I don't think Joe knows the meaning of campaigning.

I certainly hope so. 

Nasty women VOTE. As for “bitch,” these days...well, we just consider the source.

I don’t think the op knows the meaning or hypocrite.

As an American this is what I think.

I have a problem with the lengths McConnell went to stop President Obama from appointing judges including deciding that even with just shy of a year left in his term a sitting President can’t appoint a Justice to the Supreme Court as they people should decide since it was an election year.

A lot of this stalling and stopping was done by McConnell using the filibuster until he became majority leader.

I have a problem with all the Republicans that went on record saying the new norm should be in an election year if a seat opens up on the Supreme Court it shouldn’t be filled until after the people have spoken, by voting, on who they want to pick the next Justice are now rushing to fill an open seat, not only during an election year but after voting has already started.

So my question are you ok with this hypocrisy shown by the a Republicans? 

Do you think these acts by the Republican Senators is acceptable behavior? Or are you outraged enough by their actions to claim “those are big fucking deals and matter” and should never have happened?

Are you ok with it because it’s your guys that are doing it?

I would be interested in what you & Gia have to say about the actions of the Republicans. Are you ok with it?  

For every action there is a reaction and this is the potential reaction by the Democratic Party to the actions taken by the Republican Party.  What did you think the Democrats were going to do when given the chance?  Nothing?  

I don’t know what Biden will do if elected.  I kind of like the idea of term limits on Supreme Court Judges.  

As long as he knows the meaning of leading a country.

And serving the people rather than himself.

I wear that moniker with pride, joining the long list of amazing women your boy has called nasty.

What is it with trumpers and calling women nasty?

Pearl clutchers, spare me. Mitch McConnell has spent more time packing the courts, than he’s spent considering legislation sitting on his desk.

Republicans are just trying to deflect from Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the pandemic and ramming a nomination through during an election. I think Biden is right to avoid the question and focus on what is happening right now. There are just too many hypotheticals to answer that question. If he wins and Democrats take back the Senate, Republicans deserve whatever justice reform the Democrats choose. Republicans made their own choices and had their own version of packing the courts.

It sounds good to say that you don’t like what they are doing, but are you doing anything about it? Are you voting out those who are going along with this? Are you and other republicans standing up and saying you are not ok with it? Doubt it.

Lol. What a savage joke that Dems contemplating the expansion of the SC is considered nefarious when it is perfectly legal via legislation while the actual court packing and stealing of SC seats by the GOP are considered anodyne by comparison. ?! In what world does that even make sense?

Especially when espoused by the diehards of the most corrupt president this country had the misfortune to be saddled with. ?!! A president enabled by McConnell who had previously used judicial blockade to deny Obama his constitutional right, not once, not twice, but many times for the district, circuit and SC courts.

And so what if the number of justices has been the same since 1869? How does that even matter? So if a piece of legislation has been around since the 1860s we should leave it alone even if it does not serve the present population? What a backward and infantile way of thinking. If lawmakers had adopted that regressive stance we would never have had amendments to the Constitution, and blacks would still be slaves without rights including the right to vote. Government should be stable but NEVER static, and that includes the Supreme Court.

Don’t like it that Dems are pushing for the expansion of the SC? Go complain to McConnell. We Dems don’t owe you a damn thing.

          Opinion Piece - Opinion Piece - Opinion Piece - Opinion Piece 


“Who's Up For Some Court Packing?”

And Some Questions For Trump

By Charlie Sykes - Bulwark link

From the article...

Super-spreader events, Superman t-shirts, the coveted Taliban endorsement, a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, devastating new polls for TrumpWorld, and the End of the Faucian Bargain.

Happy Monday.

Welcome to the Countdown Journal. There are 22 days until Election Day, and then 78 days until the Inauguration.

The Senate GOP is upacking its by-any-means-possible strategy today, putting the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett on track for a confirmation vote the week before the election.

But over the weekend, the media’s focus was on Joe Biden’s continuing attempts to dodge the question of whether he supports court-packing. The question dominated weekend Twitter: Biden’s refusal to answer was “unacceptable,” “disqualifying,” “outrageous,” and for some folks reason enough to sit out the election. Senator Ben Sasse called Biden’s refusal to say whether he would support adding seats to the Supreme Court “grotesque.” CNN’s Jake Tapper called Biden’s refusal “bizarre.”

Was it?

Let’s stipulate that Biden’s handling of this has been sub-optimal. Nothing feeds a frenzy like transparently dodging a question. But let’s also stipulate that this isn’t likely to make a difference in the election and that much of the faux indignation is indeed, faux.

Because punditry abhors a vacuum, the whole does-he-doesn’t-he support court packing has come to fill the role that her-emails did four years ago.

