If Democrats win in November, nothing less than absolute ruthlessness will do

[Poiuyt]

This is the best essay I've read about the the SC takeover by conservatives and what to do about it. The author pulls no punches. It's a short, but powerful article, so I hope all of you take a few minutes to read it. It's time for Democrats to stop letting Republicans walk all over them. Republicans play for blood--Democrats should too.

Four New Justices, No Matter What

The Republicans, who have fought every political battle of the past dozen years as though it were their last, can be expected to keep their word. But even if they unexpectedly stand down from yet another divisive political escalation, or somehow fail in their effort to replace Ginsburg, Democrats must be prepared to enlarge the Supreme Court—by four justices—if they win resoundingly on November 3.

Such a radical gambit is justified by the fact that America’s political institutions this century have consistently translated minority support for Republicans into political majorities. GOP presidential candidates have won the popular vote just once since 1992. Republicans have not won the total popular vote of any three consecutive Senate elections in the twenty-first century, but due to the absurdity of that chamber’s composition—where half a million people in Wyoming have the same number of senators as 38 million Californians—they have controlled the chamber more often than not for more than two decades.

Now 53 Republican senators—several of whom won their seats in achingly close elections that would have gone blue without the GOP voter suppression tactics upheld by the Roberts court, and who represent a minority of the American population—may well confirm another right-wing justice, the third nominated in four years by a president elected by a minority of the American people thanks to the Electoral College, the most plainly undemocratic electoral institution in the democratic world.

McConnell’s quest to fill a Supreme Court vacancy weeks before a presidential election should fuel outrage that finally radicalizes even committed institutionalists. While the Roberts court has issued the occasional heterodox decision, it has always reinforced Republican political power when given the opportunity. In 2010, it overturned decades of campaign finance law so that idle rich people could try to buy our elections, and in 2013 it gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing states across the South to make it harder for people to vote. This will get worse unless and until Democrats do something about it.

Yet the party {Democrats}, until very recently, seemed oblivious to its predicament. During the early years of Obama’s presidency, Democratic elites clung to the outmoded, anti-democratic filibuster in the Senate, allowing Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans to exercise veto power over their agenda. The national party largely ignored GOP voter suppression tactics in the states, even when GOP legislatures were gleefully passing cookie-cutter voter ID laws transparently designed to quash Democratic turnout. The first strict voter ID law was passed in 2005, and Democrats did nothing about it with their towering congressional majorities from 2009 to 2011.

---

Court-packing is gloriously legal. Unless Republicans indicate an openness to a compromise constitutional amendment to end lifetime tenure for justices, it is the only way Democrats can avenge years of Republican nihilism and avert a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court majority that strikes down whatever ambitious Democratic laws may come. That’s why, if the Democrats win the Senate and Joe Biden wins the White House, they should pass a court-packing bill soon after the new Congress is sworn in on January 3. Biden should then give Neil Gorsuch and whoever replaces Ginsburg two weeks to resign before he signs the bill and relegates them both to writing lonely dissents on a court with a 7–6 liberal majority.

---

Democrats cannot move this country forward by clinging to long-dead norms that their adversaries gleefully and unapologetically flout at every opportunity. If the Democrats pack the court straight away, voters might already have grown accustomed to it by 2022, while the party shores up its political standing with one social policy after another and take decisive action to ensure future elections are fought on a level playing field. Alternately, in the interest of pleasing Beltway civility umpires, the Democrats can sit back and watch as Republicans stomp out any remaining embers of fairness and equality in America’s electoral system.

https://newrepublic.com/article/159455/supreme-court-packing-expand-four-new-liberal-justices

[msongs]

1. but but but if we just be nice to repubs they will love us ya know nt

[Ronjon55]

2. Yep

I’m really done with the

“Stop, kind sir or I’ll be forced to say stop again, if that’s okay with you”

[Thekaspervote]

3. Biden has a very progressive agenda..even some progressives think so

MHO: This isn’t his first political rodeo. He knows what he will have to do. Why put any laws forward when the pukes will run to the courts to have them overturned? Which is what will happen.
So...progressive agenda, but a regressive court standing in the way?

It’s a no brainer