One is that if some left-wing morons hadn't voted for Ralph Nader in New Hampshire, Al Gore would have had 270 electoral votes and Florida wouldn't have mattered. If Gore is president, do we get Alito? Of course not.
Another is that Alito was, of course, a Bush appointee. Often justices seem much more liberal or conservative than when they came on the court or than the president who appointed them, but it's truer that the issues themselves change. FDR wanted justices who would uphold the New Deal. He got them. But when it came time to deal with threats to civil liberties, they divided.
But Alito is not different from the administrations from which he emerged. As a Reaganite, he was tied to the same ideology. Likewise, lest we forget, beyond Iraq and screwing up 9/11, the Bush administration believed in "signing statements" and a "unitary executive." Alito is just another republican.
Finally, I always use lower-case because Lincoln was a Republican. There's a difference. It would be more accurate to call today's republicans Copperheads or Confederates.
And that is really what tore it for me. Not because I expected Poppy to appoint a liberal (and he didn't--David Souter was a moderate justice; the last liberal justice was indeed Thurgood Marshall). Rather, unlike his son, he was smart enough to know better when he described the Long Dong Silver wannabe as the most qualified person.
It wasn't just the spoiler effects of Nader, Michael, it was also the sexual misconduct of Clinton (which shouldn't even been brought to the Nation's attention, except Newt Gingrich forced it. Sexual morality (unless force or minors are involved) is no ones business and has nothing to do with running the government). That apparently turned a lot of voters off and reflected unfavorably on Gore (like he could have intervened?)
Actually, Clinton by 1990 was quite popular again, and Gore's mistake was he listened to the moralizing of his wife and his running mate Joe Lieberman and distanced himself from the popular Clinton (who was certainly more popular than he was). Vote count or not, Al Gore was why the election was so close when it shouldn't have been.
Rove’s evil hand had been cheating, plotting, and scheming since foisting W on Texas in 1994. He also turned most churches into arms of the Repub party on 2004. An evil bastard from the git go.
I think you mean 2000, Clinton was first elected in 1992. He was always popular. Gingrich going after him on sexual immorality was a joke, as I recall Newt's wife left him for screwing around. I have never thought coitus had anything to do with ability to lead.
My problem was I actually liked Al Gore, his climate science, although he was a lawyer, was well founded. And of course the real reason he lost was soley due to the stupid electoral college. And the electoral college was due to the snobbish framers of the Constitution who were convinced that only propertied (landed) educated gentlemen were capable of running the country. By the time we, the people, accepted what a fallacy that was it was too late. The small (by population) States enjoyed their only source of power for a Constitutional Amendment to pass. (we couldn't even pass the toothless 28th Amendment that only said there were no legal differences between the rights of the genders)
I thought the SC chose Bush, the people certainly didn’t. And Newt is still a self-righteous pig. Sorry to smear pigs with that comment, but I once thought he was as low as they could go. Silly me.
He had sufficient electoral college votes with Florida to give him the Presidency and yes, the Supreme Court by a count of 5 to 4 stopped the vote count if Florida, thereby giving the Presidency to GW Bush. The usual 5 Republican to 4 Democrats. I really think we need a better way of appointing ALL Federal Judges both Supreme and Inferior.
We had better stop letting repubs pull fast ones on us, the dirty tricksters have more evil up their sleeves than Dems are usually aware of. Lara Trump is fond of saying “We won’t back down.” Well, Dems should never again. Dem lawyers need to get more “creative.” The gall of chump and his cult knows no bounds.
Oh, yes, and Gore himself having his issues. But Clinton remained popular with the public. Apropos of a great story in Politico about how The New York Times won't admit it's shivving Joe Biden because nepo baby AG Sulzberger is mad that he won't give them an interview, Frank Bruni was so far up W's butt in 2000 that if he had sneezed, Bush would have had a religious experience. A lot of factors worked against Gore including that, in Florida, Democrats were their usual selves, bringing pillows to a knife fight.
I want to patent a line of mine, in honor of Michelle Obama: When they go low, we ... should castrate them with a rusty, unsharpened knife, without anesthesia.
Agreed. Tom. Thanks for the excerpts from Lincoln, I hadn't read those before.
