lemm.ee

35 points

3 months ago

report

[ - ]

-1 points

3 months ago

I absolutely agree with your point. The amount of hero worship that went on was positively alarming and she absolutely should have been persuaded to retire. Unless I’m missing something though, neither the president nor congress can force a judge to retire, short of impeaching them. Even if they could, you’d likely end up in a situation similar to Obama’s, where the opposite side blocks your attempts to instate a replacement.

report

[ - ]

35 points

3 months ago

So you’re just going to accept Republicans always get their judges and Democrats never get them?

Why don’t Democrats block the Republican judges?

There’s always going to be some excuse stopping the “good guys”. Ask yourself why that is.

report

[ - ]

-1 points

3 months ago

Why don’t Democrats block the Republican judges?

Because they’re somewhere between idealistic and hopeless at this sort of thing. They want to play ‘fair’, which is all very noble and all, but means they get hammered by the opposition who have no such scruples. At no point here am I saying the Dems are a good choice, only that the alternative is worse. It’s a poor choice, but the one in front of us.

report

MoreAmphibians [none/use name]@hexbear.net

[ - ]

8 points

3 months ago

It’s the same thing with the Washington Generals, they’re playing their hearts out out there on the court but the opposition is both composed of better players and is willing to use every tool at their disposal in order to win.

report

[ - ]

0 points

3 months ago

Pretty much, a complete lack of killer instinct.

report

Show more comments

[ - ]

6 points

3 months ago

Idealistic and hopeless is OK as long as not much is at stake. Usually both parties agree on giving ever larger bags of money to the military, continuing to meddle in other nations’ business, etc. The unwritten agreement was things would stay the same here, bad but not unbearable, social progress would happen at a slow enough pace to stick, and the white cul-de-sac voters would be able to have their comfy wages / petition bourgeois lifestyles.

That deal is over. Now abortion is gone, LGBT rights under attack, racism against non-whites is growing worse. Even the comfortable white class is starting to feel the effects of high prices, worse weather, a bungled pandemic, etc. Layoffs everywhere. No one who doesn’t already own a home can buy one. Employment more precarious than ever thanks to the 1-2 punch of AI and gig jobs… The treats aren’t flowing as freely. This is the time to act!

And of course Democrats, like you said, aren’t going to do anything about it. I’m not supporting the party that cannot do the bare minimum to help people. They were always a capitalist party but before Trump at least they did enough to get us gay marriage and other small social consessions. Now we’re not even getting that!

I hope they crash and burn so they can learn their lesson. Serve the people or get out of the way of people who will!

report

[ - ]

-1 points

3 months ago

OK, I agree with almost everything you’ve said there, but the last bit ‘I hope they crash and burn so they can learn their lesson. Serve the people or get out of the way of people who will!’ fails to consider the damage that will occur while they’re learning said lesson. You talk about things like LGBT rights being under attack, and abortion being gone, but that is all from the (far)right party, racism also seems to be worst amongst that portion too. Giving the Dems a kicking, though richly deserved, just gives free reign to those who would go further, faster and strip even more rights long before a reformed and recovered Dem party could do anything about it. I think the changes will need to be made ‘live’, as it were, which will entail them having enough power to curtail the republicans whilst also listening to a large enough group of voters telling them how to change.

report

[ - ]

4 points

3 months ago

I’m going to assume you are arguing in good faith. Around 2016 I would have been in your shoes. I was a Dem and a “true believer”. I used to work for the party, literally paid to harass old people to get them to come to a field office to make calls for, 🤮🤢, Hillary.

I used to be you, but then I saw “my” party continue to either cast shitty votes or make excuse after excuse for why they can’t ever play hardball like the Republicans do. Thanks to their incompetence or Malice (prob depends on who we’re talking about) I looked for alternatives, found the “real” left and now I’m here.

report

420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net

Show more comments

[ - ]

13 points

3 months ago

Unless I’m missing something though, neither the president nor congress can force a judge to retire, short of impeaching them.

