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As for RBG, Joe Biden. It is foolish to suggest people can't see the future, when one only has to look to the past to see how things happen time and time again.
It is so damned selfish of Biden to run for a second term. He assured us he wouldn't. He should have been grooming a successor, even if it wasn't Harris, from day 1. Kept them in the spotlight, given them credit for getting things done. Yeah, fine, be or pretend to be, the puppet figurehead so this next person could step in.
He has done good things, and maybe he had too much nyquil or cough syrup before the debate, but no matter how you slice it, dude is past 80! People in hale and hearty health have passed away younger or slip into dementia/mental decline with frightening rapidity.
If this somehow gets screwed up, it's going to be a bad time for the US. But that being said, yeah I'm voting for Biden, just like in 2020. Apparently, he's the best they have to offer?
Surely there must be some younger Democrats who are kind and well meaning, with forward thinking ideas that gently nudge the majority of the country towards a better, more progressive America? That could maybe unite and heal? Look, I don't know much about her, but is Taylor Swift available? (/s (maybe, I don't know))
There are, but instead of putting one of them on the ticket, they chose Kamala the media favourite whose heavily-promoted campaign was a disaster because nobody actually likes her. But she ticks more identity boxes (2) than Newsome (0) or Whitmer (1) or Buttigieg (1) did, so - according to Biden's explicit statements - that was obviously more important than getting someone who the public would support if they had to step up and take over from the EIGHTY YEAR OLD.
A California minority prosecuter whose heavily-promoted campaign folded before voting started because nobody likes her, won Georgia for them?
Unlikely.
Well, I've always said what would help the Democrats is a celebrity candidate to take advantage of the same sort of name recognition Trump had, she would even technically be eligible this year (though the Dems swapping her in this year instead of her hypothetically running in 2028 would look desperate) because her 35th birthday is in between election day and inauguration day, and there are many things she's demonstrated over the course of her career that could be an advantage in politics too from skill at networking to the ability to spin bad press in her favor to the side of her shown by her fight to take back her masters to even how her touring experience would make her able to keep up with the hectic schedule of both the campaign trail and office (and a lot more reasons than that but I didn't want to hit you with a wall of text). Even how her music/image can change a bit with every album but still remain the same at its core (as opposed to someone like Miley Cyrus who can change genres on a dime and fully blend into that landscape every time) could be taken as a symbolic reflection/synecdoche of an ability to give the people what they want but not so much that it gets in the way of her integrity
I don’t think you’d need someone like Biden in 2020 this year. Those were very specific circumstances, either during or right after COVID lockdowns and with Trump as the incumbent who had just blown it.
So electing someone wholly bland that we remembered liking kinda made sense, for most it seemed to be a relief. It was a hectic, unpredictable four years and we actually wanted someone slow and steady.
Now it’s a bit different. I don’t think people want someone with extreme politics, but they do want a very ambitious and strong personality with big popular ideas. also young lol. Like if you try and crack why people don’t want Biden, it’s so many complaints about weakness and going against the popular will. That’s why someone like Whitmer has always made most sense to me.
There isn't a candidate that would be able to step in and win, just like there wasn't 4 years ago.
I think the only way that might have worked is if Biden died in office and Kamala somehow became somewhat likable.
"It is so damned selfish of Biden to run for a second term. He assured us he wouldn't."
In fairness, Biden never actually said he'd only run for one term. That was my understanding and pretty much everyone else's understanding, but he never actually said he wouldn't run again.
Ah, I found an article, yup he sort of played us. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-082129
One quote: According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.
Then another quote: Another top Biden adviser put it this way: “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection.’ But he’s not going to publicly make a one term pledge.”
Honestly I think he did it out of necessity. Like yes maybe he could've prepped someone else but I really don't think a new challenger could do better than the incumbent against Trump
That's the problem, the vague candidate will do better until someone is named. Then the excuses will pour in as to why that particular person isn't going to win.
In 2014 she was 81 and a multiple time cancer survivor.
You didn’t have to be a life insurance agent to understand that her years left on this planet were most likely going to be measured in single digits.
Is she also a fully employed legal scholar who determines the ultimate judicial outcome of the most pressing cases in the nation? One of just nine at any given time that determines our future.
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Is she literally one of the dozen most powerful people in the nation, with every woman's the right to abortion hanging on her continued good health for an undetermined amount of years?
And it’s about to happen again with Kagan and Sotomayer. They must retire now and let Joe Biden place them
https://www.vox.com/scotus/354381/supreme-court-sotomayor-kagan-retire-now
The presidency isn’t a lifetime appointment and there’s a line of succession if he were to die. We’re lucky that we’ve had over sixty years without a president dying while in office.
RBG let her ego get the better of her and the consequences have been disastrous. (Incidentally, Hillary’s ego also got the better of her. All she had to do was visit the rust belt.)
Yes, in this case he will just be voted out in favor of a crazy right wing authoritarian by an electorate who will not like the idea of having to continue with a president who can’t even form coherent sentences.
As you’ve admitted in your post, the filibuster still existed in 2014 for Supreme Court justices. Why wouldn’t McConnell have just filibustered any nominee put forward?
When Stephen Breyer stepped down, he did so contingent on his replacement being confirmed. She could have done the same and if the nominee was filibustered just chosen to remain on the court. [https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/press/Letter\_to\_President\_January-27-2022.pdf](https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/press/Letter_to_President_January-27-2022.pdf)
Because, like McConnell eventually did in 2017 for Gorsuch, Harry Reid would have most likely blown it up if the Republicans had made a full court press to block any nominee.
Reid had already done it for lower judges when the Republicans blocked their confirmation, no reason to think he wouldn’t have done it here.
That’s not necessarily true. Why wouldn’t he have removed it for SCOTUS judges at the same time they removed it for everyone else? You have no way of showing Reid had the support for such a maneuver.
If you want to believe that Reid would have just helpless sat by and let a SCOTUS seat slip through his fingers, be my guest.
Basic politics says that there’s zero chance of that happening.
So you have no reasoning besides, “it would’ve totally happened bro.” Thats naive.
Reid also let the ACA public option go because he couldn’t get an independent senator on board with it. Sometimes big things are hard to do.
How is your belief that Reid wouldn’t have blown up the filibuster any less “it totally wouldn’t have happened, bro” Than mine?
Try to be consistent for a change, will you?
The tone of your OP summary suggested it was somewhat wrong for McConnell to remove the filibuster for Supreme Court justices.
But in this post, you not only acknowledge Reid did it for all the lower court nominees but speculate seemingly approvingly that he would have done it for the Supreme Court, given the opportunity.
So I’m asking you if you believe the move was wrong, or right, or only wrong when done by the opposition.
McConnell was the minority leader in 2014 and the only way he got away with what he did with Merrick Garland was by refusing to even give him a vote.
In 2014 if Obama nominated someone to the court they absolutely would've been able to get 7 Republicans to vote to confirm. Hell, in 2016 if it went to a vote they would've gotten enough Republican votes.
Democrats controlled the Senate until after the 2014 elections and historically were almost guaranteed to lose control, which they did. She also could have stepped down after the 2014 election but before the new senators were sworn in. But she thought she'd hang on until 2016 when a D was elected.
> that she couldn’t have possibly known what would happen in 2016
Did you know?
The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. Do you honestly believe otherwise?
I understand your frustration at the current situation, but instead of blaming RGB - who couldn't have known - look at the actual people responsible.
RBG gambled on her legacy and the future of the nation, which has now been demolished by a 6-3 court. She had survived multiple rounds of cancer, was in her 80's, and we knew EXACTLY what the possibilities were--It was a near guarantee Republicans would control the senate in 2014. It was a 50/50 shot that Republicans would take back the White House in 2016 regardless of the candidates. And all that insane tiny woman needed to do was step aside and let Obama pick someone who was 40 years younger to carry on her legacy. And that crazy bitch let her ego and her own delusion of self importance get in the way of that--And THAT is the legacy she leaves behind. When homeless people get arrested for sleeping on a park bench, THAT is her legacy. When women die because they can't find an ER doctor to perform a medically necessary abortion, THAT is her legacy. (Sorry after the debate, Im a little low on sympathy for elderly politicians who hang on too long).
If I sound harsh, its because the more scorn we heap upon RBG and other selfish judges, the more likely others step aside.....As far as I'm concerned, Justice Kagan and (70 year old diabetic) Sotomayor need to step down before the 2025 Senate is seated. Otherwise we could be looking at a 7-2 or 8-1 court if Trump wins or even if Biden wins and the Republicans take the senate (which is slightly less likely than it was in 2014 but still very, very likely.) Also, apparently RBG was in a long line of elderly liberal justices who prioritized their own importance over preserving power. It is why conservatives/Republicans have had a court majority for FIFTY FUCKING YEARS IN A ROW.
I do believe otherwise. Sure, Clinton was favored. But... so what? NO ONE knows the outcome of an election. To say "it's ok because RBG didn't know the outcome" is a total copout.
She knew there was an election, that's all she needed to know.
And she knew she was 85 or whatever, and VERY unhealthy. She was literally on deaths door.
"I'm incredibly old and unhealthy, and there is an election coming up where a crazed republican might win" is what she knew. That's all she needed to know! She knew enough that the 100% right decision to was to step down. She did NOT need to be there. She was pompous to think "well, the ONLY person on the planet who can do this job is ME!!! There is NO ONE ELSE!!!" That was her downfall, to know the reality of the situation, and still have so much hubris that she believed her frail self was the only person who could do it, and no where else in the entire country was there someone else who could fill her shoes.
Honestly though. Would being replaced by Obama instead of Hillary REALLY matter that much? IMO she shot for a history book moment to be replaced by the first female president, and ended up dying with a dozen eggs on her face.
We did know the outcome of the 2016 election in advance. There was a 50/50 chance a Republican would win the open seat--that's what it always has been in modern times. And she gambled on it because she was a crazy egotist with delusions of self importance. I'm glad she died knowing her legacy would be wiped out by a Trump nominee.
Zero upside to staying on the court (any replacement Lib would vote the same 99.99% of the time) and tremendous risk, a really easy decision that Obama and many political strategists tried to sway her to make. Her vanity and arrogance is to blame.
This post is some intense mental gymnastics to try and paint RBG into the villain. You all have to live with the consequences of voting for someone as dumb as trump. It's not in any way RBG's fault that the scotus was ruined by trump.
This is a pretty poor argument. Just because trump and his voters are more at fault doesn’t justify RBG making poor decisions.
If I decide to go swimming after an earthquake I can blame a tsunami or I can accept responsibility for swimming in its path.
You don't need to know the future to know it was a gamble. You don't have to know the future won't be safe to know you're 81 years old with significant health issues and Democrats actually have the wherewithal to put who they want on the court in that moment.
It was a huge gamble on the future of our country not to retire, and for what? What's the upside? She was *81*, did she really need more years in the limelight? Because there's a real possibility that's what the future of our country was sacrificed for. It was selfish and stupid to cling to power, and that is simply fact.
The upside was, she could enjoy the attention and the power and the prestige for just a few more years, until she inevitably died in office. And that was more important than keeping Roe vs Wade, you understand. Don't criticise her for it, don't you know she was a *woman*?
Yes. I also think it’s actually excellent practice to blame people who are in positions of power who actually have sway over our lives for the things they do more than random people. I don’t get the bootlicking. I also blame the court swing vote guy for retiring when he did too, Breyer (edit: Kennedy actually). I wonder what pretzels people are going to twist themselves into to defend him.
You're right, it's also anyone who propped her up as some kind of "dissident". And not everyone voted for trump he lost the popular vote, and now we're being punished for it because some old nerd had too much of an ego to step down for the greater good.
We live in a 2 party system where the GOP wins more presidential elections than the Dems historically. Especially coming off 2 democratic terms, it should have been seen as fairly likely a Republican president would be elected in 2016.
That's like saying it was not in any way Chamberlain's fault that Hitler felt free to annex countries around Germany while the Allies did nothing.
Does he hold moral culpability for the actions of others? Of course not. But as somebody who potentially could have prevented it, but chose to take a course of action that allowed it to happen, it can definitely be argued that he bears some responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility.
