The Kavanaugh Confirmation Charade Thread

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

The folly is in believing that this entire system of government that was well and truly intended for a small republic composed of a white male landowning elite that largely had more or less had the same philosophical outlook has any political or social relevance today.

[RedSoxFan9]

it's very inappropriate pack the court so women can maintain bodily autonomy.  Gotta respect those norms

[Anathema-]

 

"Please baby I'm sorry I didn't mean to hit you I promise I'm not like that, I'll be better baby PLEASE take me back."

 

[Guest]

47 minutes ago, RedSoxFan9 said:

it's very inappropriate pack the court so women can maintain bodily autonomy.  Gotta respect those norms

It just doesn’t work, get outta here with your tired “da norms” talking point  

[RedSoxFan9]

what is the liberal response to a supreme court that is 5-4 or 6-3 in favor of Republicans?  

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

6 minutes ago, RedSoxFan9 said:

what is the liberal response to a supreme court that is 5-4 or 6-3 in favor of Republicans?  

What do liberals control at both the federal and state levels in this scenario?

[RedSoxFan9]

11 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

What do liberals control at both the federal and state levels in this scenario?

 

I'm talking about their plans not what they can do right now

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

15 minutes ago, RedSoxFan9 said:

 

I'm talking about their plans not what they can do right now

I'm not talking about now.  I'm talking about a hypothetical then.

 

And I don't give a damn about plans.  I am interested in exploring the ramifications of court expansion through the larger societal context.

[RedSoxFan9]

Ok.  Let’s say the Democrats have the presidency, senate, and house in 2020

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Just now, RedSoxFan9 said:

Ok.  Let’s say the Democrats have the presidency, senate, and house in 2020

What does the state level look like?

[mclumber1]

1 minute ago, RedSoxFan9 said:

Ok.  Let’s say the Democrats have the presidency, senate, and house in 2020

 

They expand it to 11, and then when the GOP gets control, they expand it to 13.  

[RedSoxFan9]

5 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

What does the state level look like?

 

Democrats do well in elections and have about 25-27 governships and legislatures.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

I'll cut to the chase: expansion of SCOTUS by the Left will result in the outright nullification of decisions by GOP-dominant states.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

1 minute ago, RedSoxFan9 said:

 

Democrats do well in elections and have about 25-27 governships and legislatures.

Then the rulings by an expanded SCOTUS will be valid in about half the country and nullified in the other half.

[Jwheel86]

1 minute ago, SFLUFAN said:

I'll cut to the chase: expansion of SCOTUS by the Left will result in the outright nullification of decisions by GOP-dominant states.

So Little Rock 2.0, except the 101st guarding Abortion Clinics.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

7 minutes ago, Jwheel86 said:

So Little Rock 2.0, except the 101st guarding Abortion Clinics.

Something like that.

 

Hell, I could even see municipalities and other local government bodies either choosing to follow rulings or not, independent of the state in which they are situated.

[RedSoxFan9]

13 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

I'll cut to the chase: expansion of SCOTUS by the Left will result in the outright nullification of decisions by GOP-dominant states.

 

I can live with that.

 

I have doubts about Democrats being comfortably with nullification but Republicans won't hesitate.

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

6 minutes ago, RedSoxFan9 said:

 

I can live with that.

 

I have doubts about Democrats being comfortably with nullification but Republicans won't hesitate.

 

Just as long as you are also comfortable with the level of violence that nullification will ultimately lead to, then cool!

 

Because make no mistake: nullification leads to blood.

[CayceG]

This is essentially the path to the ultimate breakup and demise of this country. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

1 minute ago, CayceG said:

This is essentially the path to the ultimate breakup and demise of this country. 

Oh it absolutely is!

[RedSoxFan9]

Yeah that’s why I think Democrats will shy away from nullification.

[CayceG]

And based on that, I'm trying to find a genesis point for where it all went wrong. 

 

Trump being elected is one thing, but the people that elected him were always here. You could say that 40,000 people initiated this, but that misses a larger point. These people were always here and always going to do something like this. And they were energized after...

The election of Barack Obama is the other moment I could think of. That was when things really really ramped up. But Obama's election was a response to the Bush Administration and the horrors that it wrought upon this Earth. Which really got set off by...

9/11. That fucked us up good. But our response was something that wasn't appropriate to the scale of the attack and the perpetrators. I think that this all happened because of...

 

The Fall of the Soviet Union. This left us with no enemy. No moderating factor. No Big Bad. Nowhere to focus our discontent, our factionalism, or our xenophobia. I agree with Putin--this event was the largest, most significant geopolitical catastrophe in modern times. I'm not saying I wished the bad old days were back, but I think that is genuinely where our demise began. 

