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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis is why we can't have nice things: Joe Biden
A Republican president, especially among the current crowd, would not hesitate to find some to Scalia's right to appoint, but our "leaders" say we kowtow to the right and pick a "consensus" candidate.
From Salon:
This is a potentially gigantic game-changer, Biden acknowledged. My advice is the only way we get someone on the Court now or even later is to do what was done in the past.
Cave and appoint people like Clarence Thomas to replace Thurdgood Marshall?
But Biden suggested that using Scalias successor to make a political statement or stack the court in his final year would be a mistake for President Obama.
There are plenty of judges who are on high courts already who have had unanimous support of the Republicans, Biden told Minnesota Public Radio. This should be someone who, in fact, is a consensus and whereby we can generate enough support to get a person passed, he said, pushing back against calls for a more liberal jurist.
Biden said that the President intends to nominate someone who has demonstrated they have an open mind, someone who doesnt have a specific agenda. The Vice President named Republican nominees and eventual Supreme Court Justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy as examples of such consensus candidates.
That would be Anthony Kennedy of Bush v. Gore and Citizens United fame.
And people ask me why I don't like Joe Biden. Well, it is shit like this and his bankruptcy "reform" bill which does it.
GoneFishin
(5,217 posts)PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)If a the Senate goes Democratic Obama will have a brief window to get a nominee approved
without any Republican Support.
If the Senate and Presidency is going Democratic then Republicans may opt for an Obama appointee rather than a Sanders or Clinton one.
SoLeftIAmRight
(4,883 posts)so sad
earthshine
(1,642 posts)He is really failing as an elder statesman.
I voted for them twice, but I am so done with this administration and their centrist, third-way bullsh*t.
TPP, H-1B visas, bank bailouts, chained CPI, digging us in deeper with insurance-based healthcare, and so much more.
These are all major issues that overshadow the good Obama has done.
Sure, unemployment is lower than in the Bush years. The new jobs just suck compared to the ones that were lost.
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)Let the Republicans win and that use that as excuse to fuck the American people.
MindPilot
(12,693 posts)He also never met a drug war he didn't like and is in no small part responsible for amping up the prison-industrial complex.
cascadiance
(19,537 posts)if Bernie were to win the presidency, and the Democrats have even close to a majority in the Senate to fend off a 4 year filibuster.
Republicans will understand that even a "liberal" justice selection by Obama would be far less likely to try and vote down corporate personhood-based cases and the judicial activist "precedent" that was used from a former railroad exec court clerk's head note and not a court case decision that gave us that crappy set of "rights" that corporations have. Bernie would want to have a justice that would reverse that notion and the cases that relied on that such as Citizen's United and Hobby Lobby. Obama would be one, if nominating a liberal, would find a justice more tuned in to liberal positions on social issues than financial issues that the corporatists don't want reversed.
Republicans would clearly like to take Obama's selection rather than Bernie's selection. They will of course wait until December before giving up on the chance they have a Republican do that selection next term, but come December, even a liberal selection would get approved then, with Bernie as the next president.