Moreover, the Warren Court of the 50s did not have a liberal median vote. What Scot Powe calls "History's Warren Court" didn't happen until Frankfurter retired in 1962. The Warren Court ALWAYS represented a clear popular governing majority.
As Mark Graber once wrote, an entire generation of scholars have written about the Warren Court as if Barry Goldwater won a landslide in 1964
What Republicans are trying to do now -- install a Court majority to stop opposition majorities from governing for the foreseeable future -- has little precedent in American history, and EVERY TIME it's happened has precipitated a constitutional crisis lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/07/thomas…
Republicans had a chance to maintain a 5-4 majority led by a median vote who understands that you occasionally have to fold the case hand so it won't be too obvious, and instead they're playing maximalist constitutional hardball while claiming it's back to "but muh norms" in 2021
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
And, of course, it was also the consensus understanding of the Reconstruction Congress that federal courts should allow popular majorities to govern and if they didn't the use of Article III powers to discipline the courts was appropriate lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/07/thomas…
For Dems to expand the Court in 2021 would be consistent with historical norms, not a departure. There are zero (0) cases in American history of a minority faction successfully using the Supreme Court to prevent a majority coalition from governing: lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/10/there-…
Buried toward the end of the (excellent) Baker and Haberman dispatch from Trump’s disease-ridden bunker is this rather remarkable tacit concession lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/10/nyt-po…
The next step would be perhaps to assess WHY the Podesta emails ended up burying a objectively far more important story about Trump, but...there does some to be an emerging internal consensus that the political press blew it in 2016 wired.com/story/opinion-…
Amy Chozick deserves more credit than she's received for openly questioning why the media decided to make themselves collaborators with a ratfucking operation. She got a lot of flak from defensive colleagues at the time but she was right. lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/04/wikile…
Note as well that there is no way for the majority of Michigan citizens who support Whitmer's (perfectly lawful) orders to respond, because Michigan's legislature is gerrymandered to be permanently controlled by the state's Republican minority, with John Roberts's approval
And the invocation of long-discredited and dormant doctrines to obstruct state power *in the context of a pandemic* is particularly frightening. These judges are literally more reactionary than the Supreme Court of the Lochner era. supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/…
I mean, this is going to be a DISASTER. Congressional Dems were willing to pass a robust stimulus contrary to their electoral interests because of how much avoidable misery Trump and McConnell are determined to inflict on the country out of pure nihilistic spite
Also this REALLY should end any question at all about whether the filibuster needs to go. If Dems get the trifecta a COVID relief bill should be on Biden's desk by January 25th.
Pelosi: Passes $3 trillion in stimulus funding
Senate Republicans: cannot even agree with themselves on a counter-offer
Trump: "That's it, no stimulus."
Pro-Trump-from-the-"left" galaxy-brained take: "Stimulus talks collapsed because of Pelosi."
I would have used the MTWIDNS acronym except that as far as I can tell he's not even pretending not to be rooting for Trump
If Pelosi wasn't trying to sabotage Trump she would have dropped poison pills like "extended UI benefits" and "state and local aid" and "healthcare funding" and passed the "Corporate Immunity and Fortune 500 Bailout Act of 2020." This is a principled take, from the left.