Along with the fact that The Supreme Court Justices are not immune, is another fact; nowhere in Article 3 does it say, or even suggest, that Supreme Court Justices must be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. That's just the way we've always done it, does not imply we must continue. I just re-read Article 3 to make sure I'm correct, I am. Frankly, I think it's a shitty way to select what should be the most important legal experts in the land. Better we find legal experts who know the Constitution at least as well as I do. Have had a solid and respected career in the law. Are willing to work for $278,000 (or whatever the salary is at the time) per year plus benefits and expenses. We also need a universal code of ethics that applies to all public servants - and yes, in a democratic, representative, republic like ours, even the president is a public servant (something that slipped the attention of Nixon, Reagan, and Trump).
This is why I participate in phone banks (when I can stomach it -- it's something I actually detest doing) and write post cards when I can't. It doesn't feel like anywhere near enough, but it's what I can do.
Professor Timothy Snyder suggested in one of his blog posts, I may have found it here, that we all have to do something - every one of us. I'm too old and decrepit to march in protest any more, and my experiences with phone banking, though with some rewards, was tedious. So I have taken up Prof Snyder's suggestion of writing letters to the editor. I try not to be too preachy and start them with something historical so the morons I want to read it don't skip it after one line. And it's fun.
I remember, sometime in the Reagan years, somebody presenting himself as affiliated with the Federalist Society saying that the word "democracy" doesn't appear in the Constitution, so the founders didn't create a democracy, simply a republic. I'm pretty sure I heard that idea more than once, but even if I only heard it twice, it had an outsized effect on me because I thought it was a dangerous proposition, not the least for its bald-faced disingenuousness. If the assembly instructions for a Ford F150 don't contain the phrase "pickup truck," does that mean a Ford F-150 isn't a pickup truck? The founders created a set of assembly instructions for a democratic republic. Take democracy out of the picture and you have something outside the boundaries of the founders' constitutional vision. The comments from Alito, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were an amplification of that disingenuous democracy-erasing Federalist Society proposition I first heard in the 80s. And they would have you believe that only their opinions matter. Time to add some new seats to the bench. Make some noise with your people in Congress.
Reading Lincoln’s words and then comparing his oratory with TFG’s, one is struck by just how far the intellectual level in our political discourse has fallen. Lincoln uses lofty, serious language, while trump is about at a level of a second grader’s vocabulary and diction at best (my apologies to all second graders). Lincoln was self taught, living a hardscrabble life on the frontier while trump supposedly had access to fine schools and universities while living a life of luxury and look how each turned out. What a complete comedown of the GOP, from the party of Lincoln to the tribalism of trump when TFG is the best they have to offer…and 40% of the electorate support that offering.
Will our votes even matter by November? The cretins are busy with cheating, passing laws to make votes irrelevant, placing the true believers in positions of election “integrity,” and every dirty trick that has ever been conceived by the “wannabes.” In Texas, the takeover is practically a done deal. Lawsuits will abound. The SC will decide…
We have to assume they will matter- but Bush v Gore is lurking in the shadows. I'd put nothing by the Republican traitors on the 'Court' and elsewhere.
Lincoln puts it like this: “-let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty.” The 6 Supremes may not worry about losing THEIR liberty, but Trump or any Republican president will promote more of the global warming catastrophe which their descendants will have to face.
Brilliant. To destroy her enemies and preserve our Constitution is exactly what must be done in every way necessary to end these treasonous bastards where they stand.
For months before October 7th Israelis were in the streets protesting Netanyahu's plan to hobble Israel's Supreme Court and hand over more power to him and his ultra conservative cohorts. Here the SCOTUS maga fanboy club seems delighted to cede their role without a whimper and step aside for the formation of Trump's Revenge Ranger Units. They are indeed the Feckless Five.
Kurtz really hit the nail on the head. One had a visceral reaction to the hypos and/or the responses. It may not have been decorous but at several points I would have thought that an appropriate interjection would have been,”WTF?” And I’m bothered that no justice said that.
"If what happened today is allowed to stand, it will be very easy for historians such as I to date the Fall of the American Republic with accuracy: April 25, 2024.” Truth.
A couple of things.
One is that if some left-wing morons hadn't voted for Ralph Nader in New Hampshire, Al Gore would have had 270 electoral votes and Florida wouldn't have mattered. If Gore is president, do we get Alito? Of course not.
Another is that Alito was, of course, a Bush appointee. Often justices seem much more liberal or conservative than when they came on the court or than the president who appointed them, but it's truer that the issues themselves change. FDR wanted justices who would uphold the New Deal. He got them. But when it came time to deal with threats to civil liberties, they divided.
But Alito is not different from the administrations from which he emerged. As a Reaganite, he was tied to the same ideology. Likewise, lest we forget, beyond Iraq and screwing up 9/11, the Bush administration believed in "signing statements" and a "unitary executive." Alito is just another republican.