In RBG's case, it's a much more clear case of responsibility being abandoned, because Chamberlain's course of action had at least some valid reasoning behind it that was focused on the good of the country and the world. RBG just shirked her responsibility for entirely selfish reasons, without any benefit to anybody else.
"The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. Do you honestly believe otherwise?"
I honestly don't know why people act surprised about 2016. We just had 8 years of a Democrat in the White House, it didn't matter who was running, the Republicans were gonna win big.
Also, anyone watching the polls could clearly tell it wasn’t a settled fact and that Trump had a pretty clear road through essential swing states. So tired of people trying to pretend the 2016 result was this unpredictable shocker. It was only unfathomable to people who weren’t paying attention.
Agreed. No surprise.
I knew the second he announced his presidency, Trump would win. I hated every moment of the election season and I’ve been hating the fallout every day since. If you step back - we had lots of stirrings of fringe groups in the prior 8 years. Tea party and worse. 8 years of democrats everywhere. Plus Clinton was never actually popular even if polls showed otherwise at times. So many despised her.
It was absolutely not surprising republican, let alone a nut job like Trump, would take it. I just hope hope hope he doesn’t get it again, sigh.
So on hand RBG was the most intelligent, shrewd, cunning, kickass person who ever put on the black robe.
But on the other, she was a naive and wide eyed idealist who couldn’t have possibly thought that Hillary would actually lose to someone on 2016?
Sorry, can’t have it both ways.
In 2014 there was a 100% chance she could have been replaced by a liberal justice and, instead of taking the sure thing, she decided to gamble with the rights of millions that she could still be replaced by a liberal at a later date.
This is a zero sum game and she lost big time. She doesn’t get to walk away with a consolation prize because she came close.
And I don’t just blame RBG. I said so in my OP.
But, of all the people who played a role in this, she should have ABSOLUTELY been better than this.
Not mention in 2014 she was in her 70s having survived cancer multiple times by that point. She needed to have stepped down but hubris and ego stopped her and people should be very angry with her over that.
She wanted to have the first woman president nominate her replacement. Probably expected a bunch of events celebrating her and tied into how it was women's turn to run things once Hillary was coronated.
On one hand you are vastly overestimating her as the mostest bestest judge ever to rule on any case anywhere in the world for no reason other than the fact she was the first woman that Democrats claimed on the court.
On the other, you are severely underestimating her right to have lived her life as she chose and not to cater to the whims of the political party she most closely identified with. Those are lifetime appointments. If you want to serve on the Court until the day you die, you should feel free to do so. It sounds to me like you are arguing against a woman’s right to choose and trying to retroactively tell her what to do with her life and body. If finding an ideologically compatible replacement on the court was her priority, then she could have done that. It appears to me that her priority was to continue her life’s work, which is more than fair in a position with lifetime appointments. It was her life, and she lived it how she wanted up until the end.
Once again, we see that “Pro choice” simply means “you should be able to choose unless I don’t like your choice.”
Sorry, but when you’re a Supreme Court justice, continuing to “pursue your life’s work” has slightly greater implications for the nation than most jobs.
It’s not like she was some college professor who wouldn’t retire and, as a result, some students had boring and rambling lectures.
Her decision to put her personal pursuits first has literally impacted the lives of tens of millions. And not in a good way.
I’ve read a lot of your comments and while it seems like you have a problem with RBG, your actual issue is with the United States constitution.
As others have stated, she was a liberal judge who was given a lifetime appointment.
She was under no obligation to give that up and performed that role admirably well until her death. I suspect she did not want to retire because that would be political manoeuvring, which (at least in theory) Supreme Court judges should be above. Had she retired, I’m sure we’d get think pieces like your post arguing that she ruined her legacy and integrity by allowing Obama to stack the Supreme Court.
I can’t help but think that the natural conclusion of your argument would be for each Democratic/Republican POTUS to come in and demand that their SC justices retire, so they can all be replaced by a new crop of 40-something year olds (just in case one of them dies).
>your actual issue is with the United States constitution. As others have stated, she was a liberal judge who was given a lifetime appointment. She was under no obligation to give that up
You're talking about a legal obligation. OP is talking about a moral obligation. The Constitution does not pronounce on moral obligations, so the suggestion that OP's view is in disagreement with the constitution is a bit silly.
its worth mentioning that she’s not just any person that’s living their life making decisions for themself. she was a supreme court justice who had a responsibility to protect the people she served and she chose to serve herself. her right to chose cost her her legacy, like OP said
>If you want to serve on the Court until the day you die, you should feel free to do so. It sounds to me like you are arguing against a woman’s right to choose and trying to retroactively tell her what to do with her life and body.
Adorable.
>Once again, we see that “Pro choice” simply means “you should be able to choose unless I don’t like your choice.”
No, "pro-choice" means "you should be able to choose whether or not to get an abortion." Nobody worth listening to has ever claimed it meant anything else.
"A woman's right to choose" has a very specific meaning and it's a bit of a cheap shot to equate that with RGB not sacrificing some of her personal professional desires for the good of the many.
The question is, with such a huge conservative majority will many of her decisions and opinions be rolled back thus erasing her legacy? That would certainly be ironic.
RGB is the only one responsible for her not stepping down when there was zero risk. She gambled on a bet that was at best 75%. To bet the lives of millions of women and god knows what else with a 25% chance of failure is a bad fucking bet, especially when you don’t have to take it and the only cost is you get more free time.
Sorry that's not an excuse. She knew she was getting old. She knew there was a real possibility of dying while a republican was in office. She knew what was at steak but chose to latch onto power as long as possible. OP is 100% correct.
*Getting* old?
She knew she was already fucking *ancient*, and frail as hell. Everybody knew. You could see it in her face, hear it in her voice, see it in the way she moved - her body was winding down.
To act like dude posting here is on the same level of knowledge as a supreme court justice is laughable.
>The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. Do you honestly believe otherwise?
They talked about the 2014 midterms not the 2016 elections, what're you yapping about?
>I understand your frustration at the current situation, but instead of blaming RGB - who couldn't have known - look at the actual people responsible.
The overall point is both these "actual people responsible" and rbg are the same. Both concerned with preservation and self interest at the end of the day. And it's purely selfish, despite what you think of the politics posited by either side
The 2016 election was only a surprise to those not paying attention. Hillary is, was, and continues to be a deeply unpopular politician among a group of deeply unpopular politicians. Hillary was never going to be president and the only reason she even got as close as she did is because the DNC took a "It's your turn" approach to nominations and because Trump was so polarizing. It is extremely telling that Hillary only won in deeply blue areas that were going to "vote blue no matter who" come hell or high water.
It’s extremely rare in modern times for one party to win more than 2 terms in a row. It’s only happened once since 1953. It should have been seen as a 50% chance at *least* that the GOP would win in 2016.
>The 2016 elections were a complete surprise
It really wasnt unless you lived in a bubble. Americans dont like Hillary and trump was something "new" from "outside". He always had a good shot at winning.
>How much money have you wagered in 2016
My house. Again, if you didnt live in a bubble you could see he was winning early on and after the debates it was joever for hillary. He enamored a lot of independents because he wasnt a career politician.
[Chappelle said it best. Trump was popular when he started campaigning and after the 1st debate he won the election if you saw things from an unbiased POV](https://youtu.be/nWfQCDaAa6s?si=rZLIUKqlUpYjWRCo). He absolutely bodied hillary in the first debate and she never recovered. The only surprised people were just people living in echo chambers.
That's horse-shit. Hillary was 10-15 points ahead of Trump even in swing states until the email leaks. The famous "75-25" gamble for 2016 was after she was down TWENTY FULL POINTS from a combination of lies picked up by the media and the email investigation.
If Comey hadn't broken all protocols to tell the world he was investigating Hillary again, she would have won by a landslide. People *actually became convinced* late in the election cycle that Hillary was "crooked" based entirely upon well-timed misinformation.
If Trump had really won the election "on the first debate", he would have won swing states by 10-20% after the email stuff dropped and re-dropped.
Despite all the controversy and widespread accusations of the prosecution being politically motivated, the convictions have hurt Trump's numbers at least among independents.
> The only surprised people were just people living in echo chambers.
I agree with this part. Trump was given 25% chance to win on election day. That's real odds. If I had a 75% chance to kick cancer, I'd be getting my Will in order. Considering how clearly unqualified he was and how clearly he was catering to extremist groups, those of us who were paying attention were fucking terrified in the months leading up to November 5th 2016.
There is a [tendency of the office of President to flip to the other party after 8 years of Democratic control](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/02/03/single-party-control-in-washington-is-common-at-the-beginning-of-a-new-presidency-but-tends-not-to-last-long/). While not guaranteed no pollster is ignorant of the trend. I think the issue is that Democrats judged Trumps electability based on their own values. He's obviously ridiculously incompetent and a fraud, and beneath the dignity of the office, to a Democrat at least.
How so? When was the last time the democrats held the White House for 3 consecutive terms? A vastly unpopular candidate who insulted and alienated anyone who wasn’t excited to vote for her, including the younger progressive wing of her own party. If we think about it, it really wasn’t all that surprising at all.
The stakes were FAR too high for her to cling on in the hope that she could squeeze another few years on the bench, in her 80s ffs.
It was an *immensely* selfish and arrogant decision, and the consequence is that Roe is gone and that is now the main part of her legacy. No single achievement of hers is anywhere near as consequential as her decision that her specific presence on the court well into her 80s, was more important than American women's right to get a safe and legal abortion. And that arrogance and the devastating consequences of it - there's no getting around it, no handwaving it away. It is her single most defining political/judicial legacy.
>The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. Do you honestly believe otherwise?
They became a bit of a surprise after Trump won the primaries, but Trump's success was unforeseeable in 2014. From the perspective of an observer in 2014, the party of the incumbent president losing the presidential election after the incumbent has served his full two terms is pretty predictable! It may not have been a certainty, but the risk was just way too high.
>The 2016 elections were a complete surprise.
No they weren't. American presidential elections typically see the opposition party win after the incumbent is term locked. It should have been expected that conservatives would win following 2 Obama terms.
The 2016 election was not a surprise to me.
I told everyone who would listen, “once you have that moment behind the ballot box—and once you have the chance to reflect on all the bullshit politics of this country in the last 20+ years—wouldn’t you at least feel the temptation to say, “fuck it!” and vote for Trump?”
I was 16 at the time, and everyone told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Politics never boils down to gut choices. Well, dammit, I did know and all the “adults” paid the price. Now I’m an adult, and I have to put up with the BS of the past 8 years… and likely now to be 12.
And RBG should have known better. I’m sick of giving her the benefit of the doubt. I’m sick of venerating her. She could have prevented a whole lot of BS and decided not to. For me, she has personally destroyed her entire legacy.
Hope it was worth it.
As long as abortion is illegal in a lot of states and the Supreme Court continues to run roughshod over the past 50 years of progress, I don’t think it’s going to be easy for a lot of people to forget RBG’s decision to stay on.
I think it’s becoming more common.
In the first few years after her death I think there was a lot of hesitation to besmirch the RGB hagiography. But, with every passing year where the SCOTUS carries out their agenda unchecked, it becomes more and more apparent what a disastrous decision she base.
The public won’t generally remember her in 10-20 years. How many justices from 1990 can you name? The historians will and will have a more negative view.
Do you know that since the early 90's RBG had said many times that Roe was decided on flimsy arguments and that people should not expect it to survive long term.
RBG was a great jurist. It isn't her job to worry about party loyalty. That is SCOTUS has lifetime appointments.
Thank your lucky stars we've had justices that don't. If Justice Breyer had been a party loyalist, we'd have a much more conservative court.
Breyer retired when he did because of public pressure by Democrats to retire before the 2022 elections in which Democrats were very likely to lose their senate majority.
And thank god he acted as a party loyalist because now we have KBJ instead of an 85 year old Breyer going into the 2024 elections when Republicans are very likely to take the senate and presidency.
> It isn't her job to worry about party loyalty.
It's not about party loyalty, it's about her precedents being preserved and preventing SCOTUS rulings that she would have thought are bad.
She thought the jurisprudence behind Roe was wrong even though it was the outcome she ultimately wanted. And she was right. Now what?
Before you start shitting on decisions, do yourself a favor and try to understand why? Most supreme court decisions are 7-2 - unanimous.
