The nominee will be supported with meaningless buzz phrases
Jeffrey Toobin says it’s important to spell out what Trump’s next Supreme Court pick is going to mean, because they won’t spell it out for us.
As with Gorsuch, the nominee will be supported with meaningless buzz phrases: he or she will be opposed to “legislating from the bench” and in favor of “judicial restraint.” Like Gorsuch, the nominee will rely on airy generalities rather than on specific examples. It’s all the more important, then, to articulate in plain English what, if such a nominee is confirmed, a new majority will do.
It will overrule Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortions and to criminally prosecute any physicians and nurses who perform them. It will allow shopkeepers, restaurateurs, and hotel owners to refuse service to gay customers on religious grounds. It will guarantee that fewer African-American and Latino students attend élite universities. It will approve laws designed to hinder voting rights. It will sanction execution by grotesque means. It will invoke the Second Amendment to prohibit states from engaging in gun control, including the regulation of machine guns and bump stocks.
And these are just the issues that draw the most attention. In many respects, the most important right-wing agenda item for the judiciary is the undermining of the regulatory state. In the rush of conservative rulings at the end of this term, one of the most important received relatively little notice. In Janus v. afscme, a 5–4 majority (including Kennedy) said that public employees who receive the benefits of union-negotiated contracts can excuse themselves from paying union dues.
Them that’s got will get even more, them that’s not will lose even more.
And the women that have them. Oh, I know, everyone says they don’t want to do that, but why not? If abortion is murder, wouldn’t the person who paid for the murder and arranged it be guilty, too? No, I think that’s just so much whitewash.
Or they’ll simply chip away at Roe without expressly overruling, until nothing is left but a theoretical right.
“Hey, you still have the right to get an abortion. As long as you consult ten different doctors, five different ‘crisis pregnancy counsellors’, sit through a three-hour documentary showing fetuses being ripped apart gorily, you will then be allowed to have an abortion at any clinic that has an entire surgical team on call 24/7, 30-foot wide hallways, and does not receive any federal funds for any purpose whatoever, performed by a doctor who has passed the government’s stringent and exhaustive Certified Baby Killer Training. Provided you do all this before the 4th week of pregnancy, naturally. Oh, it turns out that no doctors have received that certification and no such clinics exist? Gee, that’s a bummer.”
I think they’ll still end up overturning Roe, simply because a bunch of the justices have been dreaming of that great gettin’ up day. Maybe Roberts insists on doing the slo-mo, under the radar approach to protect the image of the Court. Of course, if anything should happen to Ginsburg or Breyer (or, less likely, Kagan or Sotomayor), Roberts won’t even be the swing vote.
But hey, there was no real difference between Trump and Clinton, right?
Emaiiiiiiiiils…
Yes…abortions are already nigh-impossible in large swathes of the country, not least because there just aren’t any clinics at all nearby.
The idea of judges being a political appointment is grotesque. The appointment process of high court judges in the UK is fairly blithering but at least it is nominally apolitical. Yeah, I know, it involves the queen and the house of lords, both of which enrage me, but the system can overrule the prime minister, which seems like a good thing. Especially right now.
Has Susan Sarandon’s smug smirk shifted at all?
latsot;
The confirmation process is SUPPOSED to protect the U.S. Supreme Court from blatant packing. But since Gorsuch there isn’t much pretense that we aren’t going to see a pure Republican court.
Wait a minute, there is. Hillary is shrill.
latsot, it seems to me that the hiring process for judges should be somewhat similar to that for teachers. Some sort of search committee made up of qualified individuals hire qualified people. I don’t like voting on judges anymore than political appointments, because the voters are just as likely to vote in the same sort of judges they like as they are presidents. That can be great when you get an informed, motivated, and liberal electorate, but it would be disastrous with a Trump-dominated electorate.
In short, it should be a job that goes to the best qualified applicant, like most other jobs in this economy. (I know, there is still the possibility of corruption, but the use of a non-partisan, representative hiring committee who are not themselves politically appointed could actually overcome some of that corruption).