The Courts under Trump - Mega Thread

[Ulty]

12 minutes ago, Danny Bateman said:

we're gonna be at loggerheads about this.

overall great post, and I wish I could give a +2 for using "loggerheads" in a sentence.

 

Assuming all of the following: ACB gets confirmed on the court, Biden wins, and the Dems take the Senate, the Dems need to have a very aggressive legislative agenda, first and foremost being protecting voting rights, and setting actual rules for ethical behavior, but then they really need to get to work to start passing the bills that have been sitting on McConnell's desk for years, passing and fixing programs that are popular with the American public (healthcare, environment) and fixing the damage caused by Trump.

 

Having the presidency and both houses will not last forever, so they need to not dilly dally, and not give a f#&% what the GOP says. If they wanna filibuster, the GOP will have to choose their battles. The Dems need to start getting $h!t done from day 1. 

 

The legislative work has to be aggressive, because even with a conservative SCOTUS, there is a lengthy process before cases reach that level, and they don't hear everything that comes their way. There is going to be some damage wrought by the court, but the Leg and Exec branch can outweigh the bad by moving forward with the good in greater volume.

[TGHusker]

6 minutes ago, Danny Bateman said:

Good discussion here. I've got a few more thoughts.

 

Here's the deal: we're gonna be at loggerheads about this. A few of us view what has happened to the judiciary as fine and constitutionally appropriate. Others of us view it as ill-gotten gains done with dirty tricks and two-faced lying explicitly in the hopes the new courts rule from the bench - in a way the GOP likes.

 

I don't know how two sides agree on fundamentally different views of how and why this happened.

 

But there's an elephant in the room. I'd wager a guess that this board (and P&R itself) are fairly homogeneous: mostly white men. The anatomy of a Nebraska football fan, eh? And I would wager most of us are now or were at some point some type of Christian.

 

I think it would be prudent to recognize the biases that come along with those things and set those aside. As is always the case, the court system and the precedents they set will have real world effects. Obviously some rulings affect us more than others. But some of these major cultural touchstones we're discussing are going to affect a lot of people distinct from us more than they affect us. We're not under particularly heightened threat in many of these areas. But others are and they have to live with all the anxiety that entails.

 

I don't believe just because something isn't going to affect me personally I can disregard it; rather I think it's indicative of one's capacity for empathy to understand and advocate for the concerns of others even when one doesn't have to.

Had to give you a trophy on this post Danny.   Regarding the bold -   I think there is one thing that ties it all together - The Turtle's action in 2016 and the GOPs refusal to consider 2016 nominations by Obama.  I think if the GOP had played fair then, there would be no issue of Trump making an appointment and the Senate confirming it even at this late stage. It is their constitutional duty (the president's and the senate's) to do these 2 things - even if it falls right before an election or just after an election.  What makes it seem unfair, is the hypocritical action taken 4 years ago. We all know that if a Dem President and a Dem Senate were in this situation, they would proceed with the nomination.  The villain here isn't trump (even though he is a villain in many other areas), it isn't ACB, and it really isn't the Senate but it is The Turtle.  The Turtle as the leader of the Senate 4 years ago could have taken a different path.  In fact many GOP senators were ready to confirm Garland when they realized that Hillary was about to win.  Garland was a very likeable nominee.  Even my staunchly right wing Senator Inhofe had good things to say about Garland.

The Turtle was ready to go ahead with the process if Hillary had won. This highlights his ruthlessness - if Garland was ok a day before the election, he should have been good enough the day after the election and 'fair play' would have suggested that Garland be voted on.

 

I hope you didn't think my comments meant that I don't care what happens to other people since "it doesn't affect me personally".  Personally, I don't want anyone negatively impacted by SC rulings.  Yet, I hope we can be ruled by a standard - the Constitution. Let judges do their job and let congress do theirs.  I understand the anxiety and the uncertainty and hope in the end the needs of all people will be met via both law and the court. 

[DevoHusker]

4 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

Who wants to tell him?

 

 

 

by all means, please enlighten me

[knapplc]

1 minute ago, commando said:

looks like the most per year in office maybe?   not most total.

 

Exactly. In two years trump has 219 appointments, which puts him on pace for 400-ish in eight years. The only president in the past 100 years to outstrip that pace was Carter. 

 

But again - this doesn't tell the full story for the purposes of this conversation. Obama had more than twice as many judicial openings as Bush II. But while the Democrats allowed Bush to continue nominating and they continued to hear and seat Bush's nominees, McConnell embargoed Obama's appointments. 