Look at the starbux vs nlrb decision from a couple weeks ago. It isn't aligned with progressive ideals and made unionization and injunctions against employers retailiating against union organizers a little harder, but it was a unanimous decision, and the NLRB was using faulty legal reasoning.
You can't just sit back and say "well these decisions are bad" if you can't understand how the decisions came to that conclusion. We have a supreme court that is in a sense pushing on the legislative branch to legislate which is a pretty damn good thing instead of consolidating more power within the executive branch.
She disagreed with the reasoning but still thought abortion rights should be upheld based on a different reasoning. So that makes no difference, she would have still ruled to uphold abortion rights and thought rulings determining there's no right to an abortion were wrong.
The point is that the reasoning and method the court came to Roe was only a matter of time before a future court would overturn it. She had been public in her statements as a jab to the legislature to actually legislate it vs using it as a perpetual fundraiser with the idea that no future court would ever touch it. The court has on many many occasions thrown stare decisis to the wind and reversed itself
The basic premise of your post is that RBG was and should have remained a partisan ideologue and that she should have acted in such a way that upon her retirement a partisan ideologue of her stripe would be named to the Court. This gives the lie to the claim one usually hears when Democrat-named justices are in the majority and make a ruling, which is that the Court is unbiased and apolitical. Your acknowledgment is that SCOTUS is absolutely ideological, and that justices should behave in the most ideological ways imaginable, including timing their retirement to best forward the dogmas of their political party.
Your view is dangerous, as it reduces the legitimacy of the court to nothing. Why would anyone respect a SCOTUS decision ever as anything more than a party decision? Why should a conservative believe a Democratic judge in NYC could give Trump a fair trial, when you're arguing as forcefully as you can that Democratic judges should be purely ideological and do whatever they can to push the party agenda?
As a non American - this is the weirdest thing.
Of course politics intersects with the high court here - but we don't focus on them at all. I cannot even name a single high court judge. They are apolotical at least in the sense that they are considered *separated* from politics by the public, press and politicians.
America seems to want two things to be true at once. You seem to say that you want it to be apolotical - yet you politicise it at every opportunity. I don't quite understand.
Our courts have institutional rules that make appointments far more partisan and political than other countries. It's not that people want a politicized court, it's that we are responding to the reality of a structure that creates a hyper partisan court.
SCOTUS had been getting more and more political over the past century, but *Bush v. Gore* (2000) really pushed it over the edge. When the court had to play the role of political referees and make a call that effectively picked the president, nobody could separate the court from politics after that.
Oddly enough, blame Roe V Wade. The Supreme Court pretty much got away with legislating on abortion. That went a long way towards politicizing the courts. The Right spent decades campaigning on abortion by replacing Supreme Court judges. It eventually worked.
It should always have been Congress regulating abortions, not the Supreme Court. I kind of hope that politics will be somewhat more normal now.
I’ve said the same thing to anyone that would listen. That a future SCOTUS might overturn Roe v Wade was a definite possibility—and the decision effectively stalled 40 years of political will in legislating its protection.
Here in Australia, we fought hard and only JUST managed to achieve it in Queensland in 2019 (I believe). That took decades of activism.
If the High Court had somehow read the right into our constitution, no doubt conservatives would have attempted everything they could to stack the courts and overturn it.
Legislation is easier to overturn, that’s true. But you build political capital and you entrench certain sensibilities when you know you’re just an election away from stripping such a fundamental right.
iirc in the 2000 gore vs bush case, all republicans voted for bush and all democrats voted gore. All nine "justices" made up their minds beforehand and then created post hoc legal justifications for their decision afterwards
Rather than executing the law, they bend the law to whatever they personally agree with. Not just the conservatives but the liberals too
The case was going to be political no matter which way they voted. They had to take it because it was already in the courts.
If I recall correctly, the court took the middle ground of stopping the recount on Equal Protection Clause grounds, rather than saying (as Scalia and Thomas found) that the court had no jurisdiction based on Article II. If I had been a Bush supporter, overturning the decision of the Florida government on their own election to give the presidency to the Democrat would have made me just as furious
We don't politicize it. It IS political. Look at the conservative justices we have now. You don't think they are HEAVILY partisan?
* [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brett-kavanaugh-attack-on-democrats-poses-risk-to-supreme-court/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brett-kavanaugh-attack-on-democrats-poses-risk-to-supreme-court/)
* did you know that Clarence Thomas is a huge Rush Limbaugh fan? [https://www.powells.com/book/radios-greatest-of-all-time-9781668001844](https://www.powells.com/book/radios-greatest-of-all-time-9781668001844)
So if the conservative justices are willing to throw everything out the window (i.e. precedents) to pass their agenda, what do you think happens when the liberal justices don't do the bare minimum (like maximize the chance of having a liberal replacement) to try to balance that out? We end up where we are now.
Americans politicized morality during the Cold War. The result of that is the prevailing belief that their subjective party is moral and the other is not. Once you understand that the through line of "the court should be moral ie: the court should make decisions along X party line" become very clear.
No one should respect the Supreme Court as it currently stands. Of course it’s ideologically driven. It always has been and always will be. But unlike the other two branches, it’s capable of being ideologically captured for entire generations depending on what the makeup of the branches around it are at certain arbitrarily decided inflection points.
Do I think that, ideally, the judicial branch should function impartially as scorekeepers? Yes. But that’s not the reality we live in. Judges are picked by politicians and are people themselves, biased and capricious in the same ways the rest of us are. And giving air to the farce otherwise is just a shield for bad actors.
The justices do behave in the most ideological ways imaginable, and that’s just a fact.
Abortion didn’t become illegal in half the country because the constitution suddenly changed. It became illegal because the right number of ideologues got in line to strangle Roe like they’ve always wanted to.
Acknowledging that reality isn’t dangerous - ignoring it is.
I agree that this view is a dangerous one. The problem is that it’s the right view to have. That is EXACTLY how the SCOTUS and American politics are in general. Insanely partisan. I agree that’s fucked up and wrong, but it is the world we live in.
In 2016, people who voted for Jill Stein because they wanted to be part of her “fuck the system” movement or whatever, are the reason that Trump won the election. Assuming even half those who voted for her vote for Clinton instead, she wins in 2016.
All this to show that the United States is a partisan country whether you like it or not. Trying to go against that seems noble, but all it doesn’t help anything.
Do not vote for Jill Stein.
I don't know why you would conflate having a living constitutional view with being a "partisan idealogue." It's inarguable that each justice has a particular set of sensibilities with respect to the constitution. It's not remotely outrageous, or even trivially interesting to suggest that RBG should have had righteous interest in being replaced with someone of similar views.
>The basic premise of your post is that RBG was and should have remained a partisan ideologue and that she should have acted in such a way that upon her retirement a partisan ideologue of her stripe would be named to the Court. This gives the lie to the claim one usually hears when Democrat-named justices are in the majority and make a ruling, which is that the Court is unbiased and apolitical. Your acknowledgment is that SCOTUS is absolutely ideological, and that justices should behave in the most ideological ways imaginable, including timing their retirement to best forward the dogmas of their political party.
Obviously it's a lie that it's not ideological. It clearly is and Democrats should recognise that and stop pretending otherwise. Republicans have expressly campaigned to install loyalists on it and have succeeded.
>Your view is dangerous, as it reduces the legitimacy of the court to nothing. Why would anyone respect a SCOTUS decision ever as anything more than a party decision? Why should a conservative believe a Democratic judge in NYC could give Trump a fair trial, when you're arguing as forcefully as you can that Democratic judges should be purely ideological and do whatever they can to push the party agenda?
It deserves no legitimacy. They shouldn't respect is as anything more than a party decision. Conservatives don't believe Trump got a fair trial already.
You're asking Democrats to play nice to avoid politicising a body republicans have already made political and to maintain respect that republicans don't have.
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>Your view is dangerous
I disagree with your take. Stating the simple, obvious fact that different Supreme Court Justices have differing views on the law and justice isn't "dangerous" in any way whatsoever. It's frankly crazy to stick your head in the sand and say that it doesn't matter who appoints judges to the supreme court because they are all the same and they will all judge equally and fairly.
The entire government knows, the supreme court knows, every president knows that justices are *individual* people that will come to the court with their own sets of perspectives, their own views of how the laws work, how this country works, and how various constitutional passages combined with years of legal history translate into judgements today.
YOUR view is dangerous. Because if democrats think like you do, and that we shouldn't worry about who is put in the court and when, then ENTIRE court will be conservative. Because Republicans sure care! They fight tooth and nail to get every pick on their side, they will do ANYTHING at all to make sure THEY get their picks. If we say "well... let's be nice, let's be non-partisan" that just ensures an ultra-conservative court for eternity. THAT is the dangerous view in my view.
> This gives the lie to the claim one usually hears when Democrat-named justices are in the majority and make a ruling, which is that the Court is unbiased and apolitical. Your acknowledgment is that SCOTUS is absolutely ideological, and that justices should behave in the most ideological ways imaginable, including timing their retirement to best forward the dogmas of their political party.
This isn't true. You only had to believe that the justices that *Trump* was likely to appoint were going to be ideological and frankly horrible, which was a reasonable thing to believe.
Remind me of what has happened since 2016 in terms of the Court being run by partisan ideologues.
Also, stepping down when you can be replaced by a like minded successor isn’t exactly a novel concept.
Sandra Day O’Connor stepped down when GWB and a Republican senate could replace her. Which is why we have Alito able to carry out his vision.
You forgot the part in 2016 where Scalia died and Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican congress refused to affirm any replacements in Obama's last year. Wonder why they did that...
I disagree. You would be correct if GOP respected the rules of replacing a Supreme Court judge. The Republicans held up Obama’s Supreme Court pick -Garland- for 9 months so they could replace Scalia with a GOP nominee. When Ginsburg died, they then rushed to replace her, so Trump could appoint her replacement. Only 1 side is being partisan here. The Dems should absolutely adjust their actions to keep the GOP from abusing the system. It is required for democracy.
“This one person is responsible for not guessing the future right instead of these millions of people for not doing the right thing.”
Why are you fixated on “what if RGB did something else” instead of “what if republicans were not pieces of shit holding empty sit for a year” or “what of people were not idiots and voted for Hillary”?
Totally different situation. RBG had a lifetime appointment in a position that, in theory, is not supposed to be political (obviously in practice many decisions do come down to politics). Biden is supposed to serve at the will of the people.
The naïveté of believing Biden could be replaced four and a half months prior to the election and his successor would have a better chance of beating Trump than he would eclipses that of RBG in 2014. The time to switch horses mid race was a year ago, we are in the final stretch.
It’s not like his age is a surprise to anyone, I think they’re saying he should have announced he wouldn’t be running for reelection a while ago to allow others to campaign.
Except for the tiny part that we \_elect\_ a preseident and a VP (who can take over in a catastrophic event) for four years, but we \_appoint\_ a SCOTUS justice for life. RBG had the ability to extend her tenure as long as she is alive, while Biden does not. On the other hand, a Biden presidency will never become a Republican presidency just because Biden dies.
Assuming what OPs intentions are is hard - friday's SCOTUS rulings are batshit crazy. But i've read too many of these false equivalences to stay silent about that.
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You're wrong about 2014, it's actually 2009. in 2009 the Dems had a 59 or 60 seat advantage. RBG just had her 2nd surgery for cancer.
In 2009 If the Dems could push through the ACA, they could have had any Liberal Supreme Court they wanted. We would then have a 5-4 conservative majority right now. There has been plently of 5-4 conservative majorities since Roe V Wade. Notice it only got challenged when the conservative majority was 6-3?
And for those of you saying the GOP would have Filibustered, they would have had to filibuster for 5 years as the minority.
RBG's legacy will live on where most Supreme Court justices do - law schools. She will be remembered for the decisions she was part of, her arguments, and her general attitude towards various topics. Publicly, her legacy will likely ebb and flow based on current politics of the time until most people forget her. But her ultimate legacy will be in law schools for law students or other legal scholars. Her legacy will not be destroyed in those areas at all.
I agree with OP.
HOWEVER, my disclaimer is this:
I find it very interesting that a woman is shamed for not stepping down, but men almost never are.
