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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Just for clarity, their current majority is 5-3, not 6-2.
I expect a lot of decisions may depend on the public reaction to this, if polling shows that Republicans can force this through and retain 40% support they’ll likely do it, if they’d drop to 20% they might back off.
Edited by Silasw on Sep 21st 2020 at 8:53:15 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThey're up for re-election this year and believe that voting for a Justice before the next session of the Senate would hurt their chances for X, Y, or Z reason. Is a SC Justice worth losing their seat to a democrat over?
Martha McSally, Thom Tillis, Joni Ernst, David Perdue, and Steve Daines all support a Supreme Court nomination (they're in 5 of the 7 most competitive races for Democrats this year). Susan Collins is against and Cory Gardner is the only one who hasn't voiced an opinion yet. Further down the list, Kelly Loeffler and Lindsey Graham will also vote yes; don't know the opinions of John Cornyn or Dan Sullivan yet, but neither are particularly moderate or in enough danger from Democrats to switch positions and risk losing their base.
Edit: Strike Cornyn from the list, he's also for the nomination; leaving just Sullivan and Gardner as the still unannounced.
The Justice nominated is just too much for them to stomach for either ideological or practical reasons. I can't see the Republicans moving to approve Ivanka Trump as Supreme Court Justice no matter how much they're sucking up to Trump right now, nor someone with a massive scandal or views too extreme even for them.
The top judges being named are Amy Coney Barrett and Barbara Lagoa; while both of them are very conservative and hold some deeply disturbing positions, neither are untenable to GOP Senators.
They'll be pragmatic and play the long game. Make a big show about honouring the 2016 precedent and start portraying themselves as the rational candidates. If Trump goes down they're positioned to claim they were always trying to reign him in.
For the past year or so, I've been hearing this prediction from a whole bunch of places, that a group of Republican Senators/Governors/Representatives will begin to distance themselves from Trump to position themselves as moderate/rational for when the Trump ship has sunk. And this hasn't happened yet. It didn't happen during impeachment, it didn't happen after coronavirus, it didn't happen after the BLM protests, it didn't happen in any of the innumerable Trump atrocities, scandals, etc. And this is an issue where it's not just Trump going off; Mitch McConnell is behind this at least as much as he is. I have a hard time seeing this as the issue where the GOP finds principles.
Edit:
I don't see all of the Republicans willing to die on a hill if it risks their long term power.
This Supreme Court nominee is how the Republicans are going to keep their power long-term. Unless Democrats reform the court system at all levels; the judges they've appointed will hold sway in this country long after some of these Senators' children are dead.
Second edit: @Silasw - Found a Supreme Court poll
taken over the weekend. 62% for letting the winner of the election filling the vacancy, 23% against, but it's a rush poll done in the immediate aftermath of RGB's passing, so don't know if it'll change.
Edited by nova92 on Sep 21st 2020 at 5:42:51 AM
Colins’ statement is very tightly worded, it doesn’t say she will oppose such a nominee, just that such a nominee shouldn’t be put forward.
Quick check, have we had conformation from Manchin and other conservative Democrats that they're holding the line on this even if they’d agree with the ideology of a nominee? It’s probably a safe assumption, but it’s always nice to have statements.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranFound a Washington Post
tracker on statements by GOP Senators on the Supreme Court vacancy. Tad bit slow to update, though.
The only ones I'd be seriously worried about are Manchin and Sinema, Manchin because he voted for both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. All other Senators voted for neither of the two, can't imagine this is the time they'd break from the party. Sinema is a bit up in the air because she's been fairly centrist, but she wasn't around for either of the two votes, so ??? on her. (No statements from either of them so far)
Edit: Doug Jones
, Jon Tester
, Angus King
, and Dianne Feinstein
have all said they're opposed.
Edited by nova92 on Sep 21st 2020 at 2:49:50 AM
The difference here is that the election is actually within view and the signs aren't looking good for Trump. He barely won in 2016 and Biden is doing a lot better than Clinton did and the attempts at creating another "but her emails" scandal. Combine that with the Democrats starting to get serious about expanding the court and the Republicans have got to be asking themselves is it worth it to get one more conservative justice rushed though if it would cost them control of the senate for the next two years and push the Democrats to go through with expanding the court.
I'm not suggesting that the GOP finds principles, I'm suggesting that it's possible they'll look at this pragmatically and realize that it's not worth losing the election to get one more justice on the SC if that pushes the Democrats to start pushing back and add more justices to take away their majority. Or in other words, I'm expecting at least some Republicans to be entertaining the possibility that the Trump ship won't sail out of the election and start hedging their bets for 2024.
Almost all the swing-state Senators who are this election have jumped aboard the Supreme Court train, suggesting that they've already made the calculations and decided Supreme Court nominee > their own career, or perhaps that they think the Supreme Court will help them win their elections, or they don't think Democrats would actually change the courts.
