Rep and Dem politicians really are all on the same side. Whoever gives THEM a little bit of $. It’s exasperating trying to care.
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It depends on how you look at it. Yes, they are both interested mainly in preserving the status quo and that means entrenching the interests of the powerful. Many connected individuals on both sides make out very well in this structure.
However, there are meaningful differences in their policies. At the policy level, you could argue that they are in some abstract way “more similar” than they are “different”, but they’re different in meaningful ways. Saying they are on the “same side” is superficial and trite, even if it is arguably correct on some level.
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Tatel also reveals high-court insights from private conversations with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He said she revealed early dealings among justices that eventually led to the milestone 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision undermining the Voting Rights Act.
Ginsburg also shared with Tatel the pressure she felt to resign while a Democrat was still president – pressure that the judge speculates may have led her to stubbornly stay on the bench.
“During one dinner at our house, she took me aside to express her annoyance at commentators who were calling for her retirement. ‘The timing of a resignation is up to each justice,’ she told me. ‘John Stevens didn’t step down until he was ninety,” Tatel wrote.
RGB’s arrogance was audacious.
In his book, Tatel wrote that Ginsburg told him about the behind-the-scenes dealings in a 2009 case, known as Northwest Austin v. Holder, that was the forerunner to Shelby County. The 2009 case left the VRA’s Section 5 intact, although its reasoning laid the groundwork for future obliteration. (Tatel had authored the lower court opinions in both Northwest Austin and Shelby County.)
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2009, Tatel said, “What I couldn’t figure out was why the four liberal justices had joined the Chief’s majority opinion. … (T)he unnecessary and irrelevant jabs at Section 5’s constitutionality? Why had they gone along with that part of the Chief ’s opinion? I suspected I knew the answer, and Justice Ginsburg herself later confirmed my suspicions.”
“The justices had initially voted 5–4 to declare Section 5 unconstitutional, but they later worked out a compromise: The majority agreed to sidestep the big question about Section 5’s constitutionality, and the would-be dissenters agreed … to sign on to the critique of Section 5,” the judge wrote. “With that compromise, the liberal justices had bought Congress time to salvage the keystone of the Civil Rights Movement.”
Congress never acted, and Tatel contends the 2009 compromise cost the liberals: “They sure paid a high price: an unrebutted opinion that criticized the VRA and, worse, endorsed a new ‘equal sovereignty’ doctrine with potentially profound implications,” Tatel wrote of the principle that restricted Congress’ ability to single out certain states, in this situation because of past discriminatory practices. “The Court’s opinion in Northwest Austin thus planted the seeds for Section 5’s destruction.”
Tatel said Ginsburg often reached out to him regarding his DC Circuit cases that came before the Supreme Court on appeal.
“One particularly memorable case involved an energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney,” he recounted of a 2004 dispute. “… I wrote an opinion that the Supreme Court reversed 7–2. (It would have been 6–2, but Justice Scalia had refused to recuse himself notwithstanding his recent duck-hunting trip with Vice President Cheney.) Just minutes after the Court announced its decision, my chambers’ fax machine sputtered to life with a message from Justice Ginsburg. ‘Dear David: This is the dissenting statement I just read from the bench. Every best wish, Ruth.’” As Tatel observed, justices read excerpts of their dissents from the bench only when they feel especially strongly about a case.
Tatel added that he was reluctant to announce his retirement in 2021 after President Joe Biden, a Democrat, came to office. But he decided against waiting another four years, on the chance his successor would be named by a president who campaigned on the court and essentially against the rule of law.
There is no way for the legislature to pass the Civil Rights Law with the current court. They’d just rule all the parts that made it work; preclearance etc are unconstitutional.
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“Fuck you, no!”
I’m developing a visceral vomit reaction every time I hear about dems writing some fucking letter for each massive breach of democratic processes or foundational ideas.
Fuck the dems so hard.
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I should just save this response but the US is fucked until the Dem party is reformed/overthrown/replaced or whatever. There is no vehicle for actual progessive change in the US in our current system. No amount of voting or protest matters at all until the current iteration of the Dems is replaced with an actual leftist party.
Dems aren’t only complicit they are solely to blame for the politics shifting right and right and right. The GOP has been allowed to move into insano terrotory because the Dems have turned into 90s GOP era politicians outside of a few social things they never had to vote for.