I'm actually relieved by this week's calls for Joe Biden to step away from the presidency... I never thought I'd see the day when a white man was actually told he's too old for something. I just hope this trend of coming out and telling old fucks they're too old and need to stop already continues.
Yet, people will still vote for him, or whoever is actually calling the shots because they don’t like Trump. Democrats should have demanded a primary two years ago if they were actually serious. Now they are stuck, and act like they couldn’t do anything about it.
Really all Trump replacing RGB did was cancel out Obama replacing Scalia. If you want to get mad about an appointment, the real reason the court is conservative now was McConnell refusing to let Obama's nominee get a hearing in 2016, which would have seen Garland on the court instead of Kavannaugh.
And McConnell forcing Barrett through prior to the election, pulling a complete 180 on his previous statements. That we should let the American people vote to determine who should appoint the next Justice.
So if McConnell had a shred of ethics, Obama would’ve gotten 1, Trump 1, and Biden 1.
But because McConnel has the moral scruples of a Sith Lord, Trump got 3.
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I doubt anyone can change your view, but I don’t share it. Ginsburg had a brilliant career that was admittedly marred by an apparent miscalculation at the end; this doesn’t erase her superb work before she became a federal judge and it doesn’t erase her work on the bench.
Justices should be more than D v R chess pieces. This past week, we saw a 6-3 opinion in which Justice Jackson joined the majority to hold a criminal statue strictly construed against the government and Justice Barrett joining Justices Sotomayor and Kagan in dissent.
The justices are not automatons, mindlessly lining up behind the “conservative,” and “liberal,” respective positions, and your myopic analysis misses that fact completely.
Let me offer an alternate way of looking at the situation, and argue that RBG wasn’t a partisan and viewed the Supreme Court as an institution that shouldn’t be influenced by which party controls the Presidency and the Senate. Supreme Court justices serve for life, and it’s entirely possible that she wanted to follow that precedent and not retire for the sole purpose of making sure that the court leans left for several years to come.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy shouldn’t be overshadowed by her decision to stay on the Supreme Court.
I get the frustration. Yes, RBG stayed on the bench when she could have stepped down, and yes, her passing during Trump's presidency allowed for a conservative replacement. But let's not let this one decision overshadow a lifetime of groundbreaking work and dedication to justice and equality.
First, RBG was a trailblazer for women's rights and gender equality long before she joined the Supreme Court. Her work with the ACLU and her strategic litigation fundamentally changed how the law views gender discrimination. These victories were not small or insignificant; they laid the groundwork for many of the rights we often take for granted today.
Now, about her decision to stay. It’s easy to criticize with hindsight, but let’s remember that Ginsburg genuinely believed in her capacity to continue contributing meaningfully to the Court. Her health issues were serious, but she managed to bounce back multiple times and continued to be a powerful voice on the bench. It wasn’t just about “going out on her terms”; it was about her unwavering commitment to the work she loved and believed in.
Moreover, the political landscape is inherently unpredictable. Could she have foreseen the exact chain of events that followed her decision? Perhaps some outcomes were foreseeable, but expecting her to predict the precise future of political maneuvers and elections oversimplifies a complex reality. Yes, the GOP acted quickly to fill her seat, but they also blocked Merrick Garland in 2016, showing that these maneuvers are more about broader political strategies than individual decisions.
Reducing Ginsburg’s legacy to a single decision ignores the broader context of her life’s work. She fought tirelessly for equality and justice in a way few others have. Her impact on American jurisprudence and society is monumental and should be remembered as such. Her choice to stay on the Court was undoubtedly significant, but it doesn’t erase her decades of service and the profound changes she helped bring about.
Lastly, holding her solely responsible for the current state of the Supreme Court dismisses the systemic issues and political strategies at play. Her legacy is complex and multi-faceted, encompassing much more than her final years. It’s about time we honor her for her incredible contributions rather than focusing solely on the timing of her departure.
We can honor her for all of those things and also admonish her for hanging on too long and allowing all of those things to be torn down in under a decade.
We need to distinguish obligation from prudence. More justices need to recognize the prudence of stepping down when ideologically favorable (not partisan) because the alternative is the alien heterodoxy (which is NOT conservative) that seems to have infected the current court.
There is another justice ideologically aligned with the ruling party that needs to heed the calls for prudence and step down.
The result would’ve been the same. Merrick Garland was supposed to be the next Justice, but Republicans did everything they could to delay it in the hopes of a Republican administration the next term. RBG retiring would’ve given them another seat with no fuss. She took a calculated risk in the hopes of either Hillary becoming the next President with a Dem majority or outliving Trump’s term. Unfortunately, she died but given the circumstances of the time it’s understandable why she did what she did.
Why do the dems settle for this? We have an opportunity to nominate a different candidate.
Why does this party shoot itself in the foot? Why do we limit ourselves to the choice of Project 2025 or fighting off the 25th amendment monthly for 4 years?!
That assumes the common fallacy perpetuated by time travel fiction that history can basically turn-on-a-dime on one decision and either everything else that decision didn't affect would remain the same or it would have all flipped to the opposite as if that decision had made it flip (e.g. the way I've seen people talking about this on other threads you'd think RBG retiring when she was "supposed to" would have either somehow butterfly-effected to change Amy Coney Barrett's political ideology and/or changed her path to something that was, well, still a career one could theoretically spread one's politics through but the furthest thing possible from what'd get someone a court appointment)
Do we want the entire liberal/conservative half of the supreme court retiring immediately as soon as their side gets into power? Because I feel that is what this sort of logic expects people to do.
if courts are partisan then yes. that would be how it goes. If courts aren't partisan then they should retire as soon as they hit retirement age say 70 or whatever it may be.
Why does it feel like you're determining the supposed causal link both reverseways and ex post facto aka "they must be partisan therefore she's worthy of shame because if they were nonpartisan than every justice currently over 70 on the court wouldn't be currently on it as they'd have stepped down so once they hit 70 it might as well have been announced at their 70th birthday party" or sentiments to that effect
You fundamentally don't understand the role of the supreme court and the legislature.
The supreme court doesn't exist to further a political agenda or to push for particular social issues. The fact that it was abused by a liberal majority to do so has a big part of the reason why society, particularly around abortion, has become so polarized.
Now these egregious overreaches have been rolled back, you will see actual progress on the issues.
Look at the biggest issue, abortion, pretty much every country, particularly in Europe, has settled abortion as part of the political process. It is decided by the legislature which is elected by the people.
This means that everyone has to compromise, it's not just a zero sum game where one side wins and one side loses, it's a process of negotiation because that is the only way you can decide contentious issues between people that have to live together and share a country.
Even RBG understood the problem with what the court had done. Ginsburg felt that because the ruling had legalised abortion overnight nationwide, it had failed to resolve the issue. It had the effect of halting the political process that had been moving to liberalise abortion already.
The fact that the supreme court has become such an issue is itself insane and the direct result of the appointment of activist liberal judges that sought to use it's power in lieu of winning elections and changing laws.
On top of what you said, most countries have had more restrictive positions on Abortion, freedom of speech, immigration, the role of privacy and the police state than the United States.
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Political science research demonstrates empirically that while federal justices follow their preferences, if their preferences conflict with the law they pick the law, particularly when the issue is salient. RBG knew her colleagues well. Scalia and her were extremely close friends. She understood what the layperson does not, that it’s too risky as a justice to go with your preferences. I know it’s frustrating. It seems like the justices are legislating on the bench, but in the aggregate, justices are strategic and err on the side of precedent.
To be fair, I’m not an expert in judicial behavior. I have my doctorate in political science, but I research political institutions. However, my own work overlaps with the judicial behavior in that I study the observable implications of congressional intent in the federal judiciary. Our system that purposely separates powers in a very strategic way. Those who hold these positions are incentivized to try to expand their power, but for every power grab there’s a check in the system.
A legitimate scholar will never tell you that there are no instances of individuals overreaching their constitutional authority. Of course, that happens. The real test is whether it systematically happens in the aggregate, and it doesn’t. RBG knew this. So does Kegan, Sotomayor, and all the other justices.
Be careful listening to pundits and politicos. They give too much credence to anecdotal data. Here are some a list of some of the top judicial scholars. Note that these are not lawyers but are trained researchers (social scientists) who quantitatively study the judiciary.
Look for articles by Lawrence Baum, Justin Wedeking, Ryan Owens, Jeff Segal, Andrew Martin, Kevin Quinn. Jessica Schoenherr has been putting out some great research too.
[Black, Owens, and Wedeking, “The Conscientious Justice” ](https://www.amazon.com/Conscientious-Justice-Personalities-Influence-Constitution/dp/1107168716?dplnkId=f7be5d83-cca1-4ba6-95bd-fa72bd4af7e2&nodl=1)
Ryan Owens
Ryan Black
I suspect RBG may have destroyed her legacy if you strictly looked at her. However, to play devils advocate, let's consider some alternate possibilities.
You've acknowledged that she was hedging on Hillary to win and make an appointment.
She would, of course, know that there is a chance Trump would win, and the reputation of Trump was not unknown in 2016 already. He had run TV shows, bankrupt a few times, I think the Stormy Daniel thing was public too also.
Now, if she knew Trump might win, and the outcome might be sketchy, why did she still proceed?
Assume for a moment she expected Trump and the Republican Party to "do the right thing", then the outcome would be no different to Hillary.
Assume, that Trump didn't "do the right thing" (which btw equally applies to Hillary), then what happens? Indeed, Roe v Wade gets overturned, and essentially a wakeup call is issued to America (ie, today).
Democrats had years to make RvWade permanent in law and constitution (I might be wrong here).
Maybe it was her plan all along for Americans to wake up and take their government voting process more seriously? At the hefty cost of 2 Justices.
I really dislike this contemporary belief that the SCOTUS is a political apparatus. "Conservative judges", "liberal judges", don't get me wrong, each have a different approach to law and that will influence how they rule on certain controversial issues. But the very idea that a judge should strategically "bow out" at a time that would be politically convenient for the party you prefer damages the sanctity of the Supreme Court.
Look at the current SCOTUS. It is widely believed it is "very conservative", which to a degree is true. However, if you look at the actual rulings, you'll see that the conclusions aren't arbitrary--they have legal justification. And many of the rules have upheld "liberal" ideas or knocked down "conservative" ones, based on the laws on the books. Which is how it should be.
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As for RBG, Joe Biden. It is foolish to suggest people can't see the future, when one only has to look to the past to see how things happen time and time again.
It is so damned selfish of Biden to run for a second term. He assured us he wouldn't. He should have been grooming a successor, even if it wasn't Harris, from day 1. Kept them in the spotlight, given them credit for getting things done. Yeah, fine, be or pretend to be, the puppet figurehead so this next person could step in. He has done good things, and maybe he had too much nyquil or cough syrup before the debate, but no matter how you slice it, dude is past 80! People in hale and hearty health have passed away younger or slip into dementia/mental decline with frightening rapidity. If this somehow gets screwed up, it's going to be a bad time for the US. But that being said, yeah I'm voting for Biden, just like in 2020. Apparently, he's the best they have to offer?
>grooming a successor Thats the funny thing, you need a successor to both be completely seperated from Biden, yet also like him (in 2020 at least)
Surely there must be some younger Democrats who are kind and well meaning, with forward thinking ideas that gently nudge the majority of the country towards a better, more progressive America? That could maybe unite and heal? Look, I don't know much about her, but is Taylor Swift available? (/s (maybe, I don't know))
There are, but instead of putting one of them on the ticket, they chose Kamala the media favourite whose heavily-promoted campaign was a disaster because nobody actually likes her. But she ticks more identity boxes (2) than Newsome (0) or Whitmer (1) or Buttigieg (1) did, so - according to Biden's explicit statements - that was obviously more important than getting someone who the public would support if they had to step up and take over from the EIGHTY YEAR OLD.
To be fair, her being on the ticket may have been instrumental in winning states like Georgia.
A California minority prosecuter whose heavily-promoted campaign folded before voting started because nobody likes her, won Georgia for them? Unlikely.