Here are Biden’s choices:

(1) He can endorse court-packing (adding new justices by legislation). This would :

overshadow every other issue in the campaign
represent a flip-flop from his previous opposition to the idea
set the stage for a culture war battle that would consume the early months of his administration (and one that he might well lose)

(2) He can declare his opposition to adding justices. This would:

Anger and/or demoralize some of his base in the final days of the campaign
Surrender his negotiation position by giving up what small leverage he has to discourage bad behavior by the GOP and SCOTUS

(3) Continue to dodge, which would:

feed Twitter outrage
annoy the media
make him look weaselly

You can see why he has so far chosen (3). But Tim Alberta makes a modest suggestion:

The answer to court-packing Q is “Look, that isn’t our decision to make. Congress would need to pass legislation to expand the Supreme Court, and there’s no use speculating on that possibility when we’ll face immediate challenges on day one of a Biden adminstration.”

Not hard.

That’s still a sort of non-answer, but it is definitely better than no, voters don’t “deserve” to know.

The odd thing about the whole controversy is that Biden’s position really isn’t that great of a mystery. He has repeatedly said he doesn’t support court-packing. Via NPR.

"I'm not prepared to go on and try to pack the court, because we'll live to rue that day," he told Iowa Starting Line early in the primary race last year. A few months later, during a Democratic primary debate, Biden once again rejected the idea. "I would not get into court packing," Biden said. "We add three justices. Next time around, we lose control, they add three justices. We begin to lose any credibility the court has at all."

And this is what he told the New York Times editorial board:

JW: Speaking of those other candidates, several of them have proposed major structural reforms to our government and to our democracy. These include abolishing the Electoral College, expanding the size of the Supreme Court, setting term limits for justices, abolishing the legislative filibuster. Which, if any of these, do you support?

None.

JW: Why not?

Because that structural change requires constitutional amendments. It raises problems that are more damaging than the problem that exists. We’re in a situation where the reason they gave judges lifetime tenure, you know why.

Maybe that has all changed in the wake of RGB’s death and Republican plans to push through her successor before the election. But that seems unlikely, given the theme of his campaign, which stresses a return to normalcy, not a retaliatory nuclear strike in the cultural war over the courts.

The other theory is that Biden would be too weak to withstand the demands of the Left. But (at this point) it’s hard to imagine either Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer asking a President Biden to put his agenda on hold to make a quixotic charge on the Court.

(Caveat: There’s always the possibility that the next few weeks/months might radicalize Democrats to the point where the pressure becomes irresistible. I’ll have more to say about that later.)

Over the weekend, the fight over the court devolved into a battle over the nomenclature of “court-packing,” with Biden and some Democrats using the term to describe filling open seats. This provoked a new round of outrage over the “Orwellian” distortion of language.

But this is another issue where partisans seem to have switched sides. Back in 2013, Senator John Cornyn had explicitly referred to President Obama’s appointments to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as an “attempt to pack” the court.

And speaking of norms. Back in October 2016, when Hillary Clinton was leading in the polls, National Review ran an article arguing that: “The Senate should decline to confirm any nominee, regardless of who is elected. More than that, it is time to shrink the size of the Supreme Court.”

But when it comes to the question of which questions candidates should answer, there is a rather striking asymmetry.

Put this in perspective. Yes, Biden is clearly avoiding answering this question.

But Trump has repeatedly refused to answer questions about his willingness to accept the results of the election, or a peaceful transfer of power.

But that’s hardly all of it. He’s also refusing to answer basic questions about his medical condition, his finances, and his second-term agenda (if there is one).

So, at a minimum, the same folks who insist that the voters have a right to hear Biden’s position on court packing ought to ask Trump to answer some questions of his own.

Here’s a short, and by no means exhaustive, list:

Will you fire the FBI director after the election?
Will you order the DOJ to indict political opponents? Which ones?
Who do you owe that $400 million to?
Will you withdraw from NATO in a second term?
Will you issue pardons after the election? Paul Manafort? Members of your family?
Will you rule out a self-pardon?
What executive orders would you issue to circumvent Congress?
How do you intend to fund Social Security?
What is your health care plan?
Will you still claim success when the pandemic death toll hits 300,000?
You can probably come up with a dozen more….

BTW, as this whole thing escalates, it might be worth noting that RBG herself took a dim view of court-packing.

"Nine seems to be a good number. It's been that way for a long time," she said, adding, "I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court."

The term-limits proposal doesn't worry Ginsburg because she sees it as unrealistic, given that the Constitution specifies life terms for federal judges and because, as she puts it, "Our Constitution is powerfully hard to amend."

"If anything would make the court look partisan," she said, "it would be that — one side saying, 'When we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.' "

That impairs the idea of an independent judiciary, she said.

"We are blessed in the way no other judiciary in the world is," she noted. "We have life tenure. The only way to get rid of a federal judge is by impeachment. Congress can't retaliate by reducing our salary, so the safeguards for judicial independence in this country, I think, are as great or greater than anyplace else in the world."

Well, in 4 years we have yet to hear tRUMP's position, so yes, it is indeed how it works. Could you please be a little less hypocritical? it's not a good look