Discussion for article #246534
Can we have an adult conversation, at least for a moment, about the open seat on the Supreme Court?
Here’s a number you might try: Mutant Terrapin Hotline (202) 224-2541
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Thank you for this refreshingly candid, and well stated, article. My thoughts exactly, but much better stated by you. Kudos!
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Is there any real doubt that if we were in the last year of the George W. Bush administration with a Democratic Senate, the Democrats’ arguments would be flipped with the Republicans?
What a crock of shit. The Democrats have never not held hearings or not given a vote on a nominee, even less than a year before the election and during the Iran Contra criminal investigation of said POTUS.
Sorry Rick Hasen, but you have you head up your ass. Oh wait, I guess that wasn’t very adult of me.
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**Is there any real doubt that if we were in the last year of the George W. Bush administration with a Democratic Senate" blah blah.
Yes there’s 100% doubt because it’s nothing but your shameless unsupported and supportable blarney, I.e., tawdry lie.cooked up by yourself and your Republican fellow propagandists.
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Is that you, Reins? What is refreshing well-stated is the reflection by Lestatdelec, What a crock of shit!!! Your little Donald Seggretti juniors can get back to “raf-fucking” the Democratic nomination now,
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I’d like to talk about how upside down the process is. We’ve come such a long way from Miranda v Arizona to Bag of Dicks v Bureau of Land Management, that people don’t even seem to notice how backwards the process is.
Miranda obviously didn’t kidnap and rape a woman to challenge police to read criminals their rights better, but judicial terrorist Ammon Bundy was literally on Megyn Kelly’s show, before his arrest, explaining his plan to overthrow the whole BLM.
The question for Scalia’s replacement should be how a Justice should avoid helping criminal defendants calibrate their crime sprees to have the best chance at overturning whichever precedent some rich white guy needs overturned, to facilitate him getting what he wants.
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Can we have an adult conversation,
Not if there are republicans in the room —
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That’s your idea of an “adult conversation”, Mr. Hasan? The usual false equivalency we are treated to on a daily basis in the “mainstream” corporate media?
Thanks for nothing, this tripe isn’t even worth a comment. My advice to you personally, though, is: Grow up, morally and intellectually. When you’ve accomplished that, come back and we’ll talk as adults.
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Blah blah both sides do it blah blah. This is not an “adult conversation” it’s a “let’s pretend to be adults” conversation.
On the Democratic side is history, precedent, and the Constitution.
On the Republican side is a counterfactual argument that “Dems would do the same.” Which is neither here nor there but fully hypothetical.
Oh and neither Biden nor Obama when they were Senators said Democrats should block hearings altogether.
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The notion of the so called “Biden rule” on which this piece relies has been debunked. I believe it was TPM itself that provided the context of the quotation from Biden to show how it was being twisted. And also, it was never a rule and never was acted on. Really, what part of the right’ frame shop did this writer get this from?
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Adult Conversation?
Nothing about Scalia successor that has been happening up to know strikes me as not “adult”. McConnell is behaving like all the adults that I run into, he will try to take advantage of any situation to a) Benefit Himself b) Those close to him c) Those who belong to the same “group” as hi does… in that order.
For those that believe that “Adults” don’t behave that way, I have a Cheap Beachfront property in Fukushima to sell them.
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So if we cut through all the hogwash about precedents, and what the President’s obligations are, about letting “the people” decide, about the difference between “interpreting” and “making” law, the dispute comes down to a political power struggle.
And therein lies the problem. The normal functioning of government is not “a political power struggle.” 151 people have been nominated to the SCOTUS in our 239 year history. Of those 151, none have been given, as Josh Marshall called it, “the three no’s”. ZERO Every single one of them has had meetings with the Senate. A handful have been withdrawn by the president, but never has the Senate simply refused to even consider them. That’s the precedent. 239 continuous years of precedent. If you want to call that “hogwash” that’s up to you, but that’s not “an adult conversation” in my book.
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Something like a bare-knuckles power struggle is underway. Accepting it in those terms, though, is not necessarily the “adult” view of it.
If politics evolves wholly into a power struggle, then you have no rules, no rule of law, and no democracy. Presidents have the power to call out the military – so why should they ever give up office? That happens routinely in all kinds of places in the world … but not in places with a constitution that actually governs the political sphere.
In a healthy polity, there is always a balance between aggressive tactics and rule of law. People and factions are always pushing for something, and the system is also trying to push them out of the gutters and into the road. In this case, I think the steering wheel got yanked towards the gutter, and one party has done that yanking, while the other is trying to redirect back to the road … as written in the Constitution.
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So what if the contraceptive mandate is constitutional in some parts of the United States but not in others?
I was talking to an old friend from college days last night about this very issue, but related to gay marriage. He is gay and married in California then moved to Nevada. He teaches in Iowa and commutes every three weeks. He and his husband drove to Iowa back before SCOTUS legalized gay marriage, and he had to explain to his husband that in California they were married, in Nevada they were domestic partners with diminished rights, and in most intervening states between Nevada and Iowa, they were just good friends, except in Nebraska, where they didn’t know each other. I nearly spit my wine out on that last one.
On edit: This was in the context of what would have happened in a car crash if one of them were seriously injured. Not exactly a joking matter, I realize.
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what a fucking crock of weak-ass shit this article is.
no, we cannot have an adult conversation about this and it is entirely the fault of the Seditionist party. It takes two to have an adult conversation and unfortunately the Democratic party and Obama lack the ability to bend the Seditionists over their knees and give them the good, hard spanking they need to snap them out of their terminal temper tantrum.
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It seems relavent to me to know the republican response to both the Biden and Schumer speeches on this issue. It would seem very easy to use that response to show the shallowness of the republican leadership. They now want to use the terms “the Biden Rule” and the “Schumer rule” when neither of these speeches lead to any action; However, we hear nothing of their sure response saying that the republican president at the time had every right to appoint a Supreme Court justice. Why don’t we talk of “the Hatch rule” or whoever attempted to counter the argument at the time?
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I stopped reading when I saw “The Biden Rule”.
You mean the “Biden Rule” which only looked bad when it was played out of context? The Biden Rule where he pointed out that in fact the Democrats should consider a Republican nominee only a couple of minutes later in his speech?
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Yeah, in the same speech Biden talked about how he would be happy to start proceedings if a moderate were appointed by Bush. So apparently the Biden rule is don’t nominate a Scalia in an election year… I don’t really see Obama going for someone like that (from the left).
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The president is supposed to appoint judges. The senate is supposed (as a mild check to presidential powers) to provide “advice and consent”. The system seems to be eroding because there is no apparent check to the “advice and consent” process. What is to keep it from eventually getting to the point where we must wait for the president to be of the same party as the Senate majority before we fill court seats?
Maybe we need a constitutional amendment to fix this.
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