Hi Trump, this is a judge. You are not the boss of them. UH OH, is Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump's SCOTUS pick who wants to take your slut pills and eat them, trying to get his nomination withdrawn? Usually SCOTUS nominees are pretty quiet before their confirmation hearings, so we didn't expect Gorsuch to hold a press conference on
Got it in one, and with more snark than I was going to bring to the party. If Gorsuch suffered any crippling deficiency like ethics, morality or a conscience, he'd withdraw from consideration. But I'm sure he was vetted extremely by the Trump administration to be sure there was no trace of such character flaws.
I see the logic of your argument and under normal circumstances I would not disagree; but I just can't buy two of the legs it's standing on, which are:
1. If we don't use the filibuster, we will continue to have it. I just don't see how we can count on that being the case. If the Republicans can take it away if we use it, they can take it away if we don't use it. Relying on them to follow some kind of Queensbury rules on fairness in governance seems to me to be a fool's errand. What happens if, as seems far more likely, we don't use it and it gets taken away anyway? We'll have no weapons and a lost fight we might potentially have won if we'd used that weapon while we still had it.
2. Using the filibuster on, e.g., Kennedy's seat will result in a more centrist judge being nominated to replace the filibustered candidate. If Kennedy's seat comes up, the same person who gets to fill Scalia's also gets to fill Kennedy's. There's no reason to believe that he's going to nominate, at any point in his term, a candidate who will be centrist or liberal, and you can't vote for a nominee who doesn't exist whether you use the filibuster or not. The result of Kennedy's seat coming up will be a new list of rabid conservative nominees. Using the filibuster on any of those candidates will get us just exactly as much nothing as using it on this one.
This is the Supreme Court. The body that gutted the VRA, making it so that many, many D voters' votes count for exactly the same whether they turn out or not. The body that is very likely to gut Roe v. Wade. The body that could, if it feels like it, turn back not only Obergefell but Loving v. Virginia. If this is not an important enough battle for us to use every tool at our disposal, then nothing is an important enough battle - and people who might have turned out to vote D will see that there is literally no battle important enough for congressional Dems to fight, and they will continue to not turn out, because there is no one to vote for who will fight for their interests. Keeping the filibuster in reserve will gain us literally nothing, now or in the future; using it might just gain us voters.
In my imagination, there was considerable debate in the Dunning and Kruger labs over whether to just cut to the chase and call it the Mediocre White Man Effect.
That's where you and I disagree. Once we lose the filibuster, we won't be able to accomplish anything. The Dems become irrelevant. The GOP won't even have to make the pretense of working with us, they'll pack the court and we'll end up with the nightmare scenarios you suggested and we will spend two years with people screaming at us to "Do something!!" Then comes 2018 and the Dems only message will be "We tried to fix it but they shut us out three months in, remember? Vote for all the Dem senators and we might be able to fix it." Which is going to go over just how you might imagine and then we'll be lucky to have the 48 senators that we do. There's no way to win on Gorsuch. The best we can hope for is to mitigate the damage from the loss.
At least if we wait for the next nominee we'll have a battle royale closer to the midterms when it might stay fresher in memory and we can use it to mobilize voters then. That's assuming another vacancy opens up. We may get a miracle and Kennedy decides he'll hang on and Ginsberg just turns out to be a machine. (Unlikely I know but possible.)
I get what you're saying. I do. But I can't get behind throwing away every weapon we have *three* months into this. Not when this administration is so unstable and independent voters are actually beginning to experience some buyers remorse. Because if we do we spend the next two years getting our ass kicked and having no hope of fighting back and no way of mobilizing our - let's be honest - lazy, shallow voters who don't pay attention and need to be "inspired" to go to the polls.
IMO, we've got a handful of battles that will get us voters over the next two years: The ACA repeal which is already turning into a GOP headache, the next SCOTUS justice which, granted, we can't predict and the upcoming economic collapse which is pretty much inevitable.
I still am carrying around my blank thank you note for Hillary, also, too. I end up using my spare time at night drinking and not commenting on Wonkette.
Maybe someone who knows a lot more about Twitter than me can tell me this: A lot of the icons on the bottom of Trump's tweets seem to be Twitter eggs. Are those the avatars of his biggest followers, or something? If so, is an egg the new Pepe the Creepy Frog?
Once he gets a seat on the court he only works for his own damn self (and theoretically the Constitution and all of us) so I'm not sure what to make of it. Is he just sucking up to Dems by saying out loud what is not a stretch to imagine that he actually does believe in private?
But we know it's pissing Donnie off, so there's that!
Well, we're in agreement on the timing; battles close to the midterm will indisputably do us more favors than battles this far out. I just think that extraordinary measures need to be taken to sustain this degree of sheer rage in the voters, which I've honestly never seen in liberals before now. If we don't use the filibuster until the midterms, okay; but the Dems seem too determined not to use any weapons at all and I think that's going to bite us in the ass.
Also, I'm not sure this country has another two years to play with, to be honest. I hope I'm wrong.
I'd be willing to send that to the atmosphere.
Cruz and Kasich would not have allowed their chief political operative (a nazi) to insert himself onto the NSC.
