month.

Does he put it between his knees to keep from getting knocked up?

[Indy Texas]

If procedural sleights of hand don't buy enough time, the Democrats should resort to less sophisticated measures.

Pull the fire alarm so everyone has to leave the building.

Hit the emergency stop button in the elevator with a few GOP senators.

Call Mitch McConnell's cable company pretending to be him and cancel his service, necessitating that Mitch get it turned back on and spend a day sitting at home waiting for the Comcast guy to show up.

[Indy Texas]

It's astonishing how Trump has gotten the opportunity to choose a third of the Supreme Court in just one term. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and now Barrett will probably be on the Court for at least another thirty years, long after Trump himself is gone and in the ground. The last President to have this many seats to fill in one term was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Eisenhower's picks were disappointments to Eisenhower.

One of Eisenhower's picks was Charles Whittaker.  He never liked the job and he had a nervous breakdown in 1962, leading to his resignation and being succeeded by Byron White.  So he doesn't really count.  Whittaker was considered a failure as a Justice and was an erratic "swing" vote despite having solid conservative credentials. 

It's interesting that there have been two completely unrelated SCOTUS justices with the first and middle names "Charles Evans" (Hughes and Whittaker). Almost as interesting as Earl Warren having been succeeded as Chief Justice by Warren Earl Burger.

Hughes was a giant of the Court who was twice appointed.  He was a progressive Republican who was the man the GOP needed in 1920 when they stuck America with Harding.

Whittaker was erratic.  He was a "swing" vote in his short tenure who assumed an extremely light workload, had a nervous breakdown in 1962, then spent much of the rest of his life as a critic of the Civil Rights movement.  (Whittaker was not from the South; he was a native of Indiana.)  While Hughes was a "Great" Justice, Whittaker was considered a "Failure". 

We talk about how the court is suddenly more "politicized" while forgetting how commonplace it was for partisan political figures to end up on the Court or for justices to enter partisan politics in a way that is unthinkable today.

But the increasing demands for philosophical "reliability" have precluded this. People who have a long track record of writing about the law need to have been the editor of their school's law review, done a federal judicial clerkship, been a law professor, been a lower level judge...a lot of things the typical JD holder who goes into elected office hasn't done.

[Indy Texas]

Example of how presidents used to be a lot "worse" at nominating judges:

Sonia Sotomayor was first appointed to the federal bench by George H. W. Bush.

[Indy Texas]

For those unfamiliar, MEK is a celibacy cult of Iranian exiles based in Albania known for their sophisticated information operations that make up probably 90+% of anti-Iranian regime posts on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/1311071847107223557

Barrett wrote that she was one of five lawyers on a team that represented the National Council of Resistance of Iran and its U.S. representative office from 2000 to 2001 in their petition to review the State Department’s foreign-terrorist-organization designation.

The NCRI is affiliated with the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), a onetime militant group comprising Iranian exiles who oppose Iran’s clerical regime. The Obama administration removed the group from the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations in 2012. The MEK has faced accusations of cultlike practices, which the organization has disputed as smears.

...

The MEK formed as a militant group in opposition to Iran’s monarchy but was forced into exile after the 1979 revolution that toppled the shah. The State Department designated the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, citing its involvement in the killing of Americans in Iran during the 1970s. The department, which also cited a 1992 incident in which five men with knives invaded the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York, said the NCRI “functioned as part of the MEK” and “supported the MEK’s acts of terrorism.”

So she worked at a law firm and was given a task ?

I don't think it's any more disqualifying than anything else from her past, but after years of hearing about how every case that Hillary and Kamala were involved in as lawyers somehow represented their deep-held beliefs about right and wrong, I like to imagine what would have happened if a Democrat had nominated someone for SCOTUS who had represented (and presumably got money from) a group called the People's Mujahideen of Iran that had this logo:

The American conservative movement's embrace of a Marxist group (even if much of that is aesthetic LARPing at this point) that once counted Saddam Hussein as a major benefactor and that was not and still is not pro-American simply because they hate the mullahs too is peak Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend.

Of course, one of the profoundly stupid strategic errors of the Iranian Left in the 1970s was to ally with archconservative religious clerics. I realize they had few good options and their first order concern was removing the Shah, but, really, what the hell did they expect to happen afterward? In a way, it was a particularly dark example of how often leftist university students and intellectuals in major cities claim to speak for and understand the working class and the rural peasantry and then, when it's too late, realize they really didn't understand what those people actually wanted after all.

[Indy Texas]

https://twitter.com/josh_wingrove/status/1311689358295085056

Literally a couple of days after Trump mocked his opponent for going to the University of Delaware.

[Indy Texas]

Would be great if the confirmation got pushed past the election because Trump’s Typhoid Mary Super Spreader behavior deprived the Senate of a quorum for weeks.

[Indy Texas]

https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/1312188356822888448

This gives Democrats a "good faith" excuse to basically walk out of the Senate and refuse to return until McConnell agrees to force everyone to take COVID tests and not conduct any business until everyone has tested negative and anyone who tests positive has quarantined for the minimum time period.