Yes. 100%. Undeniably. The White House had been captured by Free Market Republicans and they anointed their Saint to steer the country. Their Saint, by the way, was the trigger man for the Saturday Night Massacre after everyone of conscience told Nixon to fuck himself. Barry Goldwater's loss motivated the right wing media machine to spin up; Richard Mellon Scaife said as much and he built the damn thing. Meanwhile the Civil Rights Act lost the south to the Democrats forever and Lee Atwater ran with that. He also said as much. The Bork nomination happened in the middle of the Iran Contra hearings so it was already a conservative "we don't care, we do what we want" move; the Democrats responded by saying "we still own the Senate, fuckers" and it was game on. There's an entire Frontline about this.Is Bork the Original Sin of the Supreme Court fights?
I appreciate each and every history lesson from you. Thank you. 1. Is this guy the origin of "borked"? 2. Turn out that Biden was on the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and at least one GOP Senator has managed to blame ol' Joe for initiating the SCOTUS ugliness. lol "We have to be glaring hypocrites, because of what Joe Biden did to Bork". Brilliant, really. It's crazy, the political maneuvering you're afforded, if you check your principles and dignity at the door.
Garland was upsetting, and that should have been the GOP's revenge. At the time, I guess it was. They even named it the "Biden rule" for refusing to initiate confirmation proceedings. But filling RBG's vacancy is beyond revenge. In what fucking world is a 6-3 SCOTUS representative of this country's populace? The current disregard for democratic norms is rampant throughout the GOP, and can only be explained as a genuinely desperate power grab from a party increasingly relegated to a minority of Americans, and even a minority of American voters. There are some deep-seated issues we need to address with our society. It's not like the democrats, NYT, or fuckin' me are perfect, either, but if Trump maintains his power, we can't expect any attempts at reconciliation to succeed. He's probably the most toxic person that I've ever seen in my lifetime, and I've seen a lot of people. We need to preach a message of unity. Encourage cross-aisle dialog at a grassroots level, not let our emotions kick in, begin from a position of mutual respect, etc., I mean, at least we could try? If Trump is forced to openly disparage a popular movement of unity, that'd be a bad look. It's not that I expect to succeed, but I'm going to hate myself forever if I never try. Loved the Saxe quote, btw. Edit: Fun fact: Romney said that he "would support a floor vote on Trump's SCOTUS pick". He didn't say that he would support the nomination. This guy might be looking at John McCain's vote against Trump's "always coming in two weeks" healthcare plan, and saying, "Hmmmm, how can I be on the right side of history too?". I think with him, Collins, and Murkowski, it'd still take one or two more high-profile defections, right? Place yer bets.
The best thing the New York Times puts out is The Interpreter, which for some jackass reason they don't have on their website. In Argentina, the president’s party abused its power to replace Supreme Court justices, installing loyalists in three out of the court’s five seats. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez packed the court, adding a dozen new judges. Chile provides perhaps the most worrying example: Though the precise norm-breaking was different, it led to a cycle of escalation between the parties until the country — long seen as akin to the United States in its democratic longevity and stability — collapsed into violence and dictatorship. Chile’s bloody fate was also the product of Cold War meddling and polarization that don’t exist in today’s United States. But the pattern is disturbingly familiar. One party violates those norms to give itself a structural advantage beyond its share of the vote. The other side follows suit. Eventually, the norms are gone and with it democracy as we commonly understand it. Scholars have a term for this kind rule-twisting that exploits unwritten norms for short-term political gain: constitutional hardball. Any politician faces a temptation to break unwritten norms for short-term gain. The expectation is that they’ll restrain themselves out of a belief that preserving the system is more beneficial in the long-term and that voters or their peers may punish them for drastic transgressions. But when that logic fails and parties come to see hardball as worth the risk, it can, in extreme cases, set off a doom spiral that can be hard to recover from. Imagine a baseball game where one team begins breaking rules and faces little consequence. This forces the other team into a difficult choice. It can continue following the rules in the hopes that its opponents will voluntarily give up their rule-breaking advantage. Or it can even things out with its own rule-twisting, knowing this might set of a cycle of tit-for-tat escalation until they’re not even really playing baseball anymore so much as just brawling in the outfield. There’s a reason that fights over the nation’s high court are often what tip shaky democracies into outright collapse: It’s an opportunity for one team to appoint the umpires who oversee the game.... “If you have one of the two parties in a two-party system not committed to the rules, your system is really in trouble. There’s just no way out of that,” Mr. Ziblatt said. Asked if he knew of any democracies where this had happened and the system had recovered, he paused for several moments before answering, “No. Just no.”Some of the gravest democratic collapses, Mr. Ziblatt and his co-author, Steven Levitsky, found, occurred in 20th century South America, whose two-party presidential systems closely resemble that of the United States. And the downward spiral began, more than once, with the party in power twisting unwritten but important norms to take control of the country’s highest court.
With regard to the question of whether anyone thinks an extremest 6-3 conservative majority is representative of the country's public opinion, the answer is that no one give s a fuck what the people think: Henry Kissenger's attitude toward South America and Asia was that he had seen the Nazi's get elected, therefore the people are morons who should only be allowed to vote insofar as they were voting for something that was good. The minute democracies start to make the wrong choice, they can go to hell. The problem, of course, with that argument is that we can all retrospectively say, "Yeah, the Nazis were bad." But we can prospectively say, "A liberal Court will lead us into a Stalinist future." However, the reigning conservative intelligentsia does very much believe that. They are very aware of public opinion, but they think that acting against it is good for the country in this case, since otherwise, we're guaranteed to slump into decadence at best and Stalinism at worst. That's tough to argue against, because it requires arguing against one's imagination and not empirical facts. I had a conservative friend tell me the other day, "They want socialism." Since there's no counter factual that can be run, it's End of Discussion. I haven't successfully convinced any of my Trump friends yet that they're the allies of their own gravediggers. Most don't read, as far as I'm aware. Edit: I don't mean to imply that Trump is the Khmer Rouge...just linking for the quote, not the context.