Yes, that’s the point. Graham is in a tie race, he doesn’t want to have to be in Washington presiding over hearings in the next month while his opponent pounds the pavement.
The more confident you are of winning the election, the more likely you should be to wait and play up the idea that Republicans are institutionalists that keep their word, and Dems are nuts that want to pack the courts.
Improving your chances in a contested-election court battle is certainly an argument, but they already had a 5-4 edge, and there is zero reason to believe that they would not win another 5-4 decision.
Gotcha. I misinterpreted you comment.
You haven’t missed much. They only have two claims to fame in 20 years:
- Firing a cannon when they score a home goal
- Hiring an angry man as coach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emUxDP73gRE
I’m pretty sure the Mermaid got a reply about how the line of succession works for POTUS.
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Now show me the stats on:
Average age of appointed justice (For current SCOTUS + RBG + Garland it was approx 57 for Dems and 50 for Republicans, if I recall. If the average lifespan of a SCOTUS justice is 85, the GOP would be getting 35 year terms and we’d be getting 28 year terms. Theirs are 25% longer.)
How many justices appointed by D/R entered a new presidency of their party at 70+ and how many decided to retire vs rolling the dice
We’re not unlucky, we root for the Bad News Bears.
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Because if you win the presidency and then die, the other party doesn’t get to pick the new president. Jesus fucking Christ.
Like, I can kinda get the argument of “well why shouldn’t Breyer have retired then, huh?”, even if it is ignoring the fact that one of them had fucking pancreatic cancer and the other seems to be in good health and 5 years younger. But the easy answer is that of course he should have also retired.
We have mandatory retirement for judges at age 70 in Maryland. If you’re a SCOTUS justice and in your 70s, fucking retire the first chance you have when your party is in charge.
Honestly it’s remarkable that someone like Clarence Thomas didn’t quit this year.
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It doesn’t make logical sense that confirming a Justice now “activates the base” for the upcoming election. Whatever voting motivations existed with respect to the Supreme Court are the same as before, but less.
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Thomas gives zero fucks about the fate of the Republican Party. I think he simply retires whenever he feels like it.
It would definitely activate a lot of lizard brain “own the libs” dopamine that the base craves.
Really critical skill in life to be able to tell the difference between run bad vs rigged vs personally unskilled and pick up on them as quickly as humanly possible.
The Democrats are the living embodiment of why that skill is important. They aren’t running bad and it isn’t rigged. They are unskilled and as a result are allowing the other side to rig the game against them without any retaliation whatsoever. The other side is doing the right thing from their side of the table. As much as it galls me to say it Mitch is playing his hand extremely correctly and has been since his first day as Senate majority leader.
If you have doubts think about how much we’d appreciate anyone who got similar results for us no matter what their tactics looked like. They lost every branch of government just about in 2008 and completely thwarted our entire agenda. Then they came back with a vengeance. If I was a southerner who owned a resource extraction business I’d be a big fan.
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Hehe good luck convincing even a thousand year old judge to retire. Up here in Canada our Supreme Court aka Santa’s Little Helpers made age discrimination only apply to olds (and not youngs) just to protect themselves from being forced to retire.
Alito too. People view him as from a different generation that Thomas just because Thomas has been there forever. But Alito is less than 2 years younger.
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Perhaps I misunderstood her comment, but I thought it was a further indictment of a system that makes those the top choices, not a defense against her choosing not to retire
I took it that way too, except the reason doesn’t really apply to POTUS. If Biden dies, Harris is POTUS. It’s not such a bad thing that he’s close to death. When a Justice dies you have no control or info about the replacement. The reason for suggesting RBG should have retired wasn’t that old people suck, it was that, if she dies, a Republican could replace her.
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…and they will say shit like that no matter what. Have you seen the latest Trump ads? Not even super pac ads, actual ads put on national network TV by the Trump campaign just blatantly lying and saying Biden is going to hand your jerb to illegal immigrants. They’re going to say whatever the fuck, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will work.
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Also many Trumpers are driven 100% by owning the libs. This whole experience of replacing RBG is going to make liberals mad, which is really gonna get deplorable juices flowing. They will rejoice in the shoving through of a deplorable judge after blocking Garland because it makes them feel tough. This is a huge win all around for them no matter how the Republicans play it. They get to rub liberal noses in RBGs death and they’re gonna love every minute of it.
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As a general principle, motivation does not increase as you achieve the things that motivated you in the first place. It’s the same reason that the oddmakers move the point spread in favor of the team that is down 0-2 in a series or why parties out of power do so well in mid-terms.
I mean sure they can try whatever ‘fucking elementary’ message (2018 - 'there is a caravan of brown ppl that will invade the US if you give the Dems control of the house), but seating the justice before the election rates to hurt their electoral chances somewhat.
Graham is running in South Carolina. I’m pretty confident he’d like nothing more than for the final weeks of the election to be wall to wall coverage of him presiding over the hearings. His seat isn’t the one they need to save.