When McConnell does things like demand Ds honor R circuit blue slips in 2009 or demand Ds honor R filibusters in 2021, despite not doing those things for Ds when he was in power, the problem isn't hypocrisy. It's worse.
McConnell isn't failing to honor his own principles. McConnell's only guiding principle is "If the rules don't prevent it and it adds to GOP power, we'll do it." He's quite consistent about following it.
So when McConnell demands that Ds do this or that, he's simply try to keep Ds from using their power the way he uses his. And why not? It's always worked for him before.
In McConnell, the Ds face an opponent free of the customary limits on exercising power. Free of institutionalism, patriotism, or shame.
Responding to his demands with earnest debates about norms and history and fairness is for suckers.
McConnell didn't block Garland because of any neutral practice, and he didn't ram through Barrett based on any heretofore undiscussed exception to that neutral practice, either. He did it because no one could stop him.
Start fighting back on his terms or keep losing.
Democrats, you have power to do good things. American things, democracy things, keep-people-from-dying things. Use it.
Use all of it.
If using all of your power means that you go back on some promise, we'll forgive you. If it means doing something you said was bad last year, we'll forgive you. Break a norm, we'll forgive you.
But if you fail to use all your power, we won't forgive you.
Republicans will stop doing McConnell things when the price they pay for doing McConnell things becomes unacceptable, and not a minute sooner.
So far, the Republicans have paid no price for doing McConnell things. Quite the contrary. It got them a hammerlock on the Supreme Court for a generation and a staggering transformation of the federal circuit courts. What a hilarious romp it has been McConnell. Why would he stop?
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A strong opinion that many of my fellow progressives may strongly disagree with: Biden should put Orin Kerr, a fairly conservative Republican, on the Ninth Circuit.
Look, I anticipate spending the next 4 years mad at the Biden admin for being too timid with judicial nominations. I firmly believe Biden needs to play by the new rules, not the old ones. The days of Ds slowly nominating a bunch of mid-50s moderate prosecutors are over.
Big-picture, Biden's job is to unskew our Trump/Leo-skewed courts. In my view that means putting a lot of brilliant, dynamic, solidly progressive 30- and 40-something black women in circuit seats.
There's growing willingness to acknowledge the ways in which Trump's work of building and clinging to power resemble Hitler's. Good.
But this week the history that keeps flashing in my mind isn't Nazi Germany, it's pre-WWII Japan's May 15 Incident.
A thread. 1/
Japan after WWI was a two-party parliamentary constitutional democracy. The government functioned reasonably well into the 30s, weathering the depression better than its peers in the US and Europe. 2/
But a right-wing anti-democratic cancer took root in the lower ranks of the Japanese military. This cancer led to Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the assassination of a former cabinet minister in 1932. 3/
An unexplained, unsigned Friday-evening miscellaneous order is not how the Supreme Court of the United States speaks effectively to the American public at historic moments.
Look, I wish it was too. It isn't.
Well-intentioned, smart people are framing the Supreme Court's order as blunt, emphatic, powerful, a devastating back of the hand. And obviously we're all safer if people buy it. But it ain't reality.
Everyone understands the stakes. The nation is in danger, democracy is in danger. We needed the Supreme Court to rise to the challenge. Instead, it belly flopped.
My reading of Justice Alito's statement for himself & Justice Thomas seems to be a minority view, but I disagree, at least tentatively, w those who think the Court's ruling was really a 9-0 defeat for Trump & that Alito was saying he'd reject the suit. 1/
The order stated that the Court denied for lack of standing Texas's motion for leave to file the suit.
Alito w Thomas made a "Statement" which said that in his view, the Court doesn't have discretion to deny leave to file this kind of suit. So, they disagreed w the Court. 2/
Here's where it gets hazy.
Alito then said, "I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue." 3/