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US PoliERA 2018 |OT6| An Unmitigated Disaster
- Thread starter Midnight Jon
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As usual, they know it won't pass the Senate, so it's just something to show their base.
But their base gets riled up and shows up. So I guess it works.
I think there is absolutely a difference in kind between simply waiting to retire until the next president is elected and actively negotiating the timing of your retirement with the White House in exchange for the exact person you want to replace you. A negotiation requires multiple parties bargaining for something; someone waiting to retire is not a negotiation, it's just an independent decision (not something they're 'selling'). I think this crosses a very real and substantive line.
Organizations like the Federalist Society exist explicitly to do that negotiation on behalf of the justices. Conservative justices know that a Republican President will nominate a justice that's already been vetted by a conservative movement organization and certified as willing to advance conservative policies.
How does adding the third party make the situation less corrupt?
Damn it is seeming more and more like Cohen is fucking pissed at Trump.
Though more likely he's terrified and sending smoke signals to Mueller.
Please don't lock me away for life I will sell out Trump.
Cool jab but run-ons suck.
I've no doubt that Cohen has impeachable crimes on Trump. I think Trump's pardon today was a signal for Cohen, though. It'll be interesting how this plays out. A pardon could save Cohen but still damage Trump.
They're not packing the court now, no. Unless you have a different definition of packing than what I'm talking about. It's not completely conservative just yet. If Trump replaces RBG or Breyer then we are fucked.
You're giving lots of great examples of them breaking norms left and right but somehow you think they'd only add Justices if we did it first. Why do you think Republicans are neccesarily going to play nice and not just add more Justices on their own before they lose power? There's nothing stopping them. They're a party of fascists, not good faith members of a democracy.
Forget the past rules you think we're all playing along with, Republicans certainly have.
This is silly. Of course it's not literally up to me. I'm telling you what I think. It's called an opinion. Each of us does this every day in this thread, just like you did.
You're afraid of the consequences of this? I'm afraid of the the consequences of a SC that's made deep red for generations due to a criminal President and a complicit political party that's already stolen a seat. I'm sure the people the Court fucks over will appreciate your concern over retaliation as they're being oppressed.
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Because in one scenario the actual Supreme Court Justice is directly involved in corrupt deal-making with the White House that could implicate their recent legal decisions as having been part of a quid-pro-quo and in the other scenario you're just talking about a standard political lobbying group working completely independently? Saying that lobbying is a corrupt practice in of itself is completely different from saying that a Supreme Court Justice has directly engaged in corrupt practices. If that difference was truly meaningless then Kennedy wouldn't have needed to directly negotiate in the first place.
I think a lot of this is Lanny Davis being Cohen's new lawyer.
Cohen hiring Davis in the first place made it much more likely that he was going to flip. Lanny Davis is basically Hillary's Jorah Mormont.
To be fair if I were Kennedy I would want personal assurances from trump that he wasn't going to nominate, say, Judge Jeanine before I decided to retire.
Not that his word is worth a lot but at least you try.
Not that his word is worth a lot but at least you try.
Like I said, under a normal Republican president Kennedy wouldn't have negotiated, because he would've felt confident that they would've nominated a Federalist-approved justice anyway. He just wasn't confident about Trump's decision making specifically.
I do think his rulings this term should be scrutinized — if he changed them to please Trump, that WOULD be a difference in kind. But that also strikes me as pretty hard to prove. Who can speak to Kennedy's intent in joining a ruling?
I mean Cohen knows how fucked he is or isn't since they took like millions of his document. I feel like if he knew they had nothing, he'd keep quiet and just keep being the shit he always was and the people like Flynn, Carter, Manafort, etc continue to be.
I'm generally using the same packing definition I think you are -- more than 9 SCOTUS justices -- I'm just joking about the number of conservatives they've been ramming into the judiciary over the past year and a half.
If we flip the Senate in November then, do you expect Trump and McConnell to spend the lame duck adding another 2-3 SCOTUS justices? If the answer is no, then I don't know what you're arguing.
