The Democrats Now Face A Historic Opportunity For Structural Change | Talking Points Memo

Any loopholes useful for kicking shithole states out of the union?

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More like 9-6 rulings in favor.

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The Democrats for my entire lifetime have played by the archaic rules while the Republicans have never played by the rules. It is time to switch things up. I’m all in for this and they will not lose my votes if they pursue these options.

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Pass laws and enact policies “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” When the red states threaten secession, let their people go.

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The election is 36 days away - - Democrats must

FOCUS!!!

every ounce of energy must go toward maximizing margins - everywhere

PENNSYLVANIA is one very key state
… and over the weekend a “lean” - a “I’m not supporting Trump” …
became a “COMMITTED” … an… "I TOTALLY ENDORSE JOE BIDEN"

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I’m all on board for eliminating the SC. We have appeal courts. Why give political hacks an opportunity to reverse their rulings? If an appeals court has a majority of conservative judges, it doesn’t influence the entire country. The SC has made more bad decisions than good ones. Before Roe V Wade, it was going in the direction of less restrictive laws on abortion anyway.

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to decriminalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, or in which pregnancy would lead to permanent physical disability of the woman. Similar laws were passed in California, Oregon, and North Carolina. In 1970, Hawaii became the first state to legalize abortions on the request of the woman,[41] and New York repealed its 1830 law and allowed abortions up to the 24th week of pregnancy. Similar laws were soon passed in Alaska and Washington. In 1970, Washington held a referendum on legalizing early pregnancy abortions, becoming the first state to legalize abortion through a vote of the people.[

If we take the SC away, conservatives have less incentive to get all fired up and vote Republican or even vote. It’s always going to be a shit show and a political battle on nominations. I know it would require a change in the Constitution, but I’m all for it. Even though the chances are slim to none.

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The Constitution creates the Judiciary from the top down, not the bottom up. “The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

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Would likely require a constitutional amendment:

Article III, Section I states that “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court , and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Although the Constitution establishes the Supreme Court , it permits Congress to decide how to organize it.

Also, I think it would be a bad idea to leave judicial decisions up to “whatever appeals court district you live in”. Otherwise, you’d have large portions of the country (including many Democrats in blue cities/red states) sufferings under Plessy v Ferguson-quality appeals court decisions.

Better to 1.) Reform the courts/judge voting process and 2.) Make it easier to amend the constitution or otherwise overturn judicial opinions through popular vote.

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Republicans utilize every constitutionally permissible power to stack the Supreme Court and push forward their agenda.

I really despise articles like this because they leave out crucial elements…Like the fact that Republicans have only begun this particular behavior in the last four years. Prior to Trump’s election, they also relied on the 60 vote rule to get their SCOTUS judges nominated. Pretending this has been something Rs have done all along is just horribly dishonest.

When Democrats won the White House and Congress in 2009, they embraced Cold War relics: the filibuster, the reluctance to add states, the abhorrence of constitutional amendments, the importance of moving slowly on judicial appointments.

Again, these weren’t mere Cold War relics. It was how the Senate had operated for the past several decades until about 2011 when McConnell began slow walking all of Obama’s appointments. Until then, that was how the Senate behaved under both Democratic and Republican presidents even when their party controlled the Senate.

I think it is important to acknowledge that things changed dramatically under McConnell’s Republican leadership, that it wasn’t just that Democrats had been getting played all along. The rules of decorum in the Senate changed. It’s disingenuous and dishonest to act as though the Republican Party didn’t take an extreme and radical turn under President Obama and later under Trump. I don’t see where it does Democrats any favors when the truth is much more damming than the distortion. I don’t think it helps Democrats to paint them as feckless and stupid for decades when what we’re seeing in respect to the Senate is a very recent development.

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That’s why part of the fix is expanding the court.

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I can’t count the number of conservatives who still blame Democrats and the Bork nomination for the acrimony in the nomination process. I’ve read at least two articles in the past week claiming it goes back to Bork.
Added:
And yes, Bork never should have been confirmed.

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We’re winning the election. We’re going to ‘build back better’ and protect the country. We don’t need lefty phrases like ‘structural change’ or ‘defund the police’ to f**k up this race.

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I hope the Democrats are tuning up all the steamrollers for January.

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I don’t see this as fundamentally leftist or centrist, but more a question of collective nerve. The reform agenda could be moderate or progressive, but accomplishing either (and making it stick) requires pushing the pendulum back towards democracy from the current minoritarian extreme the GOP has spent decades perfecting, in what is perhaps their only real recent legacy.

If the Democrats don’t have the stones to make some or all of these synergistic structural changes early on, then whatever they propose will be mere hypothetical debating-society fodder for McConnell to obstruct. And the Opus Dei SCOTUS will pick apart anything that does pass by reconciliation etc. We’ll have yet another run of “Washington gridlock” followed by a cynical GOP backlash over “do-nothing government”.

Better to be bold and enact measures that are broadly popular. Address the pandemic, health care, climate change, corruption, voting, campaign finance, and education, then let Republicans try to counter 2 years’ worth of tangible accomplishments with procedural whining.

None of that means Democrats (Biden in particular) should spend the next month talking about court expansion and filibuster elimination–these have to be responses to obstruction, not anticipated power grabs. But they do need to have the will and a plan to do it early, and not wait until 2022, because it’s what they get done afterward that will legitimize it.

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When 60%+ of the country thinks we’re on the wrong track and your opponent lights himself on fire with his own words every day, you don’t need to do anything. Just let the other guy self-immolate.

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Yep, they never got over that. This piece pretends it never happened.

I completely agree with this. Democrats have an extraordinary opportunity if Biden is elected and they win the the Senate. As painful as RBG’s loss is, the fallout from her death (or rather Republicans pushing through their nomination) could prove to be the greatest catalyst for change in America in over a half century. With the very high likelihood that Biden will be a one-termer, he can get away with doing things that most president could never imagine. He should go for all of it. Expand not only SCOTUS but the lower federal courts, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, legalize weed, the Green New Deal, a new New Deal, ERA that also includes LGBTs, and anything else I’m missing. Throw it all on the table. If he does that I think he can greatly heal the divide between the wings of the party and also solidify Democrats as the party of all those disaffected, young Sanders supporters. And I think that Biden as a moderate, establishment Dem has a better opportunity to get away with it than just about anyone else in the party would have because he can cast it as righting wrongs, leveling the playing field, and returning our democracy to the will of the people.

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This would be great, but I’d rather see them just decriminalize drugs and get out of the “drug war” business. Let states regulate drugs as appropriate for their communities and remove the context for the ever increasing militarization of our police forces.

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I believe that the state legislature needs to approve any proposal for merging states (and probably also becoming a state).

I agree that it would be better if our internal administrative units were more evenly sized. As climate change proceeds, the plains and inter-mountain west will become ever more marginal for agriculture. Absent any big new industries, depopulation of the Dakotas etc will continue.

So… we need a carrot that would induce state legislatures to reduce their own power.

If Democrats sweep the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives this fall, they will have an opportunity to repair the nation’s broken systems, not just make new policies

Seems you misspelled “a responsibility

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What structural reforms can be done quickly to address the RW noise machine? These groups need to be dealt with either thru a redoing of the fairness doctrine in media access, or a restructuring of the tax codes for think tanks, but ultimately think tanks, talk radio, and unregulated social media can’t be allowed to continue to poison our discourse in the same manner as we’re currently seeing.

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