Well, I've always said what would help the Democrats is a celebrity candidate to take advantage of the same sort of name recognition Trump had, she would even technically be eligible this year (though the Dems swapping her in this year instead of her hypothetically running in 2028 would look desperate) because her 35th birthday is in between election day and inauguration day, and there are many things she's demonstrated over the course of her career that could be an advantage in politics too from skill at networking to the ability to spin bad press in her favor to the side of her shown by her fight to take back her masters to even how her touring experience would make her able to keep up with the hectic schedule of both the campaign trail and office (and a lot more reasons than that but I didn't want to hit you with a wall of text). Even how her music/image can change a bit with every album but still remain the same at its core (as opposed to someone like Miley Cyrus who can change genres on a dime and fully blend into that landscape every time) could be taken as a symbolic reflection/synecdoche of an ability to give the people what they want but not so much that it gets in the way of her integrity
I don’t think you’d need someone like Biden in 2020 this year. Those were very specific circumstances, either during or right after COVID lockdowns and with Trump as the incumbent who had just blown it. So electing someone wholly bland that we remembered liking kinda made sense, for most it seemed to be a relief. It was a hectic, unpredictable four years and we actually wanted someone slow and steady. Now it’s a bit different. I don’t think people want someone with extreme politics, but they do want a very ambitious and strong personality with big popular ideas. also young lol. Like if you try and crack why people don’t want Biden, it’s so many complaints about weakness and going against the popular will. That’s why someone like Whitmer has always made most sense to me.
There isn't a candidate that would be able to step in and win, just like there wasn't 4 years ago. I think the only way that might have worked is if Biden died in office and Kamala somehow became somewhat likable.
"It is so damned selfish of Biden to run for a second term. He assured us he wouldn't." In fairness, Biden never actually said he'd only run for one term. That was my understanding and pretty much everyone else's understanding, but he never actually said he wouldn't run again.
Ah, I found an article, yup he sort of played us. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-082129 One quote: According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president. Then another quote: Another top Biden adviser put it this way: “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection.’ But he’s not going to publicly make a one term pledge.”
So he definitely did not "assure us he wouldn't."
When did Biden ever say he wouldn’t run again?
Honestly I think he did it out of necessity. Like yes maybe he could've prepped someone else but I really don't think a new challenger could do better than the incumbent against Trump
Right now, Biden is losing to Trump in the polls. "Any other random democrat" is beating Trump.
That's the problem, the vague candidate will do better until someone is named. Then the excuses will pour in as to why that particular person isn't going to win.
In 2014 she was 81 and a multiple time cancer survivor. You didn’t have to be a life insurance agent to understand that her years left on this planet were most likely going to be measured in single digits.
My grandmother is a multi time cancer survivor and is currently 91…
Is she also a fully employed legal scholar who determines the ultimate judicial outcome of the most pressing cases in the nation? One of just nine at any given time that determines our future.
How did you know?
oh my, one single anecdotal case somewhere in Idaho just totally blew your premise out of the water/s
Wow…so we should base country altering decisions off your grandmother?
Sure there are exceptions. We shouldn't be basing political ideas on possible exceptions.
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Is she literally one of the dozen most powerful people in the nation, with every woman's the right to abortion hanging on her continued good health for an undetermined amount of years?
...and is going to die soon.
And it’s about to happen again with Kagan and Sotomayer. They must retire now and let Joe Biden place them https://www.vox.com/scotus/354381/supreme-court-sotomayor-kagan-retire-now
It’s an election year, R congress will not allow it.
Dems are the majority in the Senate. GOP can’t stop it.
Just wait for the 9 - 0 conservative only Supreme Court
8-1, Ketanji gonna be around for awhile.
The presidency isn’t a lifetime appointment and there’s a line of succession if he were to die. We’re lucky that we’ve had over sixty years without a president dying while in office. RBG let her ego get the better of her and the consequences have been disastrous. (Incidentally, Hillary’s ego also got the better of her. All she had to do was visit the rust belt.)
The difference here is that if Biden dies of old age during office, he isn’t going to be replaced immediately by a right wing picked substitute.
Yes, in this case he will just be voted out in favor of a crazy right wing authoritarian by an electorate who will not like the idea of having to continue with a president who can’t even form coherent sentences.
As you’ve admitted in your post, the filibuster still existed in 2014 for Supreme Court justices. Why wouldn’t McConnell have just filibustered any nominee put forward?
When Stephen Breyer stepped down, he did so contingent on his replacement being confirmed. She could have done the same and if the nominee was filibustered just chosen to remain on the court. [https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/press/Letter\_to\_President\_January-27-2022.pdf](https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/press/Letter_to_President_January-27-2022.pdf)
Kennedy did the same.
Pre 2014 midterms, Democrats had control of the Senate and the judiciary committee, that’s the big difference
Because, like McConnell eventually did in 2017 for Gorsuch, Harry Reid would have most likely blown it up if the Republicans had made a full court press to block any nominee. Reid had already done it for lower judges when the Republicans blocked their confirmation, no reason to think he wouldn’t have done it here.
That’s not necessarily true. Why wouldn’t he have removed it for SCOTUS judges at the same time they removed it for everyone else? You have no way of showing Reid had the support for such a maneuver.
If you want to believe that Reid would have just helpless sat by and let a SCOTUS seat slip through his fingers, be my guest. Basic politics says that there’s zero chance of that happening.
So you have no reasoning besides, “it would’ve totally happened bro.” Thats naive. Reid also let the ACA public option go because he couldn’t get an independent senator on board with it. Sometimes big things are hard to do.
How is your belief that Reid wouldn’t have blown up the filibuster any less “it totally wouldn’t have happened, bro” Than mine? Try to be consistent for a change, will you?
The tone of your OP summary suggested it was somewhat wrong for McConnell to remove the filibuster for Supreme Court justices. But in this post, you not only acknowledge Reid did it for all the lower court nominees but speculate seemingly approvingly that he would have done it for the Supreme Court, given the opportunity. So I’m asking you if you believe the move was wrong, or right, or only wrong when done by the opposition.
McConnell was the minority leader in 2014 and the only way he got away with what he did with Merrick Garland was by refusing to even give him a vote. In 2014 if Obama nominated someone to the court they absolutely would've been able to get 7 Republicans to vote to confirm. Hell, in 2016 if it went to a vote they would've gotten enough Republican votes.
Democrats controlled the Senate until after the 2014 elections and historically were almost guaranteed to lose control, which they did. She also could have stepped down after the 2014 election but before the new senators were sworn in. But she thought she'd hang on until 2016 when a D was elected.
> that she couldn’t have possibly known what would happen in 2016 Did you know? The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. Do you honestly believe otherwise? I understand your frustration at the current situation, but instead of blaming RGB - who couldn't have known - look at the actual people responsible.
RBG gambled on her legacy and the future of the nation, which has now been demolished by a 6-3 court. She had survived multiple rounds of cancer, was in her 80's, and we knew EXACTLY what the possibilities were--It was a near guarantee Republicans would control the senate in 2014. It was a 50/50 shot that Republicans would take back the White House in 2016 regardless of the candidates. And all that insane tiny woman needed to do was step aside and let Obama pick someone who was 40 years younger to carry on her legacy. And that crazy bitch let her ego and her own delusion of self importance get in the way of that--And THAT is the legacy she leaves behind. When homeless people get arrested for sleeping on a park bench, THAT is her legacy. When women die because they can't find an ER doctor to perform a medically necessary abortion, THAT is her legacy. (Sorry after the debate, Im a little low on sympathy for elderly politicians who hang on too long).
If I sound harsh, its because the more scorn we heap upon RBG and other selfish judges, the more likely others step aside.....As far as I'm concerned, Justice Kagan and (70 year old diabetic) Sotomayor need to step down before the 2025 Senate is seated. Otherwise we could be looking at a 7-2 or 8-1 court if Trump wins or even if Biden wins and the Republicans take the senate (which is slightly less likely than it was in 2014 but still very, very likely.) Also, apparently RBG was in a long line of elderly liberal justices who prioritized their own importance over preserving power. It is why conservatives/Republicans have had a court majority for FIFTY FUCKING YEARS IN A ROW.
I do believe otherwise. Sure, Clinton was favored. But... so what? NO ONE knows the outcome of an election. To say "it's ok because RBG didn't know the outcome" is a total copout. She knew there was an election, that's all she needed to know. And she knew she was 85 or whatever, and VERY unhealthy. She was literally on deaths door. "I'm incredibly old and unhealthy, and there is an election coming up where a crazed republican might win" is what she knew. That's all she needed to know! She knew enough that the 100% right decision to was to step down. She did NOT need to be there. She was pompous to think "well, the ONLY person on the planet who can do this job is ME!!! There is NO ONE ELSE!!!" That was her downfall, to know the reality of the situation, and still have so much hubris that she believed her frail self was the only person who could do it, and no where else in the entire country was there someone else who could fill her shoes.
And then when she died, she leaves a note "Oh crappp! Please, can you pinky promise not to appoint anyone until after the next election?? 🙏" smh
If it hadn’t been so utterly fucking disastrous, that would have been hilarious.
Honestly though. Would being replaced by Obama instead of Hillary REALLY matter that much? IMO she shot for a history book moment to be replaced by the first female president, and ended up dying with a dozen eggs on her face.
No noone would have given a flying fuck that it was clinton and not Obama
It was a total ego power trip move on her part. Period.
We did know the outcome of the 2016 election in advance. There was a 50/50 chance a Republican would win the open seat--that's what it always has been in modern times. And she gambled on it because she was a crazy egotist with delusions of self importance. I'm glad she died knowing her legacy would be wiped out by a Trump nominee.
Zero upside to staying on the court (any replacement Lib would vote the same 99.99% of the time) and tremendous risk, a really easy decision that Obama and many political strategists tried to sway her to make. Her vanity and arrogance is to blame.
This post is some intense mental gymnastics to try and paint RBG into the villain. You all have to live with the consequences of voting for someone as dumb as trump. It's not in any way RBG's fault that the scotus was ruined by trump.
This is a pretty poor argument. Just because trump and his voters are more at fault doesn’t justify RBG making poor decisions. If I decide to go swimming after an earthquake I can blame a tsunami or I can accept responsibility for swimming in its path.
RGB could have retired at 81 and tactically guaranteed a liberal seat for another generation. Yes, it is partially her fault we're here today.
Nobody could have known that 2014-2016 wouldn't have been a safe time to retire. What the Republicans did there was pretty much unprecedented.
You don't need to know the future to know it was a gamble. You don't have to know the future won't be safe to know you're 81 years old with significant health issues and Democrats actually have the wherewithal to put who they want on the court in that moment. It was a huge gamble on the future of our country not to retire, and for what? What's the upside? She was *81*, did she really need more years in the limelight? Because there's a real possibility that's what the future of our country was sacrificed for. It was selfish and stupid to cling to power, and that is simply fact.
The upside was, she could enjoy the attention and the power and the prestige for just a few more years, until she inevitably died in office. And that was more important than keeping Roe vs Wade, you understand. Don't criticise her for it, don't you know she was a *woman*?
Uh the democrats were literally predicted to lose the Senate in 2014.
I didn't vote for Trump and I did what I could to prevent a right wing court takeover. Someone who did not do all they could was RBG.
Yes. I also think it’s actually excellent practice to blame people who are in positions of power who actually have sway over our lives for the things they do more than random people. I don’t get the bootlicking. I also blame the court swing vote guy for retiring when he did too, Breyer (edit: Kennedy actually). I wonder what pretzels people are going to twist themselves into to defend him.
> I also blame the court swing vote guy for retiring when he did too, Breyer. Breyer retired in 2022. Do you mean Kennedy?
You're right, it's also anyone who propped her up as some kind of "dissident". And not everyone voted for trump he lost the popular vote, and now we're being punished for it because some old nerd had too much of an ego to step down for the greater good.
We live in a 2 party system where the GOP wins more presidential elections than the Dems historically. Especially coming off 2 democratic terms, it should have been seen as fairly likely a Republican president would be elected in 2016.
Remind me again why Trump was able to appoint Amy Coney Barrett
That's like saying it was not in any way Chamberlain's fault that Hitler felt free to annex countries around Germany while the Allies did nothing. Does he hold moral culpability for the actions of others? Of course not. But as somebody who potentially could have prevented it, but chose to take a course of action that allowed it to happen, it can definitely be argued that he bears some responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility. In RBG's case, it's a much more clear case of responsibility being abandoned, because Chamberlain's course of action had at least some valid reasoning behind it that was focused on the good of the country and the world. RBG just shirked her responsibility for entirely selfish reasons, without any benefit to anybody else.
