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Monday, September 21, 2020

Plenty time left

Despite the absolutely horseshit claims already emanating from partisan Democrats over the weekend, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is completely irrelevant to the Presidential election.  It's possible that it will still be a thing people are arguing over come November, but the election itself won't determine what happens. Trump is going to appoint the next justice either way

“We win an election and those are the consequences,” said the president, who then seemed to signal that he’d be willing to accept a vote on his nominee during the lame-duck period after the election. “We have a lot of time. We have plenty of time. We’re talking about January 20th.”

If Trump wins, then the person he names is the next justice. If Trump loses, then the person he names still becomes the next justice during the lame duck session. If they want to ram somebody through before the election even happens, then that is also something they can do.  But none of it has any bearing on the election itself, nor will the outcome of the election change anything one way or another.

What will be done about that? Not a whole lot. One can only laugh at the notion of Joe "nothing will fundamentally change" Biden packing the court if he becomes President. It would run contrary to Biden's entire political m/o and stated ideological reason for wanting to be President in the first place. 

What could be done about it?  Well... a whole lot, actually. A Democratic Party that actually cared about using power to affect change rather than just, you know, having it sometimes could certainly tack on as many justices as they like. There's nothing stopping them from doing that if they control the congress. They could also follow this example

Across the late 1850s, Lincoln argued that “the American people,” not the Supreme Court, were the true arbiters of the Constitution, and that the only way to defeat the proslavery judiciary was through mass political struggle. And after Lincoln and Hamlin were elected in 1860, the new president’s inaugural address articulated this view in perhaps the strongest language he ever used:

[I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made . . . the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Once in power, Lincoln and congressional Republicans “reorganized” the federal judiciary and “packed” the court, adding an additional justice in 1863. More fundamentally, though, they simply ignored the proslavery precedents established in the 1850s. In June 1862, for instance, Congress passed and Lincoln signed a bill banning slavery from the federal territories — a direct violation of the majority ruling in Dred Scott. The court meekly acquiesced, recognizing that its political power was long since broken.

Just ignore them.  The City of New Orleans ignores judges all the time. How hard can it be? 

In any case, Trump is definitely going to make the court 6-3 no matter what happens now. This does not mean Joe Biden or any future Dem Presidents  won't have options.  It's just the Dem party as currently constituted is incapable of putting those options to use. Instead they can encourage you to Vote! and pretend that will have been enough. It keeps them in business, anyway, even if they aren't always in power.  So there's plenty time left for them too.  Unfortunately, for most of us whose lives actually depend on the outcome of these games and schemes, there isn't.

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