[osxmatt]

2 hours ago, Massdriver said:

Why would you think a “constitutional solution “ would be preferable to the status quo? That sounds like furthering our progress towards a full on banana republic. You don’t have to force a constitutional issue by appointing another two justices. If memory serves me, it would be perfectly fine. 

 

On another note, the lifetime appointment to the court is supposed to serve as insulation to political winds, but we all know that the court is very political and continues to get worse every year. This latest nomination has been a circus. 

 

It’s obvious that Supreme Court nominations, or any judicial nomination, should come from within the judicial branch, instead of Congress.

 

It’s one of the countless examples that the founders were myopic fools.

[CayceG]

2 minutes ago, osxmatt said:

 

It’s obvious that Supreme Court nominations, or any judicial nomination, should come from within the judicial branch, instead of Congress.

 

It’s one of the countless examples that the founders were myopic fools.

 

If you'll remember, Kavanaugh was handpicked by Kennedy as his successor. He communicated this to Trump and it was so. 

 

Your solution is already in place. 

[osxmatt]

3 minutes ago, CayceG said:

 

If you'll remember, Kavanaugh was handpicked by Kennedy as his successor. He communicated this to Trump and it was so. 

 

Your solution is already in place. 

 

That’s not quite what I had in mind.

[Scott]

15 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

Oh it absolutely is!

-where do you think all of this is ultimately heading?

 

-do you have any book recommendations that expand on your worldview (insofar as you express it here on D1P)?

[Chairslinger]

1 minute ago, CayceG said:

And based on that, I'm trying to find a genesis point for where it all went wrong. 

 

Trump being elected is one thing, but the people that elected him were always here. You could say that 40,000 people initiated this, but that misses a larger point. These people were always here and always going to do something like this. And they were energized after...

The election of Barack Obama is the other moment I could think of. That was when things really really ramped up. But Obama's election was a response to the Bush Administration and the horrors that it wrought upon this Earth. Which really got set off by...

9/11. That fucked us up good. But our response was something that wasn't appropriate to the scale of the attack and the perpetrators. I think that this all happened because of...

 

The Fall of the Soviet Union. This left us with no enemy. No moderating factor. No Big Bad. Nowhere to focus our discontent, our factionalism, or our xenophobia. I agree with Putin--this event was the largest, most significant geopolitical catastrophe in modern times. I'm not saying I wished the bad old days were back, but I think that is genuinely where our demise began. 

 

 

The unifying factor in there is Fox News and the rightwing media echo chamber.

 

Every problem in the GOP has been magnified and then magnified again because they're all just locked in a Thunderdome of bad ideas where they smack each other and scream in each others faces to get amped about their next grievance du jour. 

[CayceG]

And there are always going to be a series of grievances du jour because there's no lingering specter of Evil outside waiting to ruin the country. 

 

We're so listless and without purpose as a country that we are forced to look at minor political differences as forces of polar opposition. 

 

 

Actually, I'll amend my statement. The Fall of the Soviet Union was the US winning without having to do anything that we commonly had done. Take it back to the beginning of the Cold War and you see that the US won WW2 and utterly defeated Japan - not by negotiation to avoid a prolonged war or ground invasion of Japan, but by complete destruction brought on by the atomic bomb. We won on our terms with complete capitulation. In Europe, the same was done (with help). We got high as fuck on that as a country. That colored how MacArthur went into Korea. That informed the bad decisions in Vietnam. It STILL infects our ideas on how to prosecute a war and what the ultimate goals are. Desert Storm didn't help either. Without a win to close out a 40 year period in our existence, we were a ship adrift in the ocean.

 

 

In short, I blame Hitler.

[Massdriver]

26 minutes ago, osxmatt said:

 

It’s obvious that Supreme Court nominations, or any judicial nomination, should come from within the judicial branch, instead of Congress.

 

It’s one of the countless examples that the founders were myopic fools.

I don’t see how that’s obvious at all. 

 

The solutions here amount to destroying the country just because the court will be right wing. 

 

It really isn’t that bad. Nothing that is happening right now calls for bloodshed or any sort of revolution. This is not even close to the sort of quality of life developing nations deal with. Everyone needs to chill. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

@Chairslinger

@CayceG

@Scott

 

If you want to see the roots of what I'm referring to, we have to go to the very colonization of this country which was largely based on "delusion".  As @Nokra can attest, I've recommended this book  to begin to understand why the very foundational essence of the United States has led to where we are today and where we are going in the future. 

 

To answer @Scott's question, I can't exactly pinpoint any specific books or articles that directly inform my worldview as I express it here.  It's largely a combination of observation, my reading of multiple texts, and my own passion for history and the rise and fall of great empires/nation-states.  While there are some very tangential similarities between the United States of 2018 and the late Roman Republic, the differences are so very significant as to render them all but moot and they are not points worth belaboring. That being said, there are some points of confluence between the United States in 2018 and the late Roman Republic. There have been any number of articles/books in recent years that state that far from being a single unified state, the United States consists of multiple nations with their own separate and unique cultures.  This is one such example.

