Discussion for article #246481
Hurray for bipartisanship. A conservative justice (Alito) and a liberal one (Breyer) both chiming in to take pressure off of the GOP to do the bare minimum that the Constitution calls for by at least holding hearings on replacing a Supreme Court justice.
Yeesh Mr. Justice. Thanks for nothing.
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So, does this mean that Kennedy will consistently vote GOTPbag for the sake of maintaining “balance”?
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Scalia: The petitioner needs five votes to overturn the judgment below, and it makes no difference whether the needed fifth vote is missing because it has been cast for the other side, or because it has not been cast at all.
Justice Thomas, how is your heart feeling these days? Any flutters? Pains in your left arm?
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Well, that’s his job, isn’t it, to shore up confidence in the court? The R’s have been undermining that confidence for decades. No reason any Justice should join them in that.
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Don’t tell him what to look for!
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Pretty week argument, there, Steve-O. 20% of the cases is quite a significant percentage, and if just a couple of those cases have major stakes…
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I expect he has a strange hollow feeling in his asshole, as Alito’s puppeteering hand is much smaller than Fat Tony’s.
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Breyer on Scalia Vacancy: “We’ll miss him, but we’ll do our work. For the most part, it will not change”
“The interior chamber of the court is near dark. In the middle of the room, the justices float in a huge tank of brine. Their decisions and dissents are issues in whale-song, hastily recorded and interpreted by clerks.”
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And, sadly, the most majestic of them is no more:
Breyer argued that only 20 percent of cases come down to a 5-4 ruling, where Scalia’s vote would have made the difference.
Yes, but those 20% of cases represent issues with great significance to many Americans. It’s hard to call yourself a SUPREME court, when you come up with a tie and the lower court ruling stands.
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Agreed. Even where the stakes are not major, it is very troubling if we have to spend much time with unresolved conflicts in the rulings of two appellate courts.
And a lot of the 4-4 cases will be time wasted, because they likely will be taken up again when the court has a new composition.
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Exactly. And I would also argue that 20% is a full one-fifth of their load. That’s not nothing … or even close. I respectively disagree with Justice Breyer on this answer. I’m not at all trying to be partisan either – it’s just common sense (and mathematics).
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Hmmm … I sort of thought of it as in the mold of the Futurama heads-in-a-jar system. The Big RBG was in one of the episodes. But, of course, that would be after their bodies die and their heads are preserved. I hope the Congressional doc wasn’t able to successfully remove Scalia’s head to put in his jar.
It’s hard to find a combination neurosurgeon/proctologist, so we’re probably safe.
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LOL! Very good. Very good.
To be fair, of course he’s going to say these things. He can’t talk about an ongoing Constitutional crisis like this in terms of how he interprets the Constitution or would rule on the subject. Expecting him to is asinine. Moreover, he’s not going to talk about the Court in a way that damages the perceived integrity of the decisions it does make while there are only 8 justices. Frankly, this is all just foolishness and the reporter should have known what he’d get…which leads me to believe he probably did, and that it was a set up and we’ll now see the GOP trying to use these quotes to say “see? even the Court says it’s no big deal to wait a little bit!!!”
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Have you tried to reach Tribe yet, TPM?
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Who’s to say one or two of those anticipated 5-4 Scalia cases might not go 5-3 the other way? Maybe Thomas or Alito might be a little less predictable. Maybe they might say thank God that asshole is finally gone, I can vote how I think without being ridiculed for once.
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