You read it here first, AB readers. … [Important addendum added.]
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ADDENDUM: I would note that Ruth Bader Ginsburg will turn 83 on March 15 and that, while clearly still mentally very sharp, does not appear to be in good physical health. There’s been a lot of speculation that if the Dem nominee, very likely now Hillary Clinton, wins the general election, and the Republicans retain control of the Senate (very unlikely, in my opinion, but probably not in theirs), they will continue to refuse to allow hearings on a Supreme Court nominee to fill Scalia’s seat.
I (strongly) suspect that the Republican idea is that Ginsburg will leave the Court fairly early into the next administration because of physical disability or death, and that the two overtly political cases currently before the Court, whose clear purpose is simply to skew elections to Republicans—and which now are deadlocked 4-4, and which the Court, rather than affirming by deadlock in a non-precedential ruling the lower appellate courts’ ruling not in favor of the Republican Party’s bald political interests, will instead be reargued next term. Voila! Precedential opinions, by a 4-3 vote, profoundly skewing elections to favor the Republican Party.
The Federalist Society has gamed this out. Trust me.
Meanwhile, the wingnut “legal foundations” that represent the petitioners in those two cases and that regularly fabricate cases for the Supreme Court to employ by a one-vote margin as their quiet-coup mechanism, will be working overtime (no, I mean even more so than usual) cooking up other cases on the wingy to-do list.
They know that this is not sustainable forever. But they think it is sustainable long enough for them to accomplish their top priorities.
The Dem presidential candidates should talk about this. I call this the Republicans’ wing-and-a-prayer strategy. The Dem candidates, and Obama as well, should call it this, too.
They also should call it this: an attempt to orchestrate a silent coup. I’ve been wondering whether issues other than the damn culture-wars ones that are at issue in Supreme Court appointments will ever get any attention from the Dem candidates.
I don’t think Clinton has the intellectual capacity to discuss, or the interest in discussing, anything but the culture-wars issues when mentioning the importance of Supreme Court appointments. And Sanders, unlike Clinton, has no background in law. But he should get information about both of the current Supreme Court cases I am referring to–Evenwell v. Abbott and Friedrichs v. California Teachers Assoc.–from people who know quite a bit about them. And then he should discuss these. These are the very types of things that his candidacy is about.
Added 3/3 at 12:15 p.m.
Bingo Beverly. After 2008 when a black guy one the White House the GOP has been in an existential struggle to suppress the voting power of poor people, young people and people of color. At the same time they have ratcheted up the rhetoric to the every fringe group who might support them with the result that Trump is likely their nominee for president. The voter suppression is a key part of the effort however because there simply are not enough old white men to win elections anymore
Terry, actually I wasn’t even talking about the voter-ID, polling place, etc., statutes. Evenwell, which I just added a link to when I mention the name of the case (I linked to it a few sentences earlier, but not when I was mentioning the case name), is truly creepy; that’s really an apt description of it. Real the article about it that I linked to. It’s at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/opinion/scalias-putsch-at-the-supreme-court.html.
Friedrichs, which I also just inserted a link to when I mention the name of the case, is a bizarre manufactured-at-the-Federalist-Society case, too. The article about it that I link to is by Linda Greenhouse, a former longtime NYT Supreme Court correspondent and now a bimonthly opinion writer at the Times. The title of the column, from last December, that the link is to is: Scalia’s Putsch at the Supreme Court.”
There you go again, Beverly, as you have done on occasion before: questioning Hillary’s “intellectual capacity.” I agree that it looks like she has little interest in discussing some issues she should, but can you just dispense with this nonsense about her brainpower? I know people who know both her and Bill, and most say she is smarter than he is, and he is widely recognized as being very smart. She is too.
That does not mean that she does not sometimes do stupid things. Among the stupidest has been her taking money from inappropriate institutions to give speeches as recently as last spring, justifying it with that nonsense about how she and Bill were broke when they left the White House (a line I think she gets from him). Of course she was not remotely close to being broke last spring.
Now she has this problem of those transcripts of her speeches to the bankers. Maybe she thinks she is helping herself against Bernie by not releasing them immediately, but she needs to get that stuff out there sooner rather than later as Trump (or whoever) will certainly use it against her, and the sooner it is out, the better it will be dealt with. But just giving those speeches in the first place was stupid given her clear desire to ultimately run for president. In any case, I think the problem there is money lust, not basic lack of intellectual capacity.
No, really, Barkley, Hillary Clinton is not smart. Her husband has the depth of intellect and the mental agility (in a good way) to be able to navigate very complex and nuanced matters and explain them to the public. And he can do that on a dime. Hillary Clinton has, best as I can tell, almost no mental agility in that sense, and couldn’t engage in a complex, nuanced explanation of anything to the public to save her life. Or her general election campaign.