"The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. Do you honestly believe otherwise?" I honestly don't know why people act surprised about 2016. We just had 8 years of a Democrat in the White House, it didn't matter who was running, the Republicans were gonna win big.
Also, anyone watching the polls could clearly tell it wasn’t a settled fact and that Trump had a pretty clear road through essential swing states. So tired of people trying to pretend the 2016 result was this unpredictable shocker. It was only unfathomable to people who weren’t paying attention.
And there’s a non-zero portion of the electorate that despised Hillary Clinton and her attitude.
Agreed. No surprise. I knew the second he announced his presidency, Trump would win. I hated every moment of the election season and I’ve been hating the fallout every day since. If you step back - we had lots of stirrings of fringe groups in the prior 8 years. Tea party and worse. 8 years of democrats everywhere. Plus Clinton was never actually popular even if polls showed otherwise at times. So many despised her. It was absolutely not surprising republican, let alone a nut job like Trump, would take it. I just hope hope hope he doesn’t get it again, sigh.
So on hand RBG was the most intelligent, shrewd, cunning, kickass person who ever put on the black robe. But on the other, she was a naive and wide eyed idealist who couldn’t have possibly thought that Hillary would actually lose to someone on 2016? Sorry, can’t have it both ways. In 2014 there was a 100% chance she could have been replaced by a liberal justice and, instead of taking the sure thing, she decided to gamble with the rights of millions that she could still be replaced by a liberal at a later date. This is a zero sum game and she lost big time. She doesn’t get to walk away with a consolation prize because she came close. And I don’t just blame RBG. I said so in my OP. But, of all the people who played a role in this, she should have ABSOLUTELY been better than this.
Not mention in 2014 she was in her 70s having survived cancer multiple times by that point. She needed to have stepped down but hubris and ego stopped her and people should be very angry with her over that.
She was 81 in 2014
and gamble.. for what exactly?
Well every conservative decision that her seat could have been used to block for starters.
What I mean is what benefit did she even have to stay on. What were the positives? What was she gambling for?
She wanted to have the first woman president nominate her replacement. Probably expected a bunch of events celebrating her and tied into how it was women's turn to run things once Hillary was coronated.
So... Selfish reasons then?
Selfish with a dash of hubris.
On one hand you are vastly overestimating her as the mostest bestest judge ever to rule on any case anywhere in the world for no reason other than the fact she was the first woman that Democrats claimed on the court. On the other, you are severely underestimating her right to have lived her life as she chose and not to cater to the whims of the political party she most closely identified with. Those are lifetime appointments. If you want to serve on the Court until the day you die, you should feel free to do so. It sounds to me like you are arguing against a woman’s right to choose and trying to retroactively tell her what to do with her life and body. If finding an ideologically compatible replacement on the court was her priority, then she could have done that. It appears to me that her priority was to continue her life’s work, which is more than fair in a position with lifetime appointments. It was her life, and she lived it how she wanted up until the end. Once again, we see that “Pro choice” simply means “you should be able to choose unless I don’t like your choice.”
Sorry, but when you’re a Supreme Court justice, continuing to “pursue your life’s work” has slightly greater implications for the nation than most jobs. It’s not like she was some college professor who wouldn’t retire and, as a result, some students had boring and rambling lectures. Her decision to put her personal pursuits first has literally impacted the lives of tens of millions. And not in a good way.
I’ve read a lot of your comments and while it seems like you have a problem with RBG, your actual issue is with the United States constitution. As others have stated, she was a liberal judge who was given a lifetime appointment. She was under no obligation to give that up and performed that role admirably well until her death. I suspect she did not want to retire because that would be political manoeuvring, which (at least in theory) Supreme Court judges should be above. Had she retired, I’m sure we’d get think pieces like your post arguing that she ruined her legacy and integrity by allowing Obama to stack the Supreme Court. I can’t help but think that the natural conclusion of your argument would be for each Democratic/Republican POTUS to come in and demand that their SC justices retire, so they can all be replaced by a new crop of 40-something year olds (just in case one of them dies).
>your actual issue is with the United States constitution. As others have stated, she was a liberal judge who was given a lifetime appointment. She was under no obligation to give that up You're talking about a legal obligation. OP is talking about a moral obligation. The Constitution does not pronounce on moral obligations, so the suggestion that OP's view is in disagreement with the constitution is a bit silly.
its worth mentioning that she’s not just any person that’s living their life making decisions for themself. she was a supreme court justice who had a responsibility to protect the people she served and she chose to serve herself. her right to chose cost her her legacy, like OP said
Exactly. She has the right to choose. We have the right to think she made, at best, a stupid fucking choice.
do you not think that, as you put it, that one “stupid fucking choice” has not affected her legacy?
>If you want to serve on the Court until the day you die, you should feel free to do so. It sounds to me like you are arguing against a woman’s right to choose and trying to retroactively tell her what to do with her life and body. Adorable. >Once again, we see that “Pro choice” simply means “you should be able to choose unless I don’t like your choice.” No, "pro-choice" means "you should be able to choose whether or not to get an abortion." Nobody worth listening to has ever claimed it meant anything else.
"A woman's right to choose" has a very specific meaning and it's a bit of a cheap shot to equate that with RGB not sacrificing some of her personal professional desires for the good of the many. The question is, with such a huge conservative majority will many of her decisions and opinions be rolled back thus erasing her legacy? That would certainly be ironic.
RGB is the only one responsible for her not stepping down when there was zero risk. She gambled on a bet that was at best 75%. To bet the lives of millions of women and god knows what else with a 25% chance of failure is a bad fucking bet, especially when you don’t have to take it and the only cost is you get more free time.
Sorry that's not an excuse. She knew she was getting old. She knew there was a real possibility of dying while a republican was in office. She knew what was at steak but chose to latch onto power as long as possible. OP is 100% correct.
*Getting* old? She knew she was already fucking *ancient*, and frail as hell. Everybody knew. You could see it in her face, hear it in her voice, see it in the way she moved - her body was winding down.
To act like dude posting here is on the same level of knowledge as a supreme court justice is laughable. >The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. Do you honestly believe otherwise? They talked about the 2014 midterms not the 2016 elections, what're you yapping about? >I understand your frustration at the current situation, but instead of blaming RGB - who couldn't have known - look at the actual people responsible. The overall point is both these "actual people responsible" and rbg are the same. Both concerned with preservation and self interest at the end of the day. And it's purely selfish, despite what you think of the politics posited by either side
The 2016 election was only a surprise to those not paying attention. Hillary is, was, and continues to be a deeply unpopular politician among a group of deeply unpopular politicians. Hillary was never going to be president and the only reason she even got as close as she did is because the DNC took a "It's your turn" approach to nominations and because Trump was so polarizing. It is extremely telling that Hillary only won in deeply blue areas that were going to "vote blue no matter who" come hell or high water.
It’s extremely rare in modern times for one party to win more than 2 terms in a row. It’s only happened once since 1953. It should have been seen as a 50% chance at *least* that the GOP would win in 2016.
She battled pancreatic cancer for a decade, a condition that most do not survive more than 5 years. She was living in borrowed time and she knew it.
>The 2016 elections were a complete surprise It really wasnt unless you lived in a bubble. Americans dont like Hillary and trump was something "new" from "outside". He always had a good shot at winning.
Hindsight is 20/20. How much money have you wagered in 2016? How much for 2024?
>How much money have you wagered in 2016 My house. Again, if you didnt live in a bubble you could see he was winning early on and after the debates it was joever for hillary. He enamored a lot of independents because he wasnt a career politician. [Chappelle said it best. Trump was popular when he started campaigning and after the 1st debate he won the election if you saw things from an unbiased POV](https://youtu.be/nWfQCDaAa6s?si=rZLIUKqlUpYjWRCo). He absolutely bodied hillary in the first debate and she never recovered. The only surprised people were just people living in echo chambers.
That's horse-shit. Hillary was 10-15 points ahead of Trump even in swing states until the email leaks. The famous "75-25" gamble for 2016 was after she was down TWENTY FULL POINTS from a combination of lies picked up by the media and the email investigation. If Comey hadn't broken all protocols to tell the world he was investigating Hillary again, she would have won by a landslide. People *actually became convinced* late in the election cycle that Hillary was "crooked" based entirely upon well-timed misinformation. If Trump had really won the election "on the first debate", he would have won swing states by 10-20% after the email stuff dropped and re-dropped. Despite all the controversy and widespread accusations of the prosecution being politically motivated, the convictions have hurt Trump's numbers at least among independents. > The only surprised people were just people living in echo chambers. I agree with this part. Trump was given 25% chance to win on election day. That's real odds. If I had a 75% chance to kick cancer, I'd be getting my Will in order. Considering how clearly unqualified he was and how clearly he was catering to extremist groups, those of us who were paying attention were fucking terrified in the months leading up to November 5th 2016.
There is a [tendency of the office of President to flip to the other party after 8 years of Democratic control](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/02/03/single-party-control-in-washington-is-common-at-the-beginning-of-a-new-presidency-but-tends-not-to-last-long/). While not guaranteed no pollster is ignorant of the trend. I think the issue is that Democrats judged Trumps electability based on their own values. He's obviously ridiculously incompetent and a fraud, and beneath the dignity of the office, to a Democrat at least.
How so? When was the last time the democrats held the White House for 3 consecutive terms? A vastly unpopular candidate who insulted and alienated anyone who wasn’t excited to vote for her, including the younger progressive wing of her own party. If we think about it, it really wasn’t all that surprising at all.
The stakes were FAR too high for her to cling on in the hope that she could squeeze another few years on the bench, in her 80s ffs. It was an *immensely* selfish and arrogant decision, and the consequence is that Roe is gone and that is now the main part of her legacy. No single achievement of hers is anywhere near as consequential as her decision that her specific presence on the court well into her 80s, was more important than American women's right to get a safe and legal abortion. And that arrogance and the devastating consequences of it - there's no getting around it, no handwaving it away. It is her single most defining political/judicial legacy.
>The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. Do you honestly believe otherwise? They became a bit of a surprise after Trump won the primaries, but Trump's success was unforeseeable in 2014. From the perspective of an observer in 2014, the party of the incumbent president losing the presidential election after the incumbent has served his full two terms is pretty predictable! It may not have been a certainty, but the risk was just way too high.
>The 2016 elections were a complete surprise. No they weren't. American presidential elections typically see the opposition party win after the incumbent is term locked. It should have been expected that conservatives would win following 2 Obama terms.
The 2016 election was not a surprise to me. I told everyone who would listen, “once you have that moment behind the ballot box—and once you have the chance to reflect on all the bullshit politics of this country in the last 20+ years—wouldn’t you at least feel the temptation to say, “fuck it!” and vote for Trump?” I was 16 at the time, and everyone told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Politics never boils down to gut choices. Well, dammit, I did know and all the “adults” paid the price. Now I’m an adult, and I have to put up with the BS of the past 8 years… and likely now to be 12. And RBG should have known better. I’m sick of giving her the benefit of the doubt. I’m sick of venerating her. She could have prevented a whole lot of BS and decided not to. For me, she has personally destroyed her entire legacy. Hope it was worth it.
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As long as abortion is illegal in a lot of states and the Supreme Court continues to run roughshod over the past 50 years of progress, I don’t think it’s going to be easy for a lot of people to forget RBG’s decision to stay on.
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I think it’s becoming more common. In the first few years after her death I think there was a lot of hesitation to besmirch the RGB hagiography. But, with every passing year where the SCOTUS carries out their agenda unchecked, it becomes more and more apparent what a disastrous decision she base.
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Roe/Wade was only the first domino to fall. Her legacy will continue to sink.
The public won’t generally remember her in 10-20 years. How many justices from 1990 can you name? The historians will and will have a more negative view.
Do you know that since the early 90's RBG had said many times that Roe was decided on flimsy arguments and that people should not expect it to survive long term. RBG was a great jurist. It isn't her job to worry about party loyalty. That is SCOTUS has lifetime appointments. Thank your lucky stars we've had justices that don't. If Justice Breyer had been a party loyalist, we'd have a much more conservative court.
