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SCOTUS Nomination Thread

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Londo_Jowo said:
I never get worked up over SCOTUS appointees as over the year those who were moderate and expected to lean liberal tended to be conservative in there voting and vice versa.
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Changing the liberal/moderate/conservative composition is a much, much bigger deal than replacing a conservative with a conservative. It's fairly clear that Obama wants to change the composition. If the shoe was on the other foot...you would have liberals doing the exact same thing just as they've done in the past.
 
Doc Savage Fan said:
Changing the liberal/moderate/conservative composition is a much, much bigger deal than replacing a conservative with a conservative. It's fairly clear that Obama wants to change the composition. If the shoe was on the other foot...you would have liberals doing the exact same thing just as they've done in the past.
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What he wants to do and who gets nod from congress will be far different.
 
There is already a healthy pool of candidates who have been vetted previously and approved without issue. I think you will see Obama picking someone from this pool which will make it hard for the GOP to suddenly say they are unacceptable.

More importantly is will he pick someone who would make a good judge, but wouldn't necessarily be the ideal candidate to throw to the wolves. Depending on how this goes you don't want to see a truly great pick wasted by a Senate fight.
 
Doc Savage Fan said:
Changing the liberal/moderate/conservative composition is a much, much bigger deal than replacing a conservative with a conservative. It's fairly clear that Obama wants to change the composition. If the shoe was on the other foot...you would have liberals doing the exact same thing just as they've done in the past.
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Of course they would, no argument here. Liberals and conservatives do the same things and paint each other as "hippocrits" and bad or wrong. But humans feel like whatever they are doing is justified to get what they believe is right. Its going to be a fight and thats how politics work. Im not angry that republicans want to block Obama's pic, its expected. And I would expect democrats to try to block a conservative pick.

@BonzaiDuck
Watch the newest episode of "Last week tonight with John Oliver" you will like it. 😉
 
MomentsofSanity said:
There is already a healthy pool of candidates who have been vetted previously and approved without issue. I think you will see Obama picking someone from this pool which will make it hard for the GOP to suddenly say they are unacceptable.

More importantly is will he pick someone who would make a good judge, but wouldn't necessarily be the ideal candidate to throw to the wolves. Depending on how this goes you don't want to see a truly great pick wasted by a Senate fight.
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Bridges have been burned long ago and this is personal now...I wouldn't be too terribly surprised to see the Senate vote 'no' even if Obama nominated Ted Cruz!
 
LPCTech said:
Of course they would, no argument here. Liberals and conservatives do the same things and paint each other as "hippocrits" and bad or wrong. But humans feel like whatever they are doing is justified to get what they believe is right. Its going to be a fight and thats how politics work. Im not angry that republicans want to block Obama's pic, its expected. And I would expect democrats to try to block a conservative pick.

@BonzaiDuck
Watch the newest episode of "Last week tonight with John Oliver" you will like it. 😉
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Almost missed your recommendation.

I don't quite agree with your appraisal, which assumes a sort of symmetry.

For instance, look into the history of the Carswell nomination of 1970, and Senator Roman Hruska's (R) remark suggesting that mediocrities should be adequately represented in government.

Long is the way, and hard is the road for sorting out which Republicans believe in "good government," and which of them believe in "no government."

Nor do I subscribe to the idea that picking a Supreme is merely an exercise in ideology. If that were the case, appointments would not be "for life." There was a specific reason for lifetime appointments: to insulate decisions from political influence.

Yet, every chucklehead eager to discourage a successful Obama nomination has nothing but political ideology operating in their logic.
 
Yeah i agree that democrats usurp the will of the people far less than republicans and are more interested in fairness than they are, and that a great majority of republican voters are kinda...not..smart and vote with anger and hatred and no logic at all, and their leaders manipulate them into voting against their own interests for financial gain, but...I feel like we are gonna win this whole "situation" anyway so I was trying to be nice lol. 😉
 
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LPCTech said:
Yeah i agree that democrats usurp the will of the people far less than republicans and are more interested in fairness than they are, and that a great majority of republican voters are kinda...not..smart and vote with anger and hatred and no logic at all, and their leaders manipulate them into voting against their own interests for financial gain, but...I feel like we are gonna win this whole "situation" anyway so I was trying to be nice lol. 😉
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Which network or cable-TV channel features the John Oliver broadcast? I've got WMC-served TV going 24/7, but I haven't a clue.

"Trying to be nice" seems like a behavior I find in local Dem activists I know. Perhaps I should try it.

But I recall an expression used by certain academics in the field of "Public Choice" or "Constitutional Economics," regarding the Founders. They supposedly recognized something called a "veil of ignorance," which translates into the idea that "what you do today (in making law or a constitution) could come back and haunt you tomorrow, when you're on the other side of the fence.