I am not *afraid* of the consequences of Dems setting a court-packing precedent for Republicans to take advantage of, I just think it's a tactically and functionally pointless move. The Supreme Court has been red for generations already (which, coincidentally, started with a criminal president) and going forward we'll just have to fucking deal with it and work within those parameters as we have for the past 50 years. And hope that we get a Dem elected in 2020 to replace RBG and Breyer and hopefully Thomas. But I don't see blowing up the size of the court as helping much at all to move progressive policy forward on any kind of permanent basis.
And give me a break with that last sentence. People and things I care about are being oppressed by this court's decisions already, and will continue to be going forward with this new justice. I live in the same country you do you know.
I'm basically with pigeon on this. There are two big obstacles to this being a corrupt quid pro quo. For one, it can't be enforced -- I'm actually a little surprised that Kennedy would trust Trump on this, and then surprised again that Trump followed through. You can't even do the usual lobbyist thing where you reward former congressmen so that current congressmen trust that you'll reward them too, since a president is unlikely to get many shots at this. The other is that there's just not much room to bargain. The only thing the justice is looking for is the ability to choose their replacement, and this is purely ideological rather than self-interested. Likewise the main thing the president wants is to influence the future direction of the court. I guess you're right that in theory a president could also try to control the justice's votes before retirement in exchange for letting the justice pick their replacement, but this seems really finicky. You don't have that much time where the president and the justice can conspire like this, and it's also got to be something urgent since the president can have a much more reliable vote as soon as the justice does retire -- nobody objects to presidents speaking to potential nominees.
I'm open to the argument that Kennedy was delivering some suspicious rulings such that that should be probed, but I'd want that argument to actually be made before I get upset about this ("this" being the negotiation between Trump and Kennedy; obviously I'm upset that Kennedy is retiring under Trump at all). The surface story is just very believable -- Kennedy wants to retire but is concerned that some combination of Trump being crazy and modern Republicans being crazy will mean that his replacement is terrible, so he seeks some assurance that Trump will nominate someone he's okay with.
But that's the precise differentiation that makes this a meaningful line in the sand. A retiring justice is not being corrupt just because an external and independent political lobbying group gave a list of suggestions to the President that the Justice happens to privately agrees with. A retiring justice is being corrupt if they decide to take individual action to ensure that a specific individual (whether on that list or not) replaces them on the bench and they use their retirement as leverage in a direct negotiation with the White House. That Kennedy took this individual action is the important factor, the question of why Kennedy did it is largely irrelevant (although I think he trusted Trump to pick from the list but he wanted a very specific person from the list).
As to the latter, his law clerks could speak to intent or reasoning that they may have witnessed. As well as the timing of any decisions he made with respect to cases or any reversals or changes he made in the course of opinions being written. If, for instance, Kennedy was undecided on the Travel Ban until the day after he received assurances from Trump that Kavanaugh would replace him, that could be supporting evidence of malfeasance.
However, the story is still unverified. But the severity of what the story represents is deeply damaging to the SC and is probably the reason why many law orientated publications are so skeptical of it being true.
Yeah it's brutal. I can't recall the last time a wait for something was this brutal. Probably my wait for Fallout 4 a few years ago. This is waaaay worse though.
I think the math is backwards on this. Cohen only needs a pardon if he can't flip because he has nothing Mueller wants. His yelling is designed to attract pardons. Ergo...
Or he does have various stuff, but he doesn't get to walk on his own charges so he is still gunning for that pardon as the only possible get out of jail card.
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If you have been convicted of a crime directly related to international political fiscal misdeeds then you should probably be banned from it for life.
I'll leave this alone once we get to the next page, but this story would still be deeply damaging even if it didn't involve influence on cases. The very act of a Supreme Court Justice directly negotiating their replacement is itself what's extraordinary. It's substantively different from timing your retirement and represents the Justice actively playing a major role in a process that is expressly reserved for the political branches. Again, maybe I'm naive and this 'naming my replacement' thing is common practice, but given the skepticism of legal communities about this story being true, I think it's a safe bet that the implications are extremely serious and above and beyond accepted practice.
