I dislike how he runs his state

i really like the way he defunded Planned Parenthood over those obviously doctored videos made by a guy who is now being indicted for flat out just making the videos up.

congratulations, republicans. this is the smartest guy in the room for you.

Werthless wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Second before going into the GOP nomination stuff, a few words about the Supreme Court fight. There are few things more certain in life than political process fights devolving into hypocrisy. I think there's something approaching a 100% chance that if RBG died in February 2008 that the Dem Senate would not have confirmed a Bush nominee to her spot. And we would have screamed our heads off about how unfaithful to the constitution Dem sens were being, and maybe they'd have paid a bit of a price at the polls (Ted Stevens might have won and maybe Obamacare would've never happened, who knows), but the Democrats would have been right to stand their ground given the consequences for the party and the progressive movement for shifting the court if Bush had replaced a liberal stalwart. The GOP is completely right to eat shit on this because the stakes are so high. McConnell could've handled it better without saying no hearings/no votes - I think we'd get 51+ no votes for any non GOP nominee (Kirk/Collins/maybe Murkowski) - but it's vital that the line is held. So I think it will be. If resulting unpopularity costs a senate seat or even the White House, that would suck, but allowing Obama to appoint someone who makes the court 5-4 or 6-3 lib on every contentious issue isn't something a conservative GOP senate can just roll over on.

Enjoyed the read, but if it costs the GOP the White house, then they lose anyway. Are you suggesting that GOP may stonewall for 5 years?

Seems like everyone in the field is running on a 'let's let the next president make the next nomination' plank, which means I would imagine that Hillary would get her pick. I think Moz is right that the GOP stance is high risk, and they could maybe get someone from Obama who is closer to the center than Hillary would end up choosing. My response to saying it's high risk would be Dem nominees have been very reliable for the people who nominated them, and I have no reason to doubt that whomever Obama put up there - even if it is a putative moderate - would be a consistent vote for the liberal block on the court. When is the last time a Dem nominee disappointed the liberal base? When is the last time a Dem nominee was 'wrong' on the biggest/one of the biggest cases of the term?

On the GOP side you have the major fuckups - Stevens, Souter - then the half and half people like O'Connor and Kennedy. And apparently Roberts is being turned into a disappointment because of Obamacare, but I think he's playing a long game with upholding the institutional integrity of the court while steadily undermining important precedents that expand the power of the federal government beyond its constitutional boundaries. Don't think he'll end up a disappointment in the history books. But anyway, almost half of GOP justices post Roe have been squishes or worse, while the four Dems tend to vote in lockstep in a way GOP presidents would kill for.

One aside on that, there were a few things in the old politics thread bringing up Clarence Thomas negatively after Scalia passed. The idea that Thomas was Scalia's puppet is either ignorant or racist or ignorant and racist. But it's one of those things that liberals can get away with that conservatives would (rightly) be slaughtered for. Such is life I suppose.

Or Thomas is a piece of shit

Hillary needs to stop saying that Bernie is not a Democrat. It's off-putting. The fact that she said it tonight and repeated it when a couple of people in the crowd booed her for it looked really bad.

jerseyhoya wrote:....On the GOP side you have the major fuckups - Stevens, Souter - then the half and half people like O'Connor and Kennedy. And apparently Roberts is being turned into a disappointment because of Obamacare, but I think he's playing a long game with upholding the institutional integrity of the court while steadily undermining important precedents that expand the power of the federal government beyond its constitutional boundaries. Don't think he'll end up a disappointment in the history books. But anyway, almost half of GOP justices post Roe have been squishes or worse, while the four Dems tend to vote in lockstep in a way GOP presidents would kill for.