Finally, I always use lower-case because Lincoln was a Republican. There's a difference. It would be more accurate to call today's republicans Copperheads or Confederates.
And papa bush gave us Clarence the grifter!
As "payback" for Thurgood Marshall.
And that is really what tore it for me. Not because I expected Poppy to appoint a liberal (and he didn't--David Souter was a moderate justice; the last liberal justice was indeed Thurgood Marshall). Rather, unlike his son, he was smart enough to know better when he described the Long Dong Silver wannabe as the most qualified person.
I like “copperheads.” Vipers is what they are
They also were Lincoln's enemies, or "the fire in the rear," as he put it in those innocent times.
It wasn't just the spoiler effects of Nader, Michael, it was also the sexual misconduct of Clinton (which shouldn't even been brought to the Nation's attention, except Newt Gingrich forced it. Sexual morality (unless force or minors are involved) is no ones business and has nothing to do with running the government). That apparently turned a lot of voters off and reflected unfavorably on Gore (like he could have intervened?)
Actually, Clinton by 1990 was quite popular again, and Gore's mistake was he listened to the moralizing of his wife and his running mate Joe Lieberman and distanced himself from the popular Clinton (who was certainly more popular than he was). Vote count or not, Al Gore was why the election was so close when it shouldn't have been.
Rove’s evil hand had been cheating, plotting, and scheming since foisting W on Texas in 1994. He also turned most churches into arms of the Repub party on 2004. An evil bastard from the git go.
I think you mean 2000, Clinton was first elected in 1992. He was always popular. Gingrich going after him on sexual immorality was a joke, as I recall Newt's wife left him for screwing around. I have never thought coitus had anything to do with ability to lead.
My problem was I actually liked Al Gore, his climate science, although he was a lawyer, was well founded. And of course the real reason he lost was soley due to the stupid electoral college. And the electoral college was due to the snobbish framers of the Constitution who were convinced that only propertied (landed) educated gentlemen were capable of running the country. By the time we, the people, accepted what a fallacy that was it was too late. The small (by population) States enjoyed their only source of power for a Constitutional Amendment to pass. (we couldn't even pass the toothless 28th Amendment that only said there were no legal differences between the rights of the genders)
I thought the SC chose Bush, the people certainly didn’t. And Newt is still a self-righteous pig. Sorry to smear pigs with that comment, but I once thought he was as low as they could go. Silly me.
He had sufficient electoral college votes with Florida to give him the Presidency and yes, the Supreme Court by a count of 5 to 4 stopped the vote count if Florida, thereby giving the Presidency to GW Bush. The usual 5 Republican to 4 Democrats. I really think we need a better way of appointing ALL Federal Judges both Supreme and Inferior.
We had better stop letting repubs pull fast ones on us, the dirty tricksters have more evil up their sleeves than Dems are usually aware of. Lara Trump is fond of saying “We won’t back down.” Well, Dems should never again. Dem lawyers need to get more “creative.” The gall of chump and his cult knows no bounds.
Recall he didn’t carry his home state!
Oh, yes, and Gore himself having his issues. But Clinton remained popular with the public. Apropos of a great story in Politico about how The New York Times won't admit it's shivving Joe Biden because nepo baby AG Sulzberger is mad that he won't give them an interview, Frank Bruni was so far up W's butt in 2000 that if he had sneezed, Bush would have had a religious experience. A lot of factors worked against Gore including that, in Florida, Democrats were their usual selves, bringing pillows to a knife fight.
LOL, Agreed! Love your description of us Democrats.
I want to patent a line of mine, in honor of Michelle Obama: When they go low, we ... should castrate them with a rusty, unsharpened knife, without anesthesia.
Oh, I love that. But what if the criminal is female? LOL
Ha! I'd better quit while I'm behind. :)
And there are plenty….
Agreed. Tom. Thanks for the excerpts from Lincoln, I hadn't read those before.
Along with the fact that The Supreme Court Justices are not immune, is another fact; nowhere in Article 3 does it say, or even suggest, that Supreme Court Justices must be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. That's just the way we've always done it, does not imply we must continue. I just re-read Article 3 to make sure I'm correct, I am. Frankly, I think it's a shitty way to select what should be the most important legal experts in the land. Better we find legal experts who know the Constitution at least as well as I do. Have had a solid and respected career in the law. Are willing to work for $278,000 (or whatever the salary is at the time) per year plus benefits and expenses. We also need a universal code of ethics that applies to all public servants - and yes, in a democratic, representative, republic like ours, even the president is a public servant (something that slipped the attention of Nixon, Reagan, and Trump).
