You already have one: is the Democratic party. What is not present in USA is a “socialist” party with progressive ideas. The Republican Party is on par with Fratelli d’Italia or Alternative für Deutschland, with some member on Forza Nuova.
I think that the USA should move to a different electoral system, like a second ballot system for president, senate and parliament members, so more than two parties could emerge.
“Thowing out the voting rights act when it has worked and is continuing to work is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Kind of like stopping a national quarantine shutdown because no one seemed to be getting sick.
the points you raise are why i used the subjunctive mood in the sentence you quote.
The changing demographics are helping already, but they will be a gamechanger in 20 years or so when white people make up only half the population instead of two-thirds.
My emphasis was less on the “old” part and more on the “white” part. I think those demographic figures look pretty good when you account for the fact that POC will represent a larger and larger proportion of the US population. If those numbers holds when POC are a majority, there might just be hope for America yet.
She may well be regressive and awful - but if the Slate article is the best material that can be raised against her then it’s awfully thin.
Faced with two plausible readings of a law, fact, or precedent, Barrett always seems to choose the harsher, stingier interpretation. Can job applicants sue employers whose policies have a disproportionately deleterious impact on older people? Barrett said no.
As the linked case report shows (and good on Slate for linking them) that decision was fairly straightforward given that the relevant provision in the Act in question specifically dealt with ‘employees’. Other provisions dealt with applicants but they weren’t raised for consideration because the claimant withdrew his claim under that provision - presumably because he wanted to argue the validity/scope of the provision dealing with ‘employees’.
No normally functioning court was ever going to come to a different conclusion and no sensible attorney would expect them to. It’s the sort of case you would only bring if you have a pot of money and want to mount a fundamental attack on the validity of a certain statute - you bring claims you know judges will have to reject so that you can appeal them up the chain. Like baking cakes for gay people for example.
Should courts halt the deportation of an immigrant who faced torture at home? Barrett said no
This wasn’t the question to be determined. The article makes it sound like a case on the principle of whether courts should generally intervene or have the power to intervene. It wasn’t. It was specifically about whether the judge who did have the power to intervene was right to decide not to in this specific case. Specifically it was about whether the evidence entitled the judge to decide that the claimant’s evidence was not credible. Since judges are (rightly) given huge latitude in how they weigh evidence, it’s hardly surprising that the appeal court declined to interfere.
Whether one agrees with that or not, it was certainly not a decision that courts should not intervene to prevent asylum claimants being returned to be tortured.
Should they shield prisoners from unjustified violence by correctional officers? Barrett said no
This one perhaps gets closest. Here the lower court granted summary judgment dismissing prisoners’ claims following their having been injured when prison officers fired shotguns during/after a fight in the mess hall.
The majority in the appeal court overturned that and allowed the case to proceed to be heard on the merits. Barrett dissented arguing that the required test for excessive force in cases between prison officers and inmates is whether the force was used “in good faith effort to maintain or restore discipline or maliciously and sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm” with citations of relevant caselaw to support that.
On that argument, she said, the plaintiffs’ case had to fail because they had not even attempted to argue that the prison officers deliberately intended to harm the claimants (or any of the prisoners).
That is arguably going overboard since apparently there was at least one line in the claim which could be construed as a claim that the officers might deliberately have aimed at the ceiling in the hope that buckshot would ricochet and harm inmates and that they therefore did not aim at the ‘shotbox’ installed in the ceiling to try to reduce the risk of that happening.
Unfortunately, the claimants main argument was that the defendants must have aimed directly at the claimants deliberately intending to hit them because the ceiling was made out of material that would make a ricochet very unlikely. In Barrett’s view that claim so fundamentally undermined any possible assertion that the officers deliberately intended to richochet off the ceiling.
The lower court ruled against the claim that the prison officers deliberately shot at the claimants and the claimants did not try to appeal that. The majority on the appeal decided that the deliberate ricochet argument at least deserved to be heard and therefore set aside the default judgment.
Personally I think that was probably right but then I’ve never seen a case where summary judgment one way or the other would be appropriate apart from ones where someone got their law fundamentally wrong or claimed facts which simply cannot be true or are necessarily contradicted by the same evidence.
Should minors be allowed to terminate a pregnancy without telling their parents if a judge has found that they’re mature enough to make the decision? Barrett said no.
This one really puzzles me. It was an appeal about an injunction where there was a request to rehear a case in front of a full panel of judges. Barrett said it should be reheard, the majority said that there was no point rehearing it because it wouldn’t get any better by having more judges argue about it. It was inevitably going to be appealed so should march on its way up the chain of courts unimpeded.
The decision said absollutely nothing about the merits of the claim.
Should women be permitted to obtain an abortion upon discovering a severe fetal abnormality? Barrett said no.