Imagine instead that your "squishes", once appointed for their lifetimes to the land's highest court, genuinely decided on the cases before them in ways that reflected their intellectual integrity - their ability to grasp, or at least reach toward, an understanding of the idea of what our country is about, what this experiment in governing is about - rather than merely engaging in a judicial version of the depressing "our side, their side" scorekeeping of political hacks, or a perverted (indeed, almost Francophile - and you know how depraved those French are!) insistence that language never changes, meaning is immutable and must be so, etc etc. until it's time to seat a President, in which case, why, [i]reprends-toi[/i].

Just imagine that.

In any case, I'll imagine you're capable of imagining it, because otherwise I'd be resigned to understanding this squalid bit of 'analysis' you've presented us as all you're capable of. And, selfishly, I don't want that.

One wonders why I stopped posting in this thread

Doll Is Mine wrote:Hillary needs to stop saying that Bernie is not a Democrat. It's off-putting. The fact that she said it tonight and repeated it when a couple of people in the crowd booed her for it looked really bad.

He's not

jerseyhoya wrote:One wonders why I stopped posting in this thread

I'm not critiquing you. I'm critiquing your ideas. You back the right political faction, though - your thin skinned defensiveness is practically an admission requirement

There will always be risk for "surprises" because most people with a strong written record on one side of the hot-button social issues don't get nominated for the SC. This was one of the takeaways of the Bork fiasco.

Scalia got in because of smart strategy by Reagan. The vacancy was Berger, the Chief Justice. Reagan nominated Rehnquist to be "promoted" to Chief Justice and Scalia to take Rehnquist's seat. All the hubbub was about Rehnquist because his stances on social issues were well known and that he had some sort of role in the Watergate drama. Little fuss was made about Scalia; the Democrats blew it.

Of all people, Joe Hoeffel, who spoke at my high school during the nominations, while he was running for Congress*, went on a whole tangent about how Scalia is the one that we should really be concerned about.

* - why he wanted to address a crowd of people who were mostly too young to vote, I have no idea.

Swiggers wrote:There will always be risk for "surprises" because most people with a strong written record on one side of the hot-button social issues don't get nominated for the SC. This was one of the takeaways of the Bork fiasco.

And I'd say republicans are especially at risk for surprises because the clear majority of the people that go to the law schools and get the clerkships that feed into the people that are qualified to be supreme court justices lean liberal, or are at least Rockefeller republican types where their politics are less likely to manifest themselves in conservatives ways as judges.

not sure there are rockefeller types left. they're conservative democrats at this point

They're the RINOs of this gen. They'd hate to be labeled liberal...

Werthless wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote: I would honestly rather have Trump than Rubio because I think Trump would at least fall back on advisors.

Why would Trump listen to advisors when he is always the smartest guy in the room? Trump = our Putin.

Trumpolini

TomatoPie wrote:Trumpolini

He'd be as ineffectual as Rufus T Firefly, but not nearly as funny

drsmooth wrote:

TomatoPie wrote:Trumpolini

He'd be as ineffectual as Rufus T Firefly, but not nearly as funny

But he's as scary as Rufus Sewell

How come I've been hearing about income tax reform for like 25 years? It always seems to be a huge issue to presidential nominees yet has legislation ever been intoduced to actually try and change it (flat tax, no IRS, etc?).

The tax code's rewritten all the time. Hugely regressive payroll taxes coupled with clumsily progressive income taxation seem to make for a financing system that devours itself, but frankly people respond in unpredictable ways to economic forces and economic dynamics aren't governed by one set of decisionmakers/actors

Warszawa wrote:How come I've been hearing about income tax reform for like 25 years? It always seems to be a huge issue to presidential nominees yet has legislation ever been intoduced to actually try and change it (flat tax, no IRS, etc?).

Everyone cares about taxes, so they like to hear about it "changing;" however, since it is an inevitability there is no real pressure for actual reform. Maybe, who knows.

I've never really heard any sensible talk about the "payroll tax" thing either. It's allegedly an invest/benefit system. Since the max benefit is capped, the max "investment" is also capped. So any talk of raising/eliminating the contribution cap has to either discuss raising the max benefit commensurately or redefining the system as a true "tax".