Fay, you just made a whole raft of superb points. Well done!
Don't forget Bush 'The Constitution is just a scrap of paper' Jr.
I hadn't heard that quote before. Who was Jr.?
Bush Jr, apparently
Thanks
This is why I participate in phone banks (when I can stomach it -- it's something I actually detest doing) and write post cards when I can't. It doesn't feel like anywhere near enough, but it's what I can do.
If everyone does as much as they can, it will be "enough."
That is the hope -- the thing with feathers . . .
Professor Timothy Snyder suggested in one of his blog posts, I may have found it here, that we all have to do something - every one of us. I'm too old and decrepit to march in protest any more, and my experiences with phone banking, though with some rewards, was tedious. So I have taken up Prof Snyder's suggestion of writing letters to the editor. I try not to be too preachy and start them with something historical so the morons I want to read it don't skip it after one line. And it's fun.
I remember, sometime in the Reagan years, somebody presenting himself as affiliated with the Federalist Society saying that the word "democracy" doesn't appear in the Constitution, so the founders didn't create a democracy, simply a republic. I'm pretty sure I heard that idea more than once, but even if I only heard it twice, it had an outsized effect on me because I thought it was a dangerous proposition, not the least for its bald-faced disingenuousness. If the assembly instructions for a Ford F150 don't contain the phrase "pickup truck," does that mean a Ford F-150 isn't a pickup truck? The founders created a set of assembly instructions for a democratic republic. Take democracy out of the picture and you have something outside the boundaries of the founders' constitutional vision. The comments from Alito, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were an amplification of that disingenuous democracy-erasing Federalist Society proposition I first heard in the 80s. And they would have you believe that only their opinions matter. Time to add some new seats to the bench. Make some noise with your people in Congress.
Reading Lincoln’s words and then comparing his oratory with TFG’s, one is struck by just how far the intellectual level in our political discourse has fallen. Lincoln uses lofty, serious language, while trump is about at a level of a second grader’s vocabulary and diction at best (my apologies to all second graders). Lincoln was self taught, living a hardscrabble life on the frontier while trump supposedly had access to fine schools and universities while living a life of luxury and look how each turned out. What a complete comedown of the GOP, from the party of Lincoln to the tribalism of trump when TFG is the best they have to offer…and 40% of the electorate support that offering.
Mind-boggling. An omen for what is to come, unless we can “woke” up enough of our fellow voters.
Will our votes even matter by November? The cretins are busy with cheating, passing laws to make votes irrelevant, placing the true believers in positions of election “integrity,” and every dirty trick that has ever been conceived by the “wannabes.” In Texas, the takeover is practically a done deal. Lawsuits will abound. The SC will decide…
We have to assume they will matter- but Bush v Gore is lurking in the shadows. I'd put nothing by the Republican traitors on the 'Court' and elsewhere.
I’m leery of assuming much of anything.
Lincoln puts it like this: “-let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty.” The 6 Supremes may not worry about losing THEIR liberty, but Trump or any Republican president will promote more of the global warming catastrophe which their descendants will have to face.
I have sent this one to my 70-plus email list, telling them that it's a must read for the obvious reasons. Thanks TC, for a superb column.
Ah Newt that compassionate creep who ask for divorce from a wife battling cancer! Newt is a newt!
You can take the boy out of the trailer park (he was raised in one) but it's hard to take the trailr park out of the boy.
From the eloquence of Lincoln the country is faced with an assault on the English language by the amoral orange creature!
Brilliant. To destroy her enemies and preserve our Constitution is exactly what must be done in every way necessary to end these treasonous bastards where they stand.
For months before October 7th Israelis were in the streets protesting Netanyahu's plan to hobble Israel's Supreme Court and hand over more power to him and his ultra conservative cohorts. Here the SCOTUS maga fanboy club seems delighted to cede their role without a whimper and step aside for the formation of Trump's Revenge Ranger Units. They are indeed the Feckless Five.
So wish all the protests were against Netanyahu instead of everybody but…
Bravo Tom! Bravo!
Kurtz really hit the nail on the head. One had a visceral reaction to the hypos and/or the responses. It may not have been decorous but at several points I would have thought that an appropriate interjection would have been,”WTF?” And I’m bothered that no justice said that.
"If what happened today is allowed to stand, it will be very easy for historians such as I to date the Fall of the American Republic with accuracy: April 25, 2024.” Truth.