Here again, Barrett may well have said no but not in this decision. Again this was a request to have a panel decision reheard by the full court where Barrett agreed with the minority that it should be reheard by the full court. The majority again took the pragmatic approach that only the Supreme Court could settle the issue so why waste time and bore the Supreme Court Justices with the opinions of lower judges (which seems to show a distressing lack of faith in one’s own abilities as a judge but hey). Rather oddly the majority also stated that basis on why the case was decided by the panel was in fact wrong because the claimants decided to base their claim on the wrong standard.
In those circumstances arguing for a rehearing doesn’t seem massively odd or cruel.
As I say she may well be a dreadful prospect bent on all of the things the article accuses her of but the choice of cases just doesn’t back that up.
It’s precisely the kind of article that is counterproductive. Any one who bothers to do the reading (and ok, who is going to do that …) will quickly find out that the dire claims are not supported by the evidence the author chose to present. From which the assumption that there was no better evidence swiftly follows. Or the assumption that the writer is incompetent in which case why should we trust their argument?
i’ll place this here–
perhaps i can get at what puzzles you. by voting to schedule a rehearing en banc barrett and the four other dissenting judges knew that such a rehearing would require weeks to reschedule. weeks during which the pregnant minor would remain pregnant. by voting for the rehearing, barrett et al. were trying to run out the clock so that the minor would be forced to give birth because the laws of indiana and kentucky impose sharp limits on a female’s ability to get an abortion once the pregnancy proceeds past a certain number of weeks.
the judges joining her in the dissent are known as some of the most rabidly forced-birth judges currently on the bench and that’s saying something.
does that clarify things for you?
It does. Thank you. I should have realised the timing issue.
You are overlooking an important point of the republican view: Rules are for other people. She thinks other women need to be stomped down and have their rights stripped away. But those special people like herself are god’s specially chosen people, not subject to being held to the same standards.
She’s also popped out 7 kids already, so clearly not completely ignoring the values of the sect.
the republicans are already a minority and they are still running the country ( into the ground. )
case in point: donald trump, the often bankrupted, racist, serial assaulter of women didn’t get the majority of votes by a long shot and yet he’s president and gets to pick three supreme court judges and gets to fill a significant portion of federal judgeships… many of those judges who are white, youngish, conservatives happy to remake the country in their image rather than represent the people.
being in the majority doesn’t necessarily get you anything. the rule of law is supposed to mitigate some of the power disparity between majority and minority groups… but the law has to acknowledge that disparity to disrupt it.
that requires work, not simply time.
They are already the minority, yes, but my original point was that they are going to become an even smaller minority in the not-too-distant future simply due to changing demographics. I do not mean to suggest that we simply wait and not do the hard work that it takes now. I was merely trying to explain the smash-and-grab, take-no-prisoners approach to governing that they are taking now. They know that the day will come when no amount of cheating will be enough to win them elections, so they are trying to run the country into the ground while they still can and keep it there for as long as possible, until long after they themselves are dead.
Back in the day, in Analog magazine, there was a a clever essay on Heinlein’s Christian theocracy in If This Goes On—, where President and First Prophet Nehemiah Scudder is elected in 2012.
The essay was mainly about how there’s no way the current (then) Supreme Court would have allowed it, and then sets out a series of Minimum Necessary Changes over the decades to trip the court.
I feel like we’re living in someone else’s essay now.
“And then, with Justice Merrick Garland never making it to the bench, the stage is set for a new President to fill his place with a conservative instead. Justice Kennedy retires on schedule, and is replaced with another conservative; no change there. But then, what if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her long battle with cancer, dies before the election rather than after?”
Shitty essay!
There are 9 of us.
Clearly, your mom was a broodmare… much like my grandmother, with her 6 kids… /s
Interesting deep dive into her writings:
She has some… interesting… points of view.
Brown v. Board of Education is the most incendiary one, but she mentions arguments that West Virginia was invalidly admitted, that the 14th Amendment wasn’t properly ratified, that paper money is unconstitutional, and so forth. She doesn’t say she thinks they ought to be overruled — and indeed suggests that the point is moot in most cases as these issues would never come before the Court — but I think even putting up the examples has raised hackles.
Dems already abandoning the pretence that they’ll do anything meaningful to block RBG’s replacement:
So much for those arrows in Pelosi’s quiver.
I mean, we’ve got a whole thread of impeachable offenses they can draw from. Just start impeaching the muthafucka tomorrow, and keep piling it on until November. They won’t run out of charges in a little over a month. Heck, they could keep that going until at least Thanksgiving.
You’d think.
Its almost as if Dem leadership is comprised of a bunch of comfortable rich fucks who think catastrophe isn’t going to hit them, so why the hell should they really care if the U.S. keeps lurching rightward.
Edit:
