I think it is always about appealing to voters, these people want to win their seats, and some of them have more political ambitions. Nate Silver said this the other day... If Trump loses the election, for some in the senate thinking about a 2024 run or those in more competitive states, it will be all too easy to just say "Well, we can't go ahead with this nomination because the people have spoken." You can say "Well, why do that, they won't appeal to republican voters." The answer to that is simple, those voters didn't carry the election. I think most agree if Biden wins he's likely carrying the Senate as well as this election will be a referendum on Trump. The moment he loses is the moment you'll see his allies turn face and some more towards the center will realize that's were they will have to be to grab more political power. Again, this is only if Trump loses and the GOP loses the senate, that just likely means the DNC has overwhelmingly won, and that is something hard to ignore. It's a mandate and a referendum on Trump and I think if Mitch and the GOP still try to push it through they will never live it down in history.
That's possible but is more reason why I think McConnell moves the vote to the lame duck session. We've already seen this before when Susan Collins after deep concern still vote for Kavanaugh and then after deeper concern still voted to acquit Trump during impeachment. I don't know if she is tone death, in deep denial or just ignorant of where Maine is at politically but someone should've told her that these were unpopular moves in ME. For Cory Gardner he didn't even want to hear from witnesses during impeachment and didn't even show concern on Kavanaugh. CO was a Clinton state and one that Democrats seem to have a good handle on now. He must've known that CO voters didn't like either of those moves yet he still voted the way he did. Az is a swing state and McSally had just lost a close race and should know that AZ is very likely going blue and she was going to face a very tough Dem challenger in Mark Kelly. That didn't stop her from going all in and being one of Trump's biggest supporters. Even more brazen considering she had John McCain's seat who famously bucked Trump. Even if McSally is gone in the lame duck period there's nothing about Collins, Gardner, and Tillis if we throw in another GOP Senator whose very well could lose showing any signs that they are willing to go against their party and it's ideology. I think McConnell will strike a deal with them to hold off on the vote before the election and they will make all sorts of waffling noises regarding filling Ginsburg's seat but when the vote comes, whether before or after the election, they will vote to confirm Trump's nominee. Susan Collins will give a long winded speech about how concerned she is and how sad she is things are but like Kavanaugh will still vote aye. Of course it's possible they grow a spine or decide that their constituents have spoken and they should listen to them. I just don't think it's likely and wouldn't count on it.
You can hate or love Trump. Even if he doesn't get re-elected he will leave his mark on this country for the next 25-30 years. He will have done more to change this country in four years than his predecessors have in the last 30. Finally there will be a constitutionalist majority on the SCOTUS. Dems should be crying about RBG, if they didn't want change on the court they should've talked her into retiring while Obama was still in office.
Atleast there will be three Trump SCOTUS to help keep the checks and balances. The SCOTUS fight is going to make everybody stand up and take notice. Schumer said everything is on the table including things like turning DC/Puerto Rico into states. I cant imagine moderate Dems/Independents voting for Biden knowing crazy things like these are possibilities. If the Dems go off of the deep end like they did in the Cavanaugh hearings then Trump will win re-election. The SCOTUS hearings will just be a reminder to the electorate of just how looney the far left wing of the Dem party is.
Prepare yourself, they're going to vote on a new Justice before the election. Some things are more important than elections. I actually think the confirmation hearings will help the GOP.
It was actually Buttigieg’s plan, although IIRC Yang later endorsed it as well. The Democrats Discover the Supreme Court Pete Buttigieg’s endorsement of a court-packing plan exemplifies the high court’s journey from afterthought to central concern among progressives. Pete Buttigieg’s announcement of a Supreme Court–packing plan is surprising in ways both small and large. The surprise comes less from the specifics of the proposal than from its circumstances. Buttigieg has been conspicuously cautious about policy initiatives, so his decision to center a sweeping revamp of the high court represents an unusually bold maneuver for the South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s presidential campaign. Moreover, the rollout exemplifies how the Supreme Court, once a somewhat tangential concern for many Democrats, has moved to the center of the agenda in the Trump era. The details of Buttigieg’s plan are interesting in an academic sense, though unlikely to really set the parameters for any rearrangement of the Court. Based on a forthcoming paper by two law professors, his plan would expand the Court from nine justices to 15, five of them Democrats, five Republicans, and five unaffiliated. NBC’s Josh Lederman explains that those last five would be chosen from federal courts by the 10 partisan justices: The plan seems to contain a key contradiction. It eschews the treasured pretense that the Court is above, or at least outside, politics—a pretense that, as I wrote when Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed in 2018, the public seems to buy into less and less. The Buttigieg plan reifies this shift, yet it also assumes that nonpartisan, mutually agreeable judges exist. It’s an aggressively technocratic proposal for an ideological problem, in keeping with Buttigieg’s sales pitch as a reasonable man and his past work at McKinsey. Maybe it’s no surprise that former Representative Beto O’Rourke, another handsome young man running a moderate campaign, has also expressed interest in the same general Court-packing plan. Court packing is not quite so unprecedented as its opponents would have the public believe. (In 1866, the Senate reduced the Court from 10 justices to seven as a swipe at President Andrew Johnson, then boosted it back to nine when Ulysses Grant replaced Johnson— a maneuver that might make even current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blush.) It is, however, a curious cause for the Democratic Party to take up at the same time that it is railing against Donald Trump for his destruction of long-standing political norms. Nonetheless, and despite the technocratic bent of the 15-justice plan, the fact that Buttigieg and O’Rourke, two cautious candidates with vague policy platforms, have aligned themselves with it shows how central the Court has become to Democratic voters. For both men, it’s a means of offering an apparently bold policy proposal that will be relatively uncontroversial among primary voters. As recently as the 2016 election, the existing Supreme Court was not at the center of Democratic Party politics, to say nothing of Court-packing schemes. According to Pew, 62 percent of Democrats called the Court “very important” to their voting in the election—which sounds impressive, but it placed behind gun policy, Social Security, and the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, to name a few other issues. This was true even though the election was held as McConnell was blocking a confirmation process for Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee to a seat on the Court. In large part, Democrats assumed that Hillary Clinton would win, and then either Garland or a new appointee of Clinton’s would join the Court. Clinton spoke about the importance of some Supreme Court decisions—calling, for example, for the reversal of the campaign-finance case Citizens United—but it wasn’t at the heart of her campaign, or of Bernie Sanders’s. It was a different story on the Republican side of things. Donald Trump promised to nominate conservative judges to the bench, even releasing a short list of possible nominees. Speaking to conservatives who remained uncomfortable with him, Trump repeatedly reminded them of the importance of the Court, an assurance that began to seem like a taunt by the end of the campaign. But Trump was right. The Court was of such importance to these voters that they held their nose and voted for him. It has paid off for both sides: Trump has indeed named judges that conservatives love, and they have rewarded him with strong support, including from some erstwhile never Trumpers. Democrats have taken notice. The appointment of two young, very conservative justices (Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch) in Trump’s first two years, and especially the messy fight over Kavanaugh’s confirmation, energized progressives. By September 2018, 81 percent of Democrats named the Court as a very important voting issue, an amazing 19 percent rise from two years earlier. Events since then have helped cement the Court’s place in Democratic fears. A series of states have instituted strict abortion limitations that seem designed to test whether the newly conservative Court is ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, leading Democratic candidates to leap to defend abortion rights in any way possible. Beyond that, many of the major items on Democratic wishlists are likely to be dead on arrival in the Roberts Court as currently constituted. From voting rights to campaign-finance reform and health-care overhauls to the Green New Deal, a new Democratic president faces the real prospect of a Court blowing big holes in any policy proposal even if Congress is Democratically controlled. (Just ask Obama about the Affordable Care Act.) Changes to the Court are a possible prerequisite to any other major legislation, so it stands to reason that Democratic presidential hopefuls would pursue them, and it makes sense that Democratic voters would take new interest in the Court. Back on the right side of the aisle, some conservatives worry that by cementing a conservative majority for the foreseeable future, Republicans may risk complacency among voters. It’s unclear what would happen if the Court did overturn or substantially undermine Roe before the next election: Would the victory energize conservatives? Or would they be even more complacent, while liberals were fired up? Either way, a genuine, widespread movement among Democrats to pack the Court and eliminate that generational conservative majority could become a major motivator for the party—but it might re-enliven Republican voters’ focus on the Court, too.
More to have damaged this country than ever before is all he has done. Wake up! There is no same reason to think he's helped anyone making less than a million dollars a year.
I don't agree with your reasoning here. If they are voted out there last saving grace is to get another SCJ on the bench, they can do that and still turn on Trump. Those senators actually believe another conservative on the bench is a good thing and it will go along way to getting jobs post senate.
Dude this is really uncalled for. I am in agreement with RJ and it took no slide rule to get there. Lets just say it's laughable that you equating stacking the court as some kind of reform and then complaining about too many Right wing federalist types being on the court. I guess I am flying with the shitbirds.
I think that they have the votes to get a justice through. However, hypothetically if the vulnerable Republicans like Collins lose... they may decide to go against Trump and McConnell as there will be no real political consequences. They cannot be happy with how McConnell and Graham and Trump have essentially bullied them to do particular things.
I don't see them voting against the nominee but I could see them leveraging their vote to get the Justice they really want and not some ideologue. I don't see how voting against would be in their best interest after leaving politics, thats a black mark in their circles.
The Mueller investigation actually made money. The report itself might've cost up to $35 million but it mad money in fines and asset forfeiture with $42 million from Manafort alone. https://time.com/5557693/mueller-report-cost/ There were also the 34 individuals and businesses indicted with 9 convictions.
Moderate Democrats and independents might not like the idea of stacking the courts but they certainly don't like the idea of McConnell and Trump et al railroading another Justice and going back on what they said before. In the words of Lindsey Graham when he said he would not agree to appointing a Justice in the last year of Trump's first term, "you can use my words against me."
If you say so. Show me the money they made after selling it off and where the money went and we can talk. Not to mention time is money and the House and Senate were both tied up with this for months. Meanwhile the Covid-19 was beginning to take a foot hold and Congress was focused on Trumping up charges on Guys/Ladies like Page/Manafort/Stone/Flynn/McFarland. A great misuse of time and resources. Mueller who was in bed with Comey came out with his report. It said there was no proof of Russian Collusion. Just accept it for what it is and move on.