1 minute ago, DevoHusker said:

 

by all means, please enlighten me

 

[DevoHusker]

4 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

Had to give you a trophy on this post Danny.   Regarding the bold -   I think there is one thing that ties it all together - The Turtle's action in 2016 and the GOPs refusal to consider 2016 nominations by Obama.  I think if the GOP had played fair then, there would be no issue of Trump making an appointment and the Senate confirming it even at this late stage. It is their constitutional duty (the president's and the senate's) to do these 2 things - even if it falls right before an election or just after an election.  What makes it seem unfair, is the hypocritical action taken 4 years ago. We all know that if a Dem President and a Dem Senate were in this situation, they would proceed with the nomination.  The villain here isn't trump (even though he is a villain in many other areas), it isn't ACB, and it really isn't the Senate but it is The Turtle.  The Turtle as the leader of the Senate 4 years ago could have taken a different path.  In fact many GOP senators were ready to confirm Garland when they realized that Hillary was about to win.  Garland was a very likeable nominee.  Even my staunchly right wing Senator Inhofe had good things to say about Garland.

The Turtle was ready to go ahead with the process if Hillary had won. This highlights his ruthlessness - if Garland was ok a day before the election, he should have been good enough the day after the election and 'fair play' would have suggested that Garland be voted on.

 

I hope you didn't think my comments meant that I don't care what happens to other people since "it doesn't affect me personally".  Personally, I don't want anyone negatively impacted by SC rulings.  Yet, I hope we can be ruled by a standard - the Constitution. Let judges do their job and let congress do theirs.  I understand the anxiety and the uncertainty and hope in the end the needs of all people will be met via both law and the court. 

 

I am in much the same boat. 

[TGHusker]

3 minutes ago, Ulty said:

overall great post, and I wish I could give a +2 for using "loggerheads" in a sentence.

 

Assuming all of the following: ACB gets confirmed on the court, Biden wins, and the Dems take the Senate, the Dems need to have a very aggressive legislative agenda, first and foremost being protecting voting rights, and setting actual rules for ethical behavior, but then they really need to get to work to start passing the bills that have been sitting on McConnell's desk for years, passing and fixing programs that are popular with the American public (healthcare, environment) and fixing the damage caused by Trump.

 

Having the presidency and both houses will not last forever, so they need to not dilly dally, and not give a f#&% what the GOP says. If they wanna filibuster, the GOP will have to choose their battles. The Dems need to start getting $h!t done from day 1. 

 

The legislative work has to be aggressive, because even with a conservative SCOTUS, there is a lengthy process before cases reach that level, and they don't hear everything that comes their way. There is going to be some damage wrought by the court, but the Leg and Exec branch can outweigh the bad by moving forward with the good in greater volume.

If they legislate with one eye on what a court may decide, they may not find the court to be the problem in the end.

But you are right, there needs to be some real action on voting rights - from gerrymandering issues to access. 

If the Dems do the right thing, the Biden admin can set itself up as being a transformative admin and not just a transitional admin.

[DevoHusker]

8 minutes ago, commando said:

it says right in your link that those are the current active judges.   that isn't the total number appointed by anyone.check out what knap posted right above this to see what i am talking about.

 

I truly don't follow your logic. It actually says actual percentage of current sitting judges

[Ulty]

58 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

2. R v W :  Personally I believe this is a state issue and not a federal issue.  I thing the ruling found a right to abortion in the thinnest of air.  However, what I believe doesn't matter.  Again this is long standing ruling and the court rarely changes its mind. If it does, it will most likely send this back to the states to decide.  There will be states for and against and you will end up wt a have and a have not situation.  Which isn't ideal.  What may happen then, their may be a push for a constitutional amendment to restore R v W.

 

I wonder if the GOP really wants to give up Roe v Wade as a wedge issue? For decades, Republicans have been using the abortion debate to proclaim themselves "pro-life" (which is bull$h!t, given their other heartless policies) and voters have eaten it up. There is a sizable cohort of one-issue voters that will pull the lever for R only because of this.

 

But under Bush, the GOP held the presidency, both houses of congress, and a fairly conservative court (5-4 in their favor on most issues), but yet they never touched the abortion issue. I think they just wanted to keep running on that issue forever but never doing anything about it. Just milk those votes.

 

If Roe v Wade gets struck down, and that single issue is off the table, will those voters still be willing to vote for racism and corruption in the same numbers? What happens to an increasingly unpopular party when one of their greatest wedge issues is gone and that voting bloc starts looking at other things?

[DevoHusker]

5 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

Exactly. In two years trump has 219 appointments, which puts him on pace for 400-ish in eight years. The only president in the past 100 years to outstrip that pace was Carter. 

 

But again - this doesn't tell the full story for the purposes of this conversation. Obama had more than twice as many judicial openings as Bush II. But while the Democrats allowed Bush to continue nominating and they continued to hear and seat Bush's nominees, McConnell embargoed Obama's appointments. 

 

 

 

Up until this post, you never mentioned percentages , or year for year, or "on place to" or ratios over hypotheticals. 