What does it say about a party if it can’t get members on their deathbeds out of positions of power? What does it say about a party if members on their deathbeds don’t do this on their own?

A competent party should be preparing younger members to take the reigns, cultivating the mentality that members shouldn’t cling to power until they keel over, and should remove members who stick around too long. It should shape the rules of the institutions of government to do this as well.

Democrats never did this, and haven’t come close to taking these questions seriously for decades.

report

[ - ]

-1 points

3 months ago

Absolutely. I agree with everything you’ve said there. That doesn’t change the fact they can’t force a judge to retire. As far as I can see, she was being obstinate for precisely the reason you outline, there was no suitable candidates to take over. It’s catastrophic that it came to that, but it’s the sort of problem that can only be addressed by enough people standing up and making their voices heard saying that it needs to be addressed. Electoral systems only work when the populous keep watch over them, and keep the participants on the right path.

report

420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net

[ - ]

10 points

3 months ago

she was being obstinate for precisely the reason you outline, there was no suitable candidates to take over

Come on, you don’t believe this. You’re saying there were zero suitable Supreme Court candidates available between Kagan and Jackson? Not retiring was an indefensible decision, simple as that.

You’re right that Democrats had failed to address the narrow issue of “what happens if a walking corpse is on the Supreme Court?” before it was too late. But don’t they have any politicians in their ranks? You know, the kind that can talk to a fellow Democrat and get them to agree to an obviously good idea? Do you think Obama even tried? What’s the media’s excuse for not running the stories they’re running right now against Biden?

it’s the sort of problem that can only be addressed by enough people standing up and making their voices heard saying that it needs to be addressed

This is always good, but there are functional parties in other countries. Parties that show some political leadership and don’t have to be browbeaten by a bunch of people risking imprisonment and police beatings to do anything decent.

What you are saying sounds a lot like “Democrats can’t fail, they can only be failed.”

report

[ - ]

-1 points

3 months ago

You’re saying there were zero suitable Supreme Court candidates available between Kagan and Jackson?

I should probably have worded that slightly differently, what I meant was ‘she was being obstinate for precisely the reason you outline, she felt there was no suitable candidates to take over’. I doubt she was correct, but I can understand wanting to be sure that your replacement is up to snuff. That she didn’t consider her own mortality is, as you say, indefensible. Any reasonable replacement would have been better than what we got.

But don’t they have any politicians in their ranks? You know, the kind that can talk to a fellow Democrat and get them to agree to an obviously good idea?

I have noticed that parties that are to the left of the other parties in their system tend to be worse at acting as a coherent whole and are much more likely to hold differences of opinion and discuss them, sometime quite vigorously, in public, whereas the more right parties tend to fall into line behind their leader and act as a cohesive unit, right up to the point they metaphorically knife them in the back. I prefer the former approach, but it does tend to mean things don’t get done.

Parties that show some political leadership and don’t have to be browbeaten by a bunch of people risking imprisonment and police beatings to do anything decent.

I agree, the question is how to get there from here, rather than just wishing for a better situation to start from as so many do.

report

420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net

[ - ]

4 points

3 months ago

she felt there was no suitable candidates to take over

Yes, a ridiculous and indefensible position. Imagine the ego to think no one else in the country can do your job (where much of the legwork is done by your clerks, anyway). You really don’t have to hand it to her, even a little.

I have noticed that parties that are to the left of the other parties

I don’t see how this is responsive to the point that Democrats should have sat down with Ginsburg and tried to convince her to retire. There’s no excuse for them not only not doing that, but doing the exact opposite.

the question is how to get there from here

Sure, and the answer starts with coming to terms with the fact that the Democratic Party needs to be replaced, or at least changed so radically that it’s unrecognizable. It deserves no loyalty and gets no benefit of the doubt.

Anything short of that approach winds up in the same “oh but they’re the lesser evil” excuse, which isn’t even true (genocide is not lesser evil), and just leads to the rightward rachet effect we’ve seen for the last ~50 years.

report