Edit: I don't think I'm being very clear here, but what I'm trying to say is that if there were some sort of hedging going on within the GOP, I think it would likely be coming from the moderate/swing state Senators who could then position themselves as the not-Trump reach-across-the-aisle person, rather than blood-red state Senators, who are more likely to be worried about the base, but I'm not seeing that. So the pragmatic consideration doesn't seem to have been made, or their calculations are different.
Edited by nova92 on Sep 21st 2020 at 5:54:54 AM
Looks like the We Chat and Tik Tok bans have been blocked at the last minute (quite literally):
The Alliance established "that there are no viable substitute platforms or apps for the Chinese-speaking and Chinese-American community," Beeler added. Their evidence shows that "We Chat is effectively the only means of communication for many in the community, not only because China bans other apps, but also because Chinese speakers with limited English proficiency have no options other than We Chat."
The government does have a compelling national security interest, Beeler's ruling concludes, but the administration "has put in scant little evidence that its effective ban of We Chat for all US users addresses those concerns."
Edited by Redmess on Sep 21st 2020 at 3:49:56 PM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesJoe Biden is ultimately a moderate Democrat, which obviously isn't going to please the left wing of the party, who would prefer someone farther to the left. That said, it's undeniable that the party itself has moved left in many ways over the years, and Joe Biden has moved with it rather than remaining where he was and finding himself on the conservative side of the party spectrum instead of the middle. Hell, ten years ago even Obama was cagey about support for things like LGBT rights, something that would get a moderate Democrat crucified today.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.It makes me very sad that the Democratic Candidates in Mississippi and South Carolina have better chances of gaining seats than Doug Jones has at keeping his seat in Alabama. Of course I'd be very happy if either, or both, of them won, I just wish Jones had this kind of luck that Espy and Harrison are having.
I'm not sure why progressives should be *happy* that decade-old ideas being heavily watered down are mainstream. It's basically the bare minimum of progress when we need to be so much more. More than ever the planet is screaming to get our shit together, the Pandemic showed that half of anti-progressive rhetoric was just contrarian feet-dragging and that we *can* just make sweeping changes and pay for it, just like that.
It's like being happy you're 20th and not last, it's nice i guess but we need to be top 3 to get a medal.
Edited by devak on Sep 21st 2020 at 7:04:59 PM
Because it’s progress, sure it’s not enough and it’s nowhere near fast enough, but it’s movement in the right direction.
Always push for bigger leaps and for them to happen more often, but we shouldn’t loose sight of the fact that we’re making gains.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranIt is a natural process of progressive ideas, though. Feminism didn't appear fully formed out of nowhere either. It took a century of gradual changes in politics and shifts in culture to get where we are today. And there is a benefit to that: humans tend to resist radical change that happens too quickly, but they will accept gradual change much more readily.
Of course there are problems that you can't take your time for, like climate change. It basically forces governments to be more radical in their policies than they otherwise would have been, and take risks with unpopular policies that could cost them electorally.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesProgressivism appeals to the desire for change, but incrementalism works. I think that's the best way to describe it. We need people to push for things to move in the desired direction, but we also need people to actually make the changes happen and fit them into society.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Incrementalism is not working, when the blood is still running on the streets, its a sign that we failed.
Its pretty easy to lose track that we're making progress when things are going too slow (Black Trans people still die at waaaaaaaaay to high a rate. Scratch that, Black people in general die more often than white people in many cases medicinal and with law enforcement) and in some cases stagnating or going backwards (Obama didn't exactly have a great track record towards immigrants or not bombing people).
Edited by AzurePaladin on Sep 21st 2020 at 1:30:27 PM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerAnd because Trump and the Republicans haven't filled their weekly quota for vileness yet...
(and I know it's only Monday)
Asked about justice Ginsburg’s statement that was dictated to her granddaughter and later reported by NPR, the president told Fox News on Monday morning: “I don’t know that she said that, or was that written out by Adam Schiff and [Chuck] Schumer and Pelosi?”
He added: “I would be more inclined to the second.”[...]
Meanwhile, Republicans on Capitol Hill appear eager to fill the vacancy before the election, with several senators who previously spoke out against holding a Supreme Court confirmation process in the midst of an election cycle now saying they would support the president nominating a judge to replace justice Ginsburg.
While Senator Lindsey Graham previously said in 2018, “If an opening comes in the last year of president Trump's term, and the primary process has started, we'll wait until the next election,” he has since released a statement indicating he will vote for the president’s nominee. [...]
Democrats would require four Republican senators to join them in opposing the president’s nomination in order to have it voted down. Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mc Connell warned his colleagues against making statements opposing the confirmation process.
“For those of you who are unsure how to answer, or for those inclined to oppose giving a nominee a vote, I urge you all to keep your powder dry,” the senate leader wrote. “This is not the time to prematurely lock yourselves into a position you may later regret.”

I can see a few reasons why some Republicans might be hesitant to vote for a SC pick this year:
Ultimately I think if Republicans think it's in their best interest not to vote or support then they'll go that way. I don't see all of the Republicans willing to die on a hill if it risks their long term power.