If the best way to understand the court is through a fundamentally political and partisan lens, why did Kennedy condition his retirement on the appointment of someone substantially to his right?
Nah he also needs a pardon if Trump doesn't want him to cooperate in whatever they could possibly implicate him in. Which doesn't necessarily have to be Russia related but could easily still be impeachable. Cohen's media pleas indicate that there is something Trump should be worried about while Guliani seems to think they have nothing on Trump.
Because the guy clerked for him and the massive amount of nepotism and backscratching is the basis of conservatism, trusting "family" above all else while fearing the rest of society.
The judicial system in this country is an "old boys club" of people who have known each other since college or earlier. There's only really a tiny pool of people who could ever dream of being Supreme Court Justices because they went to the right school and knew the right people 20 years ago.
Skeptical person who respects the SCOTUS either:
[ ] believes Justice Kennedy wanted to retire (despite clearly not preparing to retire by not hiring clerks!) without prompting and believed now, under President Trump -- under investigation for collusion, treason, election fraud, and money laundering for the Russian Mob, was a good time to do so. And not, say, 2 years from now. That and Kennedy's kid being a Trump financial consultant is just a weird coincidence.
[ ] believes Justice Kennedy negotiated for 'months and months' so he could have a hand in picking his successor in order to ensure President Trump -- under investigation for collusion, treason, election fraud, and money laundering for the Russian Mob -- would stick to his word.
You tell 'em, skeptical person who respects SCOTUS!
[ ] believes Justice Kennedy wanted to retire (despite clearly not preparing to retire by not hiring clerks!) without prompting and believed now, under President Trump -- under investigation for collusion, treason, election fraud, and money laundering for the Russian Mob, was a good time to do so. And not, say, 2 years from now. That and Kennedy's kid being a Trump financial consultant is just a weird coincidence.
[ ] believes Justice Kennedy negotiated for 'months and months' so he could have a hand in picking his successor in order to ensure President Trump -- under investigation for collusion, treason, election fraud, and money laundering for the Russian Mob -- would stick to his word.
You tell 'em, skeptical person who respects SCOTUS!
We can't judge Kennedy's current political leanings. We can only look at an estimate based on past cases, which is obviously limited to those cases the court, for whatever reason, wanted to review, and then further limited by Kennedy's ability to control the final opinion, a factor that involves lots of internal SCOTUS deliberations about which we generally don't even know procedural details, much less material ones.
We do know that people have commented a lot on Kennedy's extra-conservative lean this year (which, again, is itself a rough estimate at best, but it's all we have). How far right is Kennedy of today relative to Kennedy all-time?
For probably the same reason Breyer would be ok with someone who was far to his left replacing him as long as they were a qualified judge and not an antifa communist commited to using their power to destroy the capitalist state
Similarly I think Kennedy likes Gorsuch, likes this other guys and thinks they are fine Republicans and not weirdo cultists who would be union threatening psychopaths
They should start handing out contempt of court then if they miss the deadlines.
Justice Kennedy will never be able to undo intentionally retiring during Trump's time in power. That is a powerful fucking message about the kind of person he is, given the ultimate responsibility to democracy in the republic. He deserves every last bit of dragging and diminished legacy that he'll get.
I mean yeah it really fucking is. Somebody that's supposed to value the rule of law, just takes a shit all over it by retiring, apparently purposely, under a possible and very likely criminal president. He must have bought the Fox News koolaid like so many others have and believes Trump is truly innocent and it's all Dem conspiracies.I mean he could have waited a year until more came out from Mueller. But that would risk the Dems having a say in his replacement. The HORROR! Piece of shit.
I hope he gets remembered as a fool. Let that be his legacy
I wonder, would it be like agaisnt the law for an SC justice to call up Mueller just to get a sense of where things are at? I'm sure Mueller wouldn't say anything directly, but tone of voice, what isn't said etc.
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