I don’t care what people who know her say. She’s incessantly spouting these banal, often incoherent soundbite-type lines that anyone with a brain would know are glaringly banal and that some are incoherent.
“I want to be president for the struggling, the striving, and the successful.” Over and over and over again. Until it looked like Sanders might overtake her.
“I’m amused, Bernie, that you think that someone who’s running to become the first woman president could be part of the political and economic establishment.” Not amusing at all that she said that and thinks that.
“Bernie Sanders is a single-issue candidate.” Depends on your math, I guess.
“We don’t need to make America great again. America is still great. We need to make America whole again. We need to put back what’s been hollowed out.” Maybe America is no longer great because it’s no longer whole because it’s been hollowed out?
And on and on and on and on. I have no idea how someone who’s smart speaks and thinks like that. They’re mutually exclusive, aren’t they?
Barkley, I think I should narrow down my comment that she couldn’t explain anything nuanced and complex to the public to save her life. I do know that she can, and does, explain in detail her own complex policy proposals. What she can’t do is explain what her opponents’ policies are, in any actual specific way. It’s always just soundbites. And with Sanders’ proposals it’s been soundbites that are false as a matter of fact.
Sanders’ healthcare plan would allow Terry Bradshaw to keep his state from participating in the single-payer plan? Really?
And on and on.
Beverly,
I would agree that some of the statements you note are indeed banal. I do not see them as being incoherent, but I am not going to get into a mud wrestle over this one or that one. I also think that she has done well discussing Bernie’s proposals, although in some cases she has distorted what they are for political purposes, just as he has some of hers. That is just politics.
While neither you nor I are going to give her an IQ test, I would note that Obama did appoint her to be Secretary of State. He most certainly did not need to do that, and I would suggest that this means that he thought (and by most accounts still thinks) that she is pretty smart and competent, even though she was (and appears still to be) more hawkish than he is or Bernie is, which is one of my bigger problems with her. But I have no doubt that indeed she is very smart, even if not every remark or decision she makes is totally brilliant.
As a mathematics problem, Evenwell v Abbott has a reasonably straightforward solution. There are enough degrees of freedom in districting systems to satisfy equal population and equal number of citizens (or even eligible voters) simultaneously. You would lose a degree of compactness in solving for these two at the same time, but actually doing it would not be that hard. Imagine a total population of 10M of which 9M are citizens and represented by 10 districts. Draw lines so that each district has 1M of whom 900K are citizens. There are data sources that can be used where this outcome could be achieved pretty well.
Continuing, one of the difficulties in discussing reasonably Evenwell v Abbott is that apart from a tactical advantage that Democrats assume they have and would lose if the “equal citizen” or “equal voter” criteria be found acceptable is that it is hard to defend that any substantial inequity has been created. Non-citizens in particular do not have a voting interest so getting worked up that their geographical distribution would be ignored in districting questions hardly seems to rise to any kind of rank injustice, except that the physical distribution of non-citizens in the United States is believed to advantage one political party. If the shoe were on the other foot there wouldn’t be a peep out of people who are outraged today over this law suit. Hence I suggest just trying to “level load” both population and citizen count to the extent practicable…everyone gets what they say they want.
Wow. Non-citizens in particular do not have a voting interest so getting worked up that their geographical distribution would be ignored in districting questions hardly seems to rise to any kind of rank injustice, except that the physical distribution of non-citizens in the United States is believed to advantage one political party? Seriously?
You have to have a voting interest in order to see it as rank injustice that your area’s elected state and federal legislative representatives aren’t YOUR representatives, and that you don’t have any representatives? I mean … who knew?
So if you’re a legal immigrant but not yet a citizen, who pays state, federal and local taxes (including property taxes, either directly or via rent payments), and you have, say, two kids, who may or may not have been born in this country, you shouldn’t consider it rank injustice that your area’s elected state and federal legislators don’t, by law, give a damn about you?
Good thing about the 19th and 26th amendments giving women and people aged 18 to 21 the right to vote. Cuz otherwise their state and federal legislators wouldn’t have to be concerned with, y’know, their interests. And we won’t go back as far as the 15th Amendment in this discussion.
Sorta funny that no one for more than two centuries ever thought to argue this, until the modern Conservative Legal Movement in which five Supreme Court justices who are aggressive members of the Movement teamed up with Wingnut Welfare (Paul Krugman’s extremely apt term) legal think tanks to fabricate a lawsuit making this claim.
Drop dead.
Bev:
“Non-citizens in particular do not have a voting interest”
True, but the Repubs always have plan B. It matters mostly about who they can disqualify which is their real intent. This comes in the form of IDs and few places far apart to obtain them and how many other IDs one needs to prove who you are, etc. I am leery of laws passed for no reason.
Just get rid of districts altogether.
If you have 10 congresscritters, you get ten votes. Cast them any way you like. Ten-for-one or one-for-ten, makes no difference. Top ten vote-getters get seats.