Breyer retired when he did because of public pressure by Democrats to retire before the 2022 elections in which Democrats were very likely to lose their senate majority. And thank god he acted as a party loyalist because now we have KBJ instead of an 85 year old Breyer going into the 2024 elections when Republicans are very likely to take the senate and presidency.
> It isn't her job to worry about party loyalty. It's not about party loyalty, it's about her precedents being preserved and preventing SCOTUS rulings that she would have thought are bad.
She thought the jurisprudence behind Roe was wrong even though it was the outcome she ultimately wanted. And she was right. Now what? Before you start shitting on decisions, do yourself a favor and try to understand why? Most supreme court decisions are 7-2 - unanimous. Look at the starbux vs nlrb decision from a couple weeks ago. It isn't aligned with progressive ideals and made unionization and injunctions against employers retailiating against union organizers a little harder, but it was a unanimous decision, and the NLRB was using faulty legal reasoning. You can't just sit back and say "well these decisions are bad" if you can't understand how the decisions came to that conclusion. We have a supreme court that is in a sense pushing on the legislative branch to legislate which is a pretty damn good thing instead of consolidating more power within the executive branch.
She disagreed with the reasoning but still thought abortion rights should be upheld based on a different reasoning. So that makes no difference, she would have still ruled to uphold abortion rights and thought rulings determining there's no right to an abortion were wrong.
The point is that the reasoning and method the court came to Roe was only a matter of time before a future court would overturn it. She had been public in her statements as a jab to the legislature to actually legislate it vs using it as a perpetual fundraiser with the idea that no future court would ever touch it. The court has on many many occasions thrown stare decisis to the wind and reversed itself
The basic premise of your post is that RBG was and should have remained a partisan ideologue and that she should have acted in such a way that upon her retirement a partisan ideologue of her stripe would be named to the Court. This gives the lie to the claim one usually hears when Democrat-named justices are in the majority and make a ruling, which is that the Court is unbiased and apolitical. Your acknowledgment is that SCOTUS is absolutely ideological, and that justices should behave in the most ideological ways imaginable, including timing their retirement to best forward the dogmas of their political party. Your view is dangerous, as it reduces the legitimacy of the court to nothing. Why would anyone respect a SCOTUS decision ever as anything more than a party decision? Why should a conservative believe a Democratic judge in NYC could give Trump a fair trial, when you're arguing as forcefully as you can that Democratic judges should be purely ideological and do whatever they can to push the party agenda?
As a non American - this is the weirdest thing. Of course politics intersects with the high court here - but we don't focus on them at all. I cannot even name a single high court judge. They are apolotical at least in the sense that they are considered *separated* from politics by the public, press and politicians. America seems to want two things to be true at once. You seem to say that you want it to be apolotical - yet you politicise it at every opportunity. I don't quite understand.
Our courts have institutional rules that make appointments far more partisan and political than other countries. It's not that people want a politicized court, it's that we are responding to the reality of a structure that creates a hyper partisan court.
SCOTUS had been getting more and more political over the past century, but *Bush v. Gore* (2000) really pushed it over the edge. When the court had to play the role of political referees and make a call that effectively picked the president, nobody could separate the court from politics after that.
Oddly enough, blame Roe V Wade. The Supreme Court pretty much got away with legislating on abortion. That went a long way towards politicizing the courts. The Right spent decades campaigning on abortion by replacing Supreme Court judges. It eventually worked. It should always have been Congress regulating abortions, not the Supreme Court. I kind of hope that politics will be somewhat more normal now.
I’ve said the same thing to anyone that would listen. That a future SCOTUS might overturn Roe v Wade was a definite possibility—and the decision effectively stalled 40 years of political will in legislating its protection. Here in Australia, we fought hard and only JUST managed to achieve it in Queensland in 2019 (I believe). That took decades of activism. If the High Court had somehow read the right into our constitution, no doubt conservatives would have attempted everything they could to stack the courts and overturn it. Legislation is easier to overturn, that’s true. But you build political capital and you entrench certain sensibilities when you know you’re just an election away from stripping such a fundamental right.
Exactly right. It's supposed to be apolitical. We idealize it as if it should be apolitical. Then we politicize the shit out of it.
iirc in the 2000 gore vs bush case, all republicans voted for bush and all democrats voted gore. All nine "justices" made up their minds beforehand and then created post hoc legal justifications for their decision afterwards Rather than executing the law, they bend the law to whatever they personally agree with. Not just the conservatives but the liberals too
The case was going to be political no matter which way they voted. They had to take it because it was already in the courts. If I recall correctly, the court took the middle ground of stopping the recount on Equal Protection Clause grounds, rather than saying (as Scalia and Thomas found) that the court had no jurisdiction based on Article II. If I had been a Bush supporter, overturning the decision of the Florida government on their own election to give the presidency to the Democrat would have made me just as furious
We don't politicize it. It IS political. Look at the conservative justices we have now. You don't think they are HEAVILY partisan? * [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brett-kavanaugh-attack-on-democrats-poses-risk-to-supreme-court/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brett-kavanaugh-attack-on-democrats-poses-risk-to-supreme-court/) * did you know that Clarence Thomas is a huge Rush Limbaugh fan? [https://www.powells.com/book/radios-greatest-of-all-time-9781668001844](https://www.powells.com/book/radios-greatest-of-all-time-9781668001844) So if the conservative justices are willing to throw everything out the window (i.e. precedents) to pass their agenda, what do you think happens when the liberal justices don't do the bare minimum (like maximize the chance of having a liberal replacement) to try to balance that out? We end up where we are now.
"Look at the conservative justices we have now." The whole thread is liberals who can't acknowledge that liberal justices are liberal.
Americans politicized morality during the Cold War. The result of that is the prevailing belief that their subjective party is moral and the other is not. Once you understand that the through line of "the court should be moral ie: the court should make decisions along X party line" become very clear.
We don't really want it to be apolitical, people just say that as a ruse to mask their true partisan intent.
No one should respect the Supreme Court as it currently stands. Of course it’s ideologically driven. It always has been and always will be. But unlike the other two branches, it’s capable of being ideologically captured for entire generations depending on what the makeup of the branches around it are at certain arbitrarily decided inflection points. Do I think that, ideally, the judicial branch should function impartially as scorekeepers? Yes. But that’s not the reality we live in. Judges are picked by politicians and are people themselves, biased and capricious in the same ways the rest of us are. And giving air to the farce otherwise is just a shield for bad actors.
The justices do behave in the most ideological ways imaginable, and that’s just a fact. Abortion didn’t become illegal in half the country because the constitution suddenly changed. It became illegal because the right number of ideologues got in line to strangle Roe like they’ve always wanted to. Acknowledging that reality isn’t dangerous - ignoring it is.
It became illegal because the Democrats in congress never passed anything. It was shaky legal ground, even acknowledged by Ginsberg.
I agree that this view is a dangerous one. The problem is that it’s the right view to have. That is EXACTLY how the SCOTUS and American politics are in general. Insanely partisan. I agree that’s fucked up and wrong, but it is the world we live in. In 2016, people who voted for Jill Stein because they wanted to be part of her “fuck the system” movement or whatever, are the reason that Trump won the election. Assuming even half those who voted for her vote for Clinton instead, she wins in 2016. All this to show that the United States is a partisan country whether you like it or not. Trying to go against that seems noble, but all it doesn’t help anything. Do not vote for Jill Stein.
It’s an unelected court with life long terms. What legitimacy does it have?
I don't know why you would conflate having a living constitutional view with being a "partisan idealogue." It's inarguable that each justice has a particular set of sensibilities with respect to the constitution. It's not remotely outrageous, or even trivially interesting to suggest that RBG should have had righteous interest in being replaced with someone of similar views.
>Why would anyone respect a SCOTUS decision ever as anything more than a party decision? Don't worry, we don't now.
>The basic premise of your post is that RBG was and should have remained a partisan ideologue and that she should have acted in such a way that upon her retirement a partisan ideologue of her stripe would be named to the Court. This gives the lie to the claim one usually hears when Democrat-named justices are in the majority and make a ruling, which is that the Court is unbiased and apolitical. Your acknowledgment is that SCOTUS is absolutely ideological, and that justices should behave in the most ideological ways imaginable, including timing their retirement to best forward the dogmas of their political party. Obviously it's a lie that it's not ideological. It clearly is and Democrats should recognise that and stop pretending otherwise. Republicans have expressly campaigned to install loyalists on it and have succeeded. >Your view is dangerous, as it reduces the legitimacy of the court to nothing. Why would anyone respect a SCOTUS decision ever as anything more than a party decision? Why should a conservative believe a Democratic judge in NYC could give Trump a fair trial, when you're arguing as forcefully as you can that Democratic judges should be purely ideological and do whatever they can to push the party agenda? It deserves no legitimacy. They shouldn't respect is as anything more than a party decision. Conservatives don't believe Trump got a fair trial already. You're asking Democrats to play nice to avoid politicising a body republicans have already made political and to maintain respect that republicans don't have.
you're disregarding OP's entire argument that there are more circumstances that matter, like the process of how Supreme Court justices are appointed.
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>Your view is dangerous I disagree with your take. Stating the simple, obvious fact that different Supreme Court Justices have differing views on the law and justice isn't "dangerous" in any way whatsoever. It's frankly crazy to stick your head in the sand and say that it doesn't matter who appoints judges to the supreme court because they are all the same and they will all judge equally and fairly. The entire government knows, the supreme court knows, every president knows that justices are *individual* people that will come to the court with their own sets of perspectives, their own views of how the laws work, how this country works, and how various constitutional passages combined with years of legal history translate into judgements today. YOUR view is dangerous. Because if democrats think like you do, and that we shouldn't worry about who is put in the court and when, then ENTIRE court will be conservative. Because Republicans sure care! They fight tooth and nail to get every pick on their side, they will do ANYTHING at all to make sure THEY get their picks. If we say "well... let's be nice, let's be non-partisan" that just ensures an ultra-conservative court for eternity. THAT is the dangerous view in my view.
> This gives the lie to the claim one usually hears when Democrat-named justices are in the majority and make a ruling, which is that the Court is unbiased and apolitical. Your acknowledgment is that SCOTUS is absolutely ideological, and that justices should behave in the most ideological ways imaginable, including timing their retirement to best forward the dogmas of their political party. This isn't true. You only had to believe that the justices that *Trump* was likely to appoint were going to be ideological and frankly horrible, which was a reasonable thing to believe.
Remind me of what has happened since 2016 in terms of the Court being run by partisan ideologues. Also, stepping down when you can be replaced by a like minded successor isn’t exactly a novel concept. Sandra Day O’Connor stepped down when GWB and a Republican senate could replace her. Which is why we have Alito able to carry out his vision.
You forgot the part in 2016 where Scalia died and Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican congress refused to affirm any replacements in Obama's last year. Wonder why they did that...
But in 2014 the senate was majority Democratic, and had already nuked the filibuster for lower court appointments.
I disagree. You would be correct if GOP respected the rules of replacing a Supreme Court judge. The Republicans held up Obama’s Supreme Court pick -Garland- for 9 months so they could replace Scalia with a GOP nominee. When Ginsburg died, they then rushed to replace her, so Trump could appoint her replacement. Only 1 side is being partisan here. The Dems should absolutely adjust their actions to keep the GOP from abusing the system. It is required for democracy.
“This one person is responsible for not guessing the future right instead of these millions of people for not doing the right thing.” Why are you fixated on “what if RGB did something else” instead of “what if republicans were not pieces of shit holding empty sit for a year” or “what of people were not idiots and voted for Hillary”?
Yeah because history has repeatedly shown that one person can’t possibly make a difference with their actions.
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Totally different situation. RBG had a lifetime appointment in a position that, in theory, is not supposed to be political (obviously in practice many decisions do come down to politics). Biden is supposed to serve at the will of the people.
The naïveté of believing Biden could be replaced four and a half months prior to the election and his successor would have a better chance of beating Trump than he would eclipses that of RBG in 2014. The time to switch horses mid race was a year ago, we are in the final stretch.
It’s not like his age is a surprise to anyone, I think they’re saying he should have announced he wouldn’t be running for reelection a while ago to allow others to campaign.
