To me the problem with “packing the Court” is that in addition to being a nuclear option that will just mean the GOP does it again next time they can, it doesn’t solve the fundamental (and much more challenging) problem with the American judiciary: it’s not truly independent, and has now clearly become both a political football, and a political tool.
Speaking of nuclear option, wouldn't (re-)establishing a super-majority requirement for SC confirmation go a long way to bringing more moderate candidates into it?
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Like I said, she could have stepped down when Obama and the Dems had control, she would've been in her 70s then and made perfect sense. I'm just pointing it out - politics is all about chess, and she didn't make the right moves. So be it.
She should have. She let her ego and personal goal to serve under a *possible* female president. The whole part of being part of Scotus is to put the needs and whats best for the country first over your own beliefs ( as law allows). She did not do that. Retiring early into Obama's admin could have set up the Scotus in a more balanced way for decades .
No can do. Supreme Court ruled this year that “The 538 people who cast the actual votes for president in December as part of the Electoral College are not free agents and must vote as the laws of their states direct” and “presidential electors must act as their states require, which in most of the nation means voting for the candidate who won the popular vote in their states.”
Does this help avoid what happened in the last election where two electors who were supposed to vote for Trump didn't, and 5 electors who were supposed to vote for Clinton didn't?
Per Elect Project, over 75 million people have already voted in the 2020 election.
As noted before there is a very understandable lag in reporting, and many mail ballots are presumably, well.... “in the mail”, so the real number is undoubtedly much higher.
Does this help avoid what happened in the last election where two electors who were supposed to vote for Trump didn't, and 5 electors who were supposed to vote for Clinton didn't?
No it backs their right to provided they were compliant with state laws.
It's almost as though something happened in 2016, involving Garland and Mitch. Perhaps something the poster is referring to.
So RBG looked into the future, saw that Mitch McConnell would refuse to hold the senate hearing on Merrick Garland's nomination, and decided not to retire well before Garland was nominated?
More than two years ago, I published an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times about Donald Trump’s perilous presidency, while I was serving under him. He responded with a short but telling tweet: “TREASON?”
Make no mistake: I am a Republican, and I wanted this President to succeed. That’s why I came into the Administration with John Kelly, and it’s why I stayed on as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security. But too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives. I witnessed Trump’s inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years. Everyone saw it, though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals.
So when I left the Administration I wrote A Warning, a character study of the current Commander in Chief and a caution to voters that it wasn’t as bad as it looked inside the Trump Administration — it was worse. While I claim sole authorship of the work, the sentiments expressed within it were widely held among officials at the highest levels of the federal government. In other words, Trump’s own lieutenants were alarmed by his instability.
Much has been made of the fact that these writings were published anonymously. The decision wasn’t easy, I wrestled with it, and I understand why some people consider it questionable to levy such serious charges against a sitting President under the cover of anonymity. But my reasoning was straightforward, and I stand by it. Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling. I wanted the attention to be on the arguments themselves. At the time I asked, “What will he do when there is no person to attack, only an idea?” We got the answer. He became unhinged. And the ideas stood on their own two feet.
So RBG looked into the future, saw that Mitch McConnell would refuse to hold the senate hearing on Merrick Garland's nomination, and decided not to retire well before Garland was nominated?
What are you talking about? Looked to the future?
Garland was nominated 8 months before the election. It doesn't occur to you that Ginsburg could have considered retiring within that last stretch and decided against it after what went down, hoping Hillary won?
That would have been plenty of time, in most cases, and there would be little reason to do it before the last handful of months, until Mitch made one.
