Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the Republican ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday noted that the Supreme Court justices need “to get their house in order,” all the while insisting that Congress needs “to stay out of the Court’s business.”
Pathetic individual.
Good ol’ Lindsey…“Oh, it’s all so terrible, somebody should do something but it can’t be me/us and we can all just send thoughts and prayers they will do the right thing…”
So sayeth Lindsey “Twirling Windmill” Graham. Check with him tomorrow, he will have changed his mind.
Graham’s idea that the Court should self-police
Graham doesn’t really believe that. He’s playing politics, while trying to hide the fact that policing the Court is the responsibility of Congress.
For better law and order and justice, we need to appoint more criminals including rapists and gangsters to the Presidency and the Supreme Court. Congress and the Senate has enough members who can be bought for pennies. And there are two-bit whores like Lindsay who will do anything.
Lindsey is a man of principle. The principle being “Get thee to a microphone!”
Imagine if Elena Kagan had eaten that bagel.
Graham on tape announcing that he is ignorant of his responsibility as a US Senator. Not a good look Lindsey.
The oligarchy has for a decade been undermining the very concept of “checks and balances” by repeatedly asserting that the branches of government are not supposed to meddle in each others’ affairs. That argument is simply false. It’s not based on a novel reading of some jurisprudence, or arcane definitions of words. It’s simply a false assertion about the design and intended function of government.
But the Koch machine has consistently relied on this assertion in the 21st century, and it’s obvious why: their efforts to corrupt government are necessarily slow and focused on individual branches by turns, which is a pattern of attack that can be resisted by a system with checks and balances. The only way the Koch’s slow-but-steady program of federal corruption can succeed is if each of the arms of government are prevented from coming to the aid of the other arms when they are under attack or being controlled. Koch needs to tie his prisoner up before he can harvest its organs.
And that’s the situation now. At different times in the 21st, the branches of the government have been completely under the control of the Koch machine, and at those times members of the other branch(es) called that out in public, but well-placed Koch agents prevented intervention.
The branches of government should be more involved, not less, in each other’s affairs. That’s what the judiciary needs right now, and Roberts and Graham both know that their shared project is just the kind of thing our system of checks and balances is designed to stop and punish.
We could use some kind of easy to understand counter argument here. One hand washes the other, everybody knows that. We have to resist this pernicious groping of Overton.
ETA: some pronouns, for clarity
I thought the GOP was against the Court “legislating from the bench” but these days they are fine with the justices practicing medicine from the bench.
What a pathetic man Lindsey Graham is. He tried – sincerely, I think – to be a person of honor and principle, but he failed. He failed himself, he failed his country. And he knows it.
Every time I see him, it fills me with deep sadness.
Not to mention Citizens United. That’s when this began and that’s when Roberts signed on to the eternal corruption. BTW, where is Shrub these days? I am guessing he is so far gone down the dementia hole that we will never hear from him again. I am sorry for him, to a point, if so, but he gave us this plastic figure Roberts. Where is his voice? Oh, never mind… that GOP is long gone and dead.
“The Supreme Court needs to get their house in order and I hope they will,” Graham said during a press conference, in which a group of GOP senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee spent around 20 minutes attacking Democrats for calling for a Supreme Court ethics reform.
“Two things can be true,” Graham added. “The court probably needs to address that issue. I think they do. I believe they will. And Congress needs to stay out of the courts business.”
Wasn’t what I was looking for, but it’ll do.
This guy used to be On JAG… now, just a JAG Off…
The court should “self-police”–in response to the court’s unapologetic self-criming.
“Muggers should self-make themselves into people who help little old ladies across the street. But the police should stay out of it.”
I’m old enough to be on Medicare. I just don’t remember politicians of any party saying as many extravagantly, jaw-droppingly ridiculous things anywhere near as often as the GOP does these days.
I think the GOP should stop saying extravagantly ridiculous things. But I think our national media should stay out of it.
A man of principle who should be a person of interest (in GA anyway). Just a little banking humor.
Kompramat Lindsey has some moral tips – y’all gather 'round.
I see them as separate issues. The point of my post is to observe that the flimsy deflection offered by Graham – “Congress should stay out of the Court’s business” – is not merely some spontaneous nonsense offered absently to a reporter, but in effect a plank of Charles Koch’s secret platform.
It is both a policy and the slogan for the policy: “checks and balances” means “no checks and no balances.” Similarly, Koch might say that “arresting thieves” means “do not interfere with their thefts” and “do not take any action against them.” A person can speak those words, but they’re contradictory, which is de rigueur for a political organization that insists voters disbelieve their own lying eyes and vote how their pit bosses want.
Another reason I wanted to highlight it is to note how utterly flimsy it is on its face. Graham states pretty clearly that hoping Roberts will police himself is the strongest remedy that he believes is available under our constitution. No kid who made it through high school civics would recognize that position as compatible with what the constitution says and what the framers had in mind.
But, Koch insists that government be handcuffed so he can finish corrupting it more easily, and his pet, Graham, trying to disguise his support for that democricidal scheme as some kind of principled constitutional doctrine, is trying to gaslight us into ignoring the plain meaning of the law.
The framers knew that one hand washes the other, and one reason they gave government three distinct hands was so there would be plenty of handwashing. Koch says, through his shills, that the reason the branches are very separate and distinct is so they can’t interfere with others’ business, but the real and obviously true reason is as a firewall against corruption in their counterparts: there are three branches so that if one branch falls into a pit of corruption, it will have two strong friends who can rescue it. Koch and his pets all say the friends must stand by idly and merely observe as their friend get swallowed up.
Koch is telling us that the reason it keeps raining is that we’re still holding this umbrella up.