 

The fact of the matter is the United States of America is very much a misnomer in 2018 and I simply cannot see how it is feasible for anybody to continue to indulge the illusion that it exists or is viable.  I genuinely do believe that we are heading towards a "soft" dissolution, one where laws/regulations/etc. are simply ignored by those political entities who oppose them.  Perhaps there will be some violence here and there, but it won't even be remotely on the scale of 1861-1865.  At some point,  domestic political entities will cut their own agreements with each other or with other foreign political entities while paying little more lip service to national/state wishes.

 

An example that I can see in the immediate future is the looming political fight over California's fuel emission standards.  I could definitely see the Supreme Court ruling against them and the state giving SCOTUS the bird and saying "Screw you, we're keeping them, and whatcha gonna do about it?" and proceeding as if nothing changed.

[RedSoxFan9]

The election of Ronald Reagan and the triumph of neoliberalism deserve a lot of credit for how we got here today

[thewhyteboar]

39 minutes ago, CayceG said:

And based on that, I'm trying to find a genesis point for where it all went wrong. 

 

Trump being elected is one thing, but the people that elected him were always here. You could say that 40,000 people initiated this, but that misses a larger point. These people were always here and always going to do something like this. And they were energized after...

The election of Barack Obama is the other moment I could think of. That was when things really really ramped up. But Obama's election was a response to the Bush Administration and the horrors that it wrought upon this Earth. Which really got set off by...

9/11. That fucked us up good. But our response was something that wasn't appropriate to the scale of the attack and the perpetrators. I think that this all happened because of...

 

The Fall of the Soviet Union. This left us with no enemy. No moderating factor. No Big Bad. Nowhere to focus our discontent, our factionalism, or our xenophobia. I agree with Putin--this event was the largest, most significant geopolitical catastrophe in modern times. I'm not saying I wished the bad old days were back, but I think that is genuinely where our demise began. 

Newt Gingrich. 

[thewhyteboar]

 

 

[Jwheel86]

6 minutes ago, CayceG said:

And based on that, I'm trying to find a genesis point for where it all went wrong. 

 

Trump being elected is one thing, but the people that elected him were always here. You could say that 40,000 people initiated this, but that misses a larger point. These people were always here and always going to do something like this. And they were energized after...

The election of Barack Obama is the other moment I could think of. That was when things really really ramped up. But Obama's election was a response to the Bush Administration and the horrors that it wrought upon this Earth. Which really got set off by...

9/11. That fucked us up good. But our response was something that wasn't appropriate to the scale of the attack and the perpetrators. I think that this all happened because of...

 

The Fall of the Soviet Union. This left us with no enemy. No moderating factor. No Big Bad. Nowhere to focus our discontent, our factionalism, or our xenophobia. I agree with Putin--this event was the largest, most significant geopolitical catastrophe in modern times. I'm not saying I wished the bad old days were back, but I think that is genuinely where our demise began. 

 

No big bad is definitely part of it, but domestically I think it's deeper. When the Supreme Court opened the flood gates of money into the political system, the system started to slowly freeze. Statesmen got replaced by professional fundraisers who can't figure their way out of paper bag and only care about winning. The solutions they do implement are from Think Tanks that are equally compromised. With economic issues off the table, politics became about culture (why the South votes against it's interests). That division plus no movement on economic issues (except bailouts) is how you get a Trump. 

 

Money made relief valves impossible or flawed (like Obamacare).

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

22 minutes ago, CayceG said:

And there are always going to be a series of grievances du jour because there's no lingering specter of Evil outside waiting to ruin the country. 

 

We're so listless and without purpose as a country that we are forced to look at minor political differences as forces of polar opposition. 

 

 

Actually, I'll amend my statement. The Fall of the Soviet Union was the US winning without having to do anything that we commonly had done. Take it back to the beginning of the Cold War and you see that the US won WW2 and utterly defeated Japan - not by negotiation to avoid a prolonged war or ground invasion of Japan, but by complete destruction brought on by the atomic bomb. We won on our terms with complete capitulation. In Europe, the same was done (with help). We got high as fuck on that as a country. That colored how MacArthur went into Korea. That informed the bad decisions in Vietnam. It STILL infects our ideas on how to prosecute a war and what the ultimate goals are. Desert Storm didn't help either. Without a win to close out a 40 year period in our existence, we were a ship adrift in the ocean.

 

 

In short, I blame Hitler.

Go one step further, you're almost there. The Germans not taking Paris early in WWI leading to a German victory caused this. Instead we get the treaty of Versailles directly leading to WWII.