GOP had 54-member majority in 2016, and an 11-9 majority on Judiciary Committee.
Graham/Flake woulda felt compelled to approve an Obama nom (add Hatch for Garland), and send to floor.
Kirk, Collins, Murkowski woulda added their votes to confirm.
Dems woulda turned court left.
McConnell stepped in with his made-up principle to protect his members from the consequences of their prior commitments that they themselves wanted to abandon (but on their own had no good reason to) when the balance of the Court for a generation was finally at stake.
Democrats, for their part, demanded hearings and a vote for Obama's nominee BECAUSE THEY KNEW THEY HAD THE VOTES to turn the court solidly liberal for the first time since 1969.
It's why RBG joined the #WeNeedNine bandwagon, too
The roles are reversed in 2020 because Republicans have the votes to confirm Trump's nominee to finally complete their own mission, begun in 1969, to get a solidly conservative SCOTUS majority that obviates any wobbly vote....and Democrats don't have the votes to stop it.
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Jackson came straight out of the blocks in October 2022 to give full weight to the proper understanding of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Amendments as keys to our ensuring a robust multiracial democracy today:
Here’s the Colorado Republican Party’s SCOTUS petition via its lawyers, who redacted their generally public contact info even though SCOTUS def won’t redact when it soon uploads the petition to the docket page. media.aclj.org/pdf/Colorado-R…
No noted dissents. Maybe libs trust that CADC will hand down its decision right after 1/9 oral args so to get whole resolved in time for 3/4 trial date?
Or maybe no sense of urgency anymore now that they’ll be deciding as late as June whether half of Smith’s charges against Trump can actually stand
2nd Circuit, sitting en banc, finds that non-transgender female high school athletes have standing to sue Connecticut for Title IX sex discrimination over the state's inclusion of transgender female athletes in track and field competitions. ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isys…
CA2 says if the state made trans girls compete with boys, and "transgender girls alleged that such a policy discriminated against them on the basis of sex and deprived them of publicly recognized titles and placements, they too would have standing to bring a Title IX claim."
"On remand, the district court should assess in the first instance whether Plaintiffs’ complaint states a claim for a violation of Title IX."
IOW: now that you can sue, you have to prove you actually have a case.
Translation: Sure we are openly defying a 5-4 SCOTUS ruling but we think Justice Kavanaugh will flip his vote if we come back at him with the exact argument he told us to make when he sided against us last time
Alabama’s gonna “raise that temporal argument” and hope Kavanaugh thinks that the Voting Rights Act no longer should authorize “race-based redistricting.”
Question is whether Kav left that loaded gun out for immediate use or for some years from now.
The three-judge district court opinion smacking down Alabama’s defiance contained a section on Kavanaugh’s concurrence to show why Alabama must lose but completely ignored the part where Kav wrote how Alabama could have won—and may yet still win—his vote s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2393…