OK Senator Whitehouse, OK Senator Klobuchar – Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (!) – stop whining and describing how terrible it is that the court is illegitimate, that the court is nasty, that the court is ruthless……
”Oh dear, oh my my”.
Save it, and DO SOMETHING with your power and your position.
You don’t have the votes yet in the Senate? Fine. Tell us what the hell you’re for, and give young voters a REASON to be motivated to get up off their behinds to give Biden the Congress he needs to realistically fight back against the outrageous Dobbs/‘Handmaid’s Tale’ decision overruling Roe v. Wade.
Stop the endless defense, and tell us what you are going to DO about the situation with the Supreme Court to protect groups that are genuinely vulnerable.
Why do I think that if it were straight white men who were threatened by a radical supreme court, you might do more than simply lament?
Senator Whitehouse, I have normally admired you. Now you even continue to use the term “packing the court”.
This is tone deaf politically, and sets you up for a charge of hypocrisy if you should ever decide to actually do something about the illegitimacy of the court rather than just whining about it.
Senators, we were not born yesterday. We in the public can smell the difference between political water-treading and leadership. (That goes for you too, AOC. What would you actually propose to do about the Supreme Court’s structure? Anything?)
If you continue to simply tread water, hoping that Democrats will magically be rescued by the Roe/Dobbs and gun safety decisions of the court instead of offering real leadership to rectify the court’s illegitimacy, you are going to blow it for the Fall.
It is not you politicians who will suffer. It is poor women, women of color, children in our cities suffering from environmental regulation, and LGBTQIA people who will pay dearly for your fecklessness on Supreme Court reform, which is fully within the power of Congress to fix.
Stop whining and virtue-signalling, senators. Talk is cheap. What are you going to DO about the Supreme Court if there are no retirements or deaths if the voters send you more Democrats this Fall?
Not only do voters deserve to know in advance of the election, you cannot realistically expect the 80 million voters who do not vote in this country to suddenly come out of the woodwork to vote if you offer them no solutions or alternatives, and simply lament that they will now have to wait a generation to escape an incipient retrograde and unwanted trip into The Handmaid’s Tale.
I understand the reason for the Democrats’caution on Supreme Court reform. They think that we’re headed for victory in the fall now and we therefore don’t want to risk that by sounding radical.
The fatal flaw with this approach is that the supreme court has now shown its hand, and they plan to go on a barrage removing vulnerable minorities’ rights. And they will do this even if there is an excellent Congress elected this fall. It is for this reason that there is no choice but to alter the court’s structure..
And now, even worse, they are taking on a case that indicates that they may even be about to tinker or alter the basic right of the electorate to choose the president, This is unacceptable, and is not the kind of thing that we can wait a generation for this young conservative court to rotate out through deaths snd retirements to rectify.
It will be too late.
Now that Roe riled the rug rats, if anything they’ll be even less ready to rouse themselves to the polls if Dems simply rue Dobbs and refuse to ruffle feathers.
Updating the court is popular. Either via term limits or adding justices. I like the FDR rule of adding justices for every justice over 70 or the idea of using the 1869 precedent and having one justice for each circuit. So now we would need 13.
The majority of the public is against what this court is doing, and if getting on board these plans moved the Overton window or encourages future judicial restraint among the incumbents (as the FDR threat famously did with the switch in time that saved nine), it will have been worth it. Thomas gave away his hand-gutting the entire right ti privacy and the administrative state. Since stare decisis no longer matters, perhaps they go after ACA again or go after Obergefell.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_switch_in_time_that_saved_nine
The problem with this logic is that they did not push as hard as in retrospect they should have for Merrick Garland in large part because we all assumed Hillary Clinton was headed for victory.
Not all of us shared in that assumption and I was harshly criticized at the time for predicting exactly how Donald Trump could win. The two biggest mistakes liberals made in the last ten years was not pressuring RBG to retire and not fighting like tooth and nail for Scalia seat.
Priests in black robes are building a theocracy to destroy our democracy.
My hope is that the great silent secular majority can get its act together. This could also be a way to rejuvenate sclerotic state Democratic parties and help narrow the partisan gap in state legislative control. Rather than taking the divisive politics of abortion out of the public sphere as the court foolishly said it was, the politics of abortion is now going to take over every state legislative and governors race in the country. Maybe even some local races when it comes to clinic permits and the like. I suspect every state in the union, including the red ones, has a quiet majority that is reluctant to see these extremist bans go through. If not, they will have one in a few years time when the consequences of these decisions come to fruition.
I will also add this is not a back to the future moment. Even in the late 1960’s when abortion was banned in most states, women and doctors were not prosecuted and it was legal to advertise underground abortion services in newspapers and across state lines. Still an awful reality, but arguably better than the one being enacted today in states passing abortion bans without any exceptions and harsh jail time for doctors who even discuss abortion and for women seeking abortions. Not to mention social media and other electronic surveillance being deployed by the state to find out exactly which women actually had miscarriages or not. Actually were raped or not.
It is this totalitarian aspect of the newly emboldened extremist anti-choice movement that has to be named and stopped. I think far more Americans, even my Trumpy gun loving mask hating neighbor, are in the “leave me alone” camp rather than wanting a big brother nanny state federal government telling them or their spouses or sisters or children what to do with their bodies.