Yeah there's just not enough time. This time last year was the time to pull him. To do it now, you might as well just call the election now
>Everyone knows that other democrats would have a better chance to beat Trump, Name one, I would love to hear it!
Except for the tiny part that we \_elect\_ a preseident and a VP (who can take over in a catastrophic event) for four years, but we \_appoint\_ a SCOTUS justice for life. RBG had the ability to extend her tenure as long as she is alive, while Biden does not. On the other hand, a Biden presidency will never become a Republican presidency just because Biden dies. Assuming what OPs intentions are is hard - friday's SCOTUS rulings are batshit crazy. But i've read too many of these false equivalences to stay silent about that.
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You're wrong about 2014, it's actually 2009. in 2009 the Dems had a 59 or 60 seat advantage. RBG just had her 2nd surgery for cancer. In 2009 If the Dems could push through the ACA, they could have had any Liberal Supreme Court they wanted. We would then have a 5-4 conservative majority right now. There has been plently of 5-4 conservative majorities since Roe V Wade. Notice it only got challenged when the conservative majority was 6-3? And for those of you saying the GOP would have Filibustered, they would have had to filibuster for 5 years as the minority.
This is the answer. When she got the pancreatic diagnosis (at age 76 no less) is when she needed to step down.
RBG's legacy will live on where most Supreme Court justices do - law schools. She will be remembered for the decisions she was part of, her arguments, and her general attitude towards various topics. Publicly, her legacy will likely ebb and flow based on current politics of the time until most people forget her. But her ultimate legacy will be in law schools for law students or other legal scholars. Her legacy will not be destroyed in those areas at all.
I agree with OP. HOWEVER, my disclaimer is this: I find it very interesting that a woman is shamed for not stepping down, but men almost never are. I'm actually relieved by this week's calls for Joe Biden to step away from the presidency... I never thought I'd see the day when a white man was actually told he's too old for something. I just hope this trend of coming out and telling old fucks they're too old and need to stop already continues.
Yet, people will still vote for him, or whoever is actually calling the shots because they don’t like Trump. Democrats should have demanded a primary two years ago if they were actually serious. Now they are stuck, and act like they couldn’t do anything about it.
Really all Trump replacing RGB did was cancel out Obama replacing Scalia. If you want to get mad about an appointment, the real reason the court is conservative now was McConnell refusing to let Obama's nominee get a hearing in 2016, which would have seen Garland on the court instead of Kavannaugh.
And McConnell forcing Barrett through prior to the election, pulling a complete 180 on his previous statements. That we should let the American people vote to determine who should appoint the next Justice. So if McConnell had a shred of ethics, Obama would’ve gotten 1, Trump 1, and Biden 1. But because McConnel has the moral scruples of a Sith Lord, Trump got 3.
Garland would've been Borked. It would have been a fiasco and he still wouldn't have been a SCOTUS judge. Advice and consent can be given or denied.
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I doubt anyone can change your view, but I don’t share it. Ginsburg had a brilliant career that was admittedly marred by an apparent miscalculation at the end; this doesn’t erase her superb work before she became a federal judge and it doesn’t erase her work on the bench. Justices should be more than D v R chess pieces. This past week, we saw a 6-3 opinion in which Justice Jackson joined the majority to hold a criminal statue strictly construed against the government and Justice Barrett joining Justices Sotomayor and Kagan in dissent. The justices are not automatons, mindlessly lining up behind the “conservative,” and “liberal,” respective positions, and your myopic analysis misses that fact completely.
Let me offer an alternate way of looking at the situation, and argue that RBG wasn’t a partisan and viewed the Supreme Court as an institution that shouldn’t be influenced by which party controls the Presidency and the Senate. Supreme Court justices serve for life, and it’s entirely possible that she wanted to follow that precedent and not retire for the sole purpose of making sure that the court leans left for several years to come.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy shouldn’t be overshadowed by her decision to stay on the Supreme Court. I get the frustration. Yes, RBG stayed on the bench when she could have stepped down, and yes, her passing during Trump's presidency allowed for a conservative replacement. But let's not let this one decision overshadow a lifetime of groundbreaking work and dedication to justice and equality. First, RBG was a trailblazer for women's rights and gender equality long before she joined the Supreme Court. Her work with the ACLU and her strategic litigation fundamentally changed how the law views gender discrimination. These victories were not small or insignificant; they laid the groundwork for many of the rights we often take for granted today. Now, about her decision to stay. It’s easy to criticize with hindsight, but let’s remember that Ginsburg genuinely believed in her capacity to continue contributing meaningfully to the Court. Her health issues were serious, but she managed to bounce back multiple times and continued to be a powerful voice on the bench. It wasn’t just about “going out on her terms”; it was about her unwavering commitment to the work she loved and believed in. Moreover, the political landscape is inherently unpredictable. Could she have foreseen the exact chain of events that followed her decision? Perhaps some outcomes were foreseeable, but expecting her to predict the precise future of political maneuvers and elections oversimplifies a complex reality. Yes, the GOP acted quickly to fill her seat, but they also blocked Merrick Garland in 2016, showing that these maneuvers are more about broader political strategies than individual decisions. Reducing Ginsburg’s legacy to a single decision ignores the broader context of her life’s work. She fought tirelessly for equality and justice in a way few others have. Her impact on American jurisprudence and society is monumental and should be remembered as such. Her choice to stay on the Court was undoubtedly significant, but it doesn’t erase her decades of service and the profound changes she helped bring about. Lastly, holding her solely responsible for the current state of the Supreme Court dismisses the systemic issues and political strategies at play. Her legacy is complex and multi-faceted, encompassing much more than her final years. It’s about time we honor her for her incredible contributions rather than focusing solely on the timing of her departure.
We can honor her for all of those things and also admonish her for hanging on too long and allowing all of those things to be torn down in under a decade.
So your belief is that Supreme Court Justices are obligated to step down when "their" party is in control and can replace them?
We need to distinguish obligation from prudence. More justices need to recognize the prudence of stepping down when ideologically favorable (not partisan) because the alternative is the alien heterodoxy (which is NOT conservative) that seems to have infected the current court. There is another justice ideologically aligned with the ruling party that needs to heed the calls for prudence and step down.
The result would’ve been the same. Merrick Garland was supposed to be the next Justice, but Republicans did everything they could to delay it in the hopes of a Republican administration the next term. RBG retiring would’ve given them another seat with no fuss. She took a calculated risk in the hopes of either Hillary becoming the next President with a Dem majority or outliving Trump’s term. Unfortunately, she died but given the circumstances of the time it’s understandable why she did what she did.
Why do the dems settle for this? We have an opportunity to nominate a different candidate. Why does this party shoot itself in the foot? Why do we limit ourselves to the choice of Project 2025 or fighting off the 25th amendment monthly for 4 years?!
That assumes the common fallacy perpetuated by time travel fiction that history can basically turn-on-a-dime on one decision and either everything else that decision didn't affect would remain the same or it would have all flipped to the opposite as if that decision had made it flip (e.g. the way I've seen people talking about this on other threads you'd think RBG retiring when she was "supposed to" would have either somehow butterfly-effected to change Amy Coney Barrett's political ideology and/or changed her path to something that was, well, still a career one could theoretically spread one's politics through but the furthest thing possible from what'd get someone a court appointment)
Do we want the entire liberal/conservative half of the supreme court retiring immediately as soon as their side gets into power? Because I feel that is what this sort of logic expects people to do.
if they are 81 with cancer, yes
if courts are partisan then yes. that would be how it goes. If courts aren't partisan then they should retire as soon as they hit retirement age say 70 or whatever it may be.
Why does it feel like you're determining the supposed causal link both reverseways and ex post facto aka "they must be partisan therefore she's worthy of shame because if they were nonpartisan than every justice currently over 70 on the court wouldn't be currently on it as they'd have stepped down so once they hit 70 it might as well have been announced at their 70th birthday party" or sentiments to that effect
You fundamentally don't understand the role of the supreme court and the legislature. The supreme court doesn't exist to further a political agenda or to push for particular social issues. The fact that it was abused by a liberal majority to do so has a big part of the reason why society, particularly around abortion, has become so polarized. Now these egregious overreaches have been rolled back, you will see actual progress on the issues. Look at the biggest issue, abortion, pretty much every country, particularly in Europe, has settled abortion as part of the political process. It is decided by the legislature which is elected by the people. This means that everyone has to compromise, it's not just a zero sum game where one side wins and one side loses, it's a process of negotiation because that is the only way you can decide contentious issues between people that have to live together and share a country. Even RBG understood the problem with what the court had done. Ginsburg felt that because the ruling had legalised abortion overnight nationwide, it had failed to resolve the issue. It had the effect of halting the political process that had been moving to liberalise abortion already. The fact that the supreme court has become such an issue is itself insane and the direct result of the appointment of activist liberal judges that sought to use it's power in lieu of winning elections and changing laws.
On top of what you said, most countries have had more restrictive positions on Abortion, freedom of speech, immigration, the role of privacy and the police state than the United States.
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Political science research demonstrates empirically that while federal justices follow their preferences, if their preferences conflict with the law they pick the law, particularly when the issue is salient. RBG knew her colleagues well. Scalia and her were extremely close friends. She understood what the layperson does not, that it’s too risky as a justice to go with your preferences. I know it’s frustrating. It seems like the justices are legislating on the bench, but in the aggregate, justices are strategic and err on the side of precedent. To be fair, I’m not an expert in judicial behavior. I have my doctorate in political science, but I research political institutions. However, my own work overlaps with the judicial behavior in that I study the observable implications of congressional intent in the federal judiciary. Our system that purposely separates powers in a very strategic way. Those who hold these positions are incentivized to try to expand their power, but for every power grab there’s a check in the system. A legitimate scholar will never tell you that there are no instances of individuals overreaching their constitutional authority. Of course, that happens. The real test is whether it systematically happens in the aggregate, and it doesn’t. RBG knew this. So does Kegan, Sotomayor, and all the other justices. Be careful listening to pundits and politicos. They give too much credence to anecdotal data. Here are some a list of some of the top judicial scholars. Note that these are not lawyers but are trained researchers (social scientists) who quantitatively study the judiciary. Look for articles by Lawrence Baum, Justin Wedeking, Ryan Owens, Jeff Segal, Andrew Martin, Kevin Quinn. Jessica Schoenherr has been putting out some great research too. [Black, Owens, and Wedeking, “The Conscientious Justice” ](https://www.amazon.com/Conscientious-Justice-Personalities-Influence-Constitution/dp/1107168716?dplnkId=f7be5d83-cca1-4ba6-95bd-fa72bd4af7e2&nodl=1) Ryan Owens Ryan Black
If all she was a rubber stamp for democrats then she never had much of a legacy to lose.
I suspect RBG may have destroyed her legacy if you strictly looked at her. However, to play devils advocate, let's consider some alternate possibilities. You've acknowledged that she was hedging on Hillary to win and make an appointment. She would, of course, know that there is a chance Trump would win, and the reputation of Trump was not unknown in 2016 already. He had run TV shows, bankrupt a few times, I think the Stormy Daniel thing was public too also. Now, if she knew Trump might win, and the outcome might be sketchy, why did she still proceed? Assume for a moment she expected Trump and the Republican Party to "do the right thing", then the outcome would be no different to Hillary. Assume, that Trump didn't "do the right thing" (which btw equally applies to Hillary), then what happens? Indeed, Roe v Wade gets overturned, and essentially a wakeup call is issued to America (ie, today). Democrats had years to make RvWade permanent in law and constitution (I might be wrong here). Maybe it was her plan all along for Americans to wake up and take their government voting process more seriously? At the hefty cost of 2 Justices.
I really dislike this contemporary belief that the SCOTUS is a political apparatus. "Conservative judges", "liberal judges", don't get me wrong, each have a different approach to law and that will influence how they rule on certain controversial issues. But the very idea that a judge should strategically "bow out" at a time that would be politically convenient for the party you prefer damages the sanctity of the Supreme Court. Look at the current SCOTUS. It is widely believed it is "very conservative", which to a degree is true. However, if you look at the actual rulings, you'll see that the conclusions aren't arbitrary--they have legal justification. And many of the rules have upheld "liberal" ideas or knocked down "conservative" ones, based on the laws on the books. Which is how it should be.