Got it in one, and with more snark than I was going to bring to the party. If Gorsuch suffered any crippling deficiency like ethics, morality or a conscience, he'd withdraw from consideration. But I'm sure he was vetted extremely by the Trump administration to be sure there was no trace of such character flaws.
I see the logic of your argument and under normal circumstances I would not disagree; but I just can't buy two of the legs it's standing on, which are:
1. If we don't use the filibuster, we will continue to have it. I just don't see how we can count on that being the case. If the Republicans can take it away if we use it, they can take it away if we don't use it. Relying on them to follow some kind of Queensbury rules on fairness in governance seems to me to be a fool's errand. What happens if, as seems far more likely, we don't use it and it gets taken away anyway? We'll have no weapons and a lost fight we might potentially have won if we'd used that weapon while we still had it.
2. Using the filibuster on, e.g., Kennedy's seat will result in a more centrist judge being nominated to replace the filibustered candidate. If Kennedy's seat comes up, the same person who gets to fill Scalia's also gets to fill Kennedy's. There's no reason to believe that he's going to nominate, at any point in his term, a candidate who will be centrist or liberal, and you can't vote for a nominee who doesn't exist whether you use the filibuster or not. The result of Kennedy's seat coming up will be a new list of rabid conservative nominees. Using the filibuster on any of those candidates will get us just exactly as much nothing as using it on this one.
This is the Supreme Court. The body that gutted the VRA, making it so that many, many D voters' votes count for exactly the same whether they turn out or not. The body that is very likely to gut Roe v. Wade. The body that could, if it feels like it, turn back not only Obergefell but Loving v. Virginia. If this is not an important enough battle for us to use every tool at our disposal, then nothing is an important enough battle - and people who might have turned out to vote D will see that there is literally no battle important enough for congressional Dems to fight, and they will continue to not turn out, because there is no one to vote for who will fight for their interests. Keeping the filibuster in reserve will gain us literally nothing, now or in the future; using it might just gain us voters.
Oh, think how the hateful haters are having a field day with "Blumenthal"....
See: Dunning-Kruger Effect
In my imagination, there was considerable debate in the Dunning and Kruger labs over whether to just cut to the chase and call it the Mediocre White Man Effect.
Couldn't quite bring himself to say it in public though. Not impressed.
That's where you and I disagree. Once we lose the filibuster, we won't be able to accomplish anything. The Dems become irrelevant. The GOP won't even have to make the pretense of working with us, they'll pack the court and we'll end up with the nightmare scenarios you suggested and we will spend two years with people screaming at us to "Do something!!" Then comes 2018 and the Dems only message will be "We tried to fix it but they shut us out three months in, remember? Vote for all the Dem senators and we might be able to fix it." Which is going to go over just how you might imagine and then we'll be lucky to have the 48 senators that we do. There's no way to win on Gorsuch. The best we can hope for is to mitigate the damage from the loss.
At least if we wait for the next nominee we'll have a battle royale closer to the midterms when it might stay fresher in memory and we can use it to mobilize voters then. That's assuming another vacancy opens up. We may get a miracle and Kennedy decides he'll hang on and Ginsberg just turns out to be a machine. (Unlikely I know but possible.)
I get what you're saying. I do. But I can't get behind throwing away every weapon we have *three* months into this. Not when this administration is so unstable and independent voters are actually beginning to experience some buyers remorse. Because if we do we spend the next two years getting our ass kicked and having no hope of fighting back and no way of mobilizing our - let's be honest - lazy, shallow voters who don't pay attention and need to be "inspired" to go to the polls.
IMO, we've got a handful of battles that will get us voters over the next two years: The ACA repeal which is already turning into a GOP headache, the next SCOTUS justice which, granted, we can't predict and the upcoming economic collapse which is pretty much inevitable.
I still am carrying around my blank thank you note for Hillary, also, too. I end up using my spare time at night drinking and not commenting on Wonkette.
Maybe someone who knows a lot more about Twitter than me can tell me this: A lot of the icons on the bottom of Trump's tweets seem to be Twitter eggs. Are those the avatars of his biggest followers, or something? If so, is an egg the new Pepe the Creepy Frog?
I think this information was "leaked" to help the confirmation hearings. It didn't come directly from him, so no blowback from the vile talking yam.
Once he gets a seat on the court he only works for his own damn self (and theoretically the Constitution and all of us) so I'm not sure what to make of it. Is he just sucking up to Dems by saying out loud what is not a stretch to imagine that he actually does believe in private?
But we know it's pissing Donnie off, so there's that!
Though at least he had the integrity to own up to it, apologize for it, and not do it any more (FFS) which we all know you know who is incapable of.
Well, we're in agreement on the timing; battles close to the midterm will indisputably do us more favors than battles this far out. I just think that extraordinary measures need to be taken to sustain this degree of sheer rage in the voters, which I've honestly never seen in liberals before now. If we don't use the filibuster until the midterms, okay; but the Dems seem too determined not to use any weapons at all and I think that's going to bite us in the ass.
Also, I'm not sure this country has another two years to play with, to be honest. I hope I'm wrong.
He had a greater command of complete sentences a decade ago.