No surprise these two were friends.
His campaign will be glad this video got out because it makes it seem like he can speak in complete sentences.
They're just virtue signaling. Lifetime appointments is in the Constitution, so only a constitutional amendment could change it.
This can't be real. Permanent appointments is in the Constitution (Article III Section 1, "The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour") and so only a constitutional amendment could add time limits.
Yeah - the Constitutional standard of "good behavior" should be held more strictly when it comes to their mental capacity.
Especially as the Democrats swerve further and further left, having their judicial picks lag behind the current ethos of the party is a good thing.
I definitely agree that courts are far more partisan than the Founding Fathers would ever have meant for them to be, but I'm not convinced that replacing judges more frequently would help. I rather think it would just make the court even more partisan, because judges would be more frequently chosen to match the popular politics of the day.
Lifetime appointments for judges was a very intentional choice by the Founding Fathers. Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Fedralist 78:
According to the plan of the convention, all judges who may be appointed by the United States are to hold their offices DURING GOOD BEHAVIOR; which is conformable to the most approved of the State constitutions and among the rest, to that of this State. Its propriety having been drawn into question by the adversaries of that plan, is no light symptom of the rage for objection, which disorders their imaginations and judgments. The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government. In a monarchy it is an excellent barrier to the despotism of the prince; in a republic it is a no less excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body.
[The Judiciary] is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its co-ordinate branches; and that as nothing can contribute so much to its firmness and independence as permanency in office, this quality may therefore be justly regarded as an indispensable ingredient in its constitution, and, in a great measure, as the citadel of the public justice and the public security.
Read the whole thing here: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed78.asp
The tl;dr means that the longer the appointment of a judge, the greater their independence from Congress. Since Congress is the most fickle and partisan branch of government, it's important to have maximum barrier between them and the courts.
The law says 9 now, but if Dems ever get control of Congress and the Presidency again (like in the first 2 years of Obama) that will be all they need to change that law and pack the court.
When we talk about changing the composition of the courts for a generation, it really just means changing the composition of the courts until the next time Dems control Congress and the Presidency. Unless we make it harder to pack the court.
Unfortunately it is legal, unless a Constitutional Amendment is made. The Constitution gives Congress power to set the number of SC judges, and they have used that power many times in the past to change the number: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-does-the-supreme-court-have-nine-justices
Unfortunately not. Overturning the law is just going to require a Dem majority in House+Senate and Dem President. As for SC overturning the law, they would only do that if it was unconstitutional, and the constitution clearly gives Congress the power to specify the number of SC judges. The number of SC judges has been changed many times in US history: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-does-the-supreme-court-have-nine-justices
Democrats are already testing the waters with the idea of packing the Supreme Court, and using Ginsburg's "final wish" as the excuse to do it.
I've seen various posts here about how Trump needs to issue an executive order to stop this from happening. Or that we need Republican control of the House so we can pass legislation that will stop it.
Neither of these will work in the long run.
Executive Order: Executive orders have no power here. The Constitution gives Congress full power to organize and establish courts (Article 3, Section 1: "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.", https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/).
Republican House: Any law passed by a Republican-controlled Congress can be repealed by a future Democrat-controlled Congress. The Constitution gives Congress complete power to set its own rules (Article 1, Section 5: "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings"), so any rule that Congress makes to set a higher bar for legislation impacting the Supreme Court can be unmade by a future Congress (as we all saw with the "nuclear option"). All the Democrats need in order to pack the supreme court is 1 year with a majority in the House and Senate, and the Presidency.
Are we all willing to bet our Constitutional Freedoms that that will never happen again? If not we need to push hard now to get a Constitutional Amendment to prevent court packing. This is the only way to prevent it. Let's get the ball rolling and make this happen during the next 4 years!
His deer-in-the-headlights look when listening to the question is pretty awesome too.
https://thedonald.win/p/HXk4THpx/after-biden-says-hell-freeze-dep/c/ for original video
You can also clearly see him change his gaze at the start from when he is looking at the teleprompter to when he looks at the interviewer.
Shame on the "reporter" for going along with this sham.
"Obama's lame duck presidency" - the most accurate description of his accomplishments I've ever heard.
Maybe now they'll admit the photo was fake!
This tradition sounds made up. Let's see a source before anyone gets excited...
Mother Earth is angry </s>
I personally think there are two things: (1) Supreme Court picks is a top issue for Republicans. Many R's who hated Trump because of his "un-Presidential" demeanor, or distrusted him for his past as a Democrat and reality-TV star, held their nose and voted for him specifically because of the Supreme Court. Going through this process now reminds them all of why that is so important and brings that motivation back into the forefront. This effect to me seems to be stronger on the right than on the left.
(2) Kamala basically brought her name to the nation-wide stage by being the "attack dog" during the Kavanaugh hearings. It played well for her with the extreme left, but turned off a lot of moderates. She's now going to have to reprise that role in October. Seeing her aggressively, viciously attack the next Supreme Court nominee (especially if it is a woman!) I don't think is going to play well now that she's on the presidential ticket.
RGB's death came as a surprise, but retrospectively, it was pretty clearly coming. She has been on chemo since May. In August that was augmented with radiation therapy. In September she passed away.
There are two reasons there is any surprise that she passed away. The first is that she has made it through so many health scares in the past that it was easy to believe this was just another, and she really could live for several more years. She's done it before - why not now?
The second reason is that the Democrats have been seriously trying to downplay just how bad things were. Every report on her health has described how she had an issue, but "everything looks good now." This was clearly not true; you don't go from chemo to chemo+radiation when everything is looking good.
The strongest evidence of an effort to cover-up just how bad things were is the report that came out two weeks ago of RBG officiating a wedding.The bride tweeted out a photo that shows RGB officiating in front of the couple, which was followed up by a statement from the supreme court spokeswoman that RGB is a close friend of one of the families and did indeed officiate the wedding.
The photo is obviously fake (https://thedonald.win/p/HXfI8cCp/can-we-all-agree-that-this-is-ph/c/). The bride has made her twitter account private so you can't see it there anymore. The groom, Danny Kazin, is a DNC employee. No doubt the reason RGB wasn't wearing a mask during the ceremony is because it would have been too hard to photoshop one in.
So what can we conclude from this timeline?
(1) RGB has likely been completely out since at least Sept 2. Despite disagreeing with many of her opinions, she seems to overall have been a person of integrity (probably the basis of her friendship with Scalia). It's hard to imagine that she would have approved of the fake wedding and the photoshopped picture.
(2) Trump found out she was definitely going to die around Sept 9. His releasing the new list of supreme court picks seemed to come out of nowhere - more likely it came in preparation to what he knew would be her upcoming death announcement. Notice again that DNC did nothing to prepare the public for her death, or admit that things were in bad shape.
(3) The DNC did not want RGB to pass away before the election. There has been some speculation that they are trying to take advantage of an "October surprise" to energize voters, but the Sept 2 fake wedding shows that they have still been pushing hard to maintain the narrative that all is well. They probably accurately estimated that her death would energize R voters far more than D. Further evidence for this comes from the fact that her death was announced on a Friday afternoon. This is what companies and politicians do when they announce something that they don't want to dominate the headlines, or when they want to give some time to reduce the immediate impact of the announcement before the news cycles spin back up on Monday. Maybe she actually happened naturally to die Friday afternoon, but it seems more likely to me that they had a choice of when to pull the plug, and waited until Friday afternoon. What does this mean? Again, it means that they think this news will be more beneficial to the Trump campaign than the Biden campaign.
Whitmer and Newsom are drooling over the excitement of this news.