It seems that our GOP brethren may have forgotten -- or never learned this concept, and the McConnell quote almost seems consistent with the thought.

So if "what's good for the goose is sauce for the gander," I still contemplate a bumper sticker for my car, in two parts:

"Vote GOP, need roadside assistance?"
"Please have original birth certificate ready for inspection."

It would be interesting to see if a two-part bumper sticker like that would sell with my eager-to-contribute Dem friends. It would be interesting but possibly unpleasant to see what happens to my car, left too long in the wrong parking lot.

Maybe I should try and sell the bumper stickers, and save the car. But that sounds more like the logic of Citizens United.
 
BonzaiDuck said:
Yet, every chucklehead eager to discourage a successful Obama nomination has nothing but political ideology operating in their logic.
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So it's OK for Obama to weigh political ideology when making a SCOTUS nomination, but people are considered "chuckleheads" who happen to object to his nominee on the basis of political ideology? This just reeks of cognitive dissonance.
 
Jhhnn said:
Yeh, being a sekrit mooslim & all he probably wants a believer in strict Sharia law, right?
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If you're going to fabricate strawmen...you've got to disguise them better and make them much more convincing. Otherwise, it backfires and makes you look like the really stupid one.
 
Doc Savage Fan said:
So it's OK for Obama to weigh political ideology when making a SCOTUS nomination, but people are considered "chuckleheads" who happen to object to his nominee on the basis of political ideology? This just reeks of cognitive dissonance.
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This strikes me as a rather ridiculous argument on your part frankly. (At least the specific way you're phrasing it beyond the point about the chuckleheads phrase.)

It has clearly always been understood that the US President can consider a candidate's judicial philosophy when making a selection as one of the factors. The main question has been whether the US Senate can consider a candidate's judicial philosophy at all or just other qualification such as experience and ability to show an effective legal mind when considering cases.

Now the question is whether a judicial candidate having fairly extreme judicial views is in any way a reflection on their abilities as a judge or its simply a reflection of their political ideology. At at minimum, at least until basically the last couple years it had been clearly understood by the majority of Senators that the President gets to pick a nominee when a vacancy opens and while some might argue you can reject a nominee purely based on having truly extreme political views, it should be accepted that the ultimate pick will not be what they would ideally like politically or what a President of the other party would pick if in office.

(The Republicans today seem to coming much closer to adopting a view that they are ones who get to pick a nominee rather than the other way around. There certainly is nothing in the Constitution or the deliberations associated with it suggesting the founding fathers were thinking of the Senate blocking any possible nominee for basically a whole year simply in the hope of their party winning the Presidency.)
 
Doc Savage Fan said:
Is there a liberal on the court who is not authoritarian or a conservative on the court who is not libertarian in some sense of these words?
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Yes on both counts.

Thomas for example is generally considered to be the most conservative sitting supreme court judge. Yet he is highly authoritarian in some rulings. Take the gay marriage case for example, he dissented which is basically saying that the government had the right to say who you can and can not marry. You can't get much more authoritarian than that.

For libertarian examples of liberals on the court, see the same case.
 
dullard said:
Yes on both counts.

Thomas for example is generally considered to be the most conservative sitting supreme court judge. Yet he is highly authoritarian in some rulings. Take the gay marriage case for example, he dissented which is basically saying that the government had the right to say who you can and can not marry. You can't get much more authoritarian than that.

For libertarian examples of liberals on the court, see the same case.
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The more I think about it, the more I agree. Thanks.
 
Aegeon said:
Now the question is whether a judicial candidate having fairly extreme judicial views is in any way a reflection on their abilities as a judge or its simply a reflection of their political ideology.
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It's obviously a reflection on their ability to deal with the issues of personal freedom before the Court. The quote from Scalia about capital punishment makes that abundantly clear.
 
dullard said:
Yes on both counts.

Thomas for example is generally considered to be the most conservative sitting supreme court judge. Yet he is highly authoritarian in some rulings. Take the gay marriage case for example, he dissented which is basically saying that the government had the right to say who you can and can not marry. You can't get much more authoritarian than that.

For libertarian examples of liberals on the court, see the same case.
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Modern Conservatives aren't really conservative considering that they have a radical reactionary agenda. I'm actually more "conservative" than all too many of them.
 
Blackjack200 said:
They should ask Ted Cruz what he thinks should happen. He has such a boner for the constitution.
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Yeah, screw the constitution. It was written by a bunch of dead white guys, so it can't be valid. Let's just make sh*t up as we go. Any evolved person knows that the world will be better when the elites take full control from the subhuman masses.
 
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