The closest we came to a shift was Obama 2008 and he purposefully fumbled it away.
Dems are owned by corporate interests and those interests are evil and not at all in line with the interests of the actual people who live here if you exclude the 1-2%. That’s why both sides spew insane propaganda on literally every news source in the us.
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The letters are just cover so they can tell dumb constituents they are fighting back but it’s the absolute minimum possible and is designed to ensure nothing actually happens.
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Exactly. It’s to trick the rubes who don’t understand the US power structure/political system.
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It wont happen. The party will reform when capitalism dies. Nothing until then. Its untennable.
The thing is the 1970’s Democratic party was much more of a worker’s party who fought entrenched business interests, and they got demolished. Since then Democrats have had to make peace with corporate interests to support the party. There’s a bit of path dependence here in that, to fight corporate interests, you need a countervailing political organization and, with unions decimated, there’s no infrastructure to counterbalance it.
I’m not an accelerationist really but isn’t that pretty hardcore evidence that just letting things blow up might have the long term results we all want?
Imagine if we lived for 500 years rather than 78. That would change the calculus on how to vote/behave right? The idea that vote blue no matter who is anything but selfish is pretty dumb. And yet we have people arguing the exact opposite because they really dont care what happens in 100 years. They want to live out middle age and retirement in roughly the same world as today. Which is also rational.
Yes, longevity would change my calculus considerably. I would also put in a considerable amount of time trying to leave the country too.
I also recognize the ability to continue to exist within the binary we have set up is 100% selfish.
Speaking of longevity, selfishness and the like, am I having a midlife crisis if I want to leave a pretty solid career to get into teaching biology?
I mean the closest evidence i can think of is climate change. I believe in it but doubt it will greatly affect me until i am well past my prime.
So i do things to limit my impact. But do i forgo a longhaul flight half way around the world? No. Do i forgo occasionally buying products in plastic containers? No. And on and on.
I think there will be catastrophic results from climate change but probably not until i am a geezer. So if i am being honest im not willing to forgo my standard of living for a future i will never see. Especially as someone without kids.
Now apply that to politics and it’s obvious how lots of people think Trump will be better for them in the immediate term and fuck it they will figure out later later. That’s a base human instinct and hard to fight against.
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It is, I often find it hard to reconcile within myself why I sometimes feel the desire to make decisions purely for myself or for the ability to impact others. Why am I ok eating meat and driving when I know without doubt it contributes to planet killing? Is it simply because I understand that without systemic change, any changes I make would hurt only me and not have any real positive change? Or is it because I know I will likely die before any catastrophic negative effects occur and also that I am ok with kicking the bucket on my own terms if those catastrophies ever happened in my life? Little of column A and B? Is my desire to try to teach kids that biology is real and how to think while hurting my earning potential a guilt thing, a virtuous thing, or neither?
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100%. That’s probably the hardest thing to convice ourselves of, which is why its super unpopular politically overall, which is to forgo immediate gratification for the possibility of a better thing tomorrow for the collective.
Especially when so many people do the exact opposite on purpose and declare it as a political value/sexual value/lifestyle.
Trump’s entire schtick is enormously popular because it not only allows you to engage in your base instincts it celebrates it as the peak human experience.
I agree with 99% of this post, but why can’t voting matter? Explain it like I’m in kindergarten please. I like to think that if we continuously hammer local elections and sweep national ones we can affect change
Dem machinery prevents any leftist/progressive candidates from being elected except in the most extreme situations. They put all of their power, money and influence in primaries to stop that and elect centrist turds. Mostly because of who funds the party. Centrist corporate business entities and rich people.
We are pretty much the only developed nation that is against socialized medicine. We are pretty much the only developed nation that is against high quality public education. We are pretty much the only developed nation that incarcerates a huge percentage of our population. We are pretty much the only developed nation that spends most of their disposable government dollars on the military. And on and on. Democrats are not only not trying to change that, they are for that.
Having the left most major US party be an ultimate blocker to progress is intentional. The GOP is the symptom of the problem and the problem is the Democratic Party.
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See. Gretchen Whitmer 6-8 years ago
Thanks Shri you just stein fuck
One could make the argument that the goal should be blowing up the economy rather than the Democratic Party and change will be induced by the suffering that causes.
Have you considered that the problem may be American people in general?