US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2923

Senate Republicans can claim some precedence for blocking any of President Obama’s nominees to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia until a new president is elected -- if they reach back to the mid-1800s.

The GOP’s insistence -- immediately upon news of Scalia's death -- that the Supreme Court must wait until the next president to gets its ninth seat refilled is not unprecedented, but is nonetheless very rare. In fact, all the unsuccessful Supreme Court nominees of the last century ran into problems because of their own traits, rather than some arbitrary obstruction aimed at the president.

The closest comparison to the wholesale rejection President Obama is about to face with his nominee is President John Tyler, who holds the unenviable record of having four of the five men he put forward fail to make it to the Court. The fight was part of a larger clash between Tyler and the Whig-controlled Senate, where Whig lawmakers hoped Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky would win the next presidential election in 1844.

Over the course of 15 months in 1844 and 1845, in an effort to fill two Supreme Court vacancies, Tyler submitted and resubmitted his nominees a total of nine times. Samuel Nelson was finally confirmed in the last weeks of Tyler's presidency. But the second vacancy wasn't filled until well after Tyler left office, with the confirmation of Robert Cooper Grier in 1846, more than two years after the seat was opened up by the death of Henry Baldwin. It seems unlikely the Scalia vacancy will break that record, assuming the Senate takes up a nomination in the months after the 2017 inauguration.

The next closest scenario is what happened to President Andrew Johnson's 1866 nomination of his Attorney General Henry Stanbery, who was otherwise well-liked by lawmakers. The Senate, however, did not like Johnson, so it opted to pass legislation that reduced the number of seats on the Supreme Court from 10 to seven, preventing Stanbery from ever being considered.

In 2010, the Congressional Research Service issued a report studying the circumstances of Supreme Court nominees who were not confirmed. It found that out of the 36 times a president’s Supreme Court nominee was not confirmed by the Senate, the Senate’s opposition to the president himself played a role 16 times. Seven of those nominees -- all in the 19th century -- were submitted during a president’s lame-duck period between the election and the inauguration of the new president.

On February 14 2016 23:01 Doublemint wrote:
I think this sums up the debate and all that comes with it pretty well.

https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status/698711170702643205

This isn't just insane, this is suicidal. This is pathetic.

On February 14 2016 21:19 Doublemint wrote:
holy crap. trump actually went full ham on W. and the iraq war - breaking the spell on like a decade of republican (bullshit) talking points. and getting booed on stage. it's completely bizarre.

what a world we live in lol.

On February 14 2016 23:26 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:

Audience was probably stacked.Most Republicans agree that the mid east wars have been a disaster.Trump said it best, 5 trillion spent on achieving nothing.One thing is for sure though, if the USA had not abandoned the gold standard in 1971 we wouldn't be talking about these wars.Because they would never have happened.They are only possible because of the fiat currency easy money system we have.

On February 14 2016 23:38 Mindcrime wrote:


Becuase the gold standard was so effective at stopping that misguided adventure in Vietnam?

There was no love lost between Justice Scalia and foreign jurists. Scalia was famously dismissive of foreign and international law, which he considered good enough for, well, foreigners — but not for the great United States. “I doubt whether anybody [in the United States] would say, ‘Yes, we want to be governed by the views of foreigners,’” he scoffed in 2005.

...


A decade later, his views hadn’t mellowed much. Foreign laws can “never, never be relevant to the meaning of the U.S. Constitution,” he told a law student audience in May 2015, because “who cares? We have our laws, they have theirs.”

Scalia’s wrath fell frequently upon those justices who demonstrated a distressing tendency to offer “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence so unpatriotically put it. Justice Stephen Breyer, for instance, triggered apoplectic fits in Scalia by insisting that the interconnected “nature of the world itself… demands” that U.S. judges read and reflect on foreign legal rules and precedents. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor aggravated Scalia by taking a similar view: when judges look to international and foreign law to resolve what some might see as “domestic issues,” she argued, it will “not only enrich our own country’s decisions; it will create that all-important good impression.”

On February 14 2016 12:50 JW_DTLA wrote:
Off topic: Rubio's Lame Duck answer is making me mad. The "lame duck" period has an actual meaning. It means the time after a successor/replacement has been elected for Person X, but Person X is still in office until the newly elected person is sworn in. That is after the Nov 3/4th election in 2016 when it comes to Obama. We are in February.

On February 15 2016 00:54 KwarK wrote:
Btw GH your Walmart sucks. In the UK they'd be fined for that with an additional fine for any other produce in that state.

On February 15 2016 00:29 Jibba wrote:

His "It's not a living document" line made me mad.

Scalia's "originalism" needs to die now (quotes used because it was completely cherry picked and informed by his biases). The constitution is, and was intended to be, a living document. Thomas Jefferson fucking wrote that it is. It's both disingenuous and inaccurate whenever "what would the forefathers think about _____?" is used.

"I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors...[it] will be said it is easier to find faults than to amend [the Constitution]. I do not think...amendment so difficult as is pretended. Only lay down true principles, and adhere to them inflexibly

On February 15 2016 03:14 xDaunt wrote:
I find the attacks on Scalia around here to be hilariously uninformed. Knock his judicial views and philosophy all you want, but he was consistent, which is really all that you can ask for out of a judge. And he certainly was not one of the judges who was prone to crapping out unworkable majority opinions (like O'Connor).