IMO supermajorities make sense for some issues, court appointments being one of them.

Judges are supposed to act as refrees and therefore should prefereably be people where plenty of thoose, who oppose them on ideological grounds at least concede, that they are people of honour and can be trusted to attampt to act impartial.

Not people, where a slim majority, that came into being as artefact of the election system or incidentally by happenstance, puts them in as representant of their team.

Ironically, court appointments are the one of the few things where supermajorities are not required. It's absurd.

Anyway, Donald Trump is saying out loud that he thoroughly intends to cheat in this election. There is no actual requirement for the electoral college to vote the way voters do, so if he can sow enough chaos that the ballots cannot be counted in some arbitrarily defined period, he will simply order Republican state legislatures to choose electoral college representatives who will support him.

You guys are genuinely circling the banana republic drain.

It really doesn't help that a small number of Democratic pundits were advocating the exact same thing four years ago to prevent Donald Trump from being elected.

Happily enough his party can't commit that particular kind of treason right now. The states he needs to steal all have Democrats in a position to nullify a legislature that tries; the closest they could get would be to pick phony Republican electors to go along with the real Democratic ones that would be sent by the Secretaries of State (technically, the governors), and the House would reject every single Republican on a straight party vote. So yes, they could keep Biden down to below 300 electoral votes if enough states play that game, but they can't actually steal the election.

Though yes, now that the party of corruption has owned that it openly thinks this way, that's one more loophole that needs to be closed.

What are the chances that the Supreme Court confirmation fight will distract people's attention from the pandemic hellscape? I don't think it's possible for the Democrats to stop Judge Barrett from being confirmed, barring some truly massive scandal that the Federalist Society somehow failed to vet. (It would have to be something specifically upsetting to evangelicals, like being in porn, because they won't give a crap about normal scandals.) But the Democratic inclination towards speechifying and minutiae (truly most of them are incompetent questioners) would suck oxygen away from the climbing death toll. I think they should walk out of the confirmation hearing en masse, or refuse to ask any questions because it is pointless. They really don't do anyone favours by pretending that these hearings will change anyone's mind.

Actually, there is a good reason for the Democrats to play: Senator Harris is on that committee. If the Democrats have the wit to cede most of their time to her, she can rip this nominee a new one and help shore up the Biden/Harris ticket with the left. Will it stop anything? No, but why not use it to lock down a few more votes for Biden and Senate Democrats? The Supremes can be easily stopped from running amok later if needs must once the Democrats have the Senate and the White House.

Is it too late to impeach Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh on sexual assault charges?

I feel like that's what McConnel would do if he were a Democrat.

No, but it would be pointless. The Republicans in the Senate are all openly quite content to be party to sex crimes for personal and partisan gain. If you want to get rid of those two on that basis then you need to successfully bring criminal charges against them.

I know. Like a lot of people, I'm just grasping at straws.

eta: I mean, with Roberts as a swing vote, the sky hasn't fallen yet even with Kavanaugh on the bench. Maybe Justice Coney Barrett will be not as Scalia like as we think? Perhaps?

Happily enough all that needs to be done in a pinch is wait until they do something really awful, then pass a law forbidding the Supreme Court from engaging in Judicial Review of any act of Congress. Game, set, match.

Roberts isn't exactly a swing vote in the way Breyer was. Breyer was a moderate. Roberts is a solid conservative, he's just not as blatantly partisan as Thomas or Alito in that he occasionally cares about actual legal principles and doesn't want the Supreme Court to be showing its arse.

And I think Coney Barrett is about as down-the-line partisan as it is possible to get without actually being Bill Barr.


Uh, that is an objectively terrible idea. I say this as an inhabitant of a country whose rubber stamp legislature reserves the right to overrule the top court at the drop of a hat. Laws just mean whatever the National People's Congress say they mean (or more accurately, are told they mean by Xi Jinping). Tomorrow they may mean something different. It doesn't matter. Laws are only tools for achieving political objectives anyway. Separation of powers is an inferior foreign idea.

Don't go there.

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Anyway, I gotta give it to the New York Times, to finally get a hold of Trump's tax returns. At the very least it'll reduce his gloating-over-the-Supreme-Court time. Of course Trump's finances are a dumpster fire. I wouldn't expect any less. Tax evasion? Being terrible at business? Money laundering? Ponzi scheme? All of the above?

That's not actually what would happen. The courts would still interpret what the law means (and if Congress disagrees then they can pass another law); but the Supreme Court would lose the ability to decide whether or not a law is constitutional. At that point, what Congress decides is constitutional is what's constitutional instead of what the Supreme Court decides.

What would prevent a simple majority in congress from circumventing consitutional protections by deciding on some far fetched interpretation?

Like say "Civil liberties only apply to citizens."

Exactly the same thing that stops a 6-3 Republican Supreme Court from deciding it: nothing. But if the President decides not to play, things get interesting.

Look, it's all very well to depend on the Supreme Court to protect us from the infinite corruption of the Republicans in Congress. But the Republicans have figured that out, and now the Supreme Court is completely corrupt. We just have to acknowledge that and fix it; whether by packing the Supreme Court, or creating so many Supreme Court judges it becomes impossible to pack, or by removing from the Supremes the extra-constitutional power the criminals of the GOP are so desperate to abuse.

Oh, and what do you suppose the odds are that president comorbidities will take that drug of his which will make him slightly more likely to die?

Uh, that's still bad. Congress could pass laws that are blatantly unconstitutional on their face (ridiculous franchise restrictions, cancellation of birthright citizenship) and say "neener neener, suck an egg, Supreme Court".

I agree that a supreme court filled with partisan hacks is a problem.

I just disagree that give congress the power to interpret the constitution is an adequate solution.