[commando]

1 minute ago, DevoHusker said:

 

I truly don't follow your logic. It actually says actual percentage of current sitting judges

you didnt understand my question then.   forget it.  knap posted the info i was asking about.  you were no help at all.   

[knapplc]

1 minute ago, commando said:

you didnt understand my question then.   forget it.  knap posted the info i was asking about.  you were no help at all.   

 

I feel like he'll get it at some point in an hour or a day and have a forehead-slapping moment. We'll see.

 

[knapplc]

3 minutes ago, Ulty said:

 

I wonder if the GOP really wants to give up Roe v Wade as a wedge issue? For decades, Republicans have been using the abortion debate to proclaim themselves "pro-life" (which is bull$h!t, given their other heartless policies) and voters have eaten it up. There is a sizable cohort of one-issue voters that will pull the lever for R only because of this.

 

But under Bush, the GOP held the presidency, both houses of congress, and a fairly conservative court (5-4 in their favor on most issues), but yet they never touched the abortion issue. I think they just wanted to keep running on that issue forever but never doing anything about it. Just milk those votes.

 

If Roe v Wade gets struck down, and that single issue is off the table, will those voters still be willing to vote for racism and corruption in the same numbers? What happens to an increasingly unpopular party when one of their greatest wedge issues is gone and that voting bloc starts looking at other things?

 

 

I think the old GOP may have felt that way, but I think the new GOP, the one cozying up to White Supremacists and neoNazis, feels like it's now or never with their base aging out of the population and leftists like AOC and Omar gaining popularity. Nothing the Republicans have been doing these past eight to ten years is based on norms we can expect. 

 

 

 

[Moiraine]

@DevoHusker and anyone else who wants to read...

 

We are talking about 2 topics. One topic is the sheer # (or even % if you want) of judges. The other topic is how they got to that # and what the # would have been if both parties played fairly.

 

On the sheer #:

• A list of the total # or % of current judges appointed by each president is a trash statistic. This is what people have been trying to get at. The most recent president is going to have a very high #, especially if he was there for 8 years. That's 8 years worth of judges retiring. Of course he has more than Trump. The more relevant statistic is the % of total judgeships appointed per year.

 

On how each president got to that 3 - this is what most people are talking about:

• Obama appointed a lot of judges, but a s#!t ton more judges were blocked by the GOP. It's the president's duty to fill these openings.
• Trump had way more openings than he should have had because the GOP blocked Obama.

[TGHusker]

19 minutes ago, Ulty said:

 

I wonder if the GOP really wants to give up Roe v Wade as a wedge issue? For decades, Republicans have been using the abortion debate to proclaim themselves "pro-life" (which is bull$h!t, given their other heartless policies) and voters have eaten it up. There is a sizable cohort of one-issue voters that will pull the lever for R only because of this.

 

But under Bush, the GOP held the presidency, both houses of congress, and a fairly conservative court (5-4 in their favor on most issues), but yet they never touched the abortion issue. I think they just wanted to keep running on that issue forever but never doing anything about it. Just milk those votes.

 

If Roe v Wade gets struck down, and that single issue is off the table, will those voters still be willing to vote for racism and corruption in the same numbers? What happens to an increasingly unpopular party when one of their greatest wedge issues is gone and that voting bloc starts looking at other things?

I agree with this. This has been the ONLY way the GOP has won so many elections over the past 40 years. This is their way of keeping evangelicals on the plantation.  I've always said that if the Dem Party could find a way to be more inclusive of pro-life voters that they would win every election. The Dem party is more 'pro-life' on other issues than what the GOP has been.  It would only make sense if they could find a place of moderation in this issue.  Give up the radical abortion at all costs, at all times mantra (late term abortions - unless the mother's physical life is endangered). 

[Moiraine]

25 minutes ago, Ulty said:

 

I wonder if the GOP really wants to give up Roe v Wade as a wedge issue? For decades, Republicans have been using the abortion debate to proclaim themselves "pro-life" (which is bull$h!t, given their other heartless policies) and voters have eaten it up. There is a sizable cohort of one-issue voters that will pull the lever for R only because of this.

 

But under Bush, the GOP held the presidency, both houses of congress, and a fairly conservative court (5-4 in their favor on most issues), but yet they never touched the abortion issue. I think they just wanted to keep running on that issue forever but never doing anything about it. Just milk those votes.

 

If Roe v Wade gets struck down, and that single issue is off the table, will those voters still be willing to vote for racism and corruption in the same numbers? What happens to an increasingly unpopular party when one of their greatest wedge issues is gone and that voting bloc starts looking at other things?

 

 

Nothing will happen. They will just use the same scare tactics as with the 2nd amendment. "If the Dems gain control you will be forced to abort all of your Christian babies, especially the White ones."