AOC launches effort to impeach Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito
AOC launches effort to impeach Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s salvo seeks accountability over conservative supreme court justices’ ethics controversies
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“Justice Thomas and Alito’s repeated failure over decades to disclose that they received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with business before the court is explicitly against the law. And their refusal to recuse from the specific matters and cases before the court in which their benefactors and spouses are implicated represents nothing less than a constitutional crisis,” Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, said in a statement.
Moderate Dems don't want to actually fix the SC.
They love complaining about it. And saying that's why they can't fix anything.
But they refuse to even bring up that we can fix it by impeaching the problematic ones or just expanding the court.
People say "if we do it, trump will do it" which is just insane to me because why the fuck would any republican not do something unless a Dem does it first?
So annoying that Democrats propose something, the Republican majority opposes and entirely quashes it, and the "take" is that we should blame Democrats for not getting it done.
See also, filibuster and gerrymandering.
Republicans absolutely will do something if it benefits them. We can safely assume current filibuster rules benefit them otherwise they would have removed them themselves already. Dems do actually stand on tradition (which is why they haven't eliminated the filibuster even though it would greatly benefit them), often to their own detriment and I would say it's far more likely that they are actully concerned about norms (I would say overly so) when they're hesitant to do something like impeach justices.
Dems do actually stand on tradition (which is why they haven’t eliminated the filibuster even though it would greatly benefit them)
Really?
Everyone else always say it's just Manchin and maybe Sinema that won't, and that Biden and the rest want to...
To be honest I think you're right and there's a hell of a lot more moderates that would refuse even if we had 60 D senators, and Schumer refusing to hold a vote is to block for them so people don't replace them in their next primary.
That's pretty much the whole point of my original comment...
It's true that Manchin and Sinema are a pain and kill a lot of things that otherwise would get through majority votes. I mean I'm no expert or anything but I sure don't get the sense that ending the filibuster would be something that would get the necessary unanimous support from the rest of the sitting Dems. It just seems like a lot of them believe it's there for a good reason.
It just seems like a lot of them believe it’s there for a good reason.
Yup. It keeps them from being expected to keep their campaign promises.
"Moderate" Dems have been trying to appear palatable to an increasingly unhinged conservative voter for decades now, so they won't push for anything too controversial
They love complaining about it. And saying that’s why they can’t fix anything.
Should be noted how many conservative Democrats are genuinely happy to have a SCOTUS do the dirty work of deregulation, dismantling of the administrative state, and legalization of bribery at all levels of government.
People say “if we do it, trump will do it” which is just insane to me because why the fuck would any republican not do something unless a Dem does it first?
The Republican strategy, to date, has been to rely on liberal apathy and "norms" that favor their reactionary policies in order to ratchet their way into a judicial permanent majority. But for policies that this ratchet effect won't work fast enough - funding of Trump's Wall, illegal surveillance under Bush, police harassment of minority groups in Texas and Florida, police harassment of women's health clinics, police harassment of GOTV efforts by liberals - the Republicans simply do as thou wilt and leave it to the Democrats to pound sand in response.
To the idea of court packing, I do have to ask... why are we afraid of more SCOTUS judges? What happens if the court swelled from nine to nineteen over the course of a couple of D/R/D/R administrations? Is that actually a problem? Will court rules be meaningfully worse as a result. I've yet to hear how a larger court with a more